Turns Out the Gnu Calendar is a Great Pomodoro replacement

Benefits of Minute By Minute Task Timers #

Executive function is like a co-processor: you could run it externally with an app. And you could run it on your motherboard. The latter is trying to do it in the moment in your own brain. The former is using a tool.

Gnu Calendar #

Downsides:

• No single day window view

Upsides:

• Quick to enter events (unlike a cell phone -- cell phone alarms are too slow and clumsy to enter)
• A creeping blue line for Time Now
• Is not Google

Tiimo #

Update: I'm paying $30/year now to Tiimo. Their interface is fun, kind, suggestive.

For calendar, I have converged with the Apple Calendar of my family.

More thoughts on optimizing brain power #

Our working memory can only hold a half dozen or so truly random things. The rest is acting on stored procedures. Your brain is operating like in SQL security when they caution you to only use stored queries. All of your college calculus and full stack engineering work is using those two things. When a coder is in the zone she is using symbols of symbols of symbols all connected to small amounts of working memory.

Having had success with Pomodoro timers, I wanted to add a dimension: offload the brain's executive function of remembering the schedule of the day and when to stop something, put that into a dumb robot, and free my working memory to not think about what's next.

The Holy Trinity #

1. Getting Things Done, Journal Sketching, et cetera. This is the capture bucket
2. Sacred blocks of time, ideally in your routines of the week/day, when you ingest the lists and buckets.
3. Calendar: this is created during 2, and followed. The book for this had "Focus" in the title. I can't remember the rest of it

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