And about, I think we are live. Okay, hi again everyone. And hi
Blaine, how are you doing? Fantastic, happy to be here.
Yeah, it's good to see you again. We were just reminiscing in
a room right now that it's almost been a year exactly since we
last spoke because you were at the EmacsConf last year. That's
right. This is great fun. Yeah, well, thank you for coming in
and especially every time you come with a very well-crafted
talks talking about, you know, what you do with Org Mode, Org
Roam and whatever. And it's really fascinating as someone
who develops and use those tools constantly to see you put
them in action so well. Because you, you know, the way you
talk about your research, it really reminds me on what we
were, sorry, I've got elves talking in my ears and I'm still
not used to it at this point. But it's really nice to see you
put all of this together into a very cohesive way for you to
write. Okay, let me just share my screen and I'll be sharing
the questions. Where is it? All right, take presenter. And I
will be sharing the questions. All right. Can you see my
screen all right? I can, yes. OK, cool. So we move straight to
the question. Let me just check on the time. I think we have
about until 10.20, which is in 17 minutes. So let's take
about 10 to 15 minutes of question time. And if people have
joined on BBB, we'll also be taking questions live. All
right. Starting with the first question, what does 0573
mean in your init file name? So this name is, you can think of
it as a prefix or a stub. It's an index number that I utilize
before a short name that describes the project. So I have all
my projects in my home directory, and I just start typing the
project number or index number. in the terminal and I have
autocompletion available through oh my ZSH package. So I
just hit tab and it autocompletes the name of the project and
pops me into that folder. And so I find this to be very easy for
navigating between projects. As you saw, I work on multiple
projects in a given day and this helps me move about. And I
also use this number at the start of the log file name and at
the start of the manuscript name and the start of the, I also
have an annotated bibliography. So all those files are
identified just in case I accidentally save one to the wrong
folder. I can avoid, I can sort them out later. Great
question. Thank you. Next question, which I think is going
to be a long one. What does Zettelkasten mean? So this means
like, I guess, notebox, something along those lines. You
can think of it as a- Yeah, spitbox usually, that's the word
we use. Thank you. So this is a kind of like a card catalog
system that when it was done on paper, and now it's being done
electronically through various software packages. So in
the Emacs world, org-roam is a one of several alternate
packages that you can use. Prot has the note and there's a
couple others. So, idea is that you create a note, usually a,
ultimately what you want to do is create a nugget of
knowledge from your reading that you've done. and you add it
to this note system in such a way that you can recover it more
easily than what had to be done in the old days with index
cards.
So you set up backlinks and then you can use the search
features in Org Roam to filter and find the notes again in the
future. Org Roam has a wonderful GUI interface where you can
display it as a knowledge graph, essentially, all your
nodes and the backlinks between them. I set mine up in a
rather hierarchical fashion to, at least right now, it's
pretty hierarchical at this point, but it may become more
disorganized over time. But I find it I'm sort of a visual
person. I like mind maps a lot. I find that this visual
display of my Zettelkasten is similar, resembles to a
certain degree, a mind map.
Okay, well, that's a pretty good definition of what
Zettelkasten is, and you also went on to specify what it
means inside Emacs, so thank you. I think that clarifies it
for the two people in the room who still do not know, after
attending four Emacs conferences, what is the
Zettelkasten method. Moving on to the next question,
how many papers are you writing at the same time? Because I
believe you mentioned that you had concurrent papers being
written during your presentation. So I'm probably working
on, in a given year, somewhere between 10 and 15. How many do I
get published in a year? Probably anywhere from one to four
or five. So these papers often, the work on them spans
multiple years. will start working on a paper when I begin,
before I begin the experiments, ideally, because I'm
trying to do hypothesis-driven research. And so that helps
define the scope of the project and limit the number of
rabbit holes I go down. So, but through the nature of the
work, there's a lot of waiting required in my case for
crystals to grow and then the opportunity to collect
diffraction data on the crystals. And then the structures
have to be determined and refined and analyzed and then
deposited, figures have to be made. So a lot of steps are
involved that those take generally span, that work can span
several years.
In a given day, I try to work on two papers, ideally. I haven't
been doing so well lately over the past month.
In the past year, there was a couple of days where I worked on
five papers. There was something like a half dozen where I
worked on four, about 40 days where I worked on three, and I
think there was something like about 100 days where I worked
on two papers a day, about 140 days where I just worked on one.
