Input output
Tags: productivity
Published: 2018-11-05 20:35:25

---
title: Input output
published: true
description: My system for learning and improving
tags: productivity
---

For a very long I have been accumulating favourites, saving seemly relevant reddit posts and tagging books I want to read, work on, or write about, someday, somewhere. The current problem is that now this big list silently occupies some of my brain processing, frustrates me a little bit every time I remember about it and leaves me wondering if I'm really missing something it could improve me. 

In hindsight, it is even funny that I even started accumulating them as I never had any plan or something in place to work with all this list, it was all about [Fear of missing out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out).

Now, I want to make sure I can put some of it out, or potentially delete it 😬 I will try to set some system to make effective use of it all.

### Triage

At first, I will go through every link and ask these simply "yes" statements/questions, I potentially avoid wasting time on deeply questioning useless links. The most important part of this step is to be brutally honest.

- **I cannot find this reference again in one simple search and it is not a documentation link.** Eg. MDN docs
- **Will the topic covered in this link topic be valid next 6 months?** Eg. Web components vs some very framework specific thing which I don't even use at work
- **Do you think it is absolutely reasonable to learn this link?** I want to make sure it's not some big graduation work unrelated to what I'm currently working with now or near future
- **Is it challenging?** Potentially I know about it, and the time to "start it" is larger than "do it"
- **Do you have a vision of what you will get afterwards?** "It's cool" is not a valid vision

If none of them are answered "no", I can leave the link for the next step, otherwise, it is better for me to let them go.

### Plan

With the list of links that passed the first triage, I need to go for a more planning attitude and answer these open ended questions.

- **Assuming you have this done, in your hands, what now? What do you do with that?** Some exercise in the vision of this exercise. If having this link 'completed' is worthless, maybe I should let it go.
- **Does it take more than one hour?** If yes, I need to break the link down to more tasks.

Again, empty or useless answers makes the link go away. The good answered ones are finally getting my full attention <del>someday</del>,.

### Execute

Now I have what to do and why, I have no excuses. I can safely put the link as actionable items in my "Sprints" and potentially manage to find time to work on some of them.

- **When are you going to do it?** I'm trying to keep work with personal Sprints, so far they are completely failures and I'm not managing to keep them organized, but you never know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


### Review

After completing the task, I want to come back and review the outcomes, to cover the gaps and check if links that are coming or not coming through are actually good enough.

- **What have you got back from it?** If you didn't have done this, what would have changed?

---

### Improve, all the time

This is actually the second version of this system. I started by noting down these questions on some paper, parsed a lot of my links and then did nothing with them. 

It's worth nothing putting all this up, going forward one or two steps, and not maintaining the system. If I cannot maintain it, I need to change it.

In an ultimate case, I would be not save anything at all, so I don't have any burden to deal with. In the perfect case, I can handle 80% of the things I save and learn something worth and new.