I think of myself as not very conscientious. At school, I struggled with completing homework, sometimes not even turning in assigned essays. I forgot about deadlines and accidentally left my stuff behind. I did well on standardized tests because I could read quickly and eliminate probably incorrect answers, but other types of tests were a drag. There were some subjects I liked enough to do well in (well, mostly teachers I found engaging). For the most part, though, I didn't particularly care about grades. Even as an adult, I occasionally forget to finish something I'm working on, I lose things and time due to disorganization and attentional hiccups, and I've used my "Oops" fund a number of times. (W+ is more conscientious than I am, and occasionally patiently reminds me to take care of stuff.) I tend to follow the butterflies of my interest.

Fortunately, I've figured out some things that work well for me. Coding is great because even though it needs me to be pretty exact, I can work in small chunks, write tests to help me double-check, and automate repetitive tasks that my brain tends to hiccup on. When I worked at IBM, I had a lot of fun working on projects I cared about, like building systems to help professionals transition into teaching or helping food banks distribute food. I also did well skimming pages and pages of internal discussions so that I could summarize key themes for workshops. For my consulting clients, I tend to focus on prototyping their crazy ideas. If the idea proves worthwhile, we can then turn it over to other people to get it ready for production. Org Mode helps me keep track of what I want to do and when. In the Emacs community, I tend to focus on breadth rather than depth: Emacs News instead of package maintenance or core Emacs development. (And besides, it's volunteering anyhow, so when people bump into bugs in my code, it's either an opportunity for them to help out or something they might just put up with or work around.) I like experimenting, and I don't feel stuck; I can move on from an experiment when I've gotten enough data or when things change. I've shifted my life so that most of the tasks on my to-do list are things that I want to do that aren't time-sensitive, so I can do them when I want.

I recognize myself in other descriptions of conscientiousness. I like to plan and I like to take notes. I get somewhat stressed by the idea of being late, although I've learned to chill out a little about that because kids mean being flexible about time. I like considering decisions carefully and doing little experiments. I find risky behaviour stressful rather than fun. Still, I tend to think of myself as someone who doesn't do the extra work, who often doesn't pay attention to the fiddly details. A few counter-examples might help me figure out more about when my brain likes to spend the extra time on things:

• In a cryptography course that I took in university, we had an assignment to break a simple Caesar cipher. Each student was assigned one line. I had fun crunching through all of them (puzzles! piece of cake) and I distinctly remember relishing the teachers' surprise the next day.
• I signed up for more school, getting a master's degree in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. I got interested in it for two reasons:
  • I enjoyed teaching computer science at my alma mater. Getting an advanced degree was strongly recommended. I experimented with a masters in education but I wasn't that interested in it.
  • I was also interested in personal information management thanks to Emacs and Planner Mode, so I was curious about exploring the usage patterns of people who had highly customized their PIM tool. Several papers in that area had been written by a researcher at the University of Toronto, so I applied there for a master's. That researcher left shortly after I arrived, so we looked around for another topic. Eventually we settled on social networking platforms in organizations, which was also interesting for me because it was about how people use technology to organize collective knowledge.
• I also signed up for parenting knowing that it's a ton of extra work including stress-testing my abilities, being responsible for helping an entirely separate little being figure out things I'm still figuring out myself, and handling endless problem-solving and adaptation in the face of uncertainty.
• I notice that I'm getting a little better at slowing down and practising piano, singing, and drawing. I've tried all these things before, but now I can approach it differently because I'm going into it with more life experience.
  • For piano, I can treat it like a moving meditation on the quirks of my monkey mind, and be amused at how my brain learns. I enjoy feeling the motions become more automatic. I also like the thoughts and memories that the pieces evoke. (As part of this beginner course I'm doing, I just practised a very simple version of "Thus Spake Zarathustra", which makes everything feel more epic.) Eventually I think it would be nice to be able to play the music that A+ and I might want to sing to. It seems to be my current hyperfocus. I enjoy spending the time practising, knowing that there's no way to skip that part (and perhaps this is even supposed to be the fun part).
  • For singing, I can be mystified by all the weird movements that I have to figure out in my larynx and my diaphragm and other parts I haven't even figured out how to name yet, much less activate. It gives me some empathy for how kids are learning about things we can't easily teach them.
  • For drawing, I can be amused by the gap between how things really are and how I imagine them to be, and the gap between what I imagine and what I can draw. The video tutorial assures me that taking the time to slow down and shade or add texture is worthwhile, and is even the fun part of drawing. I still get impatient occasionally (do I really want to spend all this time on one sketch?), but it's an interesting perspective. I think it might be nice to develop art into a relaxing activity. If I go through the steps, I'll probably get there. Also, I like doodling to break up the wall of text in a blog post like this one, so that's another fun way to practice.