So my idea is, I've been sort of developing more recently is
that I'll start doing like the generative writing on a paper
at the beginning of the day on the paper project I'm most
excited about. I tried to, I'm a night owl. I tried to do this
work early in the morning when I'm half awake to try to
overcome my internal editor that inhibits me from writing
prose freely. And so the idea is just to get a lot of words out,
worry about editing them later. And then after about three
hours, I'll switch to the second project that I'm less
excited about. And I can go for another 90 minutes to two
hours on that project. So I build up a lot of momentum, and
then I do the switch. And I find that switch to be relatively
easy. So my process will be On project A, make some final
notes about what was accomplished in the writing log. Then
I'll switch over to the writing log for the project B, and
I'll go to the diary section at the beginning. I'll make a
little to-do list and maybe look at the prior entry in the
diary if I need to reboot my memory. And then I'll move on to
the manuscript and go for 90 minutes or two hours.
Generally, you're only good for somewhere between four and
a half, five and a half hours. If you try to write in a
generative fashion much longer than that, your
productivity goes down quite a bit. You're better off
switching to a completely different activity and then
using your experience doing that writing to essentially
launch background jobs in your subconscious. And so you
will get those ideas in the shower the next morning.
I find it really funny because I also relate. I've also
worked a lot on organization as linked to paper writing but
also to on my work as a developer and it's funny how you refer
to your ability to think about something in very similar
terms to how a computer would think about something. You've
mentioned in your presentation the cost of context
switching between different things but it's also
something that we use in computing when a processor needs to
be thinking about something else, well, it has a cost. And
it's really fun for me to hear you talk about, oh, I need to
select two topics, but no longer than 90 minutes per topic,
because it's really about maximizing your output for
creativity. And overall, your entire chat, your entire
presentation here is about really maximizing the
engagement that you have between outputs and your
cognition. And I really find this amazing how down to the T
you've managed to do this. And it actually leads me to
another question which is being asked of you, which is,
how do you capture those ideas when you are away from Emacs? And
perhaps not only those you have in the showers, but also
elsewhere. So that's a great question. Over the past year, I
actually, last January, upon recommendation of a senior
colleague, I bought a digital voice recorder for $85 from
Sony, and it's the best investment I've made in a very long
time. other than my laptop computer, because I then record
my thoughts. So I have a half hour commute. And to me, that's
largely a waste of time. I wish I lived a lot closer to work.
But I use that time to generate ideas. So maybe I'll start my
day at home for 90 minutes, worked on paper A, and then I might
try to prime my mind about project B, or I might still have
ideas that are flowing about project A. And I'll record
those in the digital voice recorder. And then when I get to
the lab, I'll transfer the audio file to my computer, and
I'll transcribe it using Whisper. So I've set up some
Python scripts and bash functions to go through and I
convert all the sentences into one sentence per line
because that's the way I like to write and edit things. And so
it does all this pre-processing for me. And I have this
transcript that's in pretty good shape. I don't have to do
very much editing. And I'll then copy that over and work on
it, clean it up, and pluck out the ideas that I think might be
useful. Unfortunately, I'm not very I'm not away from my
computer that much. I'm in front of it, 12, 14 hours a day. So
when I'm teaching, when I'm in seminar, other committee
meetings, traveling, then I'll capture ideas on paper. I
don't have a cell phone. I'm trying to be the last human on
earth without a cell phone. I think I would be so distracted
by a cell phone. I would be the worst person on the planet,
I would be totally focused on my cell phone
if I had one. So I'm like one
of the few people left who can read a map. So I do run into some
difficulties hailing taxis and that sort of thing when I'm
traveling. So there are some downsides to not having a cell
phone, but these days. Yeah, but I think there's a pretty
significant upside because, you know, you talk about cell
phones here, but before you were talking about the 90
minutes of uninterrupted focus on a given topic. And I think
plenty of people would be envious of this ability to focus
for that long on a topic. And I guess if we are to thread the
needle here, well, the lack of cell phone might be for
something for this ability to focus. So take of this what you
will. True, I am a sucker for the web browser. I can get
distracted going down various rabbit holes thanks to
Google searches and that sort of thing. Likewise, email is
another tension grabber. So, there's those other battles I
have to fight too. So, right, that is a huge battle that all of
us face is developing focus and being able to maintain
focus. Right. So, we have about three more minutes of
questions. So, thank you so much already for answering many
questions. How about we do a quick fire for the remaining
questions and then maybe we will take a question from... from
here or in the room. So how about we go for the next one?
What if an ID does not belong
to any current working manuscript? So I
have a sandbox area in the log file.
