1 my experience with RapidWeaver
2 using GTD at work
3 making jam
4 thinking
5 anything else that occurs to me
1 my experience with RapidWeaver
over the past week I have continued to experiment with RapidWeaver and add new parts to the website. Of course, in order to add something meaningful to the website, you need to have something worth saying. Accordingly I have so far relied on existing content. My very first website was done for a college course, and was all about woodwork. I am not sure that I want to recreate it, but I would like to take some photos of the various woodwork projects that I have done, and put them onto this site with some notes about any interesting design features. I enjoy thinking about design and design solutions, and I think that I have come up with some worthwhile ideas.
It is becoming apparent to me that it is a lot more useful to spend a couple of hours working on RapidWeaver, than simply tinkering for half an hour. If you have a decent amount of time, it is possible to explore options, do a little research, and then make some decent progress. A short session, simply tends to be meaningless tweaking.
I have been using voodoopad to create my own personal wiki for various topics. I might consider either putting elements onto this website using Rapidweaver, for example I could easily enough use the blogging element to record my work in the garden.
I would appreciate a manual for the package, mostly you can get by by experimenting and tweaking, but a manual would be useful in detailing all the functionality. For example what is a permalink? That said, the vodcasts are excellent, and there are still a couple more of them that I can watch, so they might clear up some issues.
2 using GTD at work
after initial enthusiasm for GTD, truth be told, it fell by the wayside at work, through simple pressures of too much firefighting, and not enough time. Basically the section probably needs three people to run properly, and I have been trying to run it single handed. There have been, and will be a lot of changes, so a purely mechanistic project management approach would have been ineffective. The GTD lists simply ended up being lists where stuff got dumped, never to be seen again, but I was finding it difficult to actually track progress across a variety of strands. I have had to focus on the higher level work lately, so this means more strands of work, but they are slower moving, whereas the lower level work tends to be a small number of fast moving strands of work.
Well, I suppose I am split, in strategic mode, I have a lot of slow moving work strands, in operational mode, I have a few fast moving work strands.
Anyway, the pace of work has slackened off slightly, so I have tried to organise myself better. My old approach with GTD, and the one I use at home, is a single jotter, with a page per work strand, and a list of work to do on each. I have amended my work process to
- a single word file
- with a numbered list in word format
- with collapsible items
- each workstrand is a numbered item - descriptive title sorted alphabetically, so all meetings are - meeting - blogs Liaison , meeting - quarterly audit
- with actions as subtopics, next action and not much more
- with narrative as body text - for example what has this working group agreed,
this seems a useful way of killing two birds with one stone, it tracks what stage everything is at, and it gives me a ready prompt list for what to do, for example it is a single list of everything I have promised to do, so if there is a meeting coming up, it is easy enough to see what I promised to do, and what was agreed last time.
being able to collapse all, and expand all, means that I can drill down, or see all, as is most appropriate.
The ability to embed and link in documents is a little constrained, but overall this seems a pretty workable solution.
Because the listing is so useful, I tend to keep it open all the time, and add, or delete items from it constantly. This encourages me to use it, and keep it upto date.
Time will tell whether this is the solution, or merely an artifact of having slightly more time on my hands!
3 making jam
we seem to be living in a monsoon climate, so yesterday, although not without rain, was relatively speaking, a day of sun. We made the best of the day, by heading off to a local fruit farm, where they were selling off punnets of strawberries cheap. I think that with the weather they have been down on visitors, so they were grateful for people coming to take some off them off their hands. The joy and terror of soft fruits is that they go from money to mush almost immediately. I suppose we could have done a bit of fruit picking ourselves, but the weather was still pretty iffy. Anyway took a wander round the local market town, which was clean out of granulated sugar. Obviously everyone is thinking the same as us. They have a soft fruit festival next week, which might be worth a trip.
My wife has now started on the mountain of strawberries and has done three double batches of jam, making 38 jars of strawberry jam. [22lbs of jam]
Alarmingly this still leaves a not inconsiderable mountain of strawberries to process, and turn to jam. Then she will start on a few punnets of gooseberry jam that we also bought.
Of course my garden is a veritable fruit spot, with blackcurrent, rhubarb, loganberry, flowering quince, strawberry, redcurrent, blueberry, cranberry and gooseberry, though none yet in particularly large jam making quantities, also five apple trees, and one damson. Then of course there are countless herbs, with dill and fennel being particularly decorative. I am currently trying to grow wormwood from seed, so with luck I will have some wormwood bushes in due course.
I managed a quick cut of the lawn with yesterday's okay-ish weather.
Today actually looks pretty good, so I will try and do half and half, half a day in the garden, half a day tackling the various paper work that accumulates.
4 thinking
thinking can be split up into two processes
understanding - our understanding is only ever partial, simply based on a few prominent variables. That is why society's understanding seems to shift, and hindsight is always so informative. We do our best to evaluate which are the prominent variables, but we can be wrong.
decision making - which is a specific process that is worth considering in detail.
5 and this week, nothing much else occured to me as I wrote this, so here ends this blog.
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