WEBVTT
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Hello, I'm Alexey Bychkadov, and I'm talking about
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unentangling projects and repositories,
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or maybe entangling them, depending on how you look at that.
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So that's going to be a short workflow note.
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I work as a researcher,
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so there are three main components to my work, I guess.
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First, I think, so I try to come up with new ideas,
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and that usually results in some collection of notes I have.
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Second, I try things out, so it usually means that I write code.
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And third, I communicate, so I prepare papers,
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presentations, memos, and so on and so forth.
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And so the workflow problem I had is
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sometimes all this does not really fit
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into a concept of a single repository per project,
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so I might want to have, for example,
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a source code in one repository, and then I would like to have a paper
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in another one, and then I want to have a collection of notes somewhere
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unrelated to those two. And yeah,
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Emacs is pretty good at supporting your workflows, and I figured I should
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share what I use and what works for me.
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So,
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from the technical perspective, things are
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pretty easy, so I use a collection of pretty standard components
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of Emacs, so it's a projectile org-mode with its capture templates and other
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things. Then I sustain a collection of notes in something
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that is called org-roam, which is, well, essentially, it's a glorified
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collection of org-mode files. Then I use directory
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local variables, maybe a ctext to jump through the source code,
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and very, very little Elisp glue to make this
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all work, but that's not really rocket science.
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So that's the workflow I would like to talk about today.
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So, what I mean by all that,
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it's pretty straightforward to make
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it easy to jump around a single repository in Emacs.
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Now, I have Doom Emacs, but that's not really specific to Doom.
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That'll work in any Emacs configuration.
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Well, kbindings might be
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different, but that's not the point, I guess, for the workflow. So, if I hit space
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two times, I have all the list of files within my project.
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So, if I create a couple of custom shortcuts,
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so if I press a magic button,
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hyperlp, don't worry about hyperkey, so I want it to have a
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modifier key all to myself, so that would, no program
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on my computer would use that except Emacs, and Emacs would
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use that only when I tell it to, so I have a hyperkey instead of caps lock, that's pretty easy
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to do in GNU Linux system. So,
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when I press this magic keys, I have a menu that's a normal
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kbinding, yeah, essentially in Emacs, and
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if I hit, for example, R, I end up in a readme file within
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this specific repository I was sitting in, right, so if I want to document something
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real quick, I go to the readme file. Then I could have, I could
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go to a changelog file, right, so I have a list of changes
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and the way it works, usually, for example, if I'm working on some code,
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I created a couple of dummy files in there, so
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I'm working on some code, and then I implemented something, and I can
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just use the org mode capture
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mechanisms to keep track of what
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I want to discuss with colleagues next time, for example, I could just hit
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capture repo specific changelog entry
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and I implemented a feature
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and I can continue working
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without this context switching, and then if I want to go to the changelog,
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well, it is there, and next time I talk
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to the colleagues about the source code, I can open the changelog and go through entries one by one
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and discuss what I have implemented last time.
