[Speaker 0]: Dictation.
[Speaker 1]: Right. All right I think we are live now.
The stream is here. So folks if you would
please post your questions on the pad and
we'll take them up here.
[Speaker 0]: Boy so I don't have myself set up with the
[Speaker 1]: Oh, I can read the questions to you if you
[Speaker 0]: pad. That would be fantastic.
Thank you.
[Speaker 1]: would prefer that. Sure.
Thanks.
[Speaker 0]: Well, for the purpose of breaking the ice a
little bit, I can provide a live
demonstration of the use of this Voice In
plugin for Google Chrome.
So I have, let's see, say new sentence.
I'm on a website that is called 750 words.
It provides a text area where without any
other distracting icons for the purpose of
writing and I'm using it for the purpose of
capturing my words that I'm dictating and I
have enabled the Voice In plugin by hitting
the option L command. New sentence.
So it interpreted that command new sentence
even though I didn't pronounce it correctly,
which is a pretty good demonstration of its
accuracy. New sentence.
Oops, that didn't work.
Undo. New sentence. So new sentence is a
combination of 2 commands,
period and new line. So I've found it more
convenient just to say new sentence than
having to say period and new line.
You can see that it's able to keep up with
most of my speech, and it has to interpret
the sounds that I'm making and convert those
into words, so there's always going to be a
lag. New sentence. But I've found that I can
generate about 2,000, up to 2,000
words an hour as I gather my thoughts and
talk in my rather slow fashion of speaking.
New sentence, if you're a really fast
speaker, it might have trouble keeping up.
New sentence. I like to write When I'm using
the keyboard with 1 sentence per line,
so that when I copy my text and paste it into
Emacs, for example, I can resort the
sentences very easily by just selecting 1
line at a time. I like to keep the sentences
unwrapped in that fashion because that
greatly eases the rewriting phase.
And I'm almost have sort of a hybrid reverse
outlining approach by doing that.
New sentence. Looks like I have gotten ahead
of it a bit and it has not kept up.
But generally, it does keep up pretty well.
[Speaker 1]: Nice. Thanks for the demo.
Let's see. I think we have.
Yeah, sorry.
[Speaker 0]: You're welcome. Go ahead.
You can see that it has this EN means English
and then dash US. There's actually about 40
languages that it supports,
including several variants of German and
about a dozen English dialects.
[Speaker 1]: Nice. Let's see, I think we have some
comments and questions trickling in.
So someone is saying that there is a text to
command application or utility called Clipia,
C-L-I-P-I-A, that they think is awesome.
Clipia that they think is awesome.
And someone else is also saying that Sox,
S-O-X is another good alternative.
[Speaker 0]: I've not explored those yet.
So thank you very much for the suggestions.
[Speaker 1]: So I'll... I just dropped a link to the pad
page here in the chat and on the big blue
button if you'd like to open that up as well.
But I'll continue reading the comments and
questions. So the first question,
I guess, is that could you comment on how
speaking versus typing affects your logic or
the content, quote unquote,
that you write?
[Speaker 0]: I find that this is like the difference
between writing your thoughts down on a blank
piece of printer paper versus paper bound
with a leather notebook.
I don't think there's any real difference.
I know that some people believe there is a
solid certain difference,
But this is for the purpose,
I'm using this for the purpose of generating
the first draft because my skills with using
my voice to edit my text is still not very
well developed. I'm still more efficient
using the keyboard for that stage.
So the hardest part about writing generally
is getting the first crappy draft written.
And so I have found that dictation is
perfectly fine for that phase.
And I find it actually very conducive for
just getting the text out.
The biggest problem that most of us have is
applying our internal editor.
And that inhibits us from generating words in
a free-flowing fashion.
So I generally do my generative writing.
So actually I divide my writing into 2
categories, generative writing,
generating the first crappy draft,
and then rewriting. Rewriting is probably 80,
90% of writing where you go back and rework
the order of the sentences,
order of paragraphs, the order of words in a
sentence and so forth.
The really hard work. That's best done later
in the day when I'm more awake.
I do my general writing first thing in the
morning when I feel horrible.
I'm not very alert. That's when my internal
editor is not very awake and I can get more
words out, more words past that gatekeeper.
And so I can do this sitting down,
I can do this standing up,
I can do this 20 feet away from my computer
looking out the window to give my eyes a
break. So I find it's actually very enjoyable
to use it in this fashion.
And the downside is that I wind up generating
3 times as much text, and that makes for 3
times as much work when it comes to rewriting
the text. And that means I'm using the
keyboard a lot later on in the day and I
haven't made any progress on recovering from
my own repetitive stress injury.
I hope that I will add the use of voice
commands, speech to commands,
for editing the text in the future.
And I'll eventually give my hands more of a
break.
