Practicing Mindfulness


I write lots of notes. I wrote about 15,000 bullet points and 100,000 words in 2020 and I'm up to about 10,000 bullet points and 60,000 words so far this year. I've been writing them for years. I started in school and continued at uni and then decided to keep writing notes at my first job. I handwrote them in [Spirax A4 120 page notebooks](https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/spirax-a4-no-810-recycled-notebook-120-page-es56800) using [blue BIC finepoint pens](https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/bic-cristal-fine-point-ballpoint-pens-blue-12-pack-bi1411be), non-perforated because perforated pages fall out and 120 because it's big enough without being too big. I went through about 4 notebooks a year until one day my salad dressing container leaked in my bag and destroyed my notebook so I cracked the shits and went digital.

## Dynalist

I use a tool called [Dynalist](https://dynalist.io/) because:

- It's free. You can also pay to get features like uploading images.
- It's in the cloud. My notes are backed up and available on my phone.
- It's focussed on bullet points, instead of documents and rich text. I love bullet points.

It's pretty similar to [Workflowy](https://workflowy.com/) if you've heard of that before.

Digital notes definitely have their advantages. They're not vulnerable to salad dressing and you can search through them to find things you wrote ages ago. Maybe you worked on something or made a decision or fixed a problem or maybe you just learnt something cool, it's all just a search away. That's handy because I found it a little bit easier remember handwritten notes but the search more than makes up for that.

The biggest drawback to digital notes is not being able to draw on them and I'm still working on this area. At the moment I'm using [Mermaid](https://mermaid-js.github.io/) and their [Live Editor](https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor/) and [Miro](https://miro.com/) then I copy the link into my notes. [FigJam](https://www.figma.com/figjam/) also looks cool. Digital diagrams are great because they're more presentable and you can collaborate on them with your team if you need to. I think that outweighs the initial friction when using them. I still draw rough ideas on paper sometimes but I'll usually remake it in one of those tools afterwards.

## Daily Notes

I have a document in Dynalist called Daily Notes where each day has a structure like this:

- tasks
- wins
- problems
- (general notes)

For example:

![daily-notes](/assets/i-write-notes/daily-notes.png)

I do this each day:

1. Create a new bullet point underneath structure. Minimise the structure bullet point before hitting enter.
2. Enter the current date with the Dynalist date insert (!), followed by a hyphen.
3. Copy and paste the structure into the current date.
4. Write down my tasks for the day, including meetings.
5. Start my day.
6. Write notes, add any tasks that popup and mark them as done when they're completed.
7. Add a short summary for the day next to the date, after the hyphen.

I like to roughly categorise my tasks. I'm a developer so my categories are:

- dev - General dev tasks including chats, emails, reviewing pull requests, designing solutions, writing documentation etc.
- coding - Actually developing code.
- meeting - Sync time with people.

I generally write down anything noteworthy and that usually turns out to be quite a lot. If in doubt, write it down but find a level that works for you. I'm always overwriting some things and underwriting others but that's all part of the process. I've also found myself being a bit too critical and trigger happy with wins and problems so I now prefer to put more in my general notes and leave the wins and problems for big stuff. That might be more of a me problem though.

## Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly Notes

Daily notes can become quite noisy so I like to summarise weeks, months and quarters to highlight bigger things.

I have a Weekly Notes, Monthly Notes and Quarterly Notes document with the following structure:

- summaries
- actions
- projects
  - personal
  - (other projects)
  - work
    - me
    - team
- wins
- problems
- notes

For example:

![weekly-notes](/assets/i-write-notes/weekly-notes.png)

The structure is pretty similar to Daily Notes with a few additions:

- Summaries - all the daily summaries for the week in one place.
- Actions - action points for the next week.
- Projects - tasks organised by project.

I write my Weekly Notes first thing on a Monday morning, before I read my chats and emails. It usually takes about 45 mins but I think it's well worth the time. I to try write notes from memory first then use my Daily Notes to fill in the blanks. It's similar for my Monthly and Quarterly Notes where Weekly Notes rollup into Monthly Notes and Monthly Notes rollup into Quarterly Notes.

This makes performance reviews really easy but it's also an opportunity to reflect at a personal level as well. You might discover some recurring problems and set some actions for them or reflect on your achievements. I've also fallen into the trap of being a bit too critical and ambitious but, again, that might be more of a me problem.

