51–60 of 188 posts
But in contrast, my physical workspace is completely empty, I might be a bit schizophrenic.
When I write book chapters I write, throw away, write, throw away. Mostly with no a-priori outline But eventually I get to a point where all the failed attempts crystallize and it flows out of me start to finish in one sitting. Every piece of knowledge from those failed attempts crystallizes into one gestalt of how it’s supposed to be. Those final “easy” 20 pages always come after 100 pages of discarded, frustrating,…
It's very tempting to want to write an outline & then revise the outline until it's perfect, so that your first draft can be as solid as possible. That never works out well for me, though. It's only after I've written a substantial chunk of the thing that I realize half my ideas were bad and the other half are being poorly realized, and I start to understand the story I really want to write.
I'm very taken with this one HYTRADBOI talk [1] that applies a similar approach to software design. It's not something I've ever gotten a chance to apply, but it really appeals to me.
[1]: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/03580e19-4646-4fba-91c3-17eab...
My digital workspace is a complete mess. Tabs keep piling up, whether in Chrome, Notepad, or other apps. I don't even know why I still have so much old stuff open, I'm thinking I might need it one day, but that day never comes... But in contrast, my physical workspace is completely empty, I might be a bit schizophrenic.
I do this. But every now and then, I have what I call "The Purge", in which the browser window gets closed. There are a few tabs that survive The Purge. One window has [GMail, Calendar] as pinned tabs. Another window has [Gmeet] as a pinned tab. Everyone else is expendable. If they are needed, they will be reopened.
(I do give a little thought to it. "Is there some actually ongoing thing I realistically need to save, and can't reopen?" Those tabs might be pulled off.)
I did this this week. "This will close 437 tabs. Are you sure?" Purged.
My digital workspace is a complete mess. Tabs keep piling up, whether in Chrome, Notepad, or other apps. I don't even know why I still have so much old stuff open, I'm thinking I might need it one day, but that day never comes... But in contrast, my physical workspace is completely empty, I might be a bit schizophrenic.
I recently realised I can do 70% of my work with only the terminal open and nothing else. Can get it up to 95% with terminal + single IDE at a time. The last 5% is browser-based, which can get distracting really fast - like HN and youtube rabbit holes.
If you really want to shine a light on the cockroach that is digital hoarding, try nuking your entire browsing history and tabs, delete all your movies/series/games collection. I 'cured' myself of being this kind of hoarder just before covid started and I haven't had the urge to store anything besides some private/precious data. On my one machine I've explicitly set firefox to not remember tabs and to also wipe history/cookies/tmp data on every close. Feel weird the first week but then if you see someone else's browser with 100+ tabs, its like looking at one of those picture of a hoarders car that is filled with trash. I think on some level the brain likes this kind of trash hoarding, some kind of rat behaviour. I jest but I hope you get the picture.
Every day I work on my main project, I clear my desk completely, take out a small notepad and write my overriding goal, and my next step goal, and then make a list of tasks for that next step goal. Then I work. Writing the major goal every day is important to not let sub-goals overshadow it. Writing the immediate goal every day is important because together the two goals create a very clear direction of action with a…
But I will loose it all, that's why you should bookmark everything, have terminal bookmarks of paths, use git worktrees to allow leaving workspace messy. Use a lot of notion docs, .md docs, notebooks. Places where you organize stuff, so that you can come back easily when you need it again.
This way I have everything about a ticket in a place and if someone is like "uhh, you did something to something some 3 months ago or so?" - ~/Stuff/2025-1{0,1,2} probably knows, I certainly don't. I can find things again like this :)
I'll eventually have to setup some automated archiving for it, but so far it's not using too much space.
Anyway I did this because our version of jira isn’t great, so all the features I found complicated, I put that in my system. For the rest, I use jira because with other things it’s really intuitive.