So maybe I can be a bit more conscientious when it's something I'm curious about or care about.

For the tasks that I need to be conscientious about, there are other things that help:

• I'm getting better at accepting my limits. For example, when I had a pie in the oven last night, I told A+ that I couldn't go off to play Minecraft with her because I might forget about the pie and accidentally undercook or overcook it.
• Writing notes helps me keep track of where I am, what I wanted to do next, what I'm figuring out along the way, and so on. The possibility of sharing those notes (and thus having more opportunities to learn from my past self or from other people) also encourages me to get to a point where those notes can be shared. Here I really appreciate how Org Mode helps me capture, manage, and post my tasks and notes, thanks to literate programming. People occasionally tell me that they think I'm very organized, but that's probably just because I write about stuff so that when I forget, I can look them up again.
• Checklists are also handy. Most of the time, I just make a checklist on my phone using Orgzly Revived, but maybe I can make these more visual. I notice that I'm not particularly influenced by the gamification strategy of a streak count and mildly influenced by XP bars.
• Journal entries and blog posts also give me a record of what I've worked on, and even little bits of progress accumulate.
• I'm also learning to to distract the fidgety part of my brain with music or movement, and to manage it with timers. Timers are great. Timers to get started, timers to check in with myself, timers to come back…
• Automation is wonderful. Getting a computer to do the work is often more fun and less error-prone than my doing it myself. Even semi-automation is helpful.

Despite not thinking of myself as particularly conscientious, I'm pretty happy with what I've been figuring out about my life and the world. I can think of how I work as building on my strengths instead of just working around my weaknesses. I enjoy learning about and dabbling in lots of different interests, and the combination of ideas can be very useful (like dancer curiosity). Framing many decisions as experiments helps me get to 80%-fine quickly, and I don't spend a lot of time chasing down that last 20% that takes most of the effort. I don't fit the hustle culture of many self-help books, blogs, and videos, and that's okay.

I think my dad was not particulary conscientious either, at least not in terms of planning ahead, paying attention to details, following conventions. He was always in motion, happiest whenever he had a crazy project. Fortunately, he was really good at inspiring other people to handle the logistics. He came up with the ideas ("I want to fly across the Philippines in an ultralight") and people like my mom figured out how (fuel, landing spots, etc.). His spontaneous road trips drove me a little batty when I was a kid. But also, when it came to the things he cared about, he could spend hours, days, weeks on getting it right. I remember how he'd stay up late to figure something out, whether it was digital photography or Microsoft 3D Pinball. I've written about how he repeatedly drew variations on the same sketch in order to figure out what he wanted. He did okay. He found his way, even though it looked nothing at all like the standard paths. I'm probably doing all right, too.

My mom was more conscientious and deliberate than my dad was. She handled the business while my dad got to focus on his passions. From her, I picked up the habits of reading and writing. I think I'd like to be more of a mix between their styles rather than one or the other.

Apparently, conscientiousness tends to increase with age, so that's interesting. I feel slower when it comes to some things (probably because of adapting to all those distractions and periods of sleep deprivation, or maybe age, or simply a more realistic evaluation of my abilities), so it's easier to give myself time to do things that are slow. Maybe I'll get better at enjoying the act of practising and paying attention to the details. I'll probably benefit from more orderliness, too. I wonder how I can get my brain to enjoy decluttering and figuring out the right homes for objects. It's a little like preparing the space so that I can see what I like and it's easy to work on what I enjoy. (Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up might be relevant here, although even she has found keeping a tidy house with kids to be a challenge…)

I've been trying to think of a neutral or positively-coded word for the opposite of the conscientiousness personality trait. I asked Claude AI to generate a bunch of antonyms. I don't quite identify with "free-spirited" or "spontaneous", but I like "adaptable" and "improvisational," and "interest-driven" is an accurate description of the way we spend our energy. Those words don't quite cover the same cluster of meanings that "conscientious" does, but they give me other ways to think about the personality trait as something more positive.

I'm always curious about how I can work with what I've got. New challenges, new experiences, new capabilities… I get to learn even more about how my brain works and what I can do, especially as I build systems and processes to support myself.

