Y26W44: pauses, pages, & play

have fun or go home

not too long ago, I added a new life rule: if it ain’t fun—and I have agency over the action and the outcome—then don’t do it.

the rule’s fresh, a hatchling, really 🐣 I’m still navigating the challenges of sticking to a new habit. my ‘grin and bear’ muscle is a champion bodybuilder after decades’ worth of reps.

this is my third week doing a weeknote. and it’s already stopped being fun. every few years, I go through a (short-lived) weeknotes phase. it never sticks, for the exact reason I’m facing now. yet somehow I always seem to forget that part until the next time, and so the cycle continues.

it’s clear that I want to, otherwise I wouldn’t have belted so many tries. but it’s time to stop the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. but how to make weeknotes fun?

it’s autopsy time 🩺

why do weeknotes?

doing a weekly write-up of my week quickly starts feeling like work. try as I might to shift the experience, it always ends up giving me time sheet vibes. due to the regularity of the schedule, I’m quick to view it as a must-do rather than a want-to. and that sure ain’t fun; nor is it helpful. my main aim in doing weeknotes is to make smooth ‘n’ easy my annual review at the end of December, because that tends to be a torturous experience. but it certainly shouldn’t mean serving myself torture mini-bites every single week, instead.

in theory, 52 weeknotes are easier to sift through than Daily Notes X 365. yet the published version is still only a selective slice-of-life. I don’t include the ins and outs of my life and its days. it doesn’t cover anything work-related. I don’t add the personal highlights—or lowlights, for that matter—because they’re, well, personal.

so it appears that what we have here is a blurring of purpose and boundaries. without a clear mandate as to what I’d like my public weeknotes to include, I’m having to mentally index every one of my 168 hours each week hoping to extract what’s relevant, and leave out the rest.

templates are friends

templates are, in so many areas of life, a godsend. when something is done repetitiously and spending any time thinking about it would be mental effort wasted—or when your brain needs structure or scaffolding—it makes all the difference.

one of the defining factors of leading an Obsidian-managed life is using templates.^{1 the Templater plugin is a blessing from the time-saving gods—no surprise that it’s been downloaded 6M times!} my daily note is a treasure trove and life would be a whole lot trickier if I had to do without it. I have a whole bunch of properties that, in various Bases, make my life make sense. I’ve sections for different parts of my day, my week, my month, my life.

what I don’t have is a weeknotes section. I have a weekly review template, sure, but it’s a catch-all for all of life and everything in it. as a result, it ain’t any easier, when I sit down to write this weekly post, to figure out what to say.

but before I make templating my next station stop, key is to figure out what it’d house. for that to happen, I need time to live into the question. and I can’t do that if, before I know it, it’s Sunday again and time for yet another weeknotes edition 🫠 to gain the necessary clarity, I first need to take a step back.

shifting to fortnightly notes

I’ll be able to evaluate the wisdom of this decision in two weeks’ time when I publish my first bi-weekly fortnightly (nah, I’m going with) biweekly. I wouldn’t be able to do this without the help of a template, because two weeks is indeed a very long time.

but it can also be very short. this was a busy week for me, flashing in and back out again before I’d had a chance to catch my breath. I’ve had a ton to catch up on across various (grossly backlogged) life categories now that I’m finally recovered from an illness that seemed to go on forever. so it was an extremely bouncing-ball week—with quite a lot of highlights. two incredibly seismic changes (one professional, one personal), both of which have been putting an incredible amount of strain on me this year, came to a (positive) head this week. I’ve barely had a chance to process any of it.

weeknotes are important because they highlight select happenings and goings-on over the course of one’s days, but they quickly start giving diminishing returns if reporting them becomes more important than the processing of what’s inside them.

publishing every two weeks feels like a sweet spot. while my immediate concern is that I’ll have too much to include, that’s where those clearly delineated template filters will come in.

all work and no play…

…doesn’t quite cut it. but I didn’t read as much as I would’ve liked, and I didn’t write much, either—though if a slew of half-written drafts with an accusatorial stare count, then sure 🤷‍♀️

these are things of great meaning-making importance, because they bring me joy, which is why I’m glad to:

• a) be using my interstitial reading tracker (which I’ve since upgraded to include weekly stats, and also monthly—October’s nine days’ worth of tracking justifies a monthly count, right? 😆) and
• b) have created a physical index card system to make publication a more tactile experience (yes, this is another post on the rapidly growing publishing backlog list 🙈)

making my online house a home

what joys I lost during this week’s Great Big Literacy Death, I made up for in the coding arena. programming, I’m convinced, is another word for therapy (especially for an insomniac, though I’d prefer if it were a tranquiliser 😂). when in doubt, HTML—or, as I’m increasingly learning to do, JavaScript—it out.

• added a slash of slashes page 🙃
• dressed my site in a Halloween costume 👻
• made the 512KB Club 🤏🥳
• joined the IndieWeb Webring 🕸️💍
• audited where I’m at on the IndieWeb principles, an annual practice I’m instigating (2019 me, we’re so not in Kansas anymore, baby!)

working on my RSS feed has been all over the place. I’m subscribed to myself so I can spot issues, and boy, do I! makes me grateful it’s new, so there’s not many subscribers to suffer through my experiments 😅 as with my site’s UI/UX, there’s nothing like having something be live to give you that lived-in look ‘n’ feel. had I known this, I’d have gone ahead with launching the site redesign in real time many, many moons ago rather than wait for it to be “perfect”^{2 spoiler alert: turns out there’s no such thing? I mean, the world and everything in it did keep telling me that, but obviously it was hard to believe such blasphemy} first.

writing month

thanks to Naty, I joined writingmonth.org where, for the next 44 days (30 of which are part of November’s challenge), I’ll be doing a daily writing slash art challenge that follows an anything-goes interpretation of the hero’s journey.