As has become a tradition, I am reproducing a social media thread I posted that I think is worthy of preserving, as a lightly edited blog post. This post has a somewhat authoritative tone, which is self-evident on social media but perhaps not in a blog post, so I want to explicitly say that this is a satirical and humorous post, and not a serious suggestion and/or the product of any philosophical or empirical process. That's not to say it's just a joke and/or invalid, but simply, the points made are my personal observations from following and studying metascientific issues.

Introducing: the Wakefield test.

It's simple. When you see a new research publication, evaluation, or accountability buzzword, you stop to think, would this have prevented the infamous, deadly, and shameful work of Wakefield being published on the Lancet. Prevent is the operative word, cos we've seen how futile the attempts to put the genie back in the bottle is, once bollocks as Wakefield's is given any modicum of scientific endorsement.

The main conclusion of the applications of Wakefield test I "did" so far is very clear:

Any proposed measure is nil unless it deals with social problems of academia in a concrete manner. Most bad research is caused by endemic malincentives and malignant power structures of academia. Publish or perish, white supremacy, extractive labour practices, economical disparities, publishing companies who are some of the closest institutions we have in real life to cartoon villain organisations.

But there's another key observation, that interacts with the above:

Any proposed measure that has no effect in the above finding is bound to repeat the said problems of academic research, while also failing to improve any matters and most importantly, offloading even more of the burden of academic bullshit onto disenfranchised members of the institution, including the research subjects, and the public itself.

So, stuff that fails the Wakefield test have a very concrete cost.

Now you might criticise me for saying stuff off the top of my head with an academic language, pretending its some sort of truth, but I must disagree. See, even tho I've just thought these things up right now, they are no less well-studied than all the wank quantitative supremacists and lovers of academic status quo spout like as if it was a cinnamon gobbling challenge and create policy on the basis of.

And jokes aside, anybody who follows any metascience knows they're true...

Edit: Sadly, the solution described here worked for me for ten days, but then stopped working, and I got leaks again.

I have a green Pilot Metropolitan Retro Pop which is a beautiful beautiful fountain pen (which I have fitted with an extra fine nib yoinked from a Pilot Kakuno, which if you like you a good EF nib, a worthwhile hack in my opinion). It is beautiful enough that for the longest time I tolerated it's one annoying issue: an inky grip.

Yesterday I found a fix. So first, the fix, and then the reason I think it leaks and the solution works.

If your grip gets ink drops near where the nib is and there are no cracks, look at the grip closely. At two sides of it, you will notice lines which you can also feel with touch: they are probably an artefact of the manufacturing process, the seams of the two halves of the grip. Check if they coincide with any part of the nib and feed assembly that gets inky, for example the right and left edges of the nib's root. If yes, gently but firmly rotate the nib and feed assembly so that those seams no longer coincide with any part of the nib and feed assembly that gets inky in normal operation. With my pen, I've rotated it such that, one of the seams rest at something like 20 degrees of angle relative to the nib's surface. In that configuration, the other seam coincides with the opposite back side of the feed in a similar angle, which part of the feed does not get inky.

Now, rub the grip, and the exposed part of the feed and nib with a paper towel, thoroughly to make sure no part of the grip in particular has any ink. Use Q-tips then to thoroly dry the inside of the cap, which likely has accrued some ink from the leakiness. Then cap and uncap the pen a few times, and each time check for ink sizzling out on to the grip like before. If with luck, I explained the fix well and you repeated it accurately, and if there was no other problem causing a leak, like a crack, the issue must be fixed, the grip should cease getting inky.

So, why does this work, what does it fix? Well, I have no definitive answer, but what I imagine is this: the seams, which are each tiny straight bumps, provide a structure which provokes a weak instance of capillary action—the same process by means of which the fountain pen itself works, tangentially—by means of which a tiny amount of ink travels along the seams, after finding them at the point they (almost?) contact the exposed sides of the feed. Capillary action does not really need an external force to provoke it; it depends surface tension and adhesive forces, as the Wikipedia article says, but I imagine the capping/uncapping action may be contributing to the movement of the ink as well. By rotating the nib and feed assembly, we break the contact of the ink with the seams, so the capillary action cannot start, even assuming the (un)capping catalyse it.