## Projects

Sometimes a task lasts more than a few days and that's when it becomes a project. I like to keep things simple and write notes in my Daily Notes then move them out into their own document when I need to, usually on the 3rd day of working on it. I organise my project documents by month using Dynalist's folders.

## Time blocks

I've got a section in my Daily Notes called Time Blocks to track where I'm spending my time in 30 minute blocks.

It looks like this:

- time blocks
  - 8 - , meeting - standup
  - 9 -
  - 10 -
  - 11 -
  - 12 -
  - 1 -
  - 2 -
  - 3 -
- work time:

When it's filled out it might look something like this:

![time-blocks](/assets/i-write-notes/time-blocks.png)

If I do two things in an hour then I separate them with a comma and if I do the same task in the next hour then I use a tilde. The "meeting - standup" is a daily ritual so I put it into my structure so I don't have to rewrite it every day. At the end of the day I add up the time and record it. I don't include the time blocks in my Weekly Notes but I've experimented with summing up the hours.

## Work Tasks and Ideas

Whenever I have a random idea or task I don't have to do right away I'll write it in my Work Tasks and Ideas document. That way I've got a list of cool things to pickup if I get some spare time.

## Summary

I write notes and that's kind of how I do it. Actually, these are just some of my favourite strategies so far because how I write them changes quite regularly. Experimenting is big part of writing notes so play around and experiment for yourself to find something that works for you.


I Write Notes


I want to get better at writing. I'd love to be able to turn ideas into articles and share them with my friends and family and hear what they have to say about them. Instead, my ideas are almost a burden because they take months to write and frustrate me so much that I wonder why I'm writing them in the first place. There's plenty of room for improvement here.

I've been bad at writing ever since english in high school, 10 years ago. I didn't take it seriously until year 12, where I needed it for uni, and that necessity didn't turn into results. Every essay was more or less 12.5/25 and it crushed me. I remember finishing some of my essays early so I could get feedback on them before the due date. Then I would go on to turn that feedback into a fail, which wasn't very inspiring. I ended up passing and thankfully only had to write one essay at uni. It didn't go very well either.

Last year I started practicing mindfulness and started writing about my experience. I instantly discovered all the anxiety, frustration and inferiority I felt back in school. Fortunately, practicing mindfulness taught me a lot about these kinds of feelings so I ended up practicing while writing. When I felt frustrated, I practiced patience and acceptance and remembered to breathe. I think it helped overall. Writing was challenging but I also found it really enjoyable, maybe because it’s so different from my career as a Software Engineer.

[I write lots of notes](https://cadell.dev/blog/i-write-notes/) at work and I've been doing it for years. They're quick and to the point and there's no grammar or paragraph structure to get in the way. Notes help me keep track of things but this short style of writing also translates well into chats, emails and short documents where I can quickly and efficiently articulate things.

Adjusting to longer forms of writing has been difficult. I found myself getting frustrated when I couldn't find the words, sentences and paragraphs to express what I was thinking. Now that I've practiced more, I realise that's only natural considering how bad I was to begin with and how little time I've put into it. I'm learning that writing isn't strictly about turning your ideas into words, it's also about exploring different ways to express those ideas.

It's been interesting to explore the balance between brevity and waffling. I wrote bullet points for this article in minutes but actually writing it takes hours. I'm hoping with practice it becomes easier but I also wonder if there's a way to publish bullet points in a way people can understand, somewhere in between a Tweet and an article perhaps. Books are on a whole other level. Non-fiction books frustrate me because they take me months to finish which just isn't practical for a lot of topics. I suspect some topics are panned out to a book length purely for monetisation. I'm far too terrible at writing to even think about monetisation and perhaps that gives me some level of authenticity because I don't have that conflict of interest.

I've written most of my [Practicing Mindfulness](https://cadell.dev/blog/practicing-mindfulness/) article on Monday evenings, from about 6pm to 10pm. My girlfriend is kind enough to cook dinner for me that night and leave me relatively uninterrupted so I can do whatever I need to do to get words on the page. That usually means pacing around the room. I found writing on Monday night made it easier to write later in the week but overall it's been slow progress because I'm still writing about it 9 months later.