So if it's likely going to be related to something to a
certain degree, if the idea is totally unrelated to
anything I'm working on, then I will
I maintain a 700 through 750 words. I maintain a kind of a
external diary and I just capture those kind of ideas there.
So, I have access to a web interface to this big text area with
nothing in it. And I just dump ideas all day long in there. So,
and I save that away. I have that in a big LaTeX document
currently on Overleaf. but each day has its own page. And so
that information is captured and I can recover it. And maybe
it's gonna take me a week, a month, a year to take that idea and
think about it. And then eventually I'll get to a point where
I have a critical mass of momentum and data and so forth,
where I could start a new writing project. But you're right,
that is a problem, capturing those ideas and keeping track
of them. The Xenocasting can also help with that. Right. OK,
so we have time for one more question and I think I'm going to
skip this one. You can take all the time you want after we're
done with the live show for you to answer in BBB, obviously,
and even after the conference. But I'd really like to finish
on this one.
So, if there were one habit from your process,
referencing your extensive flowchart, that you want
active learners or professional researchers to adopt,
which would it be and why? So,
I think just keeping that daily diary, that's the essential
part for overcoming the fear of forgetting and the fear of
losing momentum. One reason why people don't work on two
projects a day is that they fear losing momentum on the first
project they're working on. But we often are stuck with
working on multiple writing projects, and they're best
done over longer periods of time rather than in a hasty
fashion. I try to avoid binge writing, although I do my share
of that, too. Okay, well, Blaine, thank you so much for all
your questions. The stream is going to move to the next chat
and talk. We're moving to the next talk of the day, but feel
free to stay in a room. For everyone interested in asking
more questions to Blaine, the BBB, sorry, BigBlueButton
link is available on the website. You can join and ask
questions directly to Blaine. And otherwise, we'll make
sure that all the remaining questions on the pad get their
answer eventually. Thank you so much, Blaine. You're
welcome. Bye-bye. Bye.
okay I think the stream is moving on. Just making sure. okay. Yes
we are moving on to the next stream. So Blaine, I'm going to need to
get ready for the next talk. Thank you so much for all your
answers and feel free to answer your questions. I'm
sorry that i didn't get to fill your question live. It's just
there was a lot of questions actually. It was a comment. Okay.
Yeah, yeah. You mentioned about that you sit all the day in
front of computer, right? And I have to say, it's not too
different from a bathroom if you get distracted by web
browser. I also have the same problem. And one interesting
solution I found at some point is that I pry my mind about
certain task, I leave my office and I go for a walk while
thinking about this. And that really forces to focus
because while you're working you have nothing else to do.
You cannot go and like go like searching Google and stuff
like that. It can really help in some cases.
Yeah, I try to. Periodically, I'll try to restart doing the
Pomodoro method, where you're supposed to get up every 25
minutes and take a break. But that requires a lot of
discipline. And it also has, I find I'm more exhausted by
following that method at the end of the day. But I think the
problem with, well, I think in part- No, no, I don't mean
Pomodoro actually. I mean, more like showers. Because when
you take a shower, you think about something, right? When
you just go for a walk, you again think about it. So this is not
a break to take rest. It's a break to think away from
computer.
And you prime yourself, your brain by... picking something
to work on. So I have a project, I think, like certain
questions I want to think about. I sometimes take my, like a
piece of paper with me. And then when I walk, I like take
notes. You can record voice in your case. And like half an
hour and you can really generate ideas.
I have been doing a similar thing. I will take a clipboard.
Maybe I'll have, um, Some blank pages where I'll write, jot
down ideas as I walk. I'll go for like a half hour, hour-long
walk and also read a paper sometimes, and in the process of
reading, I get ideas.
The clipboard though is socially less acceptable. It
reminds people of their gym teacher, I think, or their
marine drill sergeant, and they give me all kinds of weird
looks. Even though they're walking and reading their cell
phone, looking down at their cell phone, they give me weird
looks for looking down at a clipboard as I walk. So there's
that weird aspect to it. It's kind of hilarious.
Thank you very much for the comment. Yeah, hopefully it's
helpful. Because I really struggled about this web browser
in the past. Not so much these days. Very good.
That's good to hear.
I asked,
when I write notes, I've noticed like with the
Getting Things Done and the Zettelkasten, I like to separate them
out. And beyond that, I also like to separate them out on
daily things and the global things. So that, for instance,
your Zettelkasten, a daily would be like a journal. If you
separate it out, It gives a lot of tension of, oh, well, if
it's just a stray thought, I'll write it into my journal if I
don't know where it goes. If I can think of a permanent place
for it to go, it goes into the Zettelkasten. Same thing with,
and then with like the getting things done is like, I don't,
you start with like a fresh sheet of paper every single day or
note or whatever. You ever done, you have tricks like that
that you've noticed? So I'm sort of doing something similar
through this. Well, to be honest, I like at the start of the
day, I actually will just do sort of a brain dump of what
happened the day before, just to try to get writing again.