For a while I had wanted to write about my bullet journaling as a grad student but never really bothered because what I did was not really all that interesting. Mostly just vanilla bullet journaling with a few little modifications and novelties, like a failed attempt at using a Gantt chart to organise long stretches of thesis work.

But during the last fall, more like since june, I have been developing a way to organise stuff that actually stuck and is still enjoyable to use for me. Simple yet sufficient, so doesn’t get in my way, and doesn’t require nor encourage too much meticulous micro-planning.

It is nothing too interesting regardless, and it boils down to two notebooks and two referencing schemes. In this blog post I want to record this method in order to share it and as a reference for its reuse in my future projects.

So, one of the notebooks is my bullet journal, and the other is what I refer to as the Thesis book or Project book, TB for short. For both notebooks I use Rhodia A5 dotpads with 48 sheets, so 96 pages. Project book is the more generic name I plan to use for future iterations of this style of notebook, with Thesis book being the specific name for the project book I use to help with my thesis.

First, why use pen and paper for this? Well, there’s no reason to, other than if it works for you. Bullet journalling works for me, because I tend to overcomplicate planning with computers, and I don’t want to depend on the computer for planning because that has proved to encourage procrastination on the web or fiddling with the puter. The thesis notebook is simply an extension of this, I want to be able to work on my thesis task list without having to open the computer, even if most tasks involve the computer. I want to open the computer with an intent. Doesn’t work every time, nothing is a silver bullet, but it is better than the alternative for me, and a pleasant part of my daily life.

So let’s start with the bullet journal itself. My bullet journals are fairly vanilla with a few interesting novelties. I use one 96 page dotpad of A5 size per quarter, i.e. per three months. One notebook from january to march, another from april to june, another from july to september, and another from october up to december. This is an optimal way to do it for me because the smaller notebooks are easier to carry, I can fit two notebooks this way into my notebook sleeve I like, and more importantly, starting a new notebook every three months specifically has two main advantages: firstly, I can review my plans more often, given the requirement to move and evaluate them all four times a year; and secondly, I like to scan my notebooks to store them digitally and have them easily accessible in case I need to reference them, on my laptop. Scanning 60-80 pages (which is usually what I use up) is tedious, but much less so compared to scanning double that or more for an entire semester, which is what I used to do for a few years, up until the last quarter of 2021.

I number my bullet journal pages using small roman numerals for the front matter, that is from the front page where I put contact information up to the first month spread, and the rest of the pages are numbered with arabic numerals. It’s mostly an aesthetic choice but has a wee little effect on the referencing scheme.

Let’s talk about the bullet journal referencing scheme. First, a recap: I have four journals per year, one per quarter, I use lowercase roman numerals and arabic numerals for page numbers. I developed this scheme a long time before I even had the idea of a thesis book, simply to be able to refer to pages in past bullet journals from my current one in a consistent manner.

My reference scheme is as follows: YYYYQXX:pp, that is, the four digit year, the capital letter ‘Q’ standing for quarter, the quarter number in uppercase roman numerals, a colon, and a page number, lowercase if it’s a roman numeral. Let’s explain what this means based on two examples: (1) 2022QI:8 and (2) 2022QIV:vi.

Example (1) refers to the first journal of the year 2022, because QI is «quarter I». After the colon there’s the number 8, and that indexes a page number. With the way I number my pages and set up my spreads, it should probably coincide with a spread the middle of january 2022.

Example (2) refers to the last (i.e. fourth) journal of 2022, because QIV is «quarter IV», fourth quarter. The number after the colon is vi, i.e. 6, so the sixth page of the front matter, probably the page right before the first month’s monthly spread for that quarter.

