Daily... things

Continuing the discussion from Learning Taskwarrior, one dream at a time:

I now have a reminder to log my daily activities, and I was wondering how to best do that. I keep personal notes on things as they come up, so I don’t need to share secrets. I want to keep a public log of activity, so I can drop it in the same database as the rest of this nonsense, and also serendipity.

Anyhow, you know what I am talking about? I used this Basecamp feature where they let middle managers send out fascist big brother check-in emails with employees in lieu of human-to-lizard-people contact. And I just set it up for me, personally, so I’d have a searchable database for future employees to find what I was doing and when.

My thinking is: we make a category with a dedicated bot user that posts on a schedule. Dailies, weeklies, whatevs. Anyhow, they post an auto-generated topic for that duration, and it is tagged and all that. That way, folks can subscribe to the category however they want, or maybe by tag. They can choose to be notified only on the site, or maybe be emailed when a new topic is posted.

That appeals to me, because I’d like to see my task, check my mail, reply to the message and mark it as complete.

It actually makes for a lot of interesting prompts, and I am just going to use a cron and webhook to generate the posts, so anything that can be scripted can be used to generate topics. Let me know if you’re thinking of something interesting!

If you’ve read The curious ecosystem of interi publishing then you can see this is a form of daily logging with emergent players, which will then produce more interesting documentation for future generations. Also, we get to check in with each other, and that is the more important thing because we’re in this together. :slight_smile:

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@tim I am returning to this, because I need a reminder to capture daily events. Especially recently, since my home is being rotted out from rain water while the landlord does nothing, I need to make sure I’m noting everything I need to.

So, I thought we’d create a daily message asking, “what’s up?”, and we can reply to it during the day of. Like my brain streams, but what’s happening to us, as it happens.

I can set up a cron, and have it posting, but I wanted to add something to it that was interesting and unique, such as a word of the day or something.

I just can’t figure out a source to draw from. You do a lot of curling, anything come to mind? Something we can script to pull down every morning, and then post to talkgroup?

I actually liked how @tim made the post for today, because it means it is something we are opting into, and not struggling with, or automating away. If we post on a given day, it was valuable, not a responsive stimuli.

That said, I think a category should hold them. What is that category called?

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Would it be weird to have a category called logs or something? That’s kind of what these are. I, of course, instantly think of Captains Log, a Al Star Trek.

years ago i saw a web app that scraped your twitter feed for any tweet beginning with a single word followrd by a colon, then aggregated those tweets using the single word as the subject. so you’d make yourself lists, like to-read:. i haven’t used it for like five years but i just started tweeting log: helicopter every time a helicopter flies low and stays for a while over wherever i am at the time. i guess i think some day i’ll make an infographic of months judy heard a helicopter or something. because SCIENCE

that has nothing to do with science

anyway DATA

i love the idea of getting tapped on the shoulder and having to do a check-in. i am sometimes good at some things, like conveying information. i am really really bad at things like remembering to convey important information at a certain time, or even remembering i’ll do something five minutes from now. reminders for everything. reminders to set reminders. “hey, have you checked your checklist today?”

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My hope is this system caters to multiple kinds of folks.

I mean, we haven’t done this for bunches of decades, and we all survived. So this is just a bonus! And you can respond when you want.

I said it like that, but I actually really liked the feature in Basecamp. I never used it with other people, my clients weren’t on top of documenting like me. So I would get about ten emails every Friday (I set it up), so I’d write a quick paragraph of what happened that week in that project. Sometimes they were single lines:

We met to reassess the editorial workflow.

Stuff like that. And each client only saw their project updates, but I have all of mine (and still do! Exported as XML, but still, I can use text search on my laptop to find info).

I like to build systems, showing what’s possible, but try to not hardcode anything in. This is a great system for us to overlap! We can use this one category for all the log-y, check-in stuff, and control what each person gets bugged about (well, for the most part; everything is notification heavy at first).

