Morning Me

As part of this whole process I’m going through of finally nailing myself down into good work habits and maximum productivity, I’m facing the not-entirely-pleasant reality that writing social media updates about what I’ve got going on is a fairly important part of my thinking process; it’s where I work out ideas and often will find flaws and gaps in my own thinking or planning as I’m writing.

Obviously there are two flaws involved there: the first is that it doesn’t have to be done on social media and the second is that it’s content and ought to be treated that way. Ergo, more blog posts like this one and I hope you dig it. I’ll probably end up playing with some kind of official cute daily title thing or whatever (I did, see below), but taking this time to focus on exactly what my goals are for the day and how I intend to achieve them is important to making each day I have left as productive – on my own terms and for my own purposes – as they can possibly be. That’ll be the last meta comment on that whole thing, at least for now, let’s commence with the thoughts that actually prompted this like 90 minutes ago and then yeah.

So I have this tool called “ProjeQtOr” running on a subdomain now, and it seems to be just what I needed (an earlier promising candidate turned out to be a false start). Good, solid project management, works great for a one-person show but still easily scalable and scopable to include stuff like some CRM and collaboration on projects. I’ve got it running on a subdomain right now (https://projects.johnhenry.us – you can go peek if you want but all you’ll see is a login screen).

I still need to spend some time learning the reporting tools to get everything I want out of it, including opening it up for public view as a supporter perk and using it to help generate work reports for inclusion in the Saturday Substack, which is where this whole side-track with the project/task management stuff started (again – I’ve taken many runs at this, but I’m finally in an environment where I have a hope of making it stick). Once I do that I’ll figure out a way to make it visible to users with access and tell them how to access it.

From my POV it’s a necessary sanity tool to keep everything I’m doing in order and stop forgetting and leaving off on things – there are probably three dozen unfinished articles on my blog! – but also the public-facing functionality that I may be able to put to use is significant and constitutes a legitimate value add for folks who are supporting my work to be able to see more closely what exactly they’re supporting and how it’s getting done.

Other than that…let’s see, I’ve got this blog post, the piece about the national debt, continuing to learn and develop with this new tool while simultaneously using it for its intended purpose which is to help me keep track of what I’m doing, when, and for how long. I did force myself to take a few hours off last night and got some new Fallout 4 screenshots…I think I’ve talked enough for here and now. I really appreciate everyone’s patience during this exciting and energetic period of major growth and development on my end; I’m doing my best to stay visible so you know I’m working and not just off screwing around somewhere.

(NTS: Maybe get into a habit of a “morning me” blog post and then something else that’s a sort of “morning news review” where folks can just get a peek at what I’ve been seeing in the news and what I think of it, small-dose stuff some of which will likely end up developing into more substantial content in time…and oh hey, half an hour later I’ve created a new project node with two levels, a new project for a new newsletter titled “morning me” that I’ll do kinda daily, and turned this into the first issue…but I have other work to do and I’ve already got a couple of hours in this plus a couple more undocumented fiddling with infrastructure and yeah. I’ll go more into what I’m thinking for this in the next edition, for now I gotta run, see you soon!)