A friend of mine and I meet up every week just to shoot the shit and compare notes. We keep each other motivated to continue moving forward and improving our lives. This week he shared with me a “Life Audit” document (specifically, it was a PDF). I was thinking about doing a blog post with basically all the steps from the PDF and talking about my approach to them. But I don't see the PDF publicly posted anywhere, or it's not easily accessible. I would say that the author is a pretty notable internet personality and “self-help guru.” It is branded content, but doesn't appear to be copyrighted... In any case, I'm not looking to be sued (should more than 10 people read this), so I'll spare you the specific steps that he walks through with his system. Instead I'll summarize the process without also promoting any one specific personality—there are a myriad of them online, you're free to pick the personality you like the best, they all essentially say the same things and they're happy to take your money. Sometimes these people are controversial figures, and I have no real context for this guy other than the title of a book he wrote, and this one PDF that my friend sent me.

For only being a 17 page document, it's not a bad way to approach the task of getting your life in order and pursuing your dreams, however simplistic his approach may be. The main idea being that you take serious inventory of your time and make sure that you're taking steps to fill your time with things that are productive and also fulfilling; emotionally, spiritually, monetarily, etc. I'm not sure if the PDF cost my friend any money, so it's possible that the PDF is just a marketing gimmick to get your buy into a larger course. That being said, simple is not always easy, and that's what is emphasized at the top of the document. So, in that regard, I get it. It would be foolish to think that any system is going to hold someone's hand until they become a millionaire, that's absurd. If it were that easy, we'd all be happy millionaires.

As I was reading through the steps, it's really sort of what I'm already doing. I'm doing it by building a personal knowledge management system though—or, interactive journal—which is a great way to organize bettering your life. The PKM stuff did come up for me when I started journaling last year and keeping a physical notebook. But, I never dove into PKM because I didn't feel that I really had the time to devote to it, after getting a recommendation from a friend for Obsidian, I decided to dive in with the new year. I still like the feel of a leather cover, cotton pages, and fountain pens—but digital is much easier to navigate and revisit things you've written. The major trade-off being that you really have to think about what you're writing when you put pen to paper. Digital is much more ephemeral. The documents you write can be heavily edited, and whatever the finished product is might not necessarily reflect what it is that you sat down to write in the first place. It's easier to edit your emotions.

Stage six of seven is taking action. This is where I'm at, and that has to do with finding a job. Something to finance this website and let me work on other projects, but also something that gives me some purpose.

Not sure what I was expecting, I had a really short interview for a law firm earlier this week, and I couldn't get a read on what the woman interviewing me thought of me. I almost got the impression that she didn't want to be interviewing me. It's not a particularly large firm. Personally, I know that I am much more comfortable with someone in-person than I am over the phone, or even over a webcam... The one thing I did like though was that she gave me time to write out answers to some interview questions rather than having to come up with answers on the spot. Obviously, if you're reading this, you know that I like to write. I'm not always a good verbal communicator.

One of the cannabis jobs that I applied for, they had me record a short one minute clip to add some “personality” to my profile. I noticed that she was using “Breezy” which is a an HR software platform that companies can use to find candidates to fill positions. It's actually really interesting. I would love to pick her brain about the types of information that she has to keep track of in the software for hiring decisions to be made.

The one portion of the frontend web design course that I took—where I did not focus a lot of my energy—were the things they wanted us to do on LinkedIn, and to promote the weekly videos we were doing for our projects. I was afraid that if I did, my employer—the one I just left—would have not acted in a supportive way. So I never really engaged and built the content that headhunters and recruiters could use to fill their HR software suites with.

More and more people are relying on software and algorithms to make those types of decisions anyway. One of the jobs I'm really interested in is as a cultivation technician. I'm dying to see what they use, I know some of it has to be tech-driven. If you haven't seen some of these grow closets that people have built, hooked up to raspberry pis to control moisture and nutrient sensors and such, then you just don't realize how sophisticated this shit can get.

Ideally, cannabis is the business I want to be in. However, I do know how to work in a law office, so I've been applying to those jobs as well. So far the first actual interviews that I've had have all been law offices. We'll see if I get any traction with any of the cannabis companies out here. But if a good offer comes along I'm going to take it, regardless of where it comes from.

I had another phone interview with a different law firm, and it was much better energy. By the end I was thinking that I probably have the job. Just a matter of waiting out the three-day weekend until I hear back on Tuesday for when they want to schedule an in-person interview.

