Kirk Petersen

I’m coming out of a long period of low productivity, in all aspects of life. I suppose that I often go through this during the winter.

It seems that I often come out of this period when the weather gets a bit nicer. It also helps that I’m just getting over a cold.

One of the few things I’ve been pretty good about is trying to spend a few hours in the garden per week, simply trying to stay on top of the weeds and cleaning things up a little bit at a time. I’m reading everything I can but still have a lot to learn.

The garlic seems to be doing really well. Shanti and I have been starting seeds inside, with mixed results. We’ve planted a few of the seedlings.

The lawn is starting to fill in again. There are several spots around the house where the grass completely died during the winter. I actually sort of like the look of the moss that replaced it, but the weeds started taking over in the late winter, so I pulled them and spread grass seed.

One project for this summer is to replace the rotting wood the serves as borders for the 5 beds in our yard. I’m not much of a handyman, but it should be easy enough. I also need to clean up the area around the beds and some of the lawn borders.

I’m halfway through Getting Things Done and I’m liking it. I’ve almost got a system worked out with a Hipster PDA and a few plain text files (INBOX, NEXTACTION, PROJECTS, TICKLER) on my Macbook.

Over the past couple days I’ve been moving from the “capture everything” stage to actually getting things moved from my INBOX to the appropriate places. In fact, I just emptied my INBOX.

Note: emptying the INBOX doesn’t mean everything is done, just that it is no longer unorganized. Now I have a bunch of “next actions” to pick from when I want to feel like a productive member of society. It’s amazing how much easier it is to convince myself to do something when I can pick from those 10-15 items. No digging through my brain trying to remember what I should be doing.

So far I’m really happy and I’ve been very productive. I’ll post more about how it goes and whether it still works when the honeymoon period is over.

Oh, and how is it that I had never used rsync until today?

An important feature of GTD is making sure that all thoughts are captured. David Allen argues that when we don’t safely capture ideas, they bounce around in our head and cause us stress. And if our brain is focused on remembering the great idea we just had, it isn’t coming up with a second or third great idea. After a few days of using this system, I believe that he’s right.

A related issue is the security of the capture mechanism. After I started getting my ideas down and organizing them on my Macbook, I noticed I still had a small amount of stress. Suddenly there are all these ideas that would take a lot of work to capture again, and they are on this one hard drive. So I bought a couple USB flash drives and I’ve been dragging and dropping files to them for a couple weeks. But today I got tired of manually deleting all the files and then copying everything over again, and I just happened to read something that Cory Doctorow said about geeks using rsync to backup files. So now I’m using that for syncing to both flash drives and network servers.

Finally, I also moved my old site from Linode to Dreamhost. I grabbed kirkpetersen.com at the same time. Linode is nice for some purposes but all I really need is a web server and maybe Ruby on Rails and a Subversion repository. Dreamhost does that very well.

I’ve come to an important realization: Projects are very important to me and I’m very bad at them. The only projects outside of work that I’ve really had any luck with in the (almost) ten years since college are:

* a few patches to the Linux kernel in 1998
* NaNoWriMo 2007

That’s basically it. And NaNoWriMo didn’t result in an actual deliverable, as I wanted, though given my lack of writing experience, that is understandable.

I have tried a variety of things. My goal when I moved to Seattle (after graduating) was to make it on my own. I had problems back then with taking initiative and being in control of my life, so I moved to Seattle where I barely knew anyone and tried a bunch of stuff, made mistakes, and learned lots. So I’m not too disappointed with my adult life.

However, there are many things I haven’t completed:

* second language: see post from last night
* knit sweater: about half done
* countless software projects: most aren’t even half finished
* music: I’ve spent a lot of time learning music theory and playing a few instruments, but never focused enough to have anything worth showing off
* countless half finished books: everyone has this problem, but few are as bad as me
* half marathon: was running very regularly and got up to 8-9 miles (not bad for a former sprinter) but never actually did the half marathon

There are many other things but that is a good sample.

I’ve thought a lot lately about why I want to do all these projects and why I’m unhappy that I haven’t made more progress. I’m not sure I’m ready to answer that yet.

Instead, I’m focusing on ways of improving my habits so I can be more productive and focused and actually deliver something of interest or value to the world.

NaNoWriMo was an eye-opener in terms of turning off the inner critic. I’ve talked about that a lot already, so I won’t say it again. I’ll just say that I encourage everyone to try it.

Getting Things Done (the book and various online resources and communities) seem like very good ideas. I’ve had a little luck with the techniques and tips from sites like 43 Folders, but something hasn’t quite clicked yet.

I need to figure out how to focus. In the short term, I need to be disciplined and not check email or RSS every few minutes. In the long term, I need to continue a project until it is finished, get the reward, and then move on to the next project.

And I need to learn to pick projects up after they’ve been sitting for a while. I’m surprisingly bad at this. I’m almost completely incapable of seeing the value in anything I did over two weeks previous. I seriously have some messed up neurons in that part of my brain. I’ve started countless projects over only to stop halfway through. Again and again.

One thing I’m thinking of trying again is free software. It might not be as fun as it was the first time I got a patch accepted into the Linux kernel, but the energy of working with a lot of other people from around the world is a useful tool.

I also want to mix in some non-creative projects, such as learning a second language. After 8 hours of programming, I find it difficult to expend the mental energy necessary for creating interesting stories or writing complex code. But sitting down with flash cards or a book on grammar is pretty easy.

I’ll write more later but it feels good to get this much down. It is both frustrating and motivating to see all the things I haven’t done.