Having smaller, quarterly journals means that this referencing scheme comes in handy pretty often, and I can use it almost whenever because the scans of the older journals are on my laptop’s hard drive. They take up about 20 megabytes in 150 DPI, so not much to worry about.

Another relevant part of the bullet journal is my week spreads. I divide the spread into a 2x4 grid, with days of the week assigned to each left to right. But I reserve the bottom left square for a section titled Current week. The current week box usually looks like a to-do list for the current week, but it functions more like the theme of the week: I never require myself to complete everything there in a given week, nor are the list items in there are simple to-do items to be added to days’ boxes later. Usually it is something more general like PhD shopping to remind me to do some work about my search for PhD opportunities. Seeing this I may add some more specific task for a day, like read this vacancy in UiO or figure out requirements at YTÜ. Where this becomes relevant is, this section is where I add a similar, general reference to the thesis notebook, the details of which we will talk about later.

Here is a representation of what my weekly spreads look like:

I have a very similar spread right in between the weekly agendas and the month planner: the Weekly routine. I had used various designs for this, as the older blog post linked above can attest to, but I have come to prefer repeating the weekly agenda layout with little modifications. This spread is for distributing routine tasks and interests across the week. Interests is the key word because not everything is a to-do item here, and they are not meant to represent a perfect blue print for the week. Instead, it’s a suggestion as to what a healthy week could look like. Below is an example. Notice the lack of day numbers, and how the area/box for Current week has become the space for a decorative title for the spread:

Notice how instead of any particular, explicit task relating to the thesis, the list item merely reads thesis. This is indeed how it is in my book: it simply suggests that a given day is a day where I expect to work on my thesis. In order to know what to do, I need to refer to the Thesis book, which we will now talk about. But also notice simpler items in these lists like laundry or update computers, these do indeed become simple to-do items in the weekly agendas. I do not force myself tho. They are merely reminders, suggestions. Because every week is ultimately unique, one can’t go about it like a theoretical robot in a vacuum, repeating oneself, having no ups and downs. So I try to never set myself up to fail, to keep morale and affection for whatever I’m doing up.

Now ’bout the Thesis book! The Thesis book is again a Rhodia notebook, A5 sized, 48 sheets and thus 96 pages, a dotpad. I don’t think a dotpad is necessary, but I like dotpads and I had a spare, so I just went with that. The added benefit is, I have a fancy leather notebook sleeve I use to keep my bullet journal and my regular pens and triangular ruler together, and I can fit both the bullet journal and the thesis book into that sleeve. (Side note but one can’t overestimate how useful a sturdy, safe notebook sleeve is. So if you work with notebooks and would rather not they die at the first accident, do acquire or make a good notebook sleeve, if you can.)

Unlike my bullet journal, which is inspired obviously by the original Bullet Journalling Method, my thesis book is more influenced by a lesser known DIY planner thing, Strikethru. The basic principle of Strikethru is that, you have a page dedicated to live tasks, i.e. stuff that you want to get down now, and you have other lists or pages with diagrams or prose planning future stuff, and you have the past stuff to refer to. It gets more complicated, but that portion is what I have roughly based my Thesis book on.

The thesis book is simple: first, there’s a cover page with contact details, in case it’s lost and then found by a benevolent person who would wish to return it, hopefully. Then, there is an Index page, that is pretty similar to a bullet journal index page, or any other simple table of contents: a flat list of what’s where.

After that, there is the first to-do list page. The title of a to-do list page is the date that to-do list was created. My most recent to-do list was created on 23rd of November, 2022, so that is the title.

From the first to-do list page on, pages are numbered with arabic numerals, and before that they are numbered with lowercase roman numerals, just like with the bullet journal.

The to-do list page is an outline of active tasks that summarise what I am trying to do right now, at the current phase of the project. They are not minutiae or implementation details, and not everything is necessarily a task. Some are notes and ideas jotted down in a few words.

