This week, I experimented with treating consulting as a dessert to encourage me to make decent progress on my personal projects. Mixed results. I learned a lot about continuous integration and code coverage reporting in Emacs (yay!), created my own Helm sources, and improved my index card workflow, but the setup made it easy to give in to the temptation of working on other people's stuff instead of sitting with my own resistance. Still, I did a good job with those consulting hours, building a couple of interesting prototypes and reports.

My digital workflow for drawing and filing index cards is getting better and better, though. =) I used the Emacs widget library for the first time, and I can't wait to build more of these little interfaces to make my life easier. Whee!

Didn't cook last weekend because the fridge had lots of leftovers, so pickings were a little slim this week (what with the snowstorm, too). Looking forward to getting back to a regular routine of cooking this week, maybe even doing bulgogi with a bunch of side dishes. =)

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending January 30, 2015
• Learning from artists: making studies of ideas
• Monthly review: January 2015
• Meta-post: Revising my post on emptying one’s cup
• De-dupe and link: Using the Flickr API to neaten up my archive and link sketches to blog posts
• Clear out your drafts by scheduling Minimum Viable Posts
• The 5-year experiment: A conversation with my anxious side, and how sharing time might be better than giving money
• Digital index piles with Emacs: Rapid categorization of Org Mode items
• Japanese curry at Hacklab, curry udon at home

Sketches

1. 2015-01-31 When I don't really like talking, and what I might be able to do about it -- index card #connecting #introvert
2. 2015-01-31 What's worth remembering -- index card #memory
3. 2015-01-31 Most of my questions are 'How can I...' -- index card #learning #question
4. 2015-01-31 Digital index card trade-offs -- index card #drawing
5. 2015-01-31 Clearing my fabric stash -- index card #tidying #decluttering
6. 2015-02-01 January 2015 -- index card #monthly #review
7. 2015-02-01 Index card sketches and monthly reviews -- index card #organization #pkm #indexing
8. 2015-02-01 Digital piles of index cards -- index card #indexing #organization #pkm
9. 2015-02-01 Accelerating the Emacs community -- index card #accelerating #emacs
10. 2015-02-01 Accelerating my learning -- index card #learning #accelerating
11. 2015-02-02 What if I use the lure of work to help me grow -- index card #consulting #experiment
12. 2015-02-02 Plain text -- index card #data #organization #pkm #org
13. 2015-02-02 Making a virtual Emacs conference happen -- index card #emacs #organizing-people #conference #planning #questions
14. 2015-02-02 Imagining an Emacs conference -- index card #emacs #conference #plans #organizing-people
15. 2015-02-02 Core areas -- index card #life #priorities #values #goals
16. 2015-02-03 Why map what you're learning -- index card #mapping #learning
17. 2015-02-03 What kinds of personal knowledge do I want to manage -- index card #pkm
18. 2015-02-03 Tree view, forest view -- index card #org #pkm #tasks
19. 2015-02-03 Scooped -- index card #writing #sharing
20. 2015-02-03 Getting better at imagining -- index card #planning
21. 2015-02-03 Delegation and dreaming small dreams -- index card #delegation
22. 2015-02-03 Better Emacs Testing -- index card #testing #emacs
23. 2015-02-03 Benefits of sharing my index cards -- index card #sharing #drawing
24. 2015-02-04 Yay, testing in Emacs -- index card #testing #emacs
25. 2015-02-04 Yay, passport -- index card #canada #travel #paperwork
26. 2015-02-04 Shrinking my Learn-Do-Share cycle -- index card #sharing #learning
27. 2015-02-04 Improving my Org clocking workflow -- index card #org
28. 2015-02-04 Digital index cards are working well -- index card #drawing #digital
29. 2015-02-05 If consulting is dessert, what are my vegetables -- index card #consulting #experiment #balance
30. 2015-02-05 How can non-profits regularly reach out to people over social media -- index card #social #social-media #connecting
31. 2015-02-05 How can I organize my questions - and why -- index card #questions #organization #pkm
32. 2015-02-05 How can I make Thursdays more like other days -- index card #experiment
33. 2015-02-05 Biscotti -- index card #cooking #baking
34. 2015-02-06 What would my ideal question-thinking workflow be like -- index card #learning #questions #thinking
35. 2015-02-06 What kind of coaching do I like to give -- index card #coaching #teaching
36. 2015-02-06 What if I made myself take someone out to lunch or coffee every month -- index card #connecting #friends
37. 2015-02-06 What do I like or dislike about learning online -- index card #learning #online
38. 2015-02-06 What activities would I like to share with friends -- index card #connecting #friends
39. 2015-02-06 Journal -- index card #journal