[Speaker 1]: Right. Thanks. Yeah, that sounds like a nice
flow of sort of being able to get your words
out while your internal editor is still not
inhibiting things. And then later in the day
or days, get back to the actual rewriting and
editing.
[Speaker 0]: Cool. So this allows you to actually separate
those 2 activities, not only by time.
So many professional writers will spend
several hours in the morning doing the
generative part and then they'll spend the
rest of the day rewriting.
So they have separated those 2 activities
temporally. What most people actually do is,
you know, they do the generative part and
then they write 1 sentence and they apply
that internal editor right away because they
want to write the first draft in a perfect,
as a perfect version as the final draft And
that slows them down dramatically.
But this also allows you to separate these 2
activities in terms of modality.
You're going to do the generative writing by
voice and the rewriting by keyboard.
So I think this is 1 way that many people can
get into using speech to text in a productive
way.
[Speaker 1]: Nice. Yeah, that sounds great.
Let's see. I think we have about 3 or 4
minutes live. So I think we have time for at
least another question.
Have you tried the chat GPT voice chat
interface? And if so, how has been your
experience of it? As someone experienced with
voice control, interested to hear your
thoughts, performance relative to the free
software tools in particular?
[Speaker 0]: I don't have much experience with that
particular software. I have used Whisper a
little bit. And so that's related.
And of course you have this problem of lag so
I find that it's a whisper is good for
spitting out a sentence you know maybe for a
doc string in a programming file.
But I find that it's very prone to
hallucinations. And I find myself spending
half my time deleting the hallucinations,
I feel like the net gain is diminished as a
result. There's not much of a net gain in
terms of what I'm getting out of it.
Whereas I really appreciate the high level of
accuracy that I'm getting from voice-in.
I would use Talon Voice for dictation,
but at this point, there's a significant
difference between the level of accuracy of
voice-in versus Talon voice.
It's large enough of a difference that I'll
probably use voice-in for a while until I can
figure out how to get town voice to generate
more accurate text.
[Speaker 1]: Cool. Thank you. I think we have at least
another 2 or 3 minutes.
So if folks have any other questions Please
feel free to post them on the pad and I'll
check IRC now as well.
Right, so I see 1 question on IRC asking,
Are any of these voice command slash
dictating dictation tools free Libre
software? They cannot find that information
Which I think is part of it.
You just mentioned
[Speaker 0]: the voice in software.
There's It's a freemium so The answer is no
To be able to add the commands,
the custom commands, you have to pay $48 a
year. The Talon Voice software is free.
And the only limitation there is access to
the language model. If you want to get the
beta version, you need to subscribe to
Patreon to help support the developer.
And I found, I did do that and I really
didn't find much of an improvement.
So I really don't intend to do that in the
future. But otherwise,
Town Voice, everything is open and free,
and the Slack community is incredibly
welcoming. The parallels with the Emacs
community are pretty striking.
[Speaker 1]: Excellent, thank you. Okay,
I think we have about another minute on the
live stream, but I believe the big blue
button room here is open and will be open,
So if folks want to join,
if Blaine maybe has a couple of extra
minutes. Awesome. Yeah,
then you're welcome to join and chat with
Blaine and ask any further questions or just
do general chatting. Chatting.
[Speaker 0]: So I see a question. How good is Talon
compared to Whisper? So with Talon,
I find that the first part of the sentence
will be fairly accurate and then when I'm
doing dictation And then towards the end,
the errors start to accumulate.
So in general, I think it's error rate is
about 5 words out of a hundred or so will be
wrong. And whisper, Whisper is wonderful
because it will insert punctuation for you.
But I guess its errors are longer and that
it'll hallucinate full sentences for you.
So they both have significant error rates.
They're just different kinds of errors.
[Speaker 1]: Interesting.
[Speaker 0]: Hopefully both will improve over time.
Right.
Let's see. There's a question.
Are the green block the author for this talk?
Not sure what that question means.
[Speaker 1]: Well, there is a green block of text that's I
think being generated from voice to text,
speech to text. At the top of the pad,
I think that's the question.
[Speaker 0]: So I have this Voicens software operating on
this GitHub, on this 750words.com
site where I do my generative writing at the
start of the day. And it just provides a text
area that's free of distractions.
And you can see the text that's being
recorded as I talk. I haven't been saying the
command new sentence, so there isn't any
punctuation over our discourse.
1 thing that I do at the start of the day is
I like to write in LaTeX.
Ultimately, that's how I store my writing.
So new sentence, new sentence.
See, insert start day.
So This is an example of a chunk of LaTeX
code. So I have some reflections on,
you know, what did I wake up this morning?
And how do I feel? I have reflections on the
prior day in terms of what did I get done
yesterday? Do I remember what I did
yesterday? What happened last night?
