Published on 08 January 2015
“Practice makes the master.” - Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
Skills are hard work. They take a lot of effort, and they take a lot of time. If you really want to be good at something, you have to do it every day - otherwise, your skills begin to rust.
I’ve tried a lot of task management systems. None of them were very good at repeated tasks - probably because no one wants to feel like Sisyphus every day, seeing tasks they just accomplished the night before in their to do list. I don’t like feeling like Sisyphus, either, but there are tasks I do want to do daily. I’ve found the way to stress less about them is to take them outside of my to do list, and to have them in a list of their own, somewhere that reminds me what I need to do.
The best place for me is my window: I sit daily and look outside at Protrero Hill, and writing on the window makes sense. So, I got a glass pen and wrote the four things I try to do every day on it:
The issue is that I don’t always sit at my window. But I am always on my laptop. So, I decided to use an old friend of mine, GeekTool, to put the four items on my desktop. I made a node module that prints out whatever I haven’t done today into the terminal, and I mirror that on the desktop.
In the process of building this small thing, I learned a lot. For instance, how to use the bin field in npm’s package.json file. Having an executable module without having to make an alias is amazing (You may recall I used aliases when I made journall. I also learned about levelup, which is great - this was the first time I actually used a proper database for some small project, and I like it much more than my old .csv file methods.
I also got it working with Alfred, which I’ve used 33,000 times in the past 18 months (I highly suggest it). I made a workflow that allows me to send arguments to my node module directly from Alfred, which took a lot more tinkering than I thought, mostly because Alfred doesn’t offer node as an option and I had to jerry rig bash to make it work.
Here’s the bash file I’m using:
#!/bin/bash
task="{query}"
if [[ $task ]]
then
/usr/local/bin/node /usr/local/lib/node_modules/practice/bin/index.js $task
else
/usr/local/bin/node /usr/local/lib/node_modules/practice/bin/index.js
fi
So far, the whole set up is working pretty well. I like having a clean desktop, so I work hard each day to do my four things, and then my desktop is clean again.
And the best part is I am getting better at journaling, coding, meditating, and exercising. Here’s to the New Year, eh?
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