Today's post will be kind of scattered; there's a few ideas I want to discuss.
Productivity Strategy: Circuits
In a previous blog post I briefly discussed how iterating through different "stations" (e.g. doing a workout routine with various machines, doing a fixed number of reps on each machine) could be a good strategy to keep a workout going, allowing parts of your body to rest while maintaining momentum/intensity.
This week I've been working on developing this idea further by bringing this into the abstracted/software/computaitonal world as well. One could cycle through different projects; working on one until you hit some road block, making some notes about how you think you should pick stuff up next time you start, and then moving on to the next thing. This way you keep multiple projects going (and hence get stuff done) and also do not get too held up on the frustrations of any one product.
Philosophy not in the "philosophy" genre
You may have heard stuff about how the ancient greeks/chinese/etc. studied "philosophy" was different from the rather obscure field it is today. What we now classify as "ancient philosophy" can be a combination of practical how-to's, religious revalations, texts on governing, etc.
Here I think it is important to consider how today's genres are very specific things; perhaps if were to take today's collections of text, we might call things like
- self-help books
- pop psychology, pop science
- marketing, communications, business writing
- assorted blogs on the internet
...philosophy?!
Going further back in time, we have less and less knowledge about what was written vs what survived; the ability to use writing and make documents that lasted was far less widespread too.
Programing Language Study: Ruby
I worked through the Ruby Koans.
Lots of ideas that are common among Nodejs programers may have come from Ruby; for example the "Agile" movement, Test Driven Development (TDD), and other ways of organizing programer laber...
Approaching Ruby, I'm trying to make extensive use of both the
interactive interpreter (irb) and offline documentation (ri). The
idea here is that being able to quickly discover new things about a
language as you work in it is a good strategy to be able to continue
moving and learning in a language and not to get hung/up stuck due to
lack of momentum.
Juggling
This week, I started to do some more juggling. I first learned how to do this during my elementary school years (long ago). Why would I move away from it and then come back later?
In summary, I stopped doing juggling and started doing other things because there were things that were more interesting to me.
However, now juggling is once again interesting to me to practice because
- I want some physical activity that is relatively quiet, can be done in small space,
- Is not so physically exhausting that it can be done for long periods of time without respite
- Is analog (lol, as in... not digital, doesn't need the Internet)
So basically I can do some casual juggling practice as recreation/sport while listening to music, watching videos, hanging out with others, etc. Not bad!