21-05-11: Doing Things #1

About once a month, I find myself in a situation where I have a lot of things that I don’t want to do.

This happened today.

I have three big hammers against this:

1. Stimulants (Ritalin, modafinil). The downside is that I feel anxious afterwards, and if I take modafinil for two days in a row, I can’t fall asleep.
2. Calling somebody and asking “hey, can you hold my hand while I’m doing X?”. Only works for shared projects — I can ask the Brick co-founder if the task is related to Brick, but I don't have anybody to ask if the task is "book a medical center appointment".
3. Writing all the things down and solving them while I'm writing about them. As long as somebody will see it — as long as it feels like a public thing in my head — I will have an easier time doing the tasks.

I am going to try #3 this time. Maybe the same technique will work for you.

(Note: I will be doing all tasks in the todo list order, instead of prioritizing them, because I want to resolve all of them. If I leave any, they will keep hanging.)

'Fundamentals of Piano Practice'

Lovkush recommended a book: Fundamentals of Piano Practice. It seems to be very long and probably good. I should read it.

Why I don't want to do it: I know I will give up after one chapter. At the same time, I don't want to remove the link from my todo list, because then I will never read it.

Solution: add it to the "Links" note in my notes app, close the tab. I will probably not look at it again, but I don't feel bad about it (at least as long as I'm writing all this).

Port a 'lens' commit into 'microlens'

I maintain a library, microlens, that is a stripped-down fork of a very popular Haskell library lens. I have been maintaining it since 2015. I need to port a fix from 'lens' to 'microlens' (this happens once in a few months).

Why I don't want to do it: I don't see any benefits from maintaining microlens.

Solution: do it anyway.

(Did it in about half an hour.)

Post idea origins for the previous month

I keep a list of ideas and where I got them from: Idea origins. I used to post all the new ones on Twitter by the end of each month, but now that I'm on a Twitter pause, I don't have anywhere to do it.

Why I don't want to do it: I don't see any benefits from posting idea origins.

Solution: do it anyway.

(Posted them on Substack. I like the ideas, and maybe somebody will react to them.)

Answer SaaS Mantra

SaaS Mantra reached out to Brick and offered to promote it if we make a pricing plan for businesses. I have to reply to them.

Why I don't want to do it: I don't think I have come up with good pricing plans, and also I'm not sure if my co-founder has approved them.

Solution: talk to him.

(Did it, spent like half an hour talking about alternative pricing plans, and then replied to SaaS Mantra.)

Write somewhere: church is the only school-like thing available to adults

Solution: wrote in the current Substack issue.

This is a great thing about having a newsletter (that doesn't double as a blog): if something is in my head and I don't know where to put it, I can just put it there. This is why Brick must eventually have newsletters. All the random shit would just go there.

Write somewhere: numbers are only needed in a world with many similar things

Solution: same.

Okay, I haven't done all of them but I want to publish this already, so there might be another session later.