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I could go to project specific
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to, sorry, to repo specific to-do list, and I have
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a list of to-dos that would live within a repository, and
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for example, I could have a high-level structure here,
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work distribution between team members and other things that sort of face
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the world, so to speak, and of course,
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there are very many ways to jump through the source code conveniently,
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I ended up not using language servers, I used a special program called
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ctags, and so the way it works is just I call
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projectile regenerate tags, and it creates the special
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tags file within the repository,
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and then I can, again, run
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I usually just hit a single keystroke,
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and here is all the symbols that are there in my
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source code, regardless of the language, right, so I can jump to the main function
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and that'll be a C++ file, or I could go to the super function, which I
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had in my Python file, and this comes in pretty convenient if I have
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a mixture of languages, so sometimes I can have some algorithm-specific code
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in Julia, and then I can have some Python glue within the same
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source code repository, and it makes it really convenient to jump
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between all of those, right,
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but I have a few problems here,
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just to give you a little bit of context, for example, here is the
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a real project that corresponds to a real paper,
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I have a single note about that project,
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where I keep all the things related to that project here, but that's a private
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note, so for example, again, I hit a special key that
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invokes my org-roam function that gives me a menu of my
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notes, and so here is the paper,
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essentially, and I can have a paper timeline, and I can
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have a list of all the dates, what happened to the paper, with links
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to my email, right, so for example, if I hit this link,
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that'll open a specific email, and that doesn't work outside of my
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computer, it doesn't make any sense to keep it in the outer world-facing
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repository, for example, so that's something to myself, right, sometimes I want
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to have, like, this list of
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working notes, right, that contain, like, for example,
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I might produce this kind of things for internal discussion, right,
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it has some marks, it has some margin notes, and things like that,
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maybe, again, health-based ideas that may or may not end up
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in a repository, in a final paper, or in a source code,
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but still I want to have it somewhere, and
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well, long story short, I need a project folder
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that would be unrelated to the source code, or
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to the source code repository, or to the paper itself,
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or a final report, right, and one way,
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as usual, there are multiple ways to achieve that, I suppose, and one way to do that
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is, so, I create
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a special folder within my org-roam
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storage, so it's a special folder outside of any
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repositories that got backed up to my hard drive, with
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certain redundancy, but I don't really need, like, version control, full-blown
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version control for that, I'm okay with just having a couple of backups, right, so
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this is the folder you see here, so pkb stands for personal knowledge
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base, and I have a folder, project notes in there, right, so
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and, how does it work, so I have a
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folder per project in there, essentially, and here I can
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have all the stuff that is, that kind of belongs to me, and I
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do not publish it anywhere, and then
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for example, a source code
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repository knows about that folder, and a paper repository
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knows about that folder, and anything else that might live in separate
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places all over my system can know about that folder, and how do I achieve that,
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well, essentially, this is one of the use cases for the directory
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local variables, right, so, for example,
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how does it work from the user perspective, so if I hit a special
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key, oh, sorry, if I hit a special key
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that would be open project
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and then, for example,
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org mode file, right, so this is my personal notes about the emacs conf, not
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specifically about this very talk, but I can have, you know,
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half-baked ideas here, again, presentation tools, and things like that,
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and how does that happen if we try to
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look at the code, the elisp magic here, what
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is happening is, it's just a couple lines of code, in fact, so
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let me just press control, help
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key, and so the key I was
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pressing is open project org mode file, and so
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what we see here, there is a single, so it's just a call to a find
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file function, so I open that file, and there is a special function that
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figures out what is the, like, umbrella
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project notes file, and that's, again, that's very easy, so
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essentially, if a variable describing this
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the name for that project is defined, then
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I use that as my project folder name, if not, I take the project name from the
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project towel, and well, that's pretty much it,
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and how do I define this
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variable is, essentially, there is this
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magical file in a folder called dear locals elisp,
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and I just put it there, and then, whenever I
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go into that folder, or any of its children folders, I get this
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variable defined, and that's pretty much it, that's how
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it works for me.
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I guess one thing that I wanted to emphasize
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specifically about that is, of course, it's
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time tracking, right, so what I find especially important when I work in
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something, and I want to clock time, I usually do not want
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this information to be in a source code repository or in a paper repository
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because other people I work with will not be particularly happy about that
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especially if most of them do not use Emacs, and they will see
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this long list of org clocked data, and that doesn't look
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nice in a plain text format, so what I usually
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do if I want to clock in some time, and then later analyze what I've
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been spending time on, so I go to my org mode file
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and I go to my current project
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to-dos, and I clock in there, and that's
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how it works, so again
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what comes in handy if I hit ctrl-o, I just go
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back to the file I jumped from, so that's also
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pretty handy, so again, no rocket science in there
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so I create a directory local variable that helps me
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to figure out what umbrella project does
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this particular folder belongs to, and this way
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I make Emacs aware of, for example, facts like so this
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source code belongs to that project, and this repository with the paper
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also belongs to that project, and I can have capture templates
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that would save my notes into my private notes
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file, and my to-dos go to my private note files
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and so on and so forth, so I find it pretty simple, but
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that really helps to reduce this context
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switching, and I don't believe it allows me to save time
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but that probably helps me to stay focused, and this
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is what is really important, I believe, so thank you
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very much, and if you have any comments or suggestions to that, please do jump
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into the discussion, yeah, after the talk, thank you.
