Month: January 2022

That’s not a project

It only takes a single sentence to peturb. Last night, while listening to Episode 70: Anatomy of a Project List (nestedfolderspodcast.com), one of those sentences came out of the blue and has had me thinking every since.

Rosemary Orchard at one point said something like, "That’s not a project. That’s a goal." Immediately gears started turning in my head and I realised that many of my projects are in fact goals. It explains a lot why nothing ever happens on them. My focus and attention is wrong. I’m trying to go from goal to next action (task) and it’s too big a leap.

Here’s an example project title. "Update photo library". Granted, it is one of those on-going "projects" that never ends. Under it I know I need to:

  • curate the photos of the last 6-9 months
  • add the most recent photos taken by family members
  • add metadata to those photos
  • review all existing photos not yet marked "Final" for metadata, events and people
  • scan the remaining photo albums

It all boils down to "work on some of that stuff when I have the inclination to"

Now I’m thinking a little differently. My role is Curator of family memories with the goal to Add metadata to all family photos. Why that goal is important to me, I’ve not yet parsed.

From there, and as I review my role and goal, I’ll come up with projects. They will be something like:

  • Scan album 15
  • Review metadata on photos from 1985
  • Import January 2022’s photos from Dropbox

Smaller, more focussed, and more likely to provide a sense of achievement.

I’m looking forward to seeing where I end up.

Practice or Practice

During my mediation practice this morning, one of the distractions I had to deal with was considering what “meditation practice” actually means.

Is it practice to improve?

Or, practice as in something habitual or repeated?

I came to the conclusion it’s the latter simply because if the focus of your meditation practice is to get better at meditation, then I believe you’re missing the point of it all.

Pros and Cons of using Obsidian Publish to blog

This evening I’ve been experimenting with Obsidian Publish to publish a few blog entries to see if I can get a workable solution. Here’s what I know so far.

Pros

  • As all the writing occurs in Obsidian, everything I write is contained in the one environment. I don’t have to write here, copy there.
  • It is super-fast to link content.
  • I can link to content I’ve not yet written or published and as that content is developed, links will fill in automatically. I use indicators for pages that don’t exist.
  • Should I move a page from one "folder" to another, any URLs that have been shared with the old folder name will still work. Obsidian Publish takes care of all that. This means create flexibility as the site expands.
  • In conjuction with Obsidian Sync I can write and publish from multiple devices with ease.!
  • Page tagging is easy and because of the way Obsidian prompts for existing tags, means I’m less likely to have tag explosion.
  • Backlinks i.e., where on entry references another are automatically displayed without me needing to do anything.

Cons

An observational blogger

I’m primarily an observational blogger. Throughout the day I’ll notice something and think, "I wonder if that’s an example of…" and I’ll use it as the prompt to share what I’ve observed.

There are three reasons for this.

  1. Writing helps my solidify my observations
  2. Observing helps be become better at understanding what’s working for me and what isn’t
  3. It prompts thinking in other readers such as yourself.

Types of bloggers