Young Hands Club

The big errors for the week are (1) delaying my Tuesday schedule by having some people over and (2) burning a copious amount of time on what should have been an easy article.

I see (1) as a symptom of the lack of self-respect problem. My excuse for inviting people over in the middle of a work day was, “it’s a saltmines day anyways and socializing is important. I can’t just be a recluse on my computer all the time.” But as already discussed with diana_coman, socializing should be for Sunday / evenings only. It takes much more mental energy to write & code then it does to chat. That I invited people over on a ‘saltmines day’ doesn’t matter, pushing back my saltmine hours causes a domino effect that hits my other work.

Problem (2) came from both spinning and having an undeveloped writing process. Since the spinning aspect has been discussed, I will share my thoughts on what I see wrong with my writing method.

Currently, I begin with an outline that tries to mention all the points I would like to include in my article. Then I look at the points I wrote and see if a subset support a thesis.¹ Then I attempt to expand those points and make them flow to deliver an argument for the thesis. Afterwards, I revise what I wrote. The revision includes removing chunks of nonsense as well as fixing the wording / grammar / spelling etc of the essay. Finally, I take a break and repeat the last step.²

A problem I have with this method is I can’t predict how long it will take to expand my outlined points. I also may be spending too much time writing text I’m going to throw out. One way I have minimized time writing text that gets discarded is I am no longer concerned with the wording of my rough drafts. It is a waste of time to polish something before you know it will be included in the final revision.

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EOD Reports:

Sunday 12/01

whaack: diana_coman: EOD report: I finished the review from last week + published the plan for next week, completed a rough draft of An Outpost of Progress article, and did a 1 hour session reading The Odyssey. I also did a short review of my backup scripts and found that they are not working – my most recent blog article is not backed up. The issue is that my ssh key is being rejected when rsync tries to connect to my account solely made
whaack: for storing backups of the blog. I believe the first time crontab fired the script that syncs from digitalocean it worked and then the script failed every subsequent time.

Monday 12/02

whaack: diana_coman: EOD report : I fixed the crontab issue and setup apache/php on my toliet box + wrote a script that takes the the backup data and recreates my blog locally. I can confirm now with much more confidence that my blog is being backed up safely. I spent the rest of the day editing/finishing my Conrad post. That took much longer than the predicted 3hr – I spent closer to 6.5 hours. I will use extra time during my saltmine day
whaack: s to tackle the 2h journaling block I had scheduled for today.

Tuesday 12/03

whaack: diana_coman: EOD report: This message comes later than it should, because I met people on the beach that I had over for a couple of hours after my surf session. I know as I type this I should not have had them over since it was during the prime morning hours and I wouldn’t just dip out of a normal job. With that said, I finished 8hr of saltmining and 30 mins of journalin
ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-18 21:20:36 diana_coman: after all, if you were working somewhere, you wouldn’t just nip out because they want you to go to the mechanic, would you?
whaack: g. I also received the monitor+ups and set them up. The UPS is giving me a ‘Site Wiring’ warning so I need to investigate what may be wrong with my outlets here. To do this I need to first pay a debt and learn about home circuitry in the general.

Wednesday 12/04

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I did roughly 9hrs of saltmines and 30 mins of journaling. I practiced the guitar for 1hr as well. An expected-unexpected task was I had to exchange the gas cylinder for my stove, which took a little bit over 45mins.

Thursday 12/05

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I did 4.5 hours of saltmines, and ~6hrs of writing about meeting with Adam. Despite the time put in, I have a yet to complete a rough draft of our encounter. I figure now that I will need a minimum of 4hr+ extra time to write this article. Even that may be an underestimate. I assigned the final draft to my open 4h slot on Saturday.

Friday 12/06

whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I spent just about the entire day finishing the rough draft of my meeting with Adam. I know this is quite a problem. There may have been more spinning, although I can’t say I was too hung up on what to include/not to include today. Part of the issue may have been I made the article too long, right now it is at 1,600 words. I moved my rough draft of my article on rereading to Sunday, and my Odyssey reading b
whaack: lock to tomorrow. I am going to leave the revision of the article as the last task i do tomorrow. I am worried it will drag on and _again_ eat up my other tasks.

1. For my article on meeting with Adam, I do not believe I have a unifying thesis. My goal was to mention what we did together and reflect on some of our conversations. Not having a thesis to guide my choice of what goes in the article may have been a reason it took a while to write. [↩]
2. This process is flexible. Sometimes I just get to writing, skipping the outline. Sometimes when listing what to write about, I make a tiny bullet points followed by a large paragraphs. [↩]