Focus of today. What's to be done today?
And so on. So I actually,
I think I have more down here.
Then I've set up these lists so that I can
expand them easily. If I say item,
then the cursor shows up at the start of an
item. And I have it coded so that that new
phrase that I speak will start with a capital
letter. As you can see,
so capitalize the word and.
So in spite of its rather limited command
syntax, There's some, it's enough to get
started and maybe in the future,
they'll add more features.
[Speaker 1]: Cool, that's neat.
[Speaker 0]: So I think this is very helpful for,
you know, doing things like expanding the
names of people. So you can do set up
commands like expand the name of a colleague
to go from their first name to their full
name with a proper spelling of their last
name, which, you know,
you can wind up spending a lot of time trying
to look that up. And so this voice in with
the custom commands enables you to store hard
to remember information like that.
[Speaker 1]: Great. I see another question.
How good is Talon compared to Whisper?
I think you might have answered that already,
at least partially, but...
[Speaker 0]: Right, yeah. I talked about how it seems that
Whisperer will carry out hallucinations,
so it will generate long tracks of error,
whereas Talon will tend to generate more
errors towards the ends of sentences,
in my experience. And the errors are
generally shorter in extent.
It doesn't hallucinate for long tracks.
[Speaker 1]: Great. Okay, I think that's all the questions
that we have on the pad.
If folks want to join here on Big Blue Button
for a few minutes and chat with Blaine,
that also works. Let's see,
I'm probably going to have to drop in a few
minutes to catch the next speaker.
But many thanks, Blaine,
for a great talk and for the interesting
demos and the question and answer.
[Speaker 0]: Thank you very much for hosting this.
[Speaker 1]: I appreciate it. glad to have you.
[Speaker 0]: Cheers, Yeah, this is really amazing to hold
this conference with people from all around
the world connected together through web
browsers.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, it's very neat what technology can do
if and when it's working correctly.
[Speaker 0]: I know it can be a little frustrating at
times, but when it's working,
it's wonderful. Yep.
[Speaker 2]: Good purpose of computers is all the
computers run the same code,
so that people, you know,
a lot of people work on the same thing and
build upon each other's works.
For journaling I found 1 good compromise
between editing and stream-of-thought
journaling. 1 good compromise between editing
and stream of thought journaling.
1 good compromise between editing and being
able to do it again and just kind of helps me
do my thoughts even when I do it is when you
do org mode and you have the bullets it kind
of allows you to naturally chart your
thoughts in a way that's really easy to edit
reorder I saw you kind of did that with your
mac la tech macro where you said item and it
would put you down to the next item.
Does... How much do you do stuff like that?
How much do you do stuff like that where you
use like org mode headings and then you
reorder them because like I did that with
also the K outline from HyperBolt package for
the for Emacs org mode later on after the
[Speaker 0]: stream. Yes. So I could actually set this up
so I have a lot of snippets for Org Mode.
I could have Org Mode version of my insert
start day snippet and carry things out in org
mode. So I use org mode from time to time.
I often use it for the purpose of writing
readme files for projects to outline the
purpose of the project,
and say for a director that contains a coding
project. And I think this would,
so the main limitation of VoiceIn is it only
works in a web page and you have to have an
Internet connection, whereas Talon voice is
perfect for something like org mode in that
you don't need an internet connection and it
will operate anywhere that you can place a
cursor. I haven't found a place where it
doesn't work. It's amazing.
So as you saw my talk,
perhaps You can run it in a terminal or a
remote computer. You can run it in a virtual
[Speaker 2]: Oh yeah, it's definitely.
[Speaker 0]: machine. If you can put your cursor there,
it will work. And so as you might imagine,
if you use bash aliases,
I've worked for, 1 of the first things I did
was map Talend commands to bash aliases so
that I can do all kinds of crazy things
inside of the terminal.
And there are, you know,
there's some support already for using Talon
in Emacs. There's some Emacs functionality
that's built into Talon.
So when you are in Emacs,
there's some features that are automatically
available. And then others have developed or
are developing packages,
which I don't think are available yet in
ELPA. There's 1 that does the font locking or
syntax highlighting of Talon files,
and another that adds some additional
functionality that I'm regrettably not yet
familiar with.
[Speaker 2]: Well, as an example with like how the
sharding of the thoughts,
like let's say, oh, how has my day went?
It's went good for reasons 123,
and bad for reasons ABC.
And then later on, I might think,
oh, there's an, I also,
my day went good for reasons 456,
then you, I can, then you jump up.
And so the, like I found like,
yeah, the org mode subheadings,
because you're able to jump around,
easily reorder them after the fact,
the very streamlined approach to the stream
of thought and the editing.
