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

My manager and I are discussing an interesting topic at work at the moment - how do we communicate what we do as engineers?

We were talking about how to set better expectations with stakeholders but it's since turned into something bigger - what do we actually do?

Deliver value to customers is one answer and it's a good start. On smaller projects that's probably all there is to it. But bigger projects mean bigger uncertainty and often require working with other engineers or teams of engineers. It's not always clear how you can best deliver value to customers.

My manager sent me this video, ["It's Like Coding in the Dark: the Need for Learning Culture in Engineering Teams" - Catherine Hicks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVec1TzQIMM), that talks about software engineering as more of a people thing than a product thing. I found it thought-provoking to say the least and I ended up writing a massive response to him. It was so massive that I decided to post it here as well.

The video talks about the paradox of a learning culture, "It looks worse before it gets better". It reminds me of an article I read recently, [Cultivating depth and stillness in research - Andy Matuschak](https://andymatuschak.org/stillness/), where Andy shares some thoughts about how he thinks about work. He's found inspiration from this quote and it resonates with me as well.

"Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverance at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity." - Bill Thurston

I think the real difficulty here is fostering this culture within the team but communicating outwards to stakeholders in terms of performance and expectations. Maybe it's as simple as adding a decent buffer to our expectations so we have room to learn. I've heard of doubling your estimate but I've even gone as far as "triple your optimistic estimate" before.

Maybe it's also about shifting the conversation from how long is the project going to take to more "this is what we've worked out so far and this is what we're still uncertain about". I think it might shift the focus more from "getting through work" to "reducing uncertainty and increasing understanding".

It also touches on how we work with other teams. We all need help from other teams at some stage and how we do that matters. We have to be empathetic if we want sustainable performance. Most people are willing to help but they're not so willing if they feel like they're being hand-balled your work. I've worked with contractors that didn't hesitate to work like this. Other teams noticed, gave less of their time and performance diminished.

Engineers respect ambition and naturally want to work with people that are genuine about it. I think this is because big goals require deep understanding and being close to someone with deep understanding means you can learn off them to develop your own skills and understanding.

I sent the stillness article to a colleague he appreciates it because he's interested in it and it's relevant for him. He sees it as a way to grow his skills and understanding but there's also social element too. "Cadell thought of me when he read that article and that's pretty cool". It's easy for him to do the same. You've done the same for me with the learning culture video. We're working together to develop our understanding of something we're interested in.

I constantly think about the paradox between progress and community. If your goal is just to socialise then it's hard to develop relationships in the long term because there's no substance behind it. You have to focus on progress, even if other people don't agree with your direction. You have to trust your gut and pursue things because ideas are easy to criticise and hard to execute. It's easy to get stuck doing the safe thing and doing nothing. Jason Fried talks about something similar in [Idea Protectionism](https://world.hey.com/jason/idea-protectionism-01ef4f59). Over time, this striving for progress turns into community. Kane Lambert retired from Richmond last year and said he won't remember his games or achievements as much as the people he did them with. It's a paradox because striving for progress can build community yet striving for community can leave you with neither.

Maybe it's as simple as "seek understanding and bring others along with you". When you've worked something out, share it. Write a document, talk to people about it, see if your team is interested. These simple things can build relationships and community in the long term.

That's how I'm not thinking about working with other teams. If I communicate my problem well, include the right level of detail, explore what I can on my own and sound genuine in trying to do a good job/solve an interesting problem/learn something/understand something better then teams and people respond to that. It gives them an opportunity to learn and understand too. 

Another team jumped on the problem I raised because they wanted to understand and wanted to help me and I made it as easy as I could for them to do that. I gave them an opportunity to contribute and learn and we all ended up with a greater understanding. We all benefited and we did it together.

Lazy questions take resources to answer and good platform teams can identify them and hand-ball them back. Good questions build understanding, build community which builds long-term, sustainable performance. It's not as simple as "another team has to help me". It depends on how you work with that other team.

The path to performance is wonky. If we stick to the happy paths we will only find local maxima. Real performance comes from understanding, through both certain parts and uncertain parts, by yourself and with others. In the end, you'll often find you couldn't accurately predict which parts where certainty and uncertainty would be anyway, only that it's there. The certain parts can be surprisingly hard and the hard parts can be surprisingly easy. [Reality has a surprising amount of detail](http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail). It reminds me of "Everything will be alright in the end. And if it's not alright, it's not the end."

That generally means thinking about performance or productivity can be counter-productive. If you focus on what needs to be done and how much time you have then you you're not actually working through the problem. They're distractions. I think this line of thinking can lead to performance anxiety and maybe imposter syndrome. Having a more senior role only contributes to this further and is something I've certainly experienced. I remind myself that if I go where the work takes me then the results will take care of themselves. Obsessing over productivity and what results I want isn't productive, even if it feels like it is.
 
It reminds me of one of the concepts in The Toyota Way and Lean Manufacturing, "go to the gemba". It means "go to where the work happens" or in other words "get out of your comfy chair". It means for managers to go down to the manufacturing line to see what's happening for themselves to build real understanding. In engineering, I think of this as following code, writing code or asking questions sooner rather than later. 

This is also a concept in Zen, "the map is not the territory". It's too easy and comfortable to conceptualise mental models and play out scenarios in your head rather than testing and validating them. Doing things can be uncomfortable because you're going to find out if you're wrong. If you shy away from this you'll only get more in your head and more uncomfortable when you eventually do something and you're wrong. You'll think "how could I have avoided this?". The real solution is do more so you make less assumptions and become more comfortable with being wrong. If you stay up in your head then all you're doing is stroking your ego. 

The complexity of reality doesn't fall into neat categories and boxes, you need to get a feel for them and go where they take you. You're in a relationship with the world and neither exists in isolation - you're both dynamic, changing and constantly interacting with each  other. Results are just as much what comes your way as they are what you want to happen. Trust your intuition, practice, back yourself and seek understanding.

This really blew up. I didn't decide to write an essay here, I just started writing a reply and it happened to turn into an essay. Maybe that means I'm starting to practice what I preach.

I guess the tl;dr of all of this is "optimistic estimate * 3".

Seek Understanding

Slowing Down

On Writing

I Write Notes

Practicing Mindfulness