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Chapter 13: Automation I was looking forward to this chapter. I’m always happy to learn about what other people like to automate and project and task management, always happy to see what others are doing as inspiration.

His decisions on when to automate something don’t exactly match my own, but that is partially because I am a programmer, and “Hard Things” / “Done Often” are what automate on a daily basis. However, generally I agree.

One thing he mentions is that he likes to automate hard things done once, which I interpret as hard things done occasionally, and specifically that this is good for documentation purposes. I somewhat agree with this, yes, having a script will potentially explain better what a process is like than anything else, assuming it works. However there is an even better way: Literate DevOps. I’m a fan of literate programming in general, though not necessarily a practitioner, but especially for small-ish scripts. I think that hard things done once, and small things done often, and even small things done once, all benefit from a literate approach. This puts the documentation front-and-center.

Also I think the idea of using make as a sysadmin tool is fantastic! I really like using GNU Make myself, and he has the right idea in this regard.

Chapter 10, Email Management. I think this chapter could've helped me manage my email a lot at my last job.

I already have some plans to improve my email management. I've been using notmuch, but it's not really working out the way I'd hoped, and also I need to start having some email on my phone again too.

I think what is suggested in this chapter is good, though. And I did do some of it already. Sending mailing list emails to separate folders, for example.

I'm big on filtering. I have a sieve script running on my email host that sorts a bunch of different types of email into different folders. I need to work on it a little more, some junk that I get from the last time I bought shoes and such, where the unsubscribe button just doesn't work.

I stopped checking my email on my phone because most of the time it was stuff that I didn't need to look at at all. But if I add a few more filtering rules I should be able to have only important emails ping me on my phone.

I will have to remain vigilant, though. I've had several rounds already of unsubscribing from things I don't want, but I'll have to maintain my sieve script diligently.

@ryuslash

Before I say anything else, I think it's important to say that I think that I think one can and should use the A, B, C prioritization whenever possible. It's simple, it's easy.

I do deviate from his process in two places, in how to prioritize, and in his "address the tasks in the order they appear".

But (and this is critical) I only came to need to do that after YEARS. One can and should use the original system only until it becomes a problem.

Now here's what I do:

If I'm unsure of a task, I start with his time based "Today", "Hopefully today, if not tomorrow" and then "Everything else" and I assign A, B, C.

Sometimes ADHD makes doing a specific task hard, and then I get "stuck", so I take inspiration from the Covey four quadrant system, but instead of prioritization, I use time.

Then I may choose a small win with big impact over the "next" task.

For example, paying a bill may only take me 10-15 minutes.

I also avoid task switching if I can, and prefer to cluster tasks.

Chapter 8, Prioritization. While reading this I felt that while it was good information, this chapter doesn't help me much at the moment.

But I think that might have been me being pessimistic. Just the type of prioritization (effort vs. impact) that he talks about will need me to adjust how I look at projects.

I feel like at work this will be more important, still, but right now I'm not working and all of my projects are personal. There are certain projects that really stand out as important (find a job!), and some that have priority because I've just committed to them. But other than that what I'm struggling with is making time for things like laundry, and where it fits in with the other things I have to do, and keeping track of all the things that are expected of me right now. Also how to stop procrastinating on certain tasks.

The scheme that was suggested in an earlier chapter has really worked well for me so far: - A: Needs to be done today - B: Needs to be done soon - C: Needs to be done sometime