[Speaker 0]: That's right, extremely powerful.
[Speaker 2]: And even with the stream of thought,
just because like, even when you're editing
that in real time, like,
oh, wait a minute, I thought of another
reason that my day went good,
even though I was talking about how it was
going bad now. So you jump up.
And then you do that. And then you have it.
You easily summarize your thoughts and
whatnot.
[Speaker 0]: That's right. And I think org mode is really
ideal for that kind of interact.
So yeah, I see your point in terms of that
sort of a blend of generative writing and
editing. And it's also kind of parallel to
mind mapping. I use this mind mapping
software called iThoughtsX where I'll
generate all these children items,
and then I'll drag them around and resort
them. And they can have children of their own
and grandchildren and so on,
in terms of the levels of the nodes.
And it's pretty much the same sort of thing
with a nested hierarchy that you can have
with org mode. I think having several
alternate modes or modalities of playing with
thoughts is useful. So sometimes I'll hit a
wall and we're just not really generating
anything in a text mode.
But if I switch to using the mind mapping,
just seeing it arranged with the connecting
lines plays on a different part of the brain,
I think, and it can be incredibly
stimulatory. It can stimulate a lot of new
[Speaker 2]: That's something that I haven't messed around
too much with is the mind mapping software,
but...
[Speaker 0]: thoughts. Because the closest thing that we
have to it in Emacs is Orgrimm in the in
terms of like the 3D visualization of with
Orgrimm GUI or
[Speaker 2]: UI. As well as being able to generate SVG
diagrams and stuff like that,
I think those 2 things would allow you stuff
like Orgrimm or denote And then the diagrams
would be the good ways of doing that in
Emacs, but they don't have the mind map
programs as well.
[Speaker 0]: They're not as well developed.
There are a couple mind mapping packages,
but they're not as advanced.
[Speaker 2]: The best ones were JavaScript web page that
it that Emacs interacted with.
Very well. And so they kind of,
you know, worked around and had a little.
Integration with the 2.
So when you be jumping around your.
When you'd be clicking on the web page it
would be pointing you to different places and
buffers okay like those are those the There's
an like org-roam node program where it kind
of shows the looks like a mind map.
You can click and drag them a little bit,
so it's a little interactive.
[Speaker 0]: Yeah, I'm not familiar with that.
I'll have to look into that.
That sounds very interesting.
[Speaker 2]: I found that I didn't know better,
though, than Org-ROM, so it doesn't.
[Speaker 0]: Why is that?
[Speaker 2]: Well, 1 of the things I'm,
I want to be able to, I don't like the
feeling of being trapped inside org-mode
documents. Like I want to be able to write,
even though I don't really use Markdown and I
like org-mode better than that.
Like for instance, I also use the Koutline
from the Hyperbole package.
That's what my I got a talk on the stream of
thought journaling for with Koutline and I
was like, I just don't like the feeling of
being tracked in 1 document and denote has
the ability to it renames the file so you get
keywords in like a PDF file so you can take
so you can link to that with your notes
without it all disappearing because it's not
an org mode document. Plus the ability of
having it run on multiple computers or with
multiple people, the database kind of gets
screwed up when you try running it under sync
thing. Sync. More fragile.
[Speaker 0]: Very interesting. Yeah.
How far are you? So are you a regular
practitioner of the Zettelkasten approach?
[Speaker 2]: Trying to be. Incrementally improving it.
I partly work too much like testing out the
org-roam versus the notes to use it too much.
So part of it is I just tweak with it too
much before using it and then.
[Speaker 0]: Oh, it's so fun to tweak it.
[Speaker 2]: I think mostly it's as I have these tools,
I know where they are.
So whenever I do need them,
I can use them, even though I don't always
use them.
[Speaker 0]: So I have about a thousand notes in my org
room. Zettelkasten. I've actually,
it's kind of cool that you can export it and
move it into other programs.
I have moved it to Obsidian and played with
it in Obsidian for a while,
maybe added to it in Obsidian,
moved it back to Orgrim.
But I'm not convinced.
I mean, that I think that Nicholas Luhmann
was very successful with it because he spent
5 hours a day or whatever working with it.
And I think I would have to do,
put in a similar amount of effort to get this
kind of benefits that he gained from it.
I'm waiting for somebody to do a scientific
study, controlled trials to see,
to prove whether there's a real benefit.
[Speaker 2]: Oh, yeah. So with the Zettelkasten,
one of the things where you have the 1 for the
sections, and then the 1.1,
or you know how the notes that it does that's
different. The denote,
it has the ability to use a hierarchy manage,
which Org-ROM does everything it can to
eliminate. But you can use them both in
tandem. They call it signatures.
And to me, 1 of the cool features of denote
would be being able to use like the
signatures for the things that make sense.
