a daily todo list

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

Ray Cummings, The Time Professor (1921)

If you skimmed through my journals over the past 25 years, stopping every five years to take a look, you would likely discover five completely different ways of organizing my to-do lists. I’ve used notecards and notebooks, Remember the Milk and Todoist, plain text files and markdown. I’ve tried most systems under that sun. But regardless of the platform, I’ve usually modeled my process, to varying degrees, on David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. Since the introduction of time blocking, however, I’ve slowly moved away from the GTD workflow, focusing less on context-matching and more on prioritizing for the time I have in front of me. 

My current system is a combination of Cal Newport’s time-blocking system and the format of the Full Focus notebooks. I add the fixed meetings to my schedule and then, examining the time I have open, determine the top 3 things I want to get done. There is a section for “other tasks” as time permits, and the rest of the page is dedicated to daily notes. 

It’s a system that works amazingly well. It’s worth noting though that this is the “bottom of the stack” in my planning process. I make my daily plan each morning, but that’s after having already set my weekly, monthly, and quarterly plans in advance. So I don’t have to look at my full to do list (which I keep in Microsoft 360) and I can stay focused on what matters most. I would say 9 times out of 10, I get at least one thing from my “top 3” done every day, and more often than not, I complete all three. 

What I’m reading

Cory Doctorow on Vice: “This is *not* the moment to be ‘social first.’ This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that *you* control.”

Call it spoons, call it energy, or: “If you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks.”

Adam Kotsko on students’ reading habits: “Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing [the world’s] complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.”

Benjamin Santos Genta on metaphors: “We owe it to ourselves and others to reflect on the appropriateness of the metaphors we employ to frame the world. These choices – conscious or not – can be constructive or disastrous.”

Garden update

young loquat tree growing among birds of paradise plants

Sneaky little bastard. When we first moved into our house over a decade ago, there was a loquat tree in the backyard. It was one of the first plants I removed because it was growing in and among two other plants. It’s not a fruit I enjoy, but they are all over the neighborhood, so I’m sure this was the result of an errant seed dropped from above.

Links to the past

Overheard online

Occasionally I see posts that look like this: “I’m just starting my MLIS and I don’t know if I should specialize in cataloguing VHS tapes or storytimes for dogs. What do you think I should do?????” Just take courses you think are interesting and take whatever job you can get when you graduate.

MidniteLibrary on Mastodon

man smoking pipe at a typewriter

(photo credit: NC State Archives on flickr)

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in this world.

Margaret Mead, quoted in New York Times, 9 Aug. 1964

If you had told me five years ago that my main source of news would be email newsletters, I would have thought you mad. If you had told me I would also be paying to subscribe to these newsletters, I would have walked away laughing. Obviously, e-newsletters have been around for decades, but the meteoric rise in platforms like Substack was not on my bingo card pre-2019. So I thought I would share what’s currently coming into my inbox on the regular in the hopes that you might find them as enjoyable as I do! 

What I pay for

Culture Study: This was the first paid subscription I bought. I heard AHP speak at the 2022 CALM conference and immediately realized that she is someone who deeply understands her audience. An author, podcaster, and gardener, she has an incredible critical eye and the ability to make any subject interesting. I love everything she writes. 

Content Prompt [referral link]: Written by Meghan Kowalski, an outreach librarian working in DC, this is a daily list of ideas for social media content creation. I heard Meghan speak at last year’s Library Marketing and Communications conference and was so impressed that I signed up for her newsletter while she was still speaking. It’s a simple, but useful format that also includes prompting questions that I’ve occasionally used in my personal journalling as well.

Link in Bio: This was a recommendation by Meghan. Rachel Karten is a social media consultant who writes about current trends. As someone who only uses social media for work, I don’t often encounter trending content outside my industry, so this is a helpful way for me to know what’s up. Subscribers also get access to a Discord that seems to be mostly populated by social media professionals, so I get to feel like an industry insider. 

Everything else

Here’s a list of all the other newsletters I read regularly. I’m just at the limit of what I have time to read each week, but I do try to read all of these in full when they arrive.

What I’m reading

Obviously from the above, you can tell I already spend a not insignificant amount of time reading, but this last week in particular I was feeling nostalgic about the early days of the web. Kyle Chayka, writing for the New Yorker, basically described my exact experience of the web from the 1990s through 2010s. If that makes you long for a simpler time (and smaller web), check out the Diagram Website. I’ve lost myself in here for hours. Need a soundtrack while you surf? Open a tab for Infraordinary FM, an AI-generated broadcast of mundane happenings around the globe.

