Productivity

You will read less than you think Assume you will read 30 books a year for your entire life between 15 and 85 years old. That is 30 * 70 = 2100 books. I don’t know about you, but I had never done the math and that made me sad. I regret having read a lot of the books I read now! Conclusion: (1) read more, (2) be careful what you select to read. For (1), I now read 1 hour daily. For (2), I try my best to read mostly books published ~100 years before the present day1. ...

Everyone I know uses email. I don’t know many people who know how to use email. If you want to be better at writing email, just do what is written on this page: https://subspace.kernel.org/etiquette.html The people who wrote the short hints/guidelines in the link above built the Linux Kernel1 while communicating 99% only through email. I’m confident they have figured out a good set of rules to reduce confusion and improve efficiency through written communication2. ...

I never thought I was going to be one of those people but here I am. I am here to tell you that the latency on typing using bluetooth is terrible. You have to either upgrade to a 2.4gz dongle or simply add a cable to your keyboard. I recently switched from BT to using a cable and it feels like before my keyboard would think whether it wanted me to actually type the character I wanted before doing it. ...

I thought I wanted to use email to keep notes. I keep notes in a specific format . Email notes do have some great advantages: Integrated metadata There are very mature apps for all platforms including mobile The apps built for email generally have a lot of funding, they tend to be high quality including very good search The mbox standard is not going away any time soon Sharing of notes is integrated directly in the system in the form of email Adding multi-media to notes is included in the system If you add more notes to previous notes, you have a record of the date of each amendment There are some important disadvantages though: My notes are mixed in with all of my email It’s more complicated to backup, email clients tend to be sneaky about what they keep locally and remotely. Means that my backups have to happen on the server side not client side Searching, although not bad, is not as good as on a regular text file where you have access to all the unix tools It’s not as easy to switch away from email to other formats. Using jrnl I can easily create different files with my search results You cannot edit emails; you have to send amendments to yourself Today, my notes have my todo list included directly within it For now, I have kept all of my notes in my big text file. The fact that I can super quickly do fuzzy searching within the file is amazing and very useful. ...

They might look ridiculous but if you want deep concentration, there is nothing better than total silence. That can be achieved in a portable way using construction ear protectors. The Peltor Optime III are the best you can get without heading into custom solutions.

Gitlab is not just for keeping your code, in fact we don’t keep any code. We only use GL for project management - it’s great software for that. I suggest you give it a try.

SQLite has been my best friend since I got proficient at it. It’s a super powerful tool that is easy to use. I run a small e-commerce business and SQLite is central to the analytics that we run.

I take a lot of notes. It allows me to stay on task and record what I work on while I work. I have set things up for myself so that I maximise the number of notes taken.