#personal #life #updates #pkm #personalknowledgemanagement

Not sure what's taking me so much time to finish my Nation of Victims review. I keep coming back to it though. Hopefully I'll be done changing things around and rearranging paragraphs enough to post a fairly decent overview and recommendation for the book soon. Right now though, I'd like to talk a little about life and get into some personal knowledge management (or, “pkm”) software that I've been using.

Life has been weird. I think everyone is in tune to a great change that is coming, or a series of little changes that are already happening. I took the plunge and quit my job last week. A series of events beginning as far back as a year to a year and a half ago just culminated in me having to walk out the door. There was some negotiating. I may have been able to stay, but it was clear that the situation wasn't getting better and everything promised me were just platitudes. It was little things that pointed to bigger things, like having never been given another office chair from the time I started the job 8 years ago, and the fact that my chair was already used when I started. I could have prepared a whole list of things like that.

And they may have made accommodations at just the threat of me leaving... if I had energy enough to hold them to it. But I didn't, and I don't. I would have happily dealt with the chair and the millions of other tiny inconveniences, if there had been some sort of an assurance that the things which concerned me about the business were being addressed. Unfortunately the majority of my job was to handle things that other people couldn't handle, or items where the ball was dropped by the person before me, so I was never able to be proactive, I was always reacting. And that was in addition to routine and predictable tasks that I was responsible for. The problem being that trying to get the timing right for all the routine stuff was always fucked because I was constantly getting hit with random shit that would come up at least once a week.

Replacing people and re-staffing roles was a problem. More often than not the decision was made to simply spread out the work of a terminated employee among the remaining staff. I absorbed at least 4 to 5 other positions during my tenure. After nearly a decade of that, I just couldn't take it any longer.

Fortunately, walking away has done wonders for my mood and even my physical health. For a while now I've thought that I might have gout, turns out that it was probably just stress. Don't get me wrong, I've thrived under stress for the past 15 years, but burnout is real.

In any case, now that my overall disposition has gotten better, I reached out to an old friend of mine and asked him if he wanted to get some coffee. It's probably been the better part of a year or two since him and I sat down and talked. It was nice that he agreed to come out and meet me. Part of the reason we haven't hung out or talked was because of the way my attitude has been.

During our conversation he brought up Obsidian. As a matter of fact, that's the software that I'm using right now to write this blog post. Although I've only been using the software for a couple of days, my experience has been good.

You can read about my friend's experience with PKMs here.

While it's not open source software, it is free to use. I could be wrong, but I'm almost certain it's an Electron app (or similar). It is definitely built on web technologies given the fact that the plugins are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. Basically just a super fancy Markdown editor.

Since Write.as / WriteFreely uses Markdown for all it's posts, it makes Obsidian the perfect editor for me to use; it stores a local .md file of my post and also formats my Markdown as I type it in a live-preview style mode, so I can see in real time what my styling, links, images, etc. all look like before copying over the Markdown to be published online. That makes it nice for me, since the programming path that I decided to go down was Nodejs and JavaScript frameworks, and I'm already writing all my content in Markdown.

Obsidian has a .deb package so I've gone ahead and installed it on both my desktop and my laptop. Both run Debian... albeit, “Debian” is just a CHROOT on laptop, since that's a Chromebook.

Additionally, the software just autosaves the files as you work on them. In a way it has a similar application design philosophy to VSCode. What's nice about that is I've chosen my desktop to be my pkm server, so it hosts the folders that I've defined as my vaults. This means I can be working in Obsidian on my desktop and when I move over to my laptop, I can continue where I left off—provided I'm on the same network as my desktop—I can even have the same files open on both systems and work on them without skipping a beat. I could take this a step further and deploy a tiny Linux VPS that is hosting my vaults, but I'll probably just stick to a local solution until I need to be able to access my files all the time from anywhere. This HERE is similar to what I did on my own network. I also tested working on the same file while it was open and loaded in Obsidian on both my desktop and laptop at the same time, it was actually pretty painless. No strange errors.

Should I want to take my laptop to the library or a coffee shop or something to work on stuff outside of the house, I'll probably just set up a “mobile” vault that I can sync into my main vault.

Hopefully I'll be updating this blog a bit more as I navigate unemployment. 15 years is a long time.