And these days, because of carpal tunnel syndrome, I'll use
a voice speech to text to generate that initial text. And I'm
just trying to, build up momentum of generating words. And
so I capture, but I'm also adding to that document
throughout the day. And so that is available through the web
browser. I have a tab open to 750 words all the time. There's
an alternate to it that is called Write Honey, that somebody
in Berlin started, because they benefited so greatly from
this practice. They have made it available for free,
apparently for life. And so there's no word limit, whereas I
have a grandfathered version of 750 words, and I have a word
limit of 5,000 words. I rarely hit it. It's nice to know that
right honey doesn't have that limit. So, that's how I'm
capturing things. And then, so some of that text winds up
being moved into my log file or even sometimes into the
manuscript.
So maybe a little less organized than the getting things
done approach with the dailies and then the refiling
process. So I don't do any refiling. I want to file once. I
don't want to file a second time or have to go back and handle
something a second time. So that's my rationale for the
approach I take. I'm not using it. I've had various
iterations of systems I've used, but I think my favorite one
for like getting things done is actually not using
Org Agenda, just like making a blank sheet and kind of doing
like a template where it's just like, and separating my
tasks out into three categories, like core tasks, like, and
rule of thumb is like, if it's beyond three, it's too much too
many. And like core tasks, secondary tasks and unplanned
tasks. So these, those three categories, like for
instance, the core task, if it's greater than three, it's
too many. That way is like, when you look back, then you can
see, like, if I got my core tasks done, I did really good. or if
I got a lot of secondary tasks but not my core tasks done, I got
side reactions with things that don't matter.
If I got a lot of unplanned tasks,
I could look at those unplanned tasks to see, oh yeah, okay,
that was fine. Okay, the day didn't go as
planned, but it was, yeah. That's an excellent suggestion.
I generally just And I ended up long of a to-do list. It's
impossible to accomplish in a day. Then I just like
furnaces. Another trick that I liked was I also put like that
under like a week. Cause it makes more sense to do it under a
week. And then I'd have like subheadings under that, like,
you know, so week day. Um, then I'd have those three
categories for each of the tasks and then kind of as an
unofficial day at the end, I just like have a staging area for
all tasks. So I just kind of, then I just, I want to be using org
agenda. So then I just be moving up and down, you know, cause
you could, cause you're able to rearrange stuff in org mode
so easily. I don't know if there's a good way of, that's been
my favorite iteration
of doing it. So I wrote a little function that pops in the
to-dos that are specific to a particular project in the log
file for that project.
And then I add the log file name to the list of org files that
Org Agenda searches, so those to-dos will show up. But my
list is too long, and that becomes overwhelming. So I'll
just assign a to-do heading to the top item in my to-do list to
try to, but maybe it should be three. That would be a
reasonable compromise.
That's a good idea.
So you're doing weekly planning then? I can show up. I was.
This is, yeah, this was, yeah. What ended up making me stop is
I didn't know how to make a template of it. And I, I ended up
getting annoyed by manually changing the days every single
time and naming like my files and stuff like that. If I Maybe
if I did it now, I could figure out how to program it or if I
spent enough time, but that's what I think eventually made
me stop doing it. So there's a, um, you can make a snippet for
the week and then you could have code in the snippet that
would generate the dates automatically. Um, So I have like
for my daily entry, I have a snippet called entry and then I
hit tab and our control or whatever to insert the snippet and
that has the current date already entered. So I skip that, I
don't have to deal with that. So I think you could probably
feed what you want to accomplish to a copilot, for example,
being copilot. I've been using Bing Copilot
for the past three or four months to return
Elisp code that works 90% of the time.
I've been pretty impressed. And it's free. So no
API key required. It runs. So I guess I installed the Bing
Copilot plugin in the Google Chrome.
And that's what I've been using.
Yeah, I can show you my screen if
you want to see what the screen looks like.
I can email you the template. I kind of have it saved as a
template. I've got to find it, though. Let's see.
Not exactly set up to.
Alright, so. I
don't know if you can see this well enough, but...
Yeah, let's make it bigger. Can you see that at all? I can see a
little bit of it. Yeah, it's kind of blurry.
