This is also a story about work, so caveat lector.
I love to takes notes. Lots and lots of it. Digitally and on paper. All in attempts to move my frequent and disjointed ideas from RAM to SSD. (Or in the terminology of product I work with, from hot to frozen data nodes).
I make some valiant and commendable attempts to be organized, idea-wise. I use a notebook application to create and maintain data lineage for all things work related. However, it often falls woefully out of sync with my indexing volume onto scratch notes.
Last night, I sat down to get some work done. I tried to think about what my priorities should be, but I haven’t “rebased my repos” in a while and was instantly overcome by scattered thoughts. I flipped through page after page of notes (with pretty bad handwriting) and felt waves of sheer panic.
It seemed like an eternity before I looked up again. But as I did, I took a few slow breaths. I’ve picked up from various podcasts that breathing is the most effective way of bringing heart rate (and subsequently emotions) into the green zone. I also heard a quote that I liked very much - “A problem well-defined is a problem half-solved”.
So I continued to flip backwards in my paper notebook until I found a page that was full of completely checked off items (why can’t we have more of these days?). It was dated more than a month ago. I launched my tracker and began to organize content from the paper notebook as either new ideas or expansions of existing ideas.
I then did the same for my digital notes strewn across various apps on various devices. I then added and/or updated priority tags for each item in my tracker.
At the end of this effort, I hadn’t actually crossed any items off my list. Yet I felt like a new person, methodical and mentally unburdened.
By no means was this the first time I experienced such a thing. For the first time, however, I decided to document my experience.
I concluded a few things:
80-20 Rules: When a problem seems too big to solve, the most valuable time I can spend is on breaking it down into smaller problems.
This Too Shall Pass: Once I take one small step and address one small problems, the rest become exponentially easier.
Telemetry the Brain: Writing things down all the time is a good thing. With good data retention policy, I can always defragment the hard drive to make sense of it later on.
“You’re only as agile as your ability to ship frequently”: When I generate a large volume of information across multiple repositories, the lack of continuous integration will bite me in the ass. A better approach would be to clock out each day by syncing various data sources, and being my own master node.