Like 1 of the ideas is if you don't exactly
know where this is, but you know,
it goes to the section,
you can just use the signature.
Maybe don't even have too much of a file
name. Like oh, this is just another thought
on, well you wouldn't use it for this,
but like my day went good for reasons 1,
2, 3, 4, 5, and you could just use the denote
signature to do 1, 2, 3,
4, 5, just as you have new ideas on like a
subject, or like cars are cars are not this
car is nice because of reasons XYZ,
or these types of four-wheelers are nice
because of XYZ. And you could just keep on
doing that rather than having to get a new
name for each 1 of those files.
Or you could choose not to have it,
but the ability to have it optionally in,
to me, sounds like a really nice combo.
Because then you
[Speaker 0]: could read. I agree. Yeah,
I've actually imposed a hierarchy in my
Zettelkasten and Orgrim.
I just, I can't imagine having random ideas.
They need some kind of structure.
Always have some kind of parent node to
attach them to.
[Speaker 2]: With the workflow I'm trying to develop with
it, part of it is I'm just trying to optimize
the workflow before it feels really,
really, really good, and I don't want to
tweak with it, or I don't know.
Or maybe I don't always need the tool,
but some of the distinctions it seems like
that I want is, I want a daily journal For
your stream of thoughts,
then I want a separate 1 for your to do list
because what you like.
You want very different properties for each
of those. Like for to-do lists,
you want hierarchical,
limited. But if you have more than 3 priority
items, you don't have a priority item and
it's not a good to-do list.
It's just unordered thoughts.
[Speaker 0]: it's a wishful list, because you won't get
most of those things done beyond the first 3.
[Speaker 2]: You're trying to- So And then when you're
trying to do the other stuff,
the stream of thoughts,
all that stuff I probably don't want to go
straight into like my Zettelkasten because
some of those problems,
like it's noisy, it might be redundant,
you don't know how it fits into it because
you haven't done that processing on it.
This hasn't been refined.
So, like, you don't want to refine it.
Like, I find that spell checking is
detrimental to me. I don't want spell
checking. I don't want spell checking.
I don't want syntax highlighting.
I just want to talk or to just write.
If I have mistakes, I can turn on that later,
do it. Because otherwise,
it will distract me and makes that process
[Speaker 0]: Yep, yep, definitely interferes with the
flow.
[Speaker 2]: worse. So yeah, when you're so yeah when
you're doing the getting things done like
that's why I want them would be want would
want them in separate files is that you want
them like ordered, numbered lists,
smaller. And then with the other,
with the stream of thought,
with journaling, you'd want it just
unordered. Thoughts land wherever they may.
Maybe not even like machine-generated
timestamps, So you don't even have to worry
about the names of it,
as an example. So yeah,
very different properties for what you want
for both of those modalities.
[Speaker 0]: So you saw, perhaps, in that snippet that I
had that at, you know,
working on my to-do list at the start of the
day, but in a certain sense that is not ideal
time. I really haven't optimized the timing
of assembly of the to-do list,
I think, in retrospect.
It's just by lifelong habit.
I do that at the beginning of the day,
but probably would be better to do it at
night or the night before.
And so you sort of prime your brain to go,
just get up and go, go after those items.
You were, you maybe you want to revise the
items a little bit after sleeping on it,
but after your subconscious has worked on
those items. Do you have a daily routine that
you follow in terms of generating those kind
of lists?
[Speaker 2]: No. As I said, mostly I just got scaffolding
for this stuff when I want to do it.
I enjoy building the scaffolding and I know
where the tools are when I need it.
And I start using them when I need it,
but I don't have it too consistent.
[Speaker 0]: So OK, so you've looked so far at denote and
org-roam, and you're using k-outline.
And are there other tools that you've
explored?
[Speaker 2]: I've tried using whisper.el
and nerd dictation to do What your talk was
about? Speaking speech to text to see how
that changes Because it does change what you
think What you write down when you speak it
rather than write it. Same thing as when
you're thinking about when you eliminate the
editing, it changes the way you write.
When you have the spell checking,
it changes the way you write to a much
smaller degree. But that's the stuff I really
haven't gotten working as well,
or underdeveloped.
[Speaker 0]: So the dictated text winds up,
I'll move it in. Often I move it into on
Overleaf, this website for a lot of tech
documents. I have a plug-in for Rightful,
And I use that to clean up my word choices
and some grammar. And I use Grammarly.
I'll copy and paste. It just depends on the
nature of the writing,
how serious it is, how polished it has to be.