Now I'm starting a new strategy - write everyday. I recently found this article, [the unreasonable effectiveness of showing up everyday](https://typesense.org/blog/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-just-showing-up-everyday/) ([comments on hacker news](https://hn.premii.com/#/comments/27833064)), and it puts words to some of the ideas I've been thinking about recently. Just show up, practice consistently and regularly and don't set goals. 90 minutes is long enough to get into some deep work without needing a break and you can flow between sessions because it's easy to remember where you left off. When other things pop up in your life you can move sessions around or make them shorter if you need to. Projects will take as long as they take and you don't need to measure progress against arbitrary goals. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Focus on the input and the output will take care of itself. It's neat because it lines up with my mindfulness experience as well.

I've started waking up at 6am before work, practicing mindfulness with meditation and yoga, then writing until I start work at 8:30am. That's about 90 minutes of writing. I've found it much easier to flow between sessions with a daily cadence than a weekly cadence, particularly at my level. Waking up early has been a bit of a transition though. I enjoyed the challenge the first week then I became really tired and frustrated the second week where I wrote my article on[ writing notes](https://cadell.dev/blog/i-write-notes/). I felt pressured to make progress because I was tired and up so early so I rushed through it and I think it comes through in the article. I'm just not at the level where that mindset is productive but it was good practice. My bedtime has somehow adjusted to 9:30pm now and it's not so hard to wake up anymore and I think it will become easier with summer approaching.

I’m feeling much better about this article and enjoyed the 5 sessions it took to finish it. I thought about working on my [Practicing Mindfulness](https://cadell.dev/blog/practicing-mindfulness/) article since I started it so long ago but this was a fun idea and I want to write about fun ideas. At my level, writing is far more important than what I'm writing so I suppose this is productive procrastination. I'm just going to write every day and hopefully that turns into articles. And if it doesn't, well, at least I showed up. Now that I think about it, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about something similar in her Ted Talk, [Your elusive creative genius](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA) (thanks David for the tip!). What a fun note to finish on.

Here's some other writing resources I've found interesting:

- [Writing, Briefly](http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html), [hacker news comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729586), [converted to bullet points](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22732644). A list of writing tips by Paul Graham.
- [Writing is rewriting](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1365425470318272514). A Tweet by Paul Graham where he shares how he [actually wrote an article](http://byronm.com/13sentences.html).
- [Consume less, create more](https://blog.tjcx.me/p/consume-less-create-more), [hackers news comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463). An article about writing your first article.
- [Writing Is Thinking](https://alistapart.com/article/writing-is-thinking/), [hacker news comments](https://hn.premii.com/#/comments/24862159). An overview of writing with some good tips.
- [How to write in plain English](http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/how-to-write-in-plain-english.html), [hacker news comments](https://hn.premii.com/#/comments/24268382). Some helpful guidelines for writing.
- [Write Simply](http://paulgraham.com/simply.html), [hacker news comments](https://hn.premii.com/#/comments/26423090). An article on writing style by Paul Graham with lots of recommendations in the comments.


On Writing


I went for a walk today and it was really nice. Not walking to get somewhere or walking for exercise, just walking for the sake of walking. Before too long I was having some deep, almost philosophical thoughts.

I realised I really like going for walks. Exploring like you would in another country, collecting your thoughts. It's humbling to slow down and do something simple. I think it's particularly important to me because I often find myself in productivity mode. It makes sense to balance that out by consciously slowing down.

It also makes sense because [life is ultimately pointless](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoEezZD71sc). We're cosmically unimportant so it doesn't really matter what you do or don't do and it certainly doesn't matter how quickly you get things done. I haven't found this perspective to be overly helpful. It's a bit like replacing "you only live once" with "you're already dead". 

Today I started thinking about this in a different way. Time makes things matter. If you two methods to achieve a goal and only have time to try one then the method you choose matters. Jeff Bezos calls these [one-way decisions](https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/amazon-founder-jeff-bezos-this-is-how-successful-people-make-such-smart-decisions.html). On the other hand, if you don't have a time constraint you would just do one, then the other, if the first didn't work. You're not locked into either method so it's not a one-way decision.

It's a bit like how Eminem says "You Can Do Anything You Set Your Mind To, Man" at the end of [Lose Yourself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yhyp-_hX2s). This is true as long as you don't have time constraints, or the goal is fluffy enough to say you achieved it by the time constraint. "I want to be a multi-platinum rapper by the end of tomorrow" is probably not possible. "You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow" kind of thing.

To make things more complicated, if you're under time pressure you might make a decision without considering whether it's a one-way decision or not. If you try something and it doesn't work, and you don't have time to try another option, then it's a one-way decision. You'll just have to let go and move on. Thankfully, time constraints are frequently made up. If you don't achieve your goal and have time to try another way then it's not a one-way decision. You can simply try another way, assuming you still care about it.