It is meant to be a single page long and brief and abstract.

When most of the items in a to-do list page get checked out, I start a new one on the first available empty page, migrate incomplete tasks if I am still interested in them, and add new stuff as necessary.

Now some extra information about my workflow that will help clarify examples, but you don’t really need to remember after reading. Detailed notes are on the computer, in an outline that divides up the whole project into Phases. So far I have completed phases titled preparation, bureaucracy, and readings, and I am currently at the analysis phase where I collect data and do my analyses. Subsequent phases are writing, defence, conferment, publications based on thesis. The structure of each of these documents is unique, but roughly, it is a mix of notes, tasks, ideas, questions, and so on that I can refer to. Thus, I create my to-do lists for the Thesis book by consulting the notes for the current phase, and essentially summarising it in an outline that resembles a to-do list.

For the current phase of analysis, based on my methodology and theory, I have decided to apply my analytical device in a repeated manner, such that each application revises and enhances the previous, and applies the improved methodology to new data. I call each repetition a round, and I am now at the first such round. This isn’t really grounded in any theory (pun intended!), it simply felt like a nice way to represent how my methodology, genre analysis, is usually applied: early pilot applications that generate an analytical method that’s then more widely applied in a repeated fashion until some metric represents a good enough final analysis (usually inter-rater agreement: one or more other researcher(s) analysing the same text coming up with a similar enough structure). The relevant part is, because of this structure, for the analysis phase, my active to-do list page represents the active round (round 1) of the active phase (analysis). Here is what it looks like:

23 november 2022

a) review page 4--8

b) analysis: round 1
   i)   collect data ✓
   ii)  visit locations
   iii) finalise theory
   iv)  pilot analyses

c) notes from meeting with advisor
   i)   revise bureaucratic documents
   ii)  revise research questions
   iii) use this particular theoretical construct
   iv)  a task I gave up on ❌

d) learn about the software I will use ✓

e) after round 1: ...

(Page number: 11)

Let’s observe this some before we move on to how this is referred to from the bullet journal. It is first and foremost an outline made up of two levels. For the toplevel I use lowercase letters of the latin alphabet, a--b. For the second level, I use lowercase roman numerals. And each page is numbered, with this page being the 11th page of the Thesis book.

With these facts, how is the Thesis book referenced? As visible, in the thesis book itself, I simply use the bare page numbers. I do not expect this to be a problem because I do not expect to use more than one notebook for the project. This notebook is an helper for the bullet journal, and while in between to-do lists I have some pages dedicated to random notes, most of the notetaking happens on the computer. This is a planner.

So, the reference looks like: TBppaxx. That is, TB which stands for Thesis book, page number represented by pp (and it is always arabic numerals because the front matter of this book has nothing interesting), a which represents the letter of alphabet that indexes the toplevel of the outline, and the roman numeral that indexes the second level of the hierarchy, xx. It is important to note that this is based on the peculiar structure of the current phase: at the reading phase, I merely had a flat to-do list, with no hierarchy, so I used arabic numerals for those lists. I also allow myself to refer to any level of this hierarchy, so a reference can be made merely to the page, or to a toplevel item, or to a sub-item.

A couple examples then: (1) TB11, (2) TB11a, (3) TB11biv, (4) TB2:3.

Example (1) is the simplest useful reference: it refers to the page 11 of the Thesis book.

Example (2) refers to the toplevel list item a in the to-do list found on the 11th page of the Thesis book.

Example (3) refers to the second level list item iv found under the toplevel item b on the page 11 of our notebook.

Example (4), finally, is a referencing style I used during the reading phase. Notice the colon character that separates the page number (2) from the index of the referenced list item (3).

