spiralofhope

It’s my nature to gain and lose interest in things, like the tides coming and going.  I’ve tried all sorts of tricks to schedule and change focus, but they just don’t work for me.  So I’m going to declare a new way of doing things.  A way which works to my advantage.  I’ll call it “rotating immersion“.

I’m so frequently immersed in some idea or other that I lose interest in everything else.  I’m over-focused to the point that I have blinders on to the importance of anything else.  So while I might have incredible ability with one particular interesting topic, I lose sight of many other things which I legitimately want to get done “some day”.

Instead of fighting this natural tendency, I’m going to encourage it.  I’ll let my interest wander until I begin to really get into some topic.  I’ll recognize that I’m going to be abandoning all sorts of other things which I was just working on and I’ll just pursue the limited scope of stuff that’s become my current interest.

The real trick with this is done while pursuing that limited scope of stuff.  While working away with the blinders on, I need to make sure I create a scaffolding of sorts.  A kind of structure needs to be left behind such that when I get around to coming back to that same, or a similar, task I will have a primer of self-instruction which will make it much easier to pick everything back up again.

I’m not entirely sure what that scaffolding ought to be or how to go about creating it on purpose.  Much of the stuff I do ends up with elaborate documentation, and I think that this will end up being the direction I take.

I’ll begin by writing up a bit of a master list of the various projects I’ve had in recent history.  It will be my shopping list of interesting stuff I’d like to get done one of these days.  Each item will have a stub of references that point me in the right direction for picking that project back up again.  Each item will probably end up being coded in various ways like time needed; learning/difficulty level; amount of time already spent/amount completed; pointers to other documentation; pointers to files or bookmarks or websites etc.

Even off the top of my head I’ve got some serious stuff to get done, and this partial list is just while at the computer..

1. Unity Linux – go through emails, go through backlog of flagged emails, officially abandon forum, step down from official capacities, get the magazine running.
2. Oldschool Linux – abandon or convert it into a packaging project.
3. CMS and markup language – had some experimental stuff I should just ignore and go back to the previous revision.  Ignore all remote-hosted stuff and just get it all compiling and working locally.  Gut and simplify everything into separate functioning “black box” pieces.  Create test cases?
4. Firefox setup guide and rant.
5. Alternate web browser reviewing.
6. Go through ~/live/application-testing and prune out old apps and write up any leftovers.
7. Review ~/live/working and migrate stuff to where it belongs.
8. Go through Firefox Bookmarks > Software in testing
9. Set up new hosting for spiralofhope.com, the current stuff is garbage.

10. Catalog data DVDs, I have a list of software which might be useful, but it’s probably all crap and I’d be better off with ls > textfile.txt for them all.

Various other stuff exists in real life, like that book I ought to be working on, more interesting recipe research, reading lists, music pursuits and more.  This would be a pretty significant list which I’d probably end up breaking into contexts.

I should probably get all this stuff into “a system”.  I even know how I’d do it, but that in itself would be an item on this list.  =)