If I, if it's really vital,
like for a grant application or something,
I'll paste that into Grammarly and work on
trying to get the writing level to the lowest
possible grade level to make it as clear as
possible to as wide of an audience as
possible. 1 of the things I kind
[Speaker 2]: of wish with all the spell checking grammarly
is I kind of wish you could say,
hey, what would the subtle cast in person
think of what I wrote who what would einstein
think of what I wrote because rather than
just trying to make 1 uniform way of talking
it's like people talk differently and that's
an advantage and I can't I really wish like
you maybe these GPT programs could do well.
I really wish it could help you with the
grammar, that maybe give you thoughts on what
your notes are. What does this person think
of your thoughts? What does this person think
of your thoughts? Well,
does this person think of your thoughts?
Well, does this person think of your
thoughts?
[Speaker 0]: That's true. Yeah, I could probably do that
even through chat GDP now.
I haven't spent time trying that out.
But I bet that capabilities are already.
It would be nice if it was like built in to
Emacs, right? It's a package.
Yeah. That'd be very cool.
[Speaker 2]: Grammarly have some sort of,
like, the grammar where they help you the way
you write. Like, for instance,
removing redundant words.
And Yeah, it's supposed to be like beyond
just spell checking, right?
[Speaker 0]: Right. So, and there's actually a Grammarly
package for Emacs, and you get some of the
functionality out of it.
I've paid for the subscription to get the
advanced features, but I've maybe I don't
have my configuration set up correctly.
I just found it was easier to copy and paste
a paragraph at a time into the desktop
application and it will go through and find
those redundancies, junk English.
[Speaker 2]: It would be really interesting trying to have
1 of these That was my problem with a lot of
the grammarly type Programs is I'm I want
something that would do that like be real
interesting seeing 1 that's like an old
English type thing or like Lumen person where
it's just like how does this person write and
Because it would be it would spit out
something a lot different.
Just different. Like, yeah,
you put different people.
[Speaker 0]: Most definitely, yes. They would have a
completely different thinking and writing
style. And so the purpose of doing that would
be to stimulate A new way of thinking or
writing I guess on your part
[Speaker 2]: the purpose of writing is to communicate It
and writing you know 1 of the targets for
that could be yourself so it's like I'd much
rather have a comprehensible sentence than a
truly correct 1. 1 of those is far more
valuable and far more correct English or
[Speaker 0]: Yeah, one's more effective at communicating
to yourself. Yes.
[Speaker 2]: language. Well, one's using the tool,
one's the other you're trying to be used by
the tool. And they're not the same thing.
[Speaker 0]: That's true. Well, I view myself as being
responsible for my writing and being the
final judge of it and as a scientist I have
to my mantra is it's got to be clear and then
precise and then concise in that order.
And I claim that, you know,
that's the order with which I go through
doing revisions. Clarity is,
you know, if it's not clear,
it's useless. It's got to be clear to me,
but it's got to be clear to a lot of people
for whom English is not a first language.
And then after that, I got to worry about
precision and then conciseness,
but those can't be done at the expense of
clarity. So it's quite a battle.
[Speaker 2]: That goes back on the to-do list,
where it's like if you have more than 3 items
like here the purpose of doing that is to
help or grant of a to-do list is help is to
Have you help choose what you're going to do
for the day. Which is why if you have more
than 3 items, if you have 50 items on there,
you're not going to get 50 of those items
done. So maybe you pick the easiest ones to
do, not necessarily the ones that you want or
need to be done. So it's like the process of
choosing those, like, I don't know,
like I found that a very good rules,
like up to 3 priority items if you,
and then also when you look back and you see
that you did those 3 items,
Who cares about this? I'd rather get those 3
items done than any number of secondary
tasks.
[Speaker 0]: Yes, I, yeah, you're very,
very right about that.
I don't, I used to, you know,
use a pattern of assigning letters.
And so you have like, you know,
based on like a hierarchy of,
you've got the urgent and important,
of course, that you got to deal with those.
And then the next thing down is the important
and so on. But I tend to just generate these
terribly long lists that most of those items
would go on what is known as a grass catchers
list of things that you may get to someday,
but there's no way you can get to them today.
But I feel compelled, I need to capture them.
I may want to do them eventually.
They wind up on my list.
[Speaker 2]: Oh yeah, my idea on that is like with a
Zettelkasten where you have the day thoughts
and the day journal, then you have your
Zettelkasten which I don't think should have
too close of a connection because one's a lot
more, what's the word?
[Speaker 0]: It's a knowledge base.
[Speaker 2]: Optimized. Yes, one's more processed.
Yeah, that's the word.
Yeah, one's actually much more processed.
The other is you don't want that process
because you want it to flow from your head
with as little friction as possible.