Figuring out more about building on my strengths will also help me parent A+, so this work is extra worth it. I can even learn from the worries that sometimes flutter up when I see her also wandering far from what the school system would probably prefer that she focus on.

Thinking about processes and tools and self-acceptance also makes me think a little about Andy's recent blog post My 10 Years with Emacs, in which (among other thoughts about what he's learned about using Emacs and other people he wants to thank for helping) he mentions thinking of me as kind of the community mom. I was 18 when I started using Emacs, I've grown up in this community, and I've got blog posts and videos that help me catch glimpses of myself throughout the years. It does feel interesting to notice the shifts in my brain, from kind of an enthusiastic puppy bursting with energy to something more about experimentation, reflection, and connection. If I can get better at understanding myself and the tools I can build to support who I am and what I want to do, I wonder if that'll help other people too. I'm looking forward to being able to someday bring grandparent energy to this. What could that be like? There are people even older than I am in this community, which is wonderful. I'm looking forward to seeing how we all figure out how to work with what we've got.

I noticed I've been a little more fretful than I'd like to be. I think I've been letting myself get all tangled up in worries about A+ and school fit, and I've also been staying up late exploring sketching. My current plan is:

• schedule fretting for Saturdays so that I don't fret too much at A+ during the week
• remind myself of counterexamples: A+ does actually get her work done, and she's pretty good at making decisions; even if she messes up, failure is feedback
• externalize my anxiety by calling her "Gumamelon" (long story), and thank her for showing up and trying to protect us and make life easier
• try to get better at detecting when Gumamelon is sneaking up on me, write down her concerns, and remind her that she can come back on Saturday.
• distract Gumamelon with other things I can do
• sleep better

It's weird, but maybe it'll help. =)

Also, trying out this approach of answering reflection questions in order to think more deeply.

I liked figuring things out with W- and A+, whether it was breaking up the ice on the walkway or redoing the galaxy icing on the cupcakes. I also liked the calmness of going through the music and art tutorials, even if they felt quite slow at times. I'm not too keen on the frazzled feeling of fretting at A+, but I'm glad I'm getting better at recognizing the irrationality of it, and that both W- and A+ are good at reminding me to back off. I'm looking forward to finding ways to redirect that. This might be the time to get back into exploring the things I want to learn. That'll keep me plenty busy.

It's interesting to see how both A+ and I respond well to impersonal feedback from a computer and to breaking things down into bite-sized, gamified learning. The pitch visualizations in the singing app have been helping her pay more attention to melody. I like the way the notes in the piano app don't let me move forward until I get them right. I'm going to experiment with pitch detection to practise singing scales. I want to see if I can get Claude AI to give me reasonably-useful writing feedback, too.

Nudged by Gina Trapani's My Life in Weeks (found via HN) and the Life in Weeks app (also discussed on HN), I'm noodling around the idea of having a quick but expressive overview. I have a journal covering most of the days since 2016, somewhat spotty coverage of weekly/monthly notes before then, and yearly reviews going back to 2005. If I wanted to summarize each day with an emoji, February would be:

Which is promisingly compact and could be fun to experiment with over the year, and then maybe I could pick weekly highlights too.

Anyway, in March, I'd like to:

• Practise being calmer and more easygoing; get better at thinking in terms of experiments
• Take A+ on more informal field trips: Royal Ontario Museum, pottery class
• Start digging into the ideas and tasks I've been postponing
• Finish the Simply Piano course and start working on sheet music for the songs A+ wants to sing
• Practise singing scales while waiting for A+ to catch up with Simply Sing
• Automate the BigBlueButton setup a bit more so that I don't forget about meetups

• Drawing:
  • Looking at landscapes; art and iteration
  • Sketching practice: Beaver, goose, squirrel, sparrow, flower, sheepdog and sheep
  • AGO field trip #2: Moments in Modernism, landscapes
  • Playing with sketching again
  • Two weeks with the iPad Air (+ SuperNote A5X and Lenovo P52)
• Org Mode:
  • Working with smaller chunks of thoughts; adding anchors to paragraphs in Org Mode HTML export
• Tech:
  • Lispy Gopher Show 2025-02-05: programming languages, history, blogging, and communities with screwtape, Ramin Honary, and me
  • Using systemd to switch nginx configurations based on number of CPUs
  • Letting A+ play with generative artificial intelligence for fiction, and a primer
• Life:
  • Productive procrastination and parenting
• Emacs News:
  • 2025-02-03 Emacs news
  • 2025-02-10 Emacs news
  • 2025-02-17 Emacs news
  • 2025-02-24 Emacs news