Alright, well. But then you just do that right there. So it's
all color coded. I, so I get a sense of, uh, uh, what the kind of
greenish blue lines must be or days, I guess, or. Okay. Well,
right. There's like, so you can see like startup show two
levels. Then I have like numbers right there. So right on one
day you have like the core tasks, there's three out of four
done. Then I have like secondary and unplanned and then.
Yeah, that's just the general idea
So that this is you raise you know the so the dilemma I face of
course is that I have maintain like a to-do list and our
project specific and then there's the all the other things I
have to do and So there should be like some The org agenda
should be a way of being able to pull the two sets together, I
guess.
I had broken up my,
well, I had way too many to-do lists stored in various
places.
And so that's a problem, I guess, when you have too many
to-dos and the org Agenda becomes overwhelming and sort of
discourages Yeah, I figure that the general task on that is
like I start writing things up. I get more and more items.
I'll make a master to-do list. Oh my master to-do list has too
many items. Let me throw it out Well, there's another name
for that kind of list you could you know called a grass
catcher list. So Charles Hobbs was this, he wrote a book in
the 80s called Time Power. And he had like, you know, so he was
one of these time management gurus. And so, let's
see, you get the name of some, like Tony Robbins and,
I forget the name of the other guy, that's Brian Tracy. So
that they have kind of pushed the same kind of similar
approaches. But Charles Hobbs had a very more organized
approach, I think, and more disciplined. And he identified
that kind of list as a grass catcher list, where you have a
list of items that you think you might want to do, but you
haven't prioritized them yet. And you haven't scheduled
them yet. but they need a safe place to be stored. When time
permits, the idea was you would pull items off that grass
catcher list and move it into a to-do item that you will
schedule and commit to getting done. That was the idea,
separating them between core tasks, secondary tasks,
unplanned tasks, because your whole day can't be planned.
Right, right. You have things you have to do that are
unscheduled that come through your door or land in your
inbox or land in your email. You've got to do them. And then
core tasks, I don't know, like to-do lists, their whole
point is. So for instance, like journal and Zettelkasten
are kind of, and like that's global lists versus the daily
lists are kind of. done a little differently. With
Zettelkasten, it's organic. Things build up. If you make a
note, it's great. If you don't, if it has a small amount,
that's great. Have a small note. With a daily to-do, you want
to use it to make decisions. That's the idea of having the
core task and the secondary task separate because the whole
thing about it is, I wanna use this to eliminate what I'm
going to do. It's to choose what I'm going to do, like the core
tasks. Because if I can get my core tasks, I can be happy with
my previous days. And then I would probably start using
agenda a lot more if I was more consistent with using like
these as like weekly files. I don't know. But then the whole
goal thing is just like, let me see what I wanna populate the
day list with. So how many core tasks wind up spanning
multiple days because they're such big projects?
I would need more time using the system before I'd figure
something like that out. As I said, I'm not using it right
now, but that has been my favorite iteration of using these.
So within the core tasks, do you assign priorities? So the
way I would translate this a little bit would be like in this
method that Charles Hobbs had, he had a category for the
items that you really have to get done, and they're really
important. And so they get a priority of A. And then the
secondary tasks would get a priority of B. But then within
the A category, you would number them like one through
three, I guess. All right, so this would be part of the
purpose of separating the daily list or like the weekly list
from the global list. So for instance, your global list,
you'd say, I want this project that will take a long duration
of time. But your daily list would just say, I want to work on
it today, even if I don't get it done today. Like, I want to
work on it today. then maybe you can link like for instance
that your daily list to that global list or something along
those lines. But that would be I think a good answer to that
type of problem because yeah, the daily list is like
supposed to be for that day, not for, Like for instance, you
start out clean, you make the list like that would probably
be your first task for the week is what do I want for the week?
Then you have some tasks that you do with staging. And then
like for instance, since you look at it as a whole week at a
time, you're able to rearrange it and say, these are the
things I wanna get done this week. This is what I really wanna
get done on this day. This is what I don't care about on this
day or yeah.
Another person that kind of, and this is kind of related,
there's this idea of
of time blocking. So obviously, three tasks, core tasks,
maybe they're going to take three or four hours each or two or
three. And you can assign blocks of time in your schedule to
get them done. And often, what happens is they take longer
than you expect. And you have to extend the blocks. Calvin
Newport has a that's a kind of approach he advocates is you
and I think the power to that is you're you. you're mapping
out, you know, you're allocating the time to do these things
and you're seeing how you actually, how much time things
actually take. And then you, so you wind up adjusting in the
future. And the idea is with this approach is do it on paper.
