za3k.com was the site of a DDoS attack. I’m pretty sure this was because my wordpress installation was compromised, and the hacker who took control of my server was herself DDoSed.
More updates to come, but the short story is that I’ll be formalizing my install and eventually containerizing + hardening everything
I’m opening the NNTP server at nttp.za3k.com (TLS or unencrypted) to the public. These are the newsgroups currently on it. It is virtually zero-traffic (no users, but also users post little).
If you don’t have a news reader, Thunderbird can do the job, or take a look at the list here.
I want to talk about three different mindsets for time management and what constitutes “success”. In all three, I’ll talk about an example problem, let’s say “writing term papers” for a student who finds this difficult, and see how each might approach the goal. My goal is not to promote one of these as best, but rather to illustrate that all three exist. Each may be favored by one person or another, or by a single person depending on the situation. I hope that by describing them, I can help people understand one another’s motivations, so as to facilitate communication. The first mindset I will call optimization. The optimizer tries to spend their time gaining resources. For example, they might work to get money. They also attempt to increase the rate at which they can gain resources. Some optimizers even try to increase the rate at which they can e.g. network or learn skills. The intuition here is that most goods are somehow fungible, and that you should try to get as many fungible goods as possible. Example of term papers: An optimizer might try to learn to write term papers, or get faster and faster at writing papers. If they got good at writing term papers, they might try to write even more (for example, taking classes heavy on papers) to take advantage of these skills. Heuristics:
Failure modes:
The second mindset I will call satisficing. The satisficer is goal-oriented, and tries to stay focus on the goal at all times. Traditional goal-based time management like GTD encourages satisficing. Example of term papers: Their specific goal might be “Get an A on all papers until I graduate”. If they can write well enough to get an A, they probably would not learn to write better. If they can’t get an A, their goal might be better served by learning to write to rubrics. The question of learning to write better vs spending more time editing on each paper would be decided by the amount of time each would take for the actual number of term papers the student expected to write for their immediate goal. Heuristics:
Failure modes:
The last mindset I will call minimization. The minimizer will try to minimize the amount of resources spent on a particular task or problem. They will especially try to avoid any indefinitely-big cost. Example of term papers: The student might try to spend the minimum amount of time possible on the paper to get an A. If they knew they were going to write several papers, they might study how to write papers faster, so as to spend less total time–even if they expected the time learning to write faster would be greater than the time to write the immediate papers (“but what if there are more papers someday”). The eventual state of the minimizer will probably be to have set things up to avoid term papers, or write them very quickly. Heuristics:
Failure modes:
Here’s how you make roasted chickpeas (aka garbanzo beans):
A small font I designed. I’m pretty proud of it.
In space no one car hear “whoosh” sounds but action potato is so cool you still can mostly.
Action Potato
It’s whooshing because it’s going as fast as a WEAK SPEEDBOAT.
Made using Piskell
Our house has seven people, so today I made some mail holders to put on our doors.
I basically had some long cardboard boxes, and cut them in half. Then I added new ends and separators in the middle.
I’m not sure if they’ll actually get used. Mail on the floor looks bad, but these aren’t that hot either. If you make some and want to improve the look, you can cover everything in paper or cardstock.
When I’ve talked to successful people, the one habit they pretty much all have is some kind of daily review process. Often journaling as well, but very specifically some kind of review process. I want to be a successful person, and I can understand how this would help, so I want that. I’ve tried to set it up before, but I never end up journaling every day.
The typical way to set up a habit is to link it to another existing habit. For a daily habit, you try to link it into an existing part of your daily routine. Here’s the problem: I don’t have any major daily habits. I don’t eat every day. I don’t brush my teeth at night every day. I don’t take a shower every day. I check my email, which is how I tried it before, which worked OK but it turns out I don’t do that every day either.
Daily: Wake up and go to the bathroom to put in contacts. Grab my journal and write a daily review for the previous day. The contents of the review are
I’m making sure to write down
I’ve also been writing my daily to-do list at the same time.
Weekly: Every monday evening, talk to <name> on Skype. Discuss the general direction my life has gone the last week and where I want it to go, and how to make those two accord. Can be as long/short as I want. I designed this to be with someone else because I didn’t anticipate doing it on my own. I haven’t done this one yet, although one Monday did pass.
Monthly: Spend two hours on the 2nd of the month (the 2nd so I notice dates). Review how the daily and weekly systems have been working, and how they need to be revised. I haven’t done this one yet. I’ve publically precommitted $100 to do this the remaining months of the year.
