-
I do love a meadow!
-
My revised workday productivity tools
About 18 months ago, I posted about my use of FocusTxt and the process behind it. As I finish my current role, I thought it would be useful to revisit this. That way, when my next role starts, I have a reminder of what works for me.
I have continued using my combination of FocustTxt and the Notes app to plan my workday. In the past six or so months, I’ve also added an additional step. At the end of every week, I’ve been feeding my weekly notes into a Gemini chat to help me identify patterns and make sure things don’t get missed.
Over the past couple of months, while working my notice, I’ve been building a “Jane’s day” page on the company Confluence account. It gives an overview of what my job entails as part of my handover documentation.
This past week, after doing my normal end-of-week check-in with my Gemini “Chief of Staff,” I fed the content of my Confluence page into the chat and asked it to spot any gaps or inaccuracies. By looking at my weekly notes, it helped me see that I’d missed an entire section from the handover documentation, surfacing elements of background knowledge I take for granted.
It could find these gaps because I don’t just use FocusTxt as a simple checklist. I annotate items with notes as the task unfolds. This might mean adding a (B) to the front of a task to show it is blocked, along with a note about why and what unblocks it. Or it might be notes about a task that is bouncing between me and development, including what defects I’ve raised in the process. What I’ve learned is that there is a lot of useful context hidden away in those daily notes, and Gemini is great at digging it out.
When I asked Gemini to review my process, it came up with one addition that I’m going to try out in my final week: using Obsidian, or another markdown editor, to keep my notes instead of the Notes app. Not only can I use a Daily Note template, but I can also just drag the files straight into the Gemini chat rather than having to copy and paste them.
-
Beach bingo
I’m a member of Surfers against Sewage. I’m not a surfer, but I am definitely against sewage being in the wrong place. And that wrong place could easily be somewhere that my dog walks through, or me for that matter.
In this season’s Pipeline journal, there’s an article called “A beachcomber’s guide to plastic pollution” which lists all the different types of plastics you can expect to find. It covers everything from packaging and fishing gear to sewage-related pollution.
I read the list and then saw that at the end they’d included a bingo card.
I both like and loathe this at the same time. It’s a great illustration, but of a really bad issue.
The article also says: > Turn your next beach walk into a mini-investigation. Every item is a clue, and every clue helps us hold polluters to account. If you’re taking part in Beach Bingo this season, we’d love you to go one step further by joining our campaign: #ReturnToOffender “See it. Snap it. Share it”.
View older posts or subscribe via RSS