Get organizized

Also known as a productivity porn.

The real reasons are that we have very limited mental capabilities, very limited self-control and self-discipline, and very little time before inevitable cognitive decline, and we usually are completely exhausted at the end of the day with literally nothing accomplished .

So, this becomes a straightforward set of basic optimizations

• optimize for a good 8-hour sleep every night
• divide the day into “natural”, sun-followed parts
• do not waste mornings, schedule them
• stick to the daily routine, time-slots
• write everything down
• do physical exercise and food hacks
• leave podcasts and light reading for the night
• simple org-mode TODOs are enough for everything

As a side-note, burn-outs aren’t just a meme, they ruin health and motivation very quickly. Optimize to avoid them.

• avoid all-nighters and other extremes, tension and stress of any kind
• spending long hours by just pushing harder is stupid and harmful
• interleave different connive tasks (reading, listening, writing, watching)
• invest heavily in the tools of the trade
• invest in your living and working environment
• exercise regularly, have time for yourself

There is no way to make progress if one has been burned out. Just like it is with top athletes – an optimal scheduling, health measurements, and adaptive sets of regular exercises are required. Just pushing hard will only ruin you.

When one begins to thing about “how to be productive” and start to look at planning software - it is too late and one is already fucked.

Anyway, the main, universal vehicle of any planning is still a plain old sorted list – sorted by priorities or dates or any other weights.

With org-mode tags we could live in a type-tagged universe of values. Lisps, by the way. are such partitioned, type-tagged universes of values.

Tags act as types by forming a distinct set of tagged items (a partition) which means that things are related to the particular tag and therefore to each other.

Multiple sorted lists are good-enough for everything, and there is org-mode for that.

org-mode provides structuring and nesting (which people call “outlining”) - the fundamental, universal notions . It also provides basic categorization mechanisms and semantic tags.

Yes, you have to develop a habit of using simple sorted nested lists and minimal tools, which are parts of the org-mode package. The goal is to build a nested hierarchical strures of texts which corresponds to conceptual hierarchies of our mind and systems.

Different kinds of org-mode keywords loosely correspond to type-classes.

Notice that org-mode keywords with "|" are essentially union types, and also a sequence of intermediate states. They are sum-types.

They are the most powerful when defined in the “header” on a per-file basis. Thus is a basic typing or a type discipline for entries.

The most difficult thing is to distill the essential workflow from an infinite number of possibilities to mess everything up with useless, redundant micro-management and an illusion of being “optimal”.

So, we write lists - PLANs and TODOs.

PLANs are more general and more about regular activities. A PLAN may include recurring activities. You may state “running every other day” in a PLAN. Or you may say “finish the Okasaki book”.

TODOs are about particular sequences of tasks to be done. You may write “implement this or that” in a TODO.

BTW, if you don’t know where this quote comes from…