Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

202109071620 PARA Method

A universal system for organizing digital information.¹

Projects

Series of tasks linked to a goal, with a deadline

Complete app mockup, develop project plan, execute business development campaign, write blog post, finalize product specs, attend conference, etc.
Goal has to be achieved (completely checked off at some point) and has a deadline

Areas

Spheres of activity with a standard to be maintained over time

Health, finances, professional development, travel, hobbies, friends, apartment, car, productivity, direct reports, product development, writing, etc.
Standard to be maintained with an indefinite end date
Areas for me are hierarchical. All projects must belong to an area and all tasks may belong to a project, but must belong to an area.

Resources

Topics and themes of ongoing interest

Habit formation, project management, transhumanism, coffee, music, gardening, online marketing, SEO, interior design, architecture, note-taking.
I use resources as my reference manager. For this reason, transient items like projects, areas, and tasks should reference resources and update them with relevant information that comes out of the doing of the item.
Basically resources should be added as links inside pages that reference them in context with reasons for including it.

Archive

Inactive items from the other categories

Projects that have been completed or become inactive, areas that you are no longer committed to maintaining, resources that you are no longer interested in.
In Notion, I can just make views that allow me to see everything including the archived ones instead of the filtered view that's in the workspace and tables.
Never throw anything away. Instead, archive it. There is still value in throwing away things that come into my inbox but are never parsed out and my interest has faded. These things naturally fall to the bottom and should be discarded once stale.

Forte, Tiago. (2017, February 8). The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information. Forte Labs. https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/ ↩