LIFE ON PAPER
I've been reading Ratfactor's posts about keeping track of tasks
and accomplishments via methods including "logging", TODO lists,
and most recently weekly summaries:
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ratfactor/phlog/2020-03-12-weekly-wrapups
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ratfactor/phlog/2020-03-03-monthly-themes
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ratfactor/phlog/2019-05-19-todo-extraction
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/ratfactor/phlog/2018-08-10-The-Logging-Habit
There are probably more, but if you really read through all of
those then you'll probably no longer be in the mood to read my
thoughts on the subject anyway.
Like most such Phlog posts I find it all very interesting, but
don't feel that anything would be worth really taking onboard
myself and to actually change some of my own habits. Nevertheless
he's hitting on a topic that I've certainly had trouble grappling
with: Rationally organising and assessing ones own life.
Now I've been thinking about this post for a while already today,
and every time I run through it in my mind it ends up spinning off
into wild tangents, so I'll just get one out of the way now. In his
post "The logging habit" he mentions a scene in the film "Seven"
(1995 apparantly, though as usual I got it on DVD for $2 at a
second-hand store a few years ago) where he was facinated with "the
imagery of the huge collection of journals created by the fictional
character John Doe". I remember that scene vaguely, and get the
facination with a life transcribed down into a physical medium, but
what that scene really did for me was remind me of something
similar that I'd seen on my TV. In fact something that was much
more disturbing in a way than all of the silly Hollywood horror in
that movie.
I'm pretty sure it was on SBS (Australian TV channel), probably on
a weekend because I think I was flipping around channels during the
day (clearly ignoring a good few TODOs). I flicked onto some
documentary, probably some obscure thing that SBS had produced that
might not even be referenced online even if I did know the title.
It was about crews who cleaned up after people had died in their
house and weren't discovered until the body had decomposed and made
a mess. It was an old lady, clearly not discovered for quite a long
time, and she had kept diaries. In neatest hardwriting she'd
written out descriptions of her day including all the trials of a
failing body and falling behind in the new technology of society.
Even consideration of suicide, though it wasn't possible to
determine her eventual cause of death. The diaries were in books
lined up neatly on shelves. Left to nobody, or perhaps to the whole
society that had left her behind.
The house was old, a typical Australian single-story weatherboard
construction from the first half of the last century. At least one
room, the kitchen where she died, was now completely ruined. No
living relatives, so being in a big city it is almost certain that
it would have been demolished for redevelopment. The contents
probably sent to the tip, maybe including the diaries unless
someone from the documentary decided to save them (it might have
said at the end that they did).
There's something intangible that I found unnerving about that.
Whether its the thought of how many similar stories go untold all
the time, or how a life's insights recorded can be so easily and
completely ignored by society, or maybe just that I'm quite likely
to go the same way eventually. I don't know, probably all of the
above. It has stayed with me that's for sure, perhaps more-so than
anything else that I've seen in a documentary. It's also something
that I doubt many people ever think about, even though they pass
worn old houses like her's every day.
I guess that's a pretty bleak association to hold against diaries,
but nevertheless I keep them, though with a much more practical
usage. Mostly they're about business topics, but these to a large
extent dominate my life anyway. Like Ratfactor's logs, I mostly
record things that I've done, though on the morning of the
following day. Not minor things though, I'm more conventional and
just jot down the individual tasks accomplished, usually not the
routine tasks that I can assume to have been completed. Really it's
about one constant goal: finding ways of making more money. I have
projects, with some sort of deadline, and I work on them. If I
progress well, I take pleasure in jotting down accomplishments. If
they go slowly and with difficulty then I often have more abrupt
entries because I'm still frustrated at running out of day and want
to put off assessing things until I can claim some concrete
progress. If it goes badly and things don't work or take much
longer than anticipated, then I write long rambly details of all
the day's disasters and restate/reassess my core objectives with
increasing desperation. It normally alternates between the latter
two.
Deadlines are a real pain too. I don't really know anyone who works
in any of the industries that I dip my toe in, and I'm often
learning new skills as I go. So I don't know how long things would
take someone experienced to do, and I don't know how much longer
they will take me if there is a significant learning aspect
involved. I know how long projects that I've done in the past take,
but so far most of them failed to attract significant interest, so
(now more than ever) I'm always looking to do something different,
and with which I have less experience. From a self-improvement
point of view I guess you could spin that in a positive way, but it
does make setting rational deadlines near-impossible.
"The sooner the better" is always the thought, so the deadlines
always get set short, rarely more than a month in advance of the
idea's conception. Approaching the deadline I get more desperate,
but usually can't really do much to avoid missing it, the odd late
night or work on weekends is never enough (and I'm someone who
suffers mentally from not getting enough rest pretty quickly too).
I'm soon past the deadline, and I have no idea how to rationally
extend it to any future point in time. I'm just left in a desperate
state needing to finish it "yesterday", and it either gets done
after probably taking some multiple of the time originally
assigned, or gets put aside in preference to some new project that
I can again mis-judge a deadline for.
Here the diary helps in being able to confirm that I really am
working on things, not somehow deluding myslef. I would like it to
highlight some better method of planning too, but I haven't managed
to get that from it. Except perhaps that it can help to alternate
between two projects when I get really stuck with something. I
guess there's always a limit to how much you can plan for failure,
and so far I've never been within it. If I can find a really
reliable, scalable, way to make money on my own terms then I guess
I might be able to improve things from there.
Now I'm running out of time to finish this post so I'll be breif. I
make lots of TODO lists, both for large tasks and their individual
steps. The funny thing is that I rarely get the real satisfaction
of ticking things off, usually there's some niggle that stops me
from being completely ready to tick something off when I'm almost
done, and by the time I get it sorted then it has lost the sense of
achievement because I did most of it earlier. Often TODO lists
written at the start of projects never get fully crossed off at the
end because I've got focused on some certain points causing me
problems and pushing me past my deadline, so the original list gets
forgotten entirely.
Lists of things to do on weekends are even worse, but I really
don't have time to complain about the state of them if I'm going to
eat tonight.
- The Free Thinker.