I generally tend to put some degree of thought into everything I do. For example, I think "I'll go for a coffee. It might be nice to have a warm beverage". Then a moment later I think "At the cost of $4 and some potential caffeine anxiety later on". That's not a huge problem and I don't have anything else planned so I go forward with the coffee.

What's interesting is getting a coffee is often infinitely better than I imagine it to be. I try a new place, the staff are friendly, the coffee is nice and the sun is nice. It's humbling. It's humbling because my idea of getting a coffee was so narrow, so one-dimensional. "Do I have time and is it cheap?". What's even more interesting is I don't seem to question this conceptualised version of getting a coffee for even a second. I'm subconsciously convinced that my idea of getting a coffee is accurate, even when time and time again I'm humbled by reality.

I wonder if I can change how I conceptualise things. Maybe with:

- "Get a coffee if you think about getting a coffee." - This would almost certainly become a daily thing and I don't really want that.
- "Get a coffee if you have time." - How will I know if I have time? How long should I spend working out if I have time? Should I make time for coffee?
- "It doesn't matter if you get a coffee or not." - I don't find this to be very helpful because nothing really matters when you think about it.
- "I'm frequently wrong and it might be nice to get a coffee and explore what that's like."

The last one really stands out to me. I like the idea of bringing more humility into my decision making. I enjoy getting a coffee because when I'm there I don't have any interest in scrolling my phone or checking my todo list. I just like to make space for the smaller things and soak it all up. It's strange, apparently that doesn't translate into my decision making.

I think it's because I'm often in productivity mode. I try to do things quickly, even when I probably don't need to. It seems to be a habit despite being unemployed for 4 months. I'm trying to go fast, maybe too fast. I'm reminded by the saying "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast", maybe that's right?

When you optimise for speed and productivity, it constrains how you think about, perceive and conceptualise the world around you. For starters, you're trying to make a decision. The only reason you would do that is because you care about time constraints, either of this activity or the opportunity cost of doing this activity. 

There's a weird middle ground here. You're trying to decide whether you should slow down or not but if you slowed down further you would realise life doesn't matter. Maybe that means if you ever think about slowing down then you absolutely should slow down because you won't be able to conceptualise it anyway. The nice part about this is it works even when you have slowed down because you don't make decisions when you're doing things slowly, there's no time constraints so nothing really matters. Put another way, not making a decision is effectively making a decision to do whatever, and you don't even realise or think about it.

Earlier today, I was thinking through some decisions bigger than coffee. I was thinking about job offers and other projects but I felt a lot better about them now. I really believed they just didn't matter that much. Not thought they didn't matter but felt they didn't matter. I felt like I could walk up this street all day and not only would everything be fine, it would probably be better.

This is the mindset I want to practice more, I want to explore with an open mind. I've flirted with this idea before but found it's easily lost and easily forgotten when there's no shortage of distractions around us. 

Money is one of those distractions. Here's an illustrated Alan Watts [lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYSQ1NF1hvw) about it if you're interested. Money is particularly distracting because it's widely accepted to be important by almost everyone. If I said I lost a job offer because I went for a very long walk and forgot to respond then you would probably call me dumb. I would be tempted to agree with you and even more so if other people told me the same thing. It's easy to fall into the middle ground I mentioned earlier where we try and conceptualise the value of a job offer versus a walk.

But ideas are easy criticize. It's harder to give them the space they need to grow. Jason Fried refers to this as [Idea Protectionism](https://world.hey.com/jason/idea-protectionism-01ef4f59). It means we should do dumb things because we might surprise ourselves, because we're frequently (and fundamentally) wrong. That might be why stepping outside your comfort zone, or "Thinking Outside the Box", can inspire creativity. The Köln Concert is a masterpiece [played on a terrible piano](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7wF2AdVy2Q), for example.

I guess we tend to undervalue simple things and simple ideas so I'm going to try and bring more humility into my decision making and slow down whenever it occurs to me. 

My 30 minute walk today turned into some philosophical epiphanies, which turned into 1h of writing the first draft of this article, then 4h of editing and into my first published article in over a year and the first article I've written in a single day. On the other hand, it doesn't really matter much.

Anyway, I really like going for walks.

Slowing Down

On Writing

I Write Notes

Practicing Mindfulness