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13th Week of 2023

Life Management⚑

Task Management⚑

Getting Things Done⚑

  • New: Note the importance of isolated containers.

    It's critical that all of these containers be kept distinct from one another. They each represent a discrete type of agreement we make with ourselves, to be reminded of at a specific time and in a specific way, and if they lose their edges and begin to blend, much of the value of organizing will be lost. That's why capturing and clarifying what your relationship to them is primary to getting organized.

  • New: Inbox management.

    Inbox is the container where you capture your stuff. I've found myself capturing stuff in each of my devices: computer, mobile phone and tablet. Each of them has their own org file under the inbox directory. Each of these files has the #+FILETAGS: :inbox: heading so that all elements share the tag.

    Part of the daily planning is to check the computer and mobile inboxes to see if there is anything that needs to be processed on the day. I don't check the tablet inbox as there's usually no urgent stuff there. The rest of the elements will be processed on the weekly review leaving all the inbox files empty.

  • New: Computer inbox management.

    nvim-orgmode has an awesome feature called capture which lets you capture thoughts with a keystroke. This is awesome as no matter what are you doing inside neovim you can quickly record your thought, action or idea and keep on doing whatever you were doing. It's a very efficient way to record your stuff at the same time as you keep your focus.

    You can use the next capture template:

      org_capture_templates = {
    i = {
      description = "Inbox",
      template = "* TODO %?\n %U",
      target = "~/org/inbox/computer.org",
    },
  }

  • New: Mobile and tablet inbox management.

    To capture the content on the go you can use the orgzly and then sync them with your computer through syncthing.

  • New: Calendar management.

    You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day's commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance while you're on the run.

    So for each element you encounter in the calendar ask yourself, does this element need to be done on this hard date? If the answer is no, then the calendar is not the correct place for the element to be.

    Using dates to order your tasks it's a waste of time, because there will always be a thousand of reasons why you can't do all the things you allocate to that day. As these not done issues start piling up, you'll start to get stressed with a lot of things that you were not able to do on the dates you deceived yourself you were supposed to do at and then you need to spend time defining a new date. Use next actions in your todo instead.

  • New: Priority management.

    You shouldn’t bother to create some external structuring of the priorities on your lists that you’ll then have to rearrange or rewrite as things change. Attempting to impose such scaffolding has been a big source of frustration in many people’s organizing. You’ll be prioritizing more intuitively as you see the whole list against quite a number of shifting variables. The list is just a way for you to keep track of the total inventory of active things to which you have made a commitment, and to have that inventory available for review.

    Therefore I'm going to try not to use orgmode's priorities for the tasks.

  • New: Soft recurrent tasks.

    There are some tasks that have a soft recurrence meaning that once you do them you don't want them to show up in your list of actions until a specific time has passed. You could use a recurrent DEADLINE or SCHEDULED but as we've seen earlier that will clutter your calendar pretty soon. Try following the next workflow with these tasks:

    • Add the :soft_recurrence: tag to keep them tracked.
    • Add them to the tickler file with a recurrent appointment date <2023-03-13 Mon ++1w> and the :tickler: tag so that it doesn't show up in the agenda view even if you move it to another file.
    • When the appointed day comes you'll review the tickler elements as part of your day's routine. If you think it's time to do it, refile it to the todo.org file, if not, adjust the recurrence period and set the next date. Even though this workflow is reproducing the "kick the can forward" that we want to avoid, the idea is that once you get the period right you'll never have to do it again. If you see that after some iterations the period keeps on changing, maybe this workflow is not working for that kind of task and you may need to think of a better system ¯\(°_o)/¯.
    • Once you complete the item, the new one will be spawned, once it has refile it to the tickler file again.

    We use appointments instead of DEADLINE or SCHEDULED so that they don't clutter the tickler view if you don't do them on the appointment date.

    Another option is not to archive the DONE tasks and in the weekly reset them to TODO the ones that you want to do the next week.

DevOps⚑

Infrastructure Solutions⚑

AWS⚑

Continuous Integration⚑

ArgoCD⚑

  • New: Introduce ArgoCD.

    Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes.

    Argo CD follows the GitOps pattern of using Git repositories as the source of truth for defining the desired application state. Kubernetes manifests can be specified in several ways:

    • kustomize applications
    • helm charts
    • jsonnet files
    • Plain directory of YAML/json manifests
    • Any custom config management tool configured as a config management plugin, for example with helmfile

    Argo CD automates the deployment of the desired application states in the specified target environments. Application deployments can track updates to branches, tags, or pinned to a specific version of manifests at a Git commit. See tracking strategies for additional details about the different tracking strategies available.

Operating Systems⚑

Linux⚑

Linux Snippets⚑

Android⚑

Orgzly⚑

  • New: Introduce Orgzly.

    Orgzly is an android application to interact with orgmode files.