And then you have to like, uh, if something takes longer,
that pushes everything else down. You just wind up
redrawing your schedule for the day, uh, manually. And, um,
So it's kind of laborious, and that labor is supposed to
inhibit you from spending too much time on a project. As you
know, you've got the pain of redrawing everything if you
spend too much time on the first project.
Yeah, there was a, let's see. It's whatever you strategy you
want to do. Like for instance, to me, it's like doing it this
way makes me say, I want to focus on like what matters. Then
it'll tell me if I feel good about that day, depends on what
algorithm, what level and what type of strategy you're
using. If you're using time blocking, you're optimizing
for each level of time block where I'm, where's like, And you
can combine the approaches. It'd be trickier. But like, now
let's see. I was listening to a talk with Jordan Peterson.
One of the things he said that really resonated with me is
like, you wanna use a calendar, but the first rule of using a
calendar is don't let the calendar tyrannize you. Because
like the first thing you wanna do whenever you use a calendar
is schedule every single minute of the day Now you don't have
any room for if any task overruns at all. And after a couple of
tests, you're like, I don't want to do this anymore. I rebel.
I'm going to throw it out. So one kind of combination is
through this Pomodoro method I mentioned earlier, where
you would sort of like block out, say, two hours. You work for
like 25 minutes, take a little, break for up to five minutes
and get back to work. And then after two hours, you're to take
like a 15 minute break in the morning. In the afternoon, you
might even let that break run longer and you might only have
three work sessions between breaks. So because you're
going to be more run down in the afternoon. And so you build in
some
into your schedule, some flex like, okay, that's supposed
to be a break time, but you know, maybe some urgency comes up
and you got to deal with, um, and you have to break out of this,
uh, Pomodoro technique. So, uh, that, that, that's one way
of kind of scheduling in some, uh, flexibility is through
the breaks at Peterson's[??], right. Right. That... I can't, I
can't... I don't schedule to that kind of detail. That's just
too oppressive.
Well, neither do I, but it's like that, like I, that's, I
don't try to, to me, the much more interesting question that
I tried to do is like, let's try to make sure I do the important
things. Cause if I do those, my life would probably move a lot
quicker. If I get, if I choose a couple items that I really
want and am able to consistently do them, I think my life
would bastically start improving. Not necessarily if I can
play the game of optimizing every hour.
Maybe that could be, and it's a place to start rather, and I
think it'd be the most effective place to start. And if I got
better at using it all the time, perhaps I'd be playing
optimizing every hour game. But this is the game I think
would be best bang for buck for me to optimize now. What
you're trying to optimize for is accomplishing these core
tasks, getting them done as quickly as possible, or as
effectively as possible, and as effectively as you need, or
whatever your goal is. But yeah, focusing on that rather
than the scheduling, I think. Plus, a core task could be, I
don't know, catch up on all my house chores, or let, or do a
specific one if it's really big or like, I don't know, it's
whatever you want it to be. It's like, you can make them
bigger or smaller depending on, on how you word them and
everything. Cause like, if you say cap, capture all of your
house chores up for like one week and you haven't done
anything, that's probably a little too ambitious.
That's right. Yeah, well, a lot of. Yeah.
I spend, I don't know, at least 15 minutes, half an hour at the
beginning of the day, sort of my my planning and sort of my
initial writing session is involves a bit of planning and
there's always. A lot more time. So generally, depending on
the nature of your work,
it can take up to 15% of your time. It can take quite a bit of
time. And I think people don't really acknowledge that as
part of your work is planning. And it can take a significant
amount of time.
Yeah, that's what I was meaning though is like the very first
thing I think people generally always try to do with the
scanners like look at how productive I can be let's schedule
every single minute up and it's like You're not gonna want to
do that for very long and it's not gonna work out And what you
were saying about The pomodoro technique one of the core
Let's see, one of the benefits could be described of another
benefit I've seen of like multiple habits books is if you
start multiple small habits where you try to do them
consistently, you give yourself an opening to where if you
get into the flow state, you can do a lot more of it. Like, I
don't know, let's say you got a habit of, I don't know, just
write a journal entry. You're a journal entry of like at
least two lines. I don't know that could very easily turn to
like three paragraphs and if you have like a whole bunch of
Like the pomodoro technique it could be like stubs to allow
you to do more stuff
Where are they in spur to allow inspiration to allow you to
generate inspiration and then capture it when it strikes if
the mood fancies you
Yeah, so that's kind of an issue with the Pomodoro
technique. So, one idea is that you just, if you really have
to break out, because the idea is too big to put on the back
burner and hold in place, then you do have to break out of the
Pomodoro and go, you know, jot down a quick note or three
paragraphs.
but like how much... You don't get to count that as a
Pomodoro. You have to like reset your count because you've
broken it. I mean, according to that method, it's
kind of rigid. It's a different algorithm optimizing for
different things. And this may just be like a by-product,
but this could be very easily like a core advantage that may
or may not be the core reason that you were using it but didn't
realize it, and may not be something that it's optimizing
for. So
are you developing a Emacs package then with your template?
