Planning the Lifehack Email

by Mike Levin

Busy, busy, busy! The deliverables for my day job are becoming challenging, pulling me into machine learning in about the most modest way possible, mere keyword grouping as any SEO worth their salt should be able to do inside a Jupyter Notebook.

Okay, that email is getting sent daily, and it rocks! I want to start building a series of projects off of it that serves me both on the personal front and the professional front. Projects? Ugh, no, nothing’s ever a “project”. That’s building up the baby-steps along the way to be to big and it becomes discouraging. Every Little Thing gets done. ELTgd! Little things! Baby-steps. Over time these little things will lead to:

• Organization of my YouTube videos (touch YouTube API)
• Organization of my Website (touch web-crawling)
• Organization of my Repos & Packages (touch Github & PyPI)

Organization in this case means more easily utilized on a day-to-day basis by both myself and others. This is your opportunity to build something interesting.

But in addition to the types of systems I want to touch, I should think about the actual tasks or chores I want to accomplish on both the personal and professional front.

PERSONAL

• Google Photos Statistics & eventual replacement
• Removing local duplicate images & videos
• Better Instapaper utilization & eventual replacement

PROFESSIONAL

• SERP Monitoring / Screenshot+
• Site Monitoring / Report
• Feed Monitoring / ML categorizing

Many of these things have to deal with overcoming an aspect of human nature that keeps us (me) from actually doing these things with all due haste. The haste isn’t so due for:

• lack of desire
• lack of imagination & vision
• lack of planning
• lack of discipline
• lack of a righteous feedback loop
  • which is addictive
  • which is insistent (in your life)

And of course, tell a story!

A series of essays that spells out my worldview. Weaves everything in. What is everything:

• Professional needs
• Spiritual needs
• Not personal needs (bring your own person)
• How to get a good base salary
• How to not hate yourself in the process
• How to prepare to pivot to almost anything (being flexible)

In a lot of ways this is aligning in the build vs. buy discussion. Most people buy. Buying is usually better and buying gets you a long way there. In fact, every undertaking lands somewhere on the build-buy spectrum because we don’t burn our computers from sand. Somebody needs to build foundations, frameworks, platforms or whatever you want to call it for us to stand on.

At some point then we step in and build upon those foundations, platforms or frameworks.

Have chapter titles, essay names or whatever ready.

• The Walrus & The Carpenter
• Tools Become a Part of You
• Hitting a Technical Wall