The other 1 you want to be processed so that
when you look it up and stuff like that's
more efficient Same thing with your to-do
things. So like oh, yeah,
I guess there's 1 more Category like I
thought I found my 3 favorite way rather than
like priority 123 is primary tasks which
basically generally goes up to 3,
secondary tasks, and then I like to have a
third category, unplanned tasks,
and I just have those wrote down in a heading
in an org mode file, and then I put the tasks
in there, rather than using the agenda,
like too much, I don't know,
just I found that that was my favorite way of
doing it and then you have like another file
that would just be your dump of anything you
want to do and that would be like that you
could pull from to get your day or I guess
something that's actually better than a day
is doing it all by a week at a time I found
that that's actually a lot nicer because
thinking about what you do in a week seems
like a nicer unit, where you have a week,
then you have your day,
and then you have the 3 categories of
priority, secondary, and unplanned.
At least that's been my favorite iteration on
[Speaker 0]: thought process workflow.
[Speaker 2]: the week of the to-do I had
[Speaker 0]: a colleague that was very effective at
planning on a weekly basis and he would just
get his weekly list of things to get done and
he was very good at pounding through that
list and getting them done.
I have been too much of a day-oriented person
and a week-oriented person to adapt his
approach, but I've been considering that too.
I think what I don't do enough of is pulling
back to the month level,
semester level, year level,
5 year level, 10 year level.
And...
[Speaker 2]: That's the advantage of finding it by a week
is like you can have like so you'd have your
week and then maybe you have like 1 section
after Friday or last day of the week and this
is like your this is just your like staging
so this is where you stage all the tasks and
then what like you can just stay in your
staging write them all down and then use alt
and your arrow keys to quickly reorder all of
them in the week and then when you're looking
at 1 day and you're just looking at ordering
everything well it makes a lot of sense when
you just say, I don't really want to do that.
Like I want this done this week.
I don't necessarily want it done on this day.
So it just, that's why I found that the week
approach works a lot nicer even.
[Speaker 0]: of a staging time you like schedule some time
in your week to do the staging.
[Speaker 2]: Yeah. Is that way The staging is more of just
like, these are the things I would like to
get done. And then when you schedule it,
then you kind of schedule it by just using
the Alt-Left key, the Alt-Arrow keys to just,
oh, I want this done. It looks like this
would work really good on this day.
This 1 looks like it would work on this day.
[Speaker 0]: A, you still utilize org agenda?
[Speaker 2]: I try to, I don't know,
I found that it works at least better without
it. Yeah, that's fine.
Because that way I also get a log of
everything I've done, which I can't find a
way that, it seems easier to just make new
files for it. And rather than,
like you could use it with Org Agenda,
but like 1 of the things that you want is
with it is to look back at it,
reflect. And so like if you have the,
if you have, if you open up the file with 2
levels or 3 levels of headings to where you
just see the priority task,
you can get a very nice overview of saying,
I did my priority task this day.
So you get the numbers next to the things.
And so you can easily just say,
I've done this. I mean,
it would be nice if I could figure out a way
of doing agenda to give me percentages.
But I haven't figured that out.
Seeing the granular level,
I can easily scan that with my eyes.
So I just did it by hand rather than the
agenda.
[Speaker 0]: Yeah, I've, I've tried to use agenda a few
times and pretty seriously,
but I keep bouncing off it.
I think I get too many things built in or
scheduled and I just don't get to them.
I feel bad about it and I wind up abandoning
it. So that's 1 area where there's probably
some potential for optimizing and making that
work better. There's a lot of customizing you
can do with Agenda. It's amazing.
[Speaker 2]: For me, it was though,
I wanted there to be a separation between the
daily to-do lists and like your grab bag
which I think agenda works a lot better for a
grab bag. I want a nice way of looking back
at my to-do daily to-do logs.
So I kind of want them to be separated,
so I just did them separate.
With the agenda, I could never figure out
exactly how I want that to work,
how the files would look,
and how all the Emacs settings would interact
with it. I mean, I'm sure I could,
but that's why I opted for weekly files.
Or at least That's my most refined idea on
the process.
[Speaker 0]: That's a good idea. So I've taken my approach
is a little different that I'm generating
this text on a daily basis and popping it
into this to 1 document file per day and a
like a diary on Overleaf as a big so it winds
[Speaker 2]: sections
[Speaker 0]: up being 365 and where every month is a
chapter and it's compiled quickly enough even
though it's often up to 1,000
pages long by the end of the year.
And I have all these, of course,
with the PDF, I can search through it.
So that's not as you can't do the kind of
really sophisticated searching that you can
do with Org Mode. But just doing that,
It sure has been very helpful in digging up
information, like the little protocols on how
I attack, accomplish a certain task that I
have to do a year later,
or to have a record of what I did on a
certain day and then somebody above me might
be trying to hold me to account what got
done. I can look that up pretty very quickly.
