hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

Drop #469 (2024-05-20): Make-Up Monday

hrbrmstr

btw; Calendar. Not To-Do Lists; News Minimalist

The theme for this very late Monday edition is “get stuff done”. Said “stuff” may be writing, scheduling, or keeping up with the mega onslaught of information that’s tossed our way each day. Regardless of the task, hopefully there’s at least one nugget in today’s triad of resources.

btw

There are way too many choices out there if you’re looking to publish a blog/newsletter. We’ll add one to that list in this section!

btw (GH) is a Medium-esque blogging/newsletter platform that can also be self-hosted. It does what it says on the tin, and does it in a very minimalist way. The free tier gets you a subdomain blog (i.e. hrbrmstr.btw.so), and $99.00USD/year gets you a custom domain.

The pages are super clean, and I appreciate a site that says things like “Start finding your 1,000 true fans today.”, vs. what Tik Tok (et al.) try to do by telling you that you’ll be a mega-influencer.

I ported this week’s Typography Tuesday post to it, and it looks basic, but decent. I didn’t bother adding links (my only beef is that they don’t seem to support markdown), but they sure do make it easy to just…write.

You can keep all your posts private (if you use the hosted option) but I would steer clear of putting sensitive info on it since you have no idea what’s happening on the back end.

Calendar. Not To-Do Lists

This somewhat old post by Devi Parikh has neat set up:

Goal: Be on top of things. Avoid drama and stress.

Assumption: Your bottleneck is time management, and not motivation.

Philosophy: Calendars convert time to space. They make the finiteness of time apparent. In a way that physical space constraints are apparent.

The core idea is using a calendar to allocate time as an explicit, finite resource rather than an abstract to-do list. This provides visibility into how much you can realistically accomplish.

It’s worth reading the whole thing for the context that Devi provides, but the general principles break down into:

  • Put everything you need to do, no matter how small, on your calendar as an event, including meetings, tasks, errands, recreation, meals, etc. This makes the finite nature of time explicit.
  • Estimate how long each task will take, but multiply that estimate by your personal “calibration multiplier” to account for your tendency to underestimate or overestimate time required.
  • Account for patterns in your productivity, energy levels, unexpected events, etc. by blocking off time accordingly on your calendar.
  • Be prepared to re-plan and move tasks to different times as needed. A successful day is going to bed with a feasible plan for the days ahead.
  • Break down large projects into calendar-sized tasks and schedule those out.
  • Backtrack from deadlines to schedule when you need to start tasks. Look ahead and block off busy times.
  • Visualize your upcoming day and week by reviewing your calendar to maintain the right mindset.

This type of structure sounded fairly daunting to me until I realized I kind of do this “boxing” mentally anyway. Translating it to an actual calendar is still going to be a challenge for me (I hate all calendar apps/services), but this technique may be useful and also doable for some readers.

News Minimalist

News Minimalist uses ChatGPT-4 to read the “top 1,000” news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10, estimated based on seven factors:

  • scale: how many people the event affected;
  • magnitude: how big was the effect;
  • potential: how likely it is that the event will cause bigger events;
  • novelty: how unexpected or unique was the event;
  • immediacy: how close in time is the event;
  • actionability: how likely it is that a reader can act on the news for personal benefit;
  • positivity: how positive is the event — used to fix media negativity bias;
  • credibility: how credible is the source.

It’s one of the better uses of this planet-killing VC-hyped technology.

If you’d rather do the legwork on your own but despise the terrible design and clickbait nature of most modern news sites, perhaps peruse some of these text-only or more lightweight news sites:

FIN

Remember, you can follow and interact with the full text of The Daily Drop’s free posts on Mastodon via @dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev@dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev ☮️

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