No. As I said,
My next steps where I think would make it work a lot better is
if I figured out some way of automatically filling out the
dates or maybe automatically adding the file per week into
and out of Org Agenda. That would be my next steps. I think if I
did that, it would have a much greater chance of becoming
part of my workflow at all times. Yeah, I bet you could do it
pretty Something I got to work with the help of copilot. I'm
not a wizard yet at Emacs Lisp, but I find that copilot is
quite helpful.
Yeah, their AIs are definitely interesting.
So. do you ever use any, uh, a lot of TeX inside of org mode?
No, mostly because I know that like I could try to learn it,
but I just don't have a need for it. So yeah. And then also like
I remember learning, when I learned HTML, I like writing
HTML more than like, for instance, Word, because it was a lot
more transparent, like a plain text document is, and kind of
wrote the ordered list, unordered list, in such a way that it
kind of looked similar to the page. But I find that I like Org
Mode more than,
HTML because, well, it's optimized for, like, my writing
and consumption and overall use case rather than, like,
optimizing it for somebody else to view, which I generally
don't have as much.
But, so, like, I don't know. Org Mode is what I'm going to end
up using the most, so. I just want to use LaTeX enough.
Although I'd be interested in learning LaTeX snippets
inside of Org Mode for like the math stuff, but then again, I
just never have to type it. So my attitude towards Org Mode
changed radically over the summer. I was avoiding it
somewhat before and then when I realized I can keep all the
great aspects of LaTeX and still use all the great features
of Org Mode. So I view now, I think of Org Mode as a wrapper
around LaTeX. I know it's not really that, but by thinking
about it that way, uh, it's much more palatable to me to, uh,
uh, just go, uh, commit to doing as much as possible in org
mode. So I've been, that's what I've been doing. Um, this
fall is just, uh, every document I started as an org file.
I imagine I would like it if I knew it, it's just because I,
because I imagine it would feel to me like HTML, or it's just
like, Yeah, I can write it, I can format it the way I want to.
This is just guesses from my experience with HTML. I can read
the source code of it and kind of get an idea of how it will look
like, but I just...
It's like if you're gonna use the Linux terminal, but you're
gonna use it for an hour a week every... Yeah, an hour a week.
It's just like, it's just not enough time to dedicate to
learn it for to start paying off. That's right. And you can
always export your org file to an HTML file.
Yeah.
But the org file is what I stare at 95% of the time or more. I
only use a PDF. So I export to PDF generally. And when I export
to HTML, it's very cool. I like looking at the document in the
web browser. I like navigating it. But I generally will
export it to PDF so I can print it out when I'm traveling to
carry out editing. But that's just a small, tiny fraction of
the time that I'm actually working with the document. So
most of the time it's in org mode. You know, maybe it doesn't
look as pretty as in, you know, uh, HTML, but it's, uh, it's so
such a pleasure to work in because of the way you can reorder
lists, you know, create headlines. So what about org mode
versus Markdown? Cause I know when, cause when I looked at
org mode versus Markdown, I was like, yeah, more stuff
supports Markdown, but. Org mode has more stuff built into
it, like the calendar and agenda stuff. And it's obvious
what this is supposed to be in org mode. And Emacs has got the
best client. I use Emacs. And I think it's got a better syntax
than Markdown. You've got stuff like Obsidian and Notes.
And what about the Markdown? So Markdown, I use it a lot on
GitHub repositories for the readme files. Sometimes I'll
do them in org, but generally just go with the GitHub
Markdown. But tables are still kind of a pain in Markdown,
whereas tables are such a pleasure to build in org mode,
because you have that dynamic adjusting of the column width
as you make entries that become wider. And it's so easy to add
columns. And it's so hard to add columns. It's much harder in
Markdown and in LaTeX. It's more of a pain to add new columns.
