Content tagged with "Personal"

Weekly PhD progress: 2 more 1st draft chapters complete, only one more “main” chapter remains and then moving on to background, intro, conclusion etc. With around 11 weeks left, ‘feeling confident’ is a stretch but things are on track.

Another day of PhD writing in the sun. Aiming for 1000 words today ahead of my now weekly progress report post tonight. Energy provided by a local coffee roaster HICS coffee

First concert since pre-covid tonight - saw Jungle in Brighton and it was absolutely brilliant. They even squeezed in a little nod to the Bee Gees.

I’m currently undergoing a bit of a refactor of my personal knowledge management (PKM) approach. Up until now I’ve been a victim of the collector’s fallacy in which one can trick themselves into a false sense of security RE: learning by bookmarking everything that looks interesting for processing later. I use Wallabag, which is a self-hosted bookmark reading app similar to Pocket, to collect articles that I might want to read later. The problem is that I’ve ended up with hundreds of unread articles in my to-read list and I’ve not ended up doing much with the material that I have read. I want to get into the habit of reading articles more thoroughly, taking notes and linking them back to material I’ve read elsewhere.

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This week has been fairly uneventful for us in the Ravenscroft household. It’s largely been business as usual. We did our usual pattern of 2 days in the office and 3 days at home.

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I’ve been continuing my somewhat meta “thinking about thinking” stream of thought from last week with a thorough refactor of my personal knowledge management practices. I started writing an update about it here which turned into a full fledged blog post so I’ve published that as a separate piece here

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Really pleased with the solar lamps we installed in the garden this afternoon. So shiny!

Here’s the 2nd installment of my weeknotes. My attempt at #100DaysToOffload didn’t go particularly well but I’m optimistic that I can keep up with 1 post a week, let’s see!

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This week I finished How to take smart notes on my kindle I’m making my way through some of the blog posts on Zetteltasken.de. One thing that strikes me about the puritanical zetteltasken approach is that it is designed for more for someone who writes articles or books for a living rather than code (although I do write articles with my academic hat on from time to time). That said there are certainly some interesting practices I intend to assimilate into my personal knowledge management practices. I really like the idea of pre-processing your notes before you store them so that they can be re-used for downstream tasks with minimal thinking. I’m wondering to what extent I can add code snippets, patterns and algorithm documentation to my PKM for low-overhead retrieval and use in new projects and to synthesise new ideas and approaches that I could try out.

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Why Weeknote?

One of my favourite Fosstodon people Doug Belshaw publishes a blog post every week about what he got up to during the week which is always interesting to read. Re-visiting your notes on a weekly basis is always a great idea from both a learning standpoint since it helps you cement the things you learned and wrote about in your mind and also from an appreciation and gratitude standpoint since it makes you take stock and look back at the things you did this week, the volume of which may surprise you. Doing this on your public facing blog has the side effect of making you write in a focused way as if someone other than yourself might read it and that will help you make sense of your own writing when you come back to review it in the future. It can help hold you accountable since its much easier to convince yourself not to bother writing a weeknote or to put it off if you are the only one who will ever see it. Finally of course, there’s the possibility that others might read it and find it interesting or learn something.

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Braced for Storm Eunice - now slap bang in the “red weather warning” zone so fully expecting to inherit our neighbours’ lawn furniture, trampolines and wheelie bins (trash cans on wheels) any minute now https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60417263

Happy early valentines from the Ravenscrofts