LIFE ON PAPER I've been reading Ratfactor's posts about keeping track of tasks and accomplishments via methods including "logging", TODO lists, and most recently weekly summaries: gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ratfactor/phlog/2020-03-12-weekly-wrapups gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ratfactor/phlog/2020-03-03-monthly-themes gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ratfactor/phlog/2019-05-19-todo-extraction gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ratfactor/phlog/2018-08-10-The-Logging-Habit There are probably more, but if you really read through all of those then you'll probably no longer be in the mood to read my thoughts on the subject anyway. Like most such Phlog posts I find it all very interesting, but don't feel that anything would be worth really taking onboard myself and to actually change some of my own habits. Nevertheless he's hitting on a topic that I've certainly had trouble grappling with: Rationally organising and assessing ones own life. Now I've been thinking about this post for a while already today, and every time I run through it in my mind it ends up spinning off into wild tangents, so I'll just get one out of the way now. In his post "The logging habit" he mentions a scene in the film "Seven" (1995 apparantly, though as usual I got it on DVD for $2 at a second-hand store a few years ago) where he was facinated with "the imagery of the huge collection of journals created by the fictional character John Doe". I remember that scene vaguely, and get the facination with a life transcribed down into a physical medium, but what that scene really did for me was remind me of something similar that I'd seen on my TV. In fact something that was much more disturbing in a way than all of the silly Hollywood horror in that movie. I'm pretty sure it was on SBS (Australian TV channel), probably on a weekend because I think I was flipping around channels during the day (clearly ignoring a good few TODOs). I flicked onto some documentary, probably some obscure thing that SBS had produced that might not even be referenced online even if I did know the title. It was about crews who cleaned up after people had died in their house and weren't discovered until the body had decomposed and made a mess. It was an old lady, clearly not discovered for quite a long time, and she had kept diaries. In neatest hardwriting she'd written out descriptions of her day including all the trials of a failing body and falling behind in the new technology of society. Even consideration of suicide, though it wasn't possible to determine her eventual cause of death. The diaries were in books lined up neatly on shelves. Left to nobody, or perhaps to the whole society that had left her behind. The house was old, a typical Australian single-story weatherboard construction from the first half of the last century. At least one room, the kitchen where she died, was now completely ruined. No living relatives, so being in a big city it is almost certain that it would have been demolished for redevelopment. The contents probably sent to the tip, maybe including the diaries unless someone from the documentary decided to save them (it might have said at the end that they did). There's something intangible that I found unnerving about that. Whether its the thought of how many similar stories go untold all the time, or how a life's insights recorded can be so easily and completely ignored by society, or maybe just that I'm quite likely to go the same way eventually. I don't know, probably all of the above. It has stayed with me that's for sure, perhaps more-so than anything else that I've seen in a documentary. It's also something that I doubt many people ever think about, even though they pass worn old houses like her's every day. I guess that's a pretty bleak association to hold against diaries, but nevertheless I keep them, though with a much more practical usage. Mostly they're about business topics, but these to a large extent dominate my life anyway. Like Ratfactor's logs, I mostly record things that I've done, though on the morning of the following day. Not minor things though, I'm more conventional and just jot down the individual tasks accomplished, usually not the routine tasks that I can assume to have been completed. Really it's about one constant goal: finding ways of making more money. I have projects, with some sort of deadline, and I work on them. If I progress well, I take pleasure in jotting down accomplishments. If they go slowly and with difficulty then I often have more abrupt entries because I'm still frustrated at running out of day and want to put off assessing things until I can claim some concrete progress. If it goes badly and things don't work or take much longer than anticipated, then I write long rambly details of all the day's disasters and restate/reassess my core objectives with increasing desperation. It normally alternates between the latter two. Deadlines are a real pain too. I don't really know anyone who works in any of the industries that I dip my toe in, and I'm often learning new skills as I go. So I don't know how long things would take someone experienced to do, and I don't know how much longer they will take me if there is a significant learning aspect involved. I know how long projects that I've done in the past take, but so far most of them failed to attract significant interest, so (now more than ever) I'm always looking to do something different, and with which I have less experience. From a self-improvement point of view I guess you could spin that in a positive way, but it does make setting rational deadlines near-impossible. "The sooner the better" is always the thought, so the deadlines always get set short, rarely more than a month in advance of the idea's conception. Approaching the deadline I get more desperate, but usually can't really do much to avoid missing it, the odd late night or work on weekends is never enough (and I'm someone who suffers mentally from not getting enough rest pretty quickly too). I'm soon past the deadline, and I have no idea how to rationally extend it to any future point in time. I'm just left in a desperate state needing to finish it "yesterday", and it either gets done after probably taking some multiple of the time originally assigned, or gets put aside in preference to some new project that I can again mis-judge a deadline for. Here the diary helps in being able to confirm that I really am working on things, not somehow deluding myslef. I would like it to highlight some better method of planning too, but I haven't managed to get that from it. Except perhaps that it can help to alternate between two projects when I get really stuck with something. I guess there's always a limit to how much you can plan for failure, and so far I've never been within it. If I can find a really reliable, scalable, way to make money on my own terms then I guess I might be able to improve things from there. Now I'm running out of time to finish this post so I'll be breif. I make lots of TODO lists, both for large tasks and their individual steps. The funny thing is that I rarely get the real satisfaction of ticking things off, usually there's some niggle that stops me from being completely ready to tick something off when I'm almost done, and by the time I get it sorted then it has lost the sense of achievement because I did most of it earlier. Often TODO lists written at the start of projects never get fully crossed off at the end because I've got focused on some certain points causing me problems and pushing me past my deadline, so the original list gets forgotten entirely. Lists of things to do on weekends are even worse, but I really don't have time to complain about the state of them if I'm going to eat tonight. - The Free Thinker.