Garden updates

close up of a young plant

I’m at the end of the winter growing season here in zone 10, so I’m not putting in any seeds yet. Instead, I’ve transplanted in various leafy greens. Once the heat comes back, these won’t last long but it should provide for the occasional salad for the next few weeks.

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: I was knee-deep into a research project on burnout in academia that, rather than resulting in a publication, made me realize I was clinically in burnout mode. So I dropped it.
  • 4 years ago: I was turning off all notifications on my phone and finally starting to prioritize sleep.
  • 10 years ago: I was making valentines for our students in the library.

Overheard online

“Strong’s Concordance” would be a pretty cool name for a band.

@hotdogsladies on Mastodon

“I am just going outside and may be some time.”

Lawrence Oates, qtd. in Robert Falcon Scott, Diary, 16-17 May 1912.

When Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram launched, I was an early adopter. I remember when Facebook was limited to .edu email addresses, when Twitter mobile meant SMS, and when Instagram felt like weak-sauce Flickr.

Since the meteoric rise of the Big 3, I’ve been reluctant to get involved in other platforms. I’ve stepped back from social media more generally over the past few years, even before the towers of Twitter began to crumble. By 2019, I had deleted all my Facebook content and de-activated my Instagram account; and while I had set my tweets to auto-delete, I was still actively engaging with my Twitter community. The Elon take-, make-, and break- over pushed me over the edge and I stopped posting completely last spring. Many of my connections left the platform. Some are still there, but the exodus of so many is hard to ignore.

I am still debating whether to get back involved with Twitter, now that some of the dust has settled and those who stuck around are tweeting regularly again. In the meantime, I’ve joined Mastodon. I’m happy to be on a server hosted for library and museum folk. It’s definitely quieter. I’m still not sure I’m doing it right. I do love the content warnings. Even if it’s for things I’m OK with (e,g., politics), it makes it easier to skip over if I’m not in the mood. 

In any case, you can find me glammr.us/@johnxlibris. See you there!

Garden updates

The winter garden is in! I have carrots, golden beets, celery, Tokyo bekana, onions, garlic, cabbage, spinach, and potatoes. The okra, peppers, and watermelon are still trucking along as well (such is garden life in a coastal zone 10b). In planter trays I have fledgling cauliflower and Brussel sprouts, but they are slow-going and I’m starting to suspect I’ll need transplants.

What I’m reading

We are not supposed to live like this by Erin Remblance

“How can we care about species loss when we cannot name the species that live in our own community?”

My Saturday self versus my Sunday self by Tom Ellison

“…with the tail of Godzilla, the tentacles of Cthulhu, and the politics of Elon Musk.”

xQc is stealing content by LegalEagle

This is a fascinating rumination on the possible legal outcomes for YouTube reaction videos.

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: On arm twisting and outreach work. I”t’s like that meme about everyone’s reaction when the social media person shows up to your office: Shit. Shit. Shit.” 
  • 6 years ago: Learning to live with it. An important life lesson was learned that day.
  • 10 years ago: Did I mention… It’s been a decade since I started my first “capital L” librarian job!

Overhead online

“my perpetual advice to new university students: go the fuck to class and go the fuck to bed. almost all student crises stem from not doing those two things”

abadidea on Mastodon

The last few weeks in the garden at chez johnxlibris have been magical. The blossoms on all my fruit trees and bushes are blooming, the late-winter flowers are in full color, and my raised vegetable beds are still producing a regular supply of carrots, kale, broccoli, and turnips.

white bearded iris

A conversation my son and I had while cleaning out the dead foliage from these magnificent bearded irises this weekend.

Amiens: I know how to stop ghosts from haunting.

Me: Huh?

Amiens: Ghost school.

Me: How is that?

Amiens: Well, they would be in school and they wouldn’t have time to haunt houses.

Me: But what about on the weekend?

Amiens: They would be so excited to be in school that they would never want to leave.

You have to admire the adoration of being in school at this age. It comes so naturally and can slip away so fast.

Starter pots for new plants

“Human life is a very simple matter. Breath, bread, health, a hearthstone, a fountain, fruits, a few garden seeds and room to plant them in, a wife and children, a friend or two of either sex, conversation, neighbours, and a task life-long given from within — these are contentment and a great estate. On these gifts follow all others, all graces dance attendance, all beauties, beatitudes, mortals can desire and know.”

via “The Secret of Happiness: Bronson Alcott on Gardening and Genius

Not all of these elements of “a great estate” may be for everyone, but for me, this reflection rings especially true. Moreover, the more time and attention I give to these things, the less need I seem to have for doom scrolling and social media.