Specifically, I’d like to automate weekly check-ins, but leave the dailies up to folks that have something to say that day. And I’m always willing to switch it up if other folks want to. :slight_smile:

I like logs. I decided that would be the journal-y name of interi if I added it, because they are what I specifically think of:

We are nerd-captains, for sure, so it works. :slight_smile:

I had never read that, but I do the same with Mastodon, but I tag them at the beginning. Hmmm, I have an example…

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@maiki/100889492393430631

I plan to process those one day, although at this point Mastodon has become a thing where I go to get more opinions, in case I already suspect I know what @tim, @judytuna, and @trashheap are thinking. :slight_smile:

There are still a handful of folks I am working up to inviting over (I’m of the opinion to discuss specific topics in meaningful, useful way, so it makes sense to join).

Now I just post to be popular! I have maiki scratches for random thoughts, but I use Mastodon to keep my online popularity strong, since my identity and happiness is so tied into social media… :rofl: Okay, sorry, I couldn’t keep it up! Hahahaha!

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@trashHeap, you are about 25% of the folks using #dailies, so you ought to consider creating them if you post before noon, local time.

That’s a suggestion, nothing more. Remember, I’m not taking this overly serious. And moving things is super easy. Just wanted to point out timezones are affecting us. :slight_smile:

Edit: I should point out, I started this thing for two reasons:

  1. To journal daily, or when something notable happened
  2. To learn which year it is

#2 means I’m paying attention to the date, for personal reasons, not editorial reasons!

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Wait until you see how it morphs into useful knowledge! For now, I’ve scooped all those posts and made a new topic; that will keep the noise isolated to those concerned, rather than signal notifications that daily was updated.

Each of those posts was something I wanted to follow up on. Many are links, ideas, short stories, anecdotes, and media that I didn’t include, because I can’t be bothered at the time.

Once I have all of those filled out (and during the process), I’ll invite folks I think find it interesting to comment on it. Then, in time, the discussion moves on. Then, in some future, I collate it, add it to the archive as a static document, and we have all these references for the future to provide more context if they need.

I’m making this note because this really big map I’ve been holding in my head is starting to make sense in a way I can explain. :slight_smile: CC0/PD, data portability, social documentation, it’s congealing now!

Round, heavy, sometimes wood. Better than bad: their good!

#logs.

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in GTD, and bullet journaling too actually, and a million other systems, you dump thoughts unfiltered and raw into an inbox and sort them out later. i guess how else would humans list things? so yes i like this system. it’s good for the way my attention works, too.

this one’s marked as the solution! that’s a cool discourse feature!

I’m doing a version where the inbox is radically open and public. Where we’re going we don’t need ego!

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i am happy you’ve provided us an LCL vat that i can dump my extra half-formed parts into too! you could charge millions of dollars for this ultra-effective productivity technology but it’s freeeee! and open!

more meta-questions, which now are turning into process questions: do you set a reminder for yourself to revisit the daily heavy pieces of wood, when you’ve left a bunch of “to expand later” pieces of wood? or are you letting the daily log itself be a reminder, cuz you’ll be reminded when you look back? reminders for reminders?

I kinda have reminders. Its more, I just occasionally feel like processing something. I am currently building those routines.

Let me say this: I know how this will work and will let you know, but currently it is too big a map to explain, for me. :slight_smile:

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i lack discipline, so basically everything i do has to be totally opportunistic or a trick. self-hacks!

Making a note that #dailies is a special tag, and should be used when posting a daily on or around the time. So like, last week can still be a daily, but last year should not.

Why?

Because to really crush through my photo collection I’m gonna start posting multiple years of the same day. And only one of them will be a daily (today! :exploding_head:).

If folks want, they can keep #logs muted, but subscribe to that tag. :slight_smile:

Oh, and by special I just mean, “hey, pay attention to a reasonable policy”; it doesn’t do anything technical.

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