How are these references used in the bullet journal then? Well, there is no real limitation, but the pattern that’s been useful for me is as follows: I will refer to the active to-do list’s page from the Current week box of weekly spreads, indicating that that todo list represents the current state and short-term plan of the work. Every day, when making that day’s agenda, if that day is one of the days which my Weekly routine suggests I do thesis work on, I will add current tasks from the active to-do list in the Thesis book using references. Usually I simply refer to an earlier thesis work day to determine which tasks are current: if a task was recently scheduled, and not striked out on the Thesis book to indicate it is done, it means it’s current. So it’s a candidate for the current day I am making the agenda for. It is of course also a matter of thinking what I want to get done that day, reasoning about what can be get done, and I determine tasks to work on for the day.

If I did any work on a task in a given day, I mark it as done in the Bullet journal. That merely indicates that some work was done. Whether a task itself is completed or not is indicated by whether or not it’s striked out in the Thesis book: I strike out completed tasks, add a checkmark near them if I did do them, or a cross mark if I decided to not do them or failed them. At times also I take small notes near these tasks in the Thesis book using a differently coloured, finer-tipped pen; these are comments on the task and often relate to why they failed or how to modify them when I move them to or repeat them in the next to-do list.

As a result of this, a week spread in the bullet journal may end up looking like this:

Notice how the Current week area merely refers to the page 11 in the Thesis book, and how the plan for monday has detailed references as to what tasks to work on that day, and even a little comment on in what manner to complete that task near one of them.

This is basically how it all works. It is complicated to explain because it requires some context to show how everything works, but the principle is simple: A bullet journal, and a project book with to-do lists that can be indexed into using a system that is simple enough that it isn’t a hassle to use. And I think the most important part is how most of these supposed to-do lists aren’t made up of references to particular small tasks but are instead representations of a plan, or a routine, or a state/portion of the whole project. It provides me with a flexibility without which I get overwhelmed, and fail to be fruitive.

Ultimately this is what works for me, what I developed to help me. It may or may not work for you. So this is more of a record for myself and a suggestion for the reader, rather than a getting things done tutorial. That is the nice thing here, it can be your personal thing that is specialised to work for you. It can inform your fully digital task management setup, or an example for your fully pen and paper workflow, and anything in between. I hope it helps the reader in that, inspirational way.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Productivity is a concept that is inherently tied to a capitalistic understanding of self and of labour. And yet it has also filled a conceptual space that is pretty relevant for a lot of people, me included. But, as ever, for me at least this is in conflict with a desire to reject the imposed capitalistic conception, perception and existence as self-realisation.

Whatever «productivity» is in my life, it is not about goals set for me by higher ups, it is not about the judgements of people, it's not about whether there is some concrete result of effort spent that is valuable in a market. It is about fulfilment, it is about living a joyful life—as a radical act, in the face of imposed turmoil and unhappiness—, and it is about an existential sense of engagement with the world.

So I just came up with an idea to materialise this disregard, to follow this desire to visibly dissociate from a social construct that is infested by such destructive things as wage labour, gig work, hustle culture, self-help, and all the other ways we are made to ostensibly-willingly spend our (free) time¹ along with labour hours for the benefit of the surplus-parasites, all the while trying to protect and appropriate the positive aspects of «productivity» as a current cultural phenomenon.

From now on, I will try to use the concept of «fruitivity» instead of «productivity». This is not just a pure word swap. Because, of course, when I used the word productivity, I did so to refer to my conception of it. As with all words and every person uttering them. The reason then to coin this word (and a set of accompanying words which I'll expose soon) is to detach a non/anti-capitalistic, personal conception of productivity from the semantic baggage of capitalistic productivity. I want to have words to talk about what I have so far referred to using productivity, or its sibling terms.

Fruitivity thus is an existential/epicurean conception that refers to the kinetic pleasure gained from spending a satisfactory amount of voluntary effort on self-determined personal goals or momentary, fleeting interests. Its goal is to maintain a state of aponia and ataraxia that stems from self-realisation. But it does not concern the false dichotomy of individualism and collectivism either. Neither a moment of fruition nor the conception of self-realisation it relates to needs necessarily to concern the individual only. One can make their communities, their collaboration with others, a major, or even a central part of their self-realisation.