So the table aspect, that, to me, was one of the killer
features. And then the other killer feature, of course, is
the literate programming or interactive programming. So
interactive computing that you can do where you have a code
block and then you can execute it and have the output show up
right below the code block. And
org modes support for that kind of interactive computing is
I'm not aware of anything more sophisticated, because you
could have parallel sessions. You could have four Python
sessions going, each of them labeled differently. And
they're all walled off from each other. They don't see each
other. Or you can have different programming languages. So
you can do polyglottic
programming where you have... Maybe Python's generating a
table, and then that table gets, you decide you want to plot
it using R, or you want to use ggplot2 and R to plot it, so that
table gets fed into R in the next code block down, and then
below it, you get a graph made in R, or you can make it in new
plot, or you could, or some other, or you could move it into a
LaTeX code block, plot the data in with Tikz,
or you could move it into Clojure and use one of the
Clojure plotting programs. Just kind of limitless what you
can do in terms of recombining the best of different
programming languages.
Yeah, let's see. The literate DevOps are really good talks
and subjects to get into this type of stuff. And they give a
very good example of some tips on how to do this. You start
writing in the previous or past tenses, though. You got the
answer already, and then your notes are already formatted
out as you're doing it for after the fact. And like, one thing
I like doing a lot is using the Raku language as a calculator,
because I can just type in math as normal and it all works.
I've tried that. Yeah, you can just say like, I don't know, 25
times four with, and you can put like parentheses in it. I'm
not exactly, I haven't used it very heavily. Oh, it also
supports Unicode. So if you wanted to have
the not equals sign, the Unicode not equals sign, it will
actually do that. Cool. Or like the division sign. I don't
know how it will do it. Yeah. But yeah. And then using that in,
I also wrote a shell script where it would just help me do a
calculation. I was trying to do a business calculation
where I was, and I'd have variable names and I ended up
writing the, in the parentheses I'd have enters, returns,
and then just a variable name with like a dollar sign, kind of
like how you'd have in the shell. And I outputted every
single line that I had in the enter.
six or 10 variables in this paragraph, the paragraph
spanned, I don't know, like four lines or something like
that. Maybe, yeah, something, I think it was along those
lines. And I was just thinking of like what this would be in
something else, just like, it was a lot nicer. Yeah, I had
like equations for the variable, like in like one line, but
when I wrote that, what my output should be is like, like I
wasn't putting all of these like, you know, string join,
string join, string join, It looked relatively close to
what my terminal output would be, and then a later iteration
I found on this was, let's write what I'm going to put into the
command line, made a couple changeable variables in it, and
then I can see my results, and that ended up being very nice.
Ended up being nicer than the shells. Yeah, ended up
enhancing that shell script that I wrote.
That's a Raku calculator.
Uh, it's the Raku programming language, which I was just
using it, which I was just using as, which I'll just use as
just straight up that calculator. Cause I'll do like,
because it supports math well enough that I, like I, yeah,
you can put like 25 divided by four and it doesn't start
doing, what's the word, modular fractal, the double math,
like it,
if it's,
the double math where it's like negative .2 versus like
minus one, or sometimes it'll do optimized computer math
where it doesn't give you the right answer, why people will
like Mathematica.
So, how do you, do you access it through, in org mode then?
I'll do it in that. Sometimes I just fire up a Raku shell, but
one of the biggest things I'll fire up a Raku shell for is like
just, um, what's oh just recently I was just like doing it for
some math and like how many people how much money will I have
to spend on Christmas oh I've got I'm gonna buy this gift it's
gonna cost this much and then I've got so let's I think 15
times four because it's no 60 divided by four because it was a
four pack And then times, and then I put it in parentheses,
oh, four plus like two plus two, because like of the
families, each of the units, and I just started doing it that
way. And I put them all in a parentheses. And then at the end of
this spit out the numbers, like, so I could just use the
parentheses without thinking about, you know, like, oh,
I'm actually in a programming language. No, I just kind of
wrote it like I was in algebra, algebra, not in,
not finding some special program, not finding a
calculator, because it's easy for me to file up a terminal.
Then I open that up, and it all just works. Plus, I also got a
full programming language behind it if I ever need it.
I wasn't aware that it utilizes standard math notation
rather than the Polish math notation that we use in ELISP.
Um, that's interesting because it's, it's in the list
family of programming languages.
Yeah. It's like, Hey, I can use, I can actually use my math
knowledge. I can use the order of operations.
Yep.
I just wish that when I was in high school, they started
telling me how to practically use this rather than me
discover it years later when I'm out of it. Yeah.
Well, I probably better move along to attend the other
talks. All right. So it's been great talking to you, Plasma
Strike. Yep, you too.