{"id":14425,"date":"2024-09-17T16:52:15","date_gmt":"2024-09-17T16:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14425"},"modified":"2025-03-08T16:26:46","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T16:26:46","slug":"consolidation-meta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/09\/17\/consolidation-meta\/","title":{"rendered":"consolidation meta"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(written in substack) I can\u2019t help myself, I love to go meta. Earlier this evening, my wife took my son out for a walk, giving me about an hour of time to focus fully on going through my drafts. I \u2018composted\u2019 almost 20 of them, either publishing them to my \/archives\/ blog or tacking them on to existing posts somewhere. I felt a huge sense of relief at having fewer drafts \u2018onsite\u2019. I feel like I can breathe better, not having all of that clutter in my \u2018workspace\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, the next task I have ahead of myself is to read the remaining drafts, side by side, and get a sense of the bigger picture of what they\u2019re all about. I\u2019ve reduced over 50 drafts down to 17. What would be really thrilling to me, as an intellectual challenge, is if I could condense all of them into a single post somehow. Incidentally one of them is temporarily-titled \u201ca time for consolidation?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That 2024may30 post goes\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1, I tweet\/write a lot, which is great but also I am tired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. tiredness is often emotional knottedness, and I that\u2019s correct in this case<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. its tempting to hope to slice open the knot, but it\u2019s likelier that the knot is actually a stallion frightened of its shadow, that needs taming, ie,

4. I\u2019m probably misdiagnosing the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5a. I then try describing the problem\u2013 just describe stuff bro\u2013 too many notes, many feel dated, don\u2019t feel comfortable deleting because of past grief at over-deleting\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5b. deeper problem is that the notes aren\u2019t as good as I want them to be. <\/em>I want to be shipping often, but I struggle to meet my still-not-well-articulated criteria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5c. I get overwhelmed at the prospect of cleanup\u2026 have to approach that \u2018one surface\/area at a time\u201d\u2026 also express frustration with the reality that people are fickle\/shallow\/overwhelmed and rely on silly proofs<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6.couple of important questions here, in 5b a question of how do notes get better? and how to articulate the criteria? 2 emotions at once?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

alright, that\u2019s one down. a big part of the problem is \u201cpast grief at overdeleting\u201d\u2013 which I have another post about, so let\u2019s dive into that one<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. ppl know me as a kind of mad archivist with sprawling threads of remembrance. part of me wants to say \u201ci\u2019m an author! a professional! the mess is justified! it wouldn\u2019t seem so messy if I had an office!\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. these threads are written with grief at the loss of old blogposts, notes, drafts, etc. lost my early-teens blog when dx died. my 90wks notebook in the saf. and my own blog deletion that i handled poorly. i wrote a lot of details about this but i\u2019m not sure i care to share them with my substack readers. all you really need to know is that i was truly devastated by a series of losses, and was very determined to not lose more.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. i\u2019ve almost definitely overcorrected. i\u2019ve become a bit of a hoarder. a fairly high-functioning hoarder, but i think the truth is that i know i can function even better if i got to the heart of all of this. while writing this i also experienced some gratitude. when you zoom out and see the full picture it\u2019s like, oh, okay. some of my best work has been a grief response. that\u2019s kind of beautiful.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. it\u2019s interesting that i felt compelled to talk about mysteries here, and perception. i think it began with the picture of ruins, the ellen ullman quote about how we build computer systems over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    there\u2019s another post that\u2019s sort of a meandering stream of consciousness. quotes dickens\u2019 long voyage, about being guilty\u2026 does my guilt even help? no! reminded of fasting and hunger. some signals are just\u2026 unhelpful patterns. then i reported cleaning my desk \u201cnah there\u2019s too much\u2026 how about if we do a bit for fun \u2192 mostly-clean desk within minutes and substantially more peace of mind\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    now there\u2019s a couple of posts about notes, sorting notes. lets call them notes1 and notes2. in notes1 there\u2019s a footnote that\u2019s basically about the grief thing. and saying \u201ci need to learn to delete things\u201d. deleting that footnote now, lol. not flippantly; but with the knowledge that it\u2019s represented elsewhere. i\u2019ve combined them and posted them to my archives to reference later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    alright, i\u2019m calling it a night for tonight\u2019s work session. today has been one of the most productive days in months, maybe all year. i\u2019ve composted a lot of stuff. my archives have gotten a little more swollen while my workspace has gotten less cluttered, and i took some time to reacquaint myself with what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    (written in substack) I can\u2019t help myself, I love to go meta. Earlier this evening, my wife took my son out for a walk, giving me about an hour of time to focus fully on going through my drafts. I \u2018composted\u2019 almost 20 of them, either publishing them to my… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[612],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3KF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14426,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14425\/revisions\/14426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}