Surprised nobody has mentioned the PARA method. After years of ad-hoc organizing setups I started using it for both home and work (separately).
Best thing is it’s simple and gets out of the way, so I focus on what I’m trying to do and not on the metawork of maintaining some complex hierarchy. I looked at more complicated schemes like Johnny Decimal and they were not for me.
I organize my filesystem, notes app, and todo app in the same way. It works really well for me and has stopped the nagging desire to periodically optimize the system. It just gets out of the way so I can focus more.
I’m actually pretty neutral on Tiago Forte overall, not a big fan for various reasons. But his PARA system has been super useful for me. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
Excellent to be concerned about heavy metal exposure. Cacao typically contains lead and cadmium; the reference dose (usually defined as: The amount of a chemical a person, including sensitive groups, can be exposed to on a daily basis over an extended period of time (usually a lifetime) without suffering deleterious effects.) of lead according to EPA is 3.5 ug/kg/day and cadmium is 1 ug/kg/day. The cadmium content of cacao nibs/paste is usually 0.5-1 mg/kg and 0.025 mg/kg lead. So cadmium is the one to be concerned about here; for a 100 kg person, the RfD would be 100 ug or 0.1 mg of cadmium per day. The FDA defines the toxicological reference value for cadmium as 0.2-0.3 ug/kg, or 20-30% of the EPA's RfD. 100 grams of cacao at the high side, 1mg/kg would contain 0.1 mg of cadmium. So a daily dose of 1-2 gram of cacao per kg of body weight should be within the RfD, and 0.2-0.6 grams cacao per kg body weight would be within the TRV. It should be noted that root vegetables such as potatoes and beets also tend to contain cadmium at a rate of about 1/10 per weight compared to cacao, but I would find myself just as likely to eat 500 grams of potato or beet vs 50 grams of cacao, which would net the same amount of dietary cadmium.
So definitely don't overdo it on the cacao and eat hundreds of grams per day, but IMO no reason to avoid it completely, relative to other vegetables that can accumulate cadmium. This is not medical or dietary advice.
> I just can not fathom the level of greed I saw hiding behind people’s eyes at Google as they try to build empires.
That’s very well written. Poetic even.
> I’m in Silicon Valley to learn about and work with computers.
The industry used to be more like that. Never entirely, of course - Microsoft made a bunch of people millionaires in the 80s and 90s, turned some heads. A few others did too.
Even in the early 2000s almost none of the MBA types were going to the Bay Area after graduating.
But things changed. It basically had to. There were too many companies making too much money - and making their employees too wealthy - for people to ignore it. Zero interest rates added fuel to the fire and everyone who could jumped on it. Late stage capitalism, everyone gotta get theirs. And here we are.
The most frustrating part of working in the tech industry for me is that when it was smaller, it was a given that you would work with people who loved the tech. Now the industry is filled with people who are "in tech" but have no real interest in the technology itself, and in many cases aren't even slightly technical. They're just doing it for the money and because everyone told them it was a good field to go into.
There's so many of these people that it's really hard to avoid working with some of them. I consider myself extremely lucky because I started a business and when these people show up, I can choose not to promote them, or straight up fire them, or find some other way to show them the door. But the broader ecosystem we're in is something I have no control over, and it has clearly changed, so that it's not just filled with people who don't know or care about the tech, it's run by them (and in the long term it shows as the tech degrades).
You might be missing the dot com boom in your analysis. MBA types flocked to the tech sector looking for those IPOs, a trend that I suspect has only grown stronger since.
> I have realized I spend a lot of time trying to keep managing projects rather than doing the project itself.
> Do you use JIRA for life, or Linear, or Obsidian, or pen and paper? Yearly goals, monthly+weekly breakdowns?
The tool doesn’t matter. Just pick a simple one and be done with it. The reminders app built into your phone works great. You sure as hell don’t need JIRA to manage your life.
You are procrastinating doing the work. Sit down, make a list of everything you have to do. Then pick one thing and do it. Then, choose the next thing to do and do that. Rinse and repeat.
Local vs cloud backups each have their own tradeoffs. I use both.
For cloud backup I use Arq backing up daily to AWS (no affiliation with Arq other than being a happy customer). You get client side encryption and the daily backup directly mitigates your concern, if there’s an AWS account issue you will know immediately and can fix it. For my storage amount and use it only costs about $2 a month.
I don’t know. I’ve been using this setup for 7+ years, daily backups, and never had this problem.
I have about 80 GB or so of data being backed up. The daily backups upload only new files plus files that are changed. The largest monthly AWS bill I ever got was $6. The next month it went back to the usual ~$2 range.
Things has a nice watch app and it works well with Siri too. Granted the watch app isn’t as flexible as Reminders, but that may not matter for a given persons usage.
Cloudflare is cash-flow positive because a big chunk of employee compensation is paid thru the issuance of new shares (eg constantly raising more money and diluting existing owners / investors). If you include that comp as a cost they are not making money https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/net/financials/cash-flow-st...
Best thing is it’s simple and gets out of the way, so I focus on what I’m trying to do and not on the metawork of maintaining some complex hierarchy. I looked at more complicated schemes like Johnny Decimal and they were not for me.
I organize my filesystem, notes app, and todo app in the same way. It works really well for me and has stopped the nagging desire to periodically optimize the system. It just gets out of the way so I can focus more.
I’m actually pretty neutral on Tiago Forte overall, not a big fan for various reasons. But his PARA system has been super useful for me. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/