• 2025-02-04-05 Lispy Gopher Show – podcast community mindmap.svg
• 2025-02-04-08 Saint-Mary Lake – painting landscape.png
• 2025-02-05-02 Saint-Mary Lake sketch 2 – drawing.png
• 2025-02-06-01 Beaver, goose, squirrel, sparrow, flower, sheepdog, sheep – drawing.png
• 2025-02-09-01 Sliding down the steps – painting art life winter.jpg
• 2025-02-14-01 How to fail without feeling like a failure – parenting experiment life kaizen.png
• 2025-02-16-06 So much snow — daily moment sketch.jpg
• 2025-02-17-04 Giraffe – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
• 2025-02-17-05 Koala – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
• 2025-02-18-03 Lispy Gopher Show with screwtape and yduJ – podcast sketchnote history emacs community lambdamoo.png
• 2025-02-18-07 Acorn – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
• 2025-02-19-08 Fir – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
• 2025-02-20-01 Productive procrastination – productivity parenting.png
• 2025-02-20-04 Lotus – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
• 2025-02-20-05 Cactus – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
• 2025-02-24-01 Evenings – parenting.jpg
• 2025-02-25-01 Learning and feelings – parenting learning school homeschooling.jpg
• 2025-02-25-03 Totally made up mushrooms – art drawing texture SimplyDraw.jpg
• 2025-02-26-01 Things to remember by – family.jpg
• 2025-02-26-06 Crate of apples – art drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
• 2025-02-27-01 Generative artificial intelligence – llm generative ai tech.png
• 2025-02-28-01 Getting used to SuperNote A5X and iPad Air 13 – drawing supernote ipad tech.png
• 2025-02-28-04 February 2025 – monthly review.png

Time

Hmm, definitely want to get more sleep.

A+ currently writes prompts like:

• Write a funny story where Darth Vader has a bunch of body doubles (like Queen Amidala did) and they have a very important meeting. The Emperor is trying to find Darth Vader and keeps finding the body doubles instead.
• Write a silly story where Anakin raises Luke and Leia with Padme instead of turning to the dark side.
• Write a continuation of The Skywalker Family Chronicles where Anakin is helping Luke and Leia get dressed for a very important Bring Your Children to a Council meeting.
• Write a funny continuation of The Skywalker Family Chronicles about the time that Captain Rex brought the rest of the 501 Legion and Commander Cody's Legion to help babysit Luke and Leia.
• Write a continuation of The Skywalker Family Chronicles where Commander Cody has to babysit Luke and Leia because Captain Rex is dealing with leftover Separatist droids and has to call in reinforcements who run into the Skywalker Naboo Lake House, fully armed, and wearing their full armor, asking whether his problem is either rouge Separatists droids or the Skywalker children and bringing two bags of military equipment and two bags of Skywalker Specific Stress Depleters and other things for babysitting.
• Write a continuation of The Skywalker Family Chronicles where Grogu reads his journal, flipping to the page where Padme takes Ahsoka, Anakin, Yoda, Grogu, still talking and potty training, Luke, and Leia to a boat ride, but it turns out Yoda, Anakin, Luke, Ahsoka, and Leia get seasick, told from Grogu's point of view in detail.
  • It was interesting to see this prompt evolve over 16 iterations starting from "Write a continuation of The Skywalker Family Chronicles where Padme takes Anakin, Luke, and Leia to a boat ride, but it turns out that boat rides become disasters for Skywalkers."
• Write a continuation of The Skywalker Family Chronicles where Ahsoka reads her journal, ending up on the page where she ends up at the Senate Medical Center due to some flu that only Togrutas can catch, the journal written in slightly squiggly handwriting, which is either Grogu or Anakin's handwriting.

All right, let's get a bit meta here. "Here are some prompts that my 9-year-old child has been using to generate funny Star Wars fanfiction in alternate timelines. Suggest 5 ideas for improving her prompts and provide detailed examples." We're out of free messages for Claude, so I asked ChatGPT.

It suggested:

1. Be more specific about the chaos or conflict.
2. Add unexpected reactions from characters.
3. Use a "What If?" format to spark creativity.
4. Introduce a clear perspective or narrator.
5. Add an absurd or over-the-top element.