I explicitly do not wish to bring any etymology into this write-up. For me, it is not the etymology of productivity that is the problem, but the set of connotations associated with that name-concept. The main reason for using a word like fruitivity here is, (i) it is different from productivity and does not share in common parlance the capitalistic connotations of the latter, and (ii) I like the word.

A (potentially) completed episode of fruitivity can be referred to as fruition. When I check off a to-do list item, it is a moment of fruition. The effort, or the kind of effort, that lead to such an outcome might be described as fruitive, just like a time-period or space that is associated with fruitivity. Library is a fruitive space for me, I can engage fruitively with self-realising effort in the realm of academic/intellectual pursuit there.

From this seed vocabulary, one can replace an entire realm of capitalistic/ablist jargon that infests our lives and dirties our discourses when attempting to talk about how we attach meaning to our lives. Occasio praeceps, vita brevis, we have no time to share with the capitalists. And yet they demand, and they enforce. In the face of that, the words, concepts, ideas we use are a frontier. We must push back. This is one of my attempts.

¹ «free time», of course, itself is a capitalistic concept as it necessitates the existence of time dedicated to labouring for the extractor classes.

You may have encountered me endorsing the "Philosophize This!" podcast before, saying something along the lines of "it's a very white podcast but a good intro to the canon of philosophy as it would be taught in universities, thus useful to go thru".

I retract that endorsement because for the second time I notice the host talking about a philosopher who has deeply fascist and Nazi roots, without mentioning these facts. First it was Heidegger, who he talked about in multiple episodes and only ever mentioned the Naziness in the end. Recently I noticed the same repeated with the episodes on Emil Cioran, whose interactions with fascists and Nazis was never mentioned. I only learned about it when I decided to read the wiki page on the guy.

The most important fact about a nazi-fascist philospher is that he's a nazi-fascist philosopher. No amount of contributions to anything neutralises, overshadows, or excuses that. I thus can't recommend a podcast which is aimed at people who don't know much about these people's lives, especially lesser known ones like Cioran, talking about them without mentioning their ties to these "movements".

If you know about 20th century European history, you probably can tell from the ideas and historical clues that, oh, this guy probably was a Nazi, but that relies on the listener looking for it (and I've been looking for it since the Heidegger episode), and is knowledgeable enough, as the host doesn't mention when these philosophers were born, which years they were active in, or when they died.

I don't know if the host has sympathies or if he has bought into some very nonsensical and harmful interpretation of separating the art from the artist, so to speak, but honestly I don't really care, it's irresponsible either way to not mention this.

Introduction

A lot of "my email setup" posts start with telling how the author deals with thousands or millions of messages with probably tens or hundreds of interactions each day.

This blog post instead is about how I deal with a humane level of email messaging, with a local-first approach, using a smallish variety of software, which you can just set up and forget about.

Let me start with a list of software, then go on with describe the setup.

• GNU Emacs
• Rmail
• msmtp and mpop
• procmail
• mairix
• pass(1)
• gnupg
• Python 3
• K-9 Mail app for Android

Of this list, the following can easily be factored out if you want: Python 3, mairix, pass, procmail, gnupg, and K-9 Mail. Furthermore, it should actually be possible to replicate this whole setup with only ever using GNU Emacs and Rmail (which comes with Emacs itself), if your system has movemail handy, or if your Emacs includes it (which was common up until recently, but is a workflow deprecated by Emacs developers). Then, you might ask, why do you bother? The answer is simple: if I use external programs to fetch and send mail, then I can use multiple email clients with the same setup. E.g., I sometimes use the mutt email client with this setup with no modifications or fragile repetitions. I'll in fact talk a bit about how you can use mutt and another tool to just totally factor Emacs out of this setup while retaining a similar workflow.

With that unrefined intro done, let's get to talking about what, why and how. ( Read more... )