Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Tag: productivity

  • 20250511 Week 19

    Really big changes are afoot on the writing front. Beginning this weekend, I started converting my daily writing and researching efforts over to using Safari instead of Google Chrome as a web browser. Yeah, I know, the death rattle of the open web is happening and I’m just now starting the process of changing browsers. This big change makes sense to me here and now in the moment and to that end I’m moving along the path to making the change complete. I’m even right now making the big switch from writing in Google Docs to using Pages on my MacBook Air for the very first time. 

    This passage of prose was my first Pages writing effort. Right from the start, I moved the zoom setting up to 200% to really bring the content into focus on my MacBook Air screen. Outside of that change, everything else is just based on the vanilla out-of-the-box Pages setup. Naming the document and setting the save location to iCloud was easy enough. Right now, my initial reaction to this new word processing environment is to observe that it is very basic and, for the most part, paired down compared to Microsoft Word or Google Docs. It works well enough, and I’m going to commit to giving it a go moving forward. 

    Maybe beyond changing up my word processing environment, it is time to get back to basics in terms of daily writing. My functional journal writing format has been essential to my efforts to be a reflective practitioner. Writing a little bit every day is a good method to actively engage in writing. For the most part, the process of daily writing begets more writing. Getting into the standard groove of producing daily content is an essential part of keeping the content flowing. That is the base level of building up content. Making sure that each block gets started is how the process is able to continue day over day into the end result of eventually building up to a perfect possible future state of evolved and interesting prose. At least that is how it is supposed to end up going. 

    I had spent some time this week looking at the various WordPress Jetpack social sharing options. Right now, I have sharing set up to both Threads and Bluesky. Building out some sort of social sharing plan would make sense at this point, but really my strategy is just to share these weblog posts on two different platforms. Based on previous sharing efforts, neither of those automations yields anything really, so it is more of less a performative action at this point. A lot less than a valid plan and a little bit more than taking no action. At some point, I’m going to have to decide if building longer manuscripts is the way to go or focusing on writing better research notes could end up being a singular focus. 

    I used the Pages Writing Tools to proofread this document. It made about 20 changes. 

  • 20250103

    My big writing plans were foiled. I had extraordinarily big plans to write something interesting and impactful today. Today was a very busy day. It really was consistently busy. Last night the game was very exciting and controversial with the Colorado Avalanche winning a hockey game in overtime. We got home pretty late. That combination of a late night of hockey and a very busy day just crushed my writing ambition for the night. It just wholesale crushed it into a fine pulp of not what I would describe as procrastination, but maybe disappointment and exhaustion. I had meant to spend this hour here just writing away to keep my weblog productivity streak going. I did spend a little bit of time trying to figure out how much snow we will be getting tomorrow.

    Instead of being a productive writer on this Friday night I’m watching the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings movie series part one about the fellowship of the ring. It’s a pretty long movie. Watching the entire thing is a pretty decent investment of my evening, but it seems to be what is happening. 

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • 20250102 

    It seems that 2025 is going to keep happening each day. Probably that will continue throughout the entire year. My continued daily blogging has been more prevalent than usual. I have even spent a little time digging into a few different ideas along the way. It’s way better than just writing about the process of writing over and over again. 

    One thing from today jumped out more than usual. I’m not sure it is really useful, but it seems like it could be interesting. I have been thinking about building a different type of resume that lists major projects and achievements with the relevant company information tagged under each achievement. Instead of a traditional employment based resume it would be an achievement based resume. This is the reverse of normal resume builds that detail employment and some bullet points about that employment. This would flip that script and I think be more informative. 

    Tonight I’m going to be watching the Colorado Avalanche play some hockey. I’m hoping it will be a great game.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado