If Goodbye Trello, Hello Todo.txt didn’t reveal my roots as a day-planner fanatic then I’m sure this post will.

This week, I sadly retire the Franklin Planner that has been by my side for the last twelve years. I never really followed the Franklin method, and over time my personal day planning strategy has relied less and less upon it’s features. The notes pages were never quite large enough to fit the reams of notes that I need for my work. The hourly planning lacked the ability to schedule in twenty-four blocks (who in this day and age keeps strictly to 9-to-5?). And the hundreds of detailed todo items, reminders, and recurring calendar events are best rendered computationally rather than by hand. Over the years, the Franklin Planner saw less and less use until it eventually become an afterthought to my daily planning regiment.

As of late, I have been trying to consider alternative solutions to GTD in order to get a more fluid style of day planning that respects the flexibility in time scheduling and necessity of play in creative work. The rigidity of keeping to a fixed hourly schedule, and a general movement towards a kind of fixed daily routine, has left me thinking of my time less in hours and more as four to five work blocks; an hour for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bed respectively; and a single block of after-dinner time for creative or cultural pursuits.

Bullet Journaling

My attention has turned Bullet Journaling as a planning method that incorporates a the kind of looseness and play that I am looking for in my planning. The Bullet Journal does not replace the todo.txt cli, but rather augments it. A large part of my day is routine and need not be recorded other than to generate an automatic reminder and be marked done. There are perhaps twenty to thirty items each day, varying by day of week or time of month that appear magically in my todo list. Likewise, managing my backlog of some three hundred house chores, creative projects, and writing prompts could fill several hand written journals.

The Midori Traveler’s Notebook

I received, form my birthday, a Midori Traveler’s Notebook. This wonderful, passport-sized leather notebook solves so many of the Franklin Planner’s problems: it’s light and pocket sized so I can carry it on me at all times, the pages are 25-lines high and open to my creative interpretation on how they will be used, the classic band-bound design allows me to easily store loose sheets of paper such as receipts or printed and folded shopping lists. Once more, it just looks and feels great to have in my hands. My passport-sized item has two bullet-guided notebooks inside (my estimate is that each notebook ought to last me roughly a month), and I carry a binder clip to hold it open to my schedule for the work day.

My Method

The method that I am about to describe is highly experimental. Over the next two months, I am forgoing the Franklin Planner to see if some form of bullet journaling could take it’s place.

The bullet journaling method needed some adaptation for my usage. First, I am not attempting to create a journal of all my tasks in a day. Such would merely be replicating the logging that I get from using Todo.txt. Rather, this is a birds-eye view of the most important tasks that I want to complete or progress in the day and a simple layout of those tasks into my block schedule.

The general bullet journal idea of placing a topic on the page with subsequent sub-items remains and will fill in the side pages. As will an index at the beginning of each notebook. The small size (remember we have only 25 lines to work with) of the notebook necessitates brevity and focus on only the most important items.

Syntax

The bullet journal syntax remains close to the original. We have three types of items: a task, an event, and a note. I add to this, the project which is a kind of aggregation of tasks. Each is marked in the journal as such:

• (•) A task
• (+) A project
• (o) An event
• (-) A note

Each of these items can then take one of five states:

• ( ) Incomplete, not occurred, or null
• (•) In progress
• (✓) Completed
• (x) Canceled
• (>) Bumped, but not scheduled
• (<) Scheduled

The Daily Template

The daily template is a full spread in the journal, except for the weekend days of Saturday and Sunday (and probably holidays or vacation days) which make use only of the right page.

The Right Page:

• The full date in the upper right along with the day of the week
• The page is divided into three sections of six lines: work, chores, and fun
• The spread is numbered in the lower left

Experience tells me that it is better to keep a short list (typically five or less) goals for a day than a long list of goals. Short lists make the anxiety of what to focus on vastly easier. Likewise the three contexts of work, chores, and fun are easily separated in my routine. I am either working, getting some bit of necessary drudgery out of the way (chores), or I am free to do something fun. Also, if fun isn’t expressly earmarked then I am often given to letting chores expand until it uses up all of my time. Putting some bit of fun (a movie, continuing a book or game) on the same page as work and chores gives it the same level of import and thus I am more likely to put away my tools at the end of the day and leave time for leisure.

The Left Page:

The left page is broken into nine blocks of time with each work block and post-dinner getting three lines and all others getting two lines:

• Planning Block (Roughly 08:00-10:00)
• Work Block A (Roughly 10:00-12:00)
• Lunch Hour (Roughly 12:00-13:00)
• Work Block B (Roughly 13:00-15:00)
• Work Block C (Roughly 15:00-17:00)
• Work Block D (Optional, roughly 17:00-19:00)
• Dinner Hour (Roughly 19:00-20:00)
• Post Dinner Block (Roughly 20:00-21:30)
• Evening Wind Down (Roughly 21:30-23:00)

Beneath each header, I jot very briefly the main task be it from the right page or perhaps some routine item on my Todo.txt list that I hope to complete or progress through that period. I may also note specific meetings or appointments that begin or cross that block and their times found in my calendar.

About two years ago I started muddling on a small project to update this blog. At the time, I felt that there was a need to create something that better reflected both my growth in design and front-end sensiblities but also my perspective on how we ought to approach our relationship with the web.

The blog itself has gone through many fine iterations since college. For a while it served as a platform for attracting employment interest. Now, that I am established, it is slowly becoming a platform for posting “anything and nothing” that crosses my mind. The get-me-hired aspects of the blog will probably be jetisoned onto some new, yet to be made site.

The Website As A Document

The web page is really a kind of virtual typesetting. We take the raw document in a UTF-8 encoded text with perhaps some simple markup like Markdown, and then set that document to build a complete html page. Had the medium been different, say if we were to set to print, then the output could be a PDF, DOCX file, or even a different markup type (e.g. Latex).

As I have grown as a developer, I have come to the slow realization that the relational database, while a great back-end for serializing relational objects, makes a rather poor document data store. Look at my old webcomic, Dreamscapes, which is currently offline because the CMS it was built upon doesn’t support PHP7. If we really care about our documents then this becomes a major concern. In order to edit, view, or generally interact with a document stored in the RDBMS we must have a full stack of applications that can work together and work on a given platform. MySQL must be installed and configured to work with the HTTP server and the HTTP server must support the PHP version of the CMS. This is a lot to maintain in order to simply read a document. Our ability to archive and retrieve a document becomes a mounting concern as time progresses. If we want to retrieve a document that is in such a system ten, twenty, or thirty years later we may find ourselves first wading through the labourous task of tracking down and compiling ancient software and virtualized systems just to read what could have been stored in a text file.

In light of these thoughts, I am moving all of my document-based sites to static site generators.

The static site generator (in this case Jekyll), respects this idea that an article on a website is a representation of a document. We can seperate the repositories of content and layout into two different respective Git repositories. When I am working on the layout, I can work in programmer-mode and when I am working on content, I can work in writer-mode.

The article, is thus a document in my documents directory. I can write in it using the same text editor that I use for any textual document (Vim). I link it to the Jekyll posts directory to be typeset for the web, or I can run it through Pandoc to typeset it for print. If I ever wanted to self-publish a book, I could use these documents as the source to typeset into a series of chapters for an e-book or volume for Lulu.

Responsive & Simple Design

The new design is no radical departure from my last layout. Overall, I liked the old layout well enough. Unfortunately, it had a few rough spots: poor display on phones, the typical wordpress cludge of spaghetti html, and an inconsistent approach to typography.

The new layout starts with the styles outlined on the Better Motherfucking Website and then applies a very minimalist layer of front-end frameworks (Bootstrap and FontAwesome) to achieve a responsive layout that resizes nicely from desktop to phone. I took great care at implementing the correct HTML5 tags and stylesheet properties for a rather simple design. The result is that the site looks good and is fully functional even if we remove the stylesheet. Last, I carefully reviewed the text blocks possible via Markdown and Kramdown syntax and crafted a series of test articles displaying a wide variety of ways those text blocks could be combined. Working through these test articles I constructed a consistent style that when applied to my existing articles resulted in a much more readable body of text.

To Comment, or Not To Comment

Comments are gone. Swept away. Lost to some MySQL dump in the back ups directory. This was a decision that took some debate. I like the idea of a distributed collection of communities discussing away on some topic. Yet, I am not interested in moderating and maintaining such a community. These communities often devolves into a cult of personalty, or which would probably be my case, abusive flame wars.

In over a decade of writing on the web, I can count the meaningful comments made on my sites on one hand. When I look at blogs that do recieve some staple comments with each post, they often become a dialogue between the creator and questioner with no real benefit to any larger community.

It seems best that discussion about some post or topic be moved into dedicated communities for discussions, that is Hacker News, Slashdot, or the healthy collection of smaller bulletin boards that litter the internet. If my words have moved someone so passionately that they must talk with me, my e-mail and twitter handles are available in multiple locations on the site. Or if you wish to rant at me at length, you can always start your own blog.

Kick Big Brother to the Curb

Google in all of it’s various forms is similarly banished. I would still like to show up in Google searches, but I have no interest in being a platform to serving up my readers to their big-data engines nor polluting my site with low-quality advertisements.

Analytics, by itself, seems a rather harmless bit of data collection. I fondly recall getting my first page-hit counter working on my geocities site over fifteen years ago. I am still amused to see how many people are reading an article and their general geographic distribution. Alone, this is just a silly whimsy, but collectively it becomes a problem. Targeted digital marketing is the bane of the internet and from it stems an endless flow of poorly written listicles and click-bait articles by authors principally interested in hitting the SEO bingo.

Which brings me next to the problem of ads and internet monetization. Shortly after college I explored the potential of online writing for employment. I found that the vast majority of online writing is paid for by advertisements and advertisements provide a most perverse form of incentivisation. The author quickly finds themselves writing for volume on topics selected for return on investment rather than passion. The ads themselves bring almost no return, and clutter up an otherwise nicely looking site while undermining the credibility and relationship between author and reader. The best writing online is either passion, paywalled or patronage (be it Patreon or academic).

Thus, analytics has moved to a self-hosted Piwik install. I could get the same data looking at my server logs, but I do like a nice user interface for my amusement. DNT honoring, is of course, turned on.

[Patreon][] strikes me as one of the few honest methods of monetization for an independent creative on the internet. As such, I have set up a Patreon page and would find it vastly more validating should someone someday choose to donate a dollar on it then any sum of money that advertisements could draw. That said, I do not imagine myself putting too much effort into constructing elaborate tiered rewards or crowdfunding campaigns. Gone are the days that I envisioned a career as a professional creative. I lack the charisma for cultivating a group of followers and I lack the focus to become well regarded in any particular niche. The day job covers me quite well, leaving my creative asperations to follow whatever path amuses me. Any earnings, I would imagine, would simply be passed along to other creatives on the site.

Licensing

Last a word on licensing. Dr. Godfried-Willem in The Absurdity of Copyright points out the futility and logically indefensible hurculean efforts that industry takes to secure intellectual property. Ultimately, the internet is a platform for speech and is best suited as a space for promoting oneself and one’s ideas rather than a marketplace for buying and selling fictitious property claims. As such, I have placed the source code for this site under The MIT License and the content of the website under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

[Patreon]:

“One cannot read a book: one can only reread it” – Nabokov

I woke this morning thinking about re-reading The Lord of the Rings. The last stab at the thick volume I made while at Oxford in 2008. A childhood friend reads the entire thing on an annual basis. Which brings me around to another question. If I examine the entirety of my library and was given the choice of only a select few books to read and re-read for eternity which volumes would that entail? It is said that the quality of a litrary work is measured in our ability to glean something anew from each reading.

Certainly there are many a book and a film that has touched and moved me greatly and yet, I would not go back and read it again. Honey & Clover, for example, was paramount in my decision leave DigiPen for Augustana. Yet, in rewatching, it has never recaptured the same motive power.

This list then is a kind of “desert island list.” A list of works so profound that if restricted to only those works on a deserted island I could potentially get by. It is also the list of works that I could potentially see myself reading and re-reading every five years into my geriatry.

Books (Novels, Short Story, and Graphic Novels)

The novel is an easy one to figure out. Which volumes have I returned to time and again? Some of have certainly fallen off the list. C.S. Lewis was wonderous as a child but what once seemed like playful allegory now feels too much like a club.

The Classics

• Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
• The Odyssey by Homer
• Gilgamesh
• The Holy Bible

The Modern Fantasy

• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• The Silmarillion or The History of Middle Earth by JRR Tolkien
• The Works of Lovecraft
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• The Dungeons & Dragons Rulebooks (AD&D, 3rd, and 5th Editions)

The Graphic Novel

• Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki
• Solanin by Inio Asano

The Literary Books

• On the Road by Jack Kuroac
• Child’s Play by Ichiyo Higuchi
• Snow Country and Thousand Cranes by Yatsunari Kawabata

Philosophy

What is worth re-reading in Philosophy is far too long of a list. I submit instead those volumes from my undergrad that I find worth returning to as they provide a rather sound foundation for further reading.

• The Complete Works of Plato
• Nichomachean Ethics by Artistotle
• Confessions by St. Augustine
• Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas
• Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by Locke
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by Hume
• Critque of Pure Reason by Kant
• Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Kant
• The Phenomonology of Spirit by Hegel
• Fear & Trembling by Kierkegaard
• The Portable Nietzche
• Being & Nothing by Sartre
• The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus

Film & Television

Rarely do I return to a film and almost never teleivison. A handful are regulars, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Labyrinth where all watched repeatedly in my youth. The collected works of Miyazaki, Kirasawa and Satoshi Kon are all revisited on occassion. A handful of anime I would like to take the time to rewatch as they were all very formative in my youth. Yet, how well they would stand up on a rewatching remains unknown.

Film

• Star Wars
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
• Night on the Galatic Railroad
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Directed by Miyazaki: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Pom Poko, Whisper of the Heart, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle
• Directed by Kirasawa: Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ikiru, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Throne of Blood
• Directed by Satoshi Kon: Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika

Anime & Television

• Cowboy Bebop
• Samuarai X
• FLCL
• Serial Experiments Lain
• Mushishi
• Kino no Tabi
• Red Dwarf
• The Twilight Zone

Games

The vast majority of games have no narrative arc. How can I return to Counter Strike? When I examine narrative single player games though, I find myself going back to Miyamoto’s early games: Mario and Zelda. Few titles from that era held up with age, and fewer modern titles are worth a second look. Yet, I must admit that I have probably gone back to re-play none of these games in the last decade.

• Super Mario I, II, and III
• Super Mario: Yoshii’s Island
• Super Mario 64
• Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
• The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Link’s Awakening
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Chrono Cross
• Shadow of Collossus
• Ico

Honorable Mentions

There are a few volumes that I have read multiple times, but upon later reading in life, I do not feel the same spark and will probably not return:

• The works of Mishima
• The works of Murakami
• The works of Bill Waterson
• The works of C.S. Lewis