#you can tell this is a shitpost by how ridiculously unpolished it is

[notarealwelder]

Recent babble on notebooking/pomodoroing

Reloading context is paramount

I cannot reliably remember fiddly details of a nontrivial task (e.g. a refactoring the size of "move 30loc into a different module, harmonize imports and dependencies") I've been doing only yesterday, much less 3 days ago on Friday

Two concepts of having an idea what to do

There are tasks in which the brain can generate an immediately takeable action it thinks will be useful, and tasks where it cannot. There are also tasks in which I have a plan/decomposition that makes it clearer how the task can be achieved, and tasks where I have none such. Both of these can be glossed as "I have an idea what to do / no idea what to do", but they're quite distinct mental states, and have different recommendations!

From no plan and no immediate action I can get into the state where "sketch a plan" is an immediate action. This gets me into "yes plan" state, from where "attempt to execute points of the plan" is either an immediate action, or a nontrivial task, to which I can apply decomposition

(this doesn't always work, because I might not have enough understanding of the domain to plan coherently: too much confusion about the domain and I can't even write steps; slightly less confusion and I can write steps, but won't have enough confidence in them to motivate myself to execute them)

Given no plan and an immediate action, it's tempting to simply take it; this is often a good idea! but also this way less structurelessness, lack of higher-level direction, moderately probably eventual disappointment from not getting Actually Useful results. in any case, pomodoro-ish structure with ≈enforced periods of reflection and re-planning does help with that; see some more on it below

Writing the very same thing multiple times is useful

dunno if it's my personal memory that's sievelike, but it refuses to hold a 5-point plan for the whole 25m it will take to execute its first 2 points; it will be displaced by execution details in the best case and by outside context distractions in the worst case.

that's an argument for writing things down once, but not more than that, right? no! reading the plan written half an hour ago, or even copy-pasting parts of it, is profoundly different from writing it down again, in entirely new words. (new copy of the plan also sidesteps the problem of searching for it in the big note & laborously filtering already-done fragments; I do not want to hold many pointers to different parts of my note, nor spend time re-reading it to locate what I need.)

Saying out loud what I intend to do to someone is very useful

when I get into it, it's a very cheap method to force myself to ≈put my plans into very-short-term memory; to give them intention; to force some explicit computation of these plans; to make a record of these computed plans that can be consulted in the next minutes to answer the constant "ok what now" question quite well

(sidethought: getting attached to doing the whole plan on time was a very bad idea for me in particular; estimating things sufficiently pessimistically is lunacy (and has additional problems w/ diminishing enthusiasm for doing them), dropping sidethoughts to get the planned thing on time is hard. much better to be ok with not getting everything planned done, and yet enjoying the benefits of planning.)

(sidethought 2: not uncommonly a plan calls for further planning somewhere in between; several iterations of plan-act cycle are....fine? I think at some point I might have had aversion to "always planning & never getting things done", but I sure do not have one now; getting a clearer view on smaller details is progress towards having them done after all)

Pomodoro-style enforced """breaks""" are good for several reasons

1st, they provide designated time slices for taking a brief higher-level look on the whole process; see below for why that's good

2nd, they provide a safety rope that can pull me out of rabbit holes I sometimes fall into

(I also recall that pomodoro technique is used to ≈alleviate frustration with ongoing tasks? but can't attest to it personally as of recent month; perhaps I'm working on insufficiently frustrating tasks.)

Summaries are useful

They refresh the context in mind, which, as above, is good

A good opportunity to get implicit or explicit mental rewards for Getting Things Done

it's not hard to lose track of the goal during the action, especially if there was no explicit plan, an idea for immediate action, and the domain was confusing. summary-time is perfectly suitable for doing a little meta: what are we trying to achieve again; did that thing we just did help; where should we go from here