Link round-up

• Grant Rettke: Hydra, a new Emacs package to fall in love with: Come to think of it, having the ability to quickly define a dynamic keymap is great. =)
• Oleh Krehel: Introducing amaranth Hydras: Hydra just keeps getting better and better. I think I might switch my custom keymaps over to it. =)
• X-Ray: A Scraper by the Author of Cheerio: This makes parsing stuff in Javascript much easier.
• Extending the org-mode link syntax with attributes: A more powerful link syntax would be awesome!
• Grant Rettke: Elmacro Shows Keyboard Macros or Latest Interactive Commands As Emacs Lisp: Neat, could make writing functions easier.
• Emacs as a clipboard manager with Clipmon: Experimenting with this…
• How to Program Yourself for Productivity and Stop Searching for the Ideal Software: Description of text-based Zettelkasten workflow.
• How to Write a Note That You Will Actually Understand: Making your notes easy to understand even after years.
• Work on a Specific Skill for One to Three Days to Practice Effectively: Focused sprint, deliberate practice.
• One Hydra Two Hydra Red Hydra Blue Hydra: Just keeps getting better and better
• Don’t Pay A Repair Person To Fix Something, Pay Them To Teach You To Fix it Yourself!: Might as well learn.
• New on (M)Elpa: speed-of-thought-lisp: Looks useful, should get the hang of this.
• emacs helmにアクション・キーバインドを超簡単に追加する方法！: How to add an action to an existing Helm source
• Flickr tag 'emacs': Org-agenda learning card: Nice to see more people making index card cheat sheets.
• Rare letter combinations and key chords: Handy table of keychord frequencies in English.
• Handling multiple selections in helm: Hmm, maybe I should use this for question selection when I draw index cards…
• Turn an ISBN to a bibtex entry: Should do this for my Org reading file.

Focus areas and time review

• Business (42.1h – 25%)
  • Earn (20.3h – 48% of Business)
    • ☑ Prepare invoice
    • ☑ Work on reports
    • ☐ Earn: E1: 1-2 days of consulting
  • Build (20.6h – 48% of Business)
    • Drawing (11.1h)
    • Delegation (0.0h)
    • Packaging (2.4h)
    • Paperwork (0.3h)
      • ☐ File payroll return
    • ☑ Flesh out plan
    • ☑ Change my set-descriptions.js to be able to use any blog URLs (archive page, future post, etc.)
    • ☑ Pass theme check required changes
    • ☑ Set up coveralls for Quantified Awesome
  • Connect (1.1h – 2% of Business)
• Relationships (5.9h – 3%)
• Discretionary – Productive (23.8h – 14%)
  • Emacs (14.6h – 8% of all)
    • ☑ Get travis going
    • ☑ Learn about Emacs testing
    • ☑ Fix my config after some weird error
    • ☑ Get Cask working
    • ☑ Set up Coveralls
    • ☑ Add a test to f.el
    • ☑ Get Travis emacs23 back on
    • ☑ Write tests for one of Steve Purcell's packages
    • ☑ Write tests for one of abo-abo's packages
    • ☑ Set up shortcuts for jumping with refile
    • ☑ Think about unconference infrastructure for Emacs
    • ☑ Help Sean
    • ☑ Measure performance of init
    • ☐ Finish Avdi's transcript
    • ☐ Check on @mattl's upcoming visit to Toronto
  • ☑ Organize questions
  • ☑ Identify index-card-sized questions
  • ☑ Consider skill tree
  • ☐ Read chapter 3
  • Writing (8.3h)
    • ☐ Start git directory for big drafts
• Discretionary – Play (1.9h – 1%)
• Personal routines (23.8h – 14%)
• Unpaid work (9.2h – 5%)
• Sleep (61.4h – 37% – average of 8.8 per day)