We read through this yesterday, and she's started telling me how she's added more detail to her prompts. I think she takes constructive feedback from the AI better than from me (just like using a timer works better than me telling her it's time to wrap up), so maybe there's some opportunity here on using a layer of indirection to keep the grumps from getting in the way of learning…

I don't want A+ to treat generative AI as some kind of magic black box with amazing capabilities, so I've been sprinkling in some primer information here and there. I want her to understand roughly how it works, how it's not actually thinking but can still do a surprisingly good job of putting things together based on patterns derived from really large data sets in ways that are hard for humans to fully understand.

I also explained how conversations and token limits work. She's already getting the hang of editing prompts to refine things instead of adding more prompts to the conversation, although she still prefers to keep most of her story prompts in one conversation because the stories sometimes refer to previous incidents in the timeline.

Other resources:

• Generative AI explained in 2 minutes - YouTube: this is probably at her level
• Generative AI Explained In 5 Minutes | What Is GenAI? | Introduction To Generative AI | Simplilearn - YouTube: more focused on image generation

I also showed her what NotebookLM could do with audio podcast generation, so she could get a sense of computer-generated audio. She noticed the interactive mode, so we experimented with that for a bit. The pauses in her speech tend to trigger premature answers, so it works better if she thinks about her sentence and says it confidently.

A+ finds generating text very engaging at the moment and I think she's learning a lot through experiments. She'll probably have a deeper understanding of and appreciation for fiction than I did as a kid because she can easily change some things and see how it feels. (What if this story is told in third-person perspective? What if this story is told in present tense or past tense? What if this event happens differently; what would happen because of that change?)

With any luck, exposure to lots of story elements, vivid words, and dialogue will influence how she writes. Maybe she'll eventually get to the point where she can imagine a story and then want to write parts of it or all of it herself to bring it closer to her vision. So it's probably worth supporting this and seeing where it can go.

If the part that I want to link to is not a heading, I can add an ID by using the #+ATTR_HTML: :id ... directive, like this snippet from my reflection on landscapes and art:

  #+ATTR_HTML: :id interest-development
  That reminds me a little of another reflection
  I've been noodling around on interest development...

It might be fun to have a little margin note with 🔗 to indicate that that's a specially-linkable section, which could be handy when I want to link when mobile. It feels like that would be a left margin thing on a large screen, so it'll just have to squeeze in there with the sticky table of contents. I've been meaning to add link icons to sub-headings with IDs, anyway, so I can probably solve both with a bit of Javascript.

/* Add link icons to headings and anchored paragraphs */
function addLinkIcons() {
  document.querySelectorAll('h1[id], h2[id], h3[id], p[id]').forEach((o) => {
    const link = document.createElement('a');
    const article = o.closest('article[data-url]');
    link.href = window.location.origin + (article?.getAttribute('data-url') || window.location.pathname) + '#' + o.getAttribute('id');
    link.innerHTML = '🔗';  // link icon
    link.title = 'anchor';
    link.classList.add('anchor-icon');
    link.addEventListener('click', copyLink);
    o.prepend(link);
  });
}

addLinkIcons();

And some CSS:

.entry h2, .entry h3, .entry h4, .entry p, .content h2, .content h3, .content h4, .content p { position: relative }
.content a.anchor-icon:link, .entry a.anchor-icon:link { font-size: 60%; text-decoration: none !important; font-size: small; float: right }
@media only screen and (min-width: 95rem) {
   .content a.anchor-icon:link, .entry a.anchor-icon:link { display: block; position: absolute; left: -2em; top: 0.2em; float: none}
}

Text fragments are even more powerful, because I can link to a specific part of a paragraph. I can link to one segment with something like #::text=text+to+highlight~. I can specify multiple text fragments to highlight by using #::text=first+text+to+highlight&text=second+text~, and the browser will automatically scroll to the first highlighted section. I can specify a longer section by using text=textStart,textEnd. Example: #:~:text=That%20is%20the%20gap,described The text fragments documentation has more options, including using prefixes and suffixes to disambiguate matches.

Text fragment links require rel="noopener" for security, so I added JKC-Codes/eleventy-plugin-automatic-noopener to my 11ty config.

If I find myself using this a lot, it might be interesting to figure out how to make it easier, maybe with something like the Text Fragment extension for Firefox.

These seem like good starting points for addressing smaller chunks of thoughts.