It's documented. I find that to be just any
kind of thorough documentation system is very
[Speaker 2]: I also mess with having it all in 1 file
rather than by a weak file.
[Speaker 0]: useful. And at least what I did.
I ran into trouble with,
like, once you get a lot of items,
like if you have 1,000
items, headings, I've had org files with
1,000 headings. It can be so hard to scroll
through. Maybe it's some limitations I'm run
into with the Emacs being single threaded.
[Speaker 2]: At least with, yeah. Yeah.
It was like, that's 1 of the things is like,
how exactly do you want this,
the information structured because it can
change how it's retrieved.
[Speaker 0]: Ooh, most definitely. Most definitely.
[Speaker 2]: So as an example, when I was doing the daily
logs and I put it all in the date and then
the priority, secondary,
unplanned tasks, and then I had it stay at
that, get auto expanded by that level by
default so I didn't see the individual task
and you and then I had a but And then it
would say like I complete 205 or something
like that of secondary tasks.
And then just being able just to quickly scan
all the days and say, oh,
it just, the feedback you get from that is
worth a lot. And I don't think it's
something, it's not something I could think
of how you do an agenda.
Even though I got done in the text files just
because you get that doesn't expand all the
way so you so you can quickly just see on
this day I did this well on this day I did
this well all within and 4 lines per day.
So it's not, that doesn't,
that's not very visually verbose.
Probably about as visually verbose as you
want it. They're not super long.
You easily see the 2 of 3 and stuff like that
that you get done so you can quickly and say,
oh well, these are the days where I got my
primary tasks done or this week,
and this day I didn't do it well and you
could helps you correlate like your feelings
with your to-do lists and journals and
whatnot.
[Speaker 0]: Yeah I think that's very powerful.
Because it's summarizing capability.
It allows you to, you know,
pull back and get an overview.
Get an overview.
[Speaker 2]: And yeah, as I said, it's like the feedback
from that almost when I did that,
it feels like half the reason or should be
like half the reason is and it's something
that I don't if you use the agenda as it is,
you wouldn't, I don't know how you would get
it, like saying, like looking at the week by
week basis, breakdowns,
you might be able to get like percentages,
which would be nice. Like I did this well,
or like habit, I don't,
there might be things that could offer you
but. Yeah,
[Speaker 0]: so I'm pretty obsessed about tracking effort
on various kinds of projects,
or various kinds of activities,
and to get some feedback in that regard.
And then you, but you got the,
So I define a project as anything that
requires work at different points in time,
more than 1
[Speaker 2]: time. I'll email you my org mode template
that I made that demonstrates that.
I don't know if you, do you have your email
in your talk notes or anything?
[Speaker 0]: Okay. I think I should have it on the first
slide. There should be my email address.
I can add it to my talk notes.
[Speaker 2]: Okay. Would you want me to show it to you at
[Speaker 0]: that'd be great.
[Speaker 2]: all? Sure, All right, let's see.
I'm going to share screen button,
right? There's a share screen button,
right?
[Speaker 0]: Yeah, so, let's see.
[Speaker 2]: Yeah, I'm all. That's the right button.
Can you not share the screen on this?
[Speaker 0]: I have something going here.
Let's see. I have, I see some stuff on here.
Wonder if I'm still active.
It shows share screen.
Cancel.
[Speaker 2]: Maybe they just did it through OBS.
[Speaker 0]: Maybe I only have permission to share.
I can put my email address in the chat.
[Speaker 2]: I guess I'll just email it to you,
but Let's see. Yeah, I think the way that
they did it on the Any of the other videos if
they shared the screen they just shared the
webcam they just took over the webcam with
OBS and shared what they wanted with it.
[Speaker 0]: Oh, okay.
[Speaker 2]: At least I'm guessing.
Yeah, I'll give that to you.
Okay. I guess I'll let you go watch the rest
of the Emacs videos.
[Speaker 0]: This has been a great conversation.
Thank you very much. I appreciate your
willingness to share your thoughts on this
matter. This is vital,
time management. It's a kind of key aspect of
life.
[Speaker 2]: Oh yeah. The way the how the function.
Reasons to use emacs is to use the keyboard
is. It's not to speed you up.
Like, yeah, that's nice.
But it keeps you in the stream,
keeps you in the flow state and which then
just makes you think better and yeah and the
thing with that is you I have you I have no
idea what the limits of that would be.
Because you think, because yes,
it's not about beating up how many words you
say a minute. I mean that's nice and all,
But when you start doing that,
when you start removing all these friction
points, all of a sudden the number,
quality, and types of thoughts you get start
[Speaker 0]: That's right.
[Speaker 2]: increasing. Which is the goal.
[Speaker 0]: Okay. Well, thank you very much.
Enjoy the rest of the meeting.
[Speaker 2]: Will do.