When the joys become pitfalls

#5

My view is we need to manage our desire to tinker or play on anything we are enthusiastic about from tiddlywiki, mountian biking, to fermented food, stamp collecting, train sets…

  • Most likely if it does not interest us, or does not permit tinkering then this is never a question.
  • My argument would be we can’t blame tiddlywiki for being so good and open to tinkering, that is in part TiddlyWikis “raison d’etre” (In French, raison d’etre literally means “reason for being”), we can only question the way we handle our relationship too it.

The main ways I deal with this, and it is not always sucessful, are;

  • I have a dedicated wiki in which I write TiddlyWiki ideas and innovations I think of when they occur and try and get back to what I was working on before the distraction. I call this my “TiddlyWiki blog to self”.
  • I also ban myself from more than 30mins tiddlywiki activity (and use a timer) during 9am-5pm - already failed this today, so I just set a timer (I have a great app in android for this)
  • I have a process of reviewing the forums more quickly so as not to spend more time, and avoid tagents, using the bookmarks.

However you will see me prolific here and I think it may be worth pointing out why;

  • I belive in the long term sucess of tiddlywiki and work to;
    • Support the community
    • Support the documentation and understanding
      • newcomers always expose what is difficult when learning or adopting tiddlywiki
    • Identify and fill gaps percieved or real
    • Help others as much as possible so I can failrly get help when needed
    • Contribute to stratigic design issues, discover bugs etc…
  • Tiddlywiki hasempowerd me with a platform who can be my life long partner leveraging computers for good, or personal need, a great investment.

The greatest danger is tiddlywikis relationship to productivity tools, when we need to be productive, we are in the same place where the “tinkering instrinct” can distract us. Procrasatination, diversion, distraction, avoidence love to drag us away.

4 Likes
#6

When the initial desire is to…

  1. get X done
  2. But I just need to do a little bit of Y
  3. Y takes a bit longer than you thought,
      but hey, it’s fun! So…
  4. Do a bit more Y
  5. What was I going to do? Oh, X…
  6. Go to 2.

I’m happy for you if that’s not a pitfall to you.

I got over that ~4 decades ago.

Link?

#7

See near the top the main ones I use for organisation, others are common cooking times etc…

  • It needs a clean up

timerApp
timerApp1080×2460 250 KB

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#8

Thanks Tones. Looks a lot better the inbuilt Samsung app.

Does it have ads?

#9

Oh, and if I leave now will the beef roast be ready?

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#10

I dont think it has adds, If it did I purchased it have and do not see them, I dont think I purchased it.

  • It is the result of too much time looking for such a simple set of independant timers.
#11

The hardest problem for me is probably the Golden Hammer Syndrome: Everywhere I look, I see another problem that seems like it could best be solved with TiddlyWiki. And almost none of them have much to do with a “personal notebook.”

So far, pretty much all of them have worked, and the few that didn’t were mostly because I abandoned them to move onto other things… things usually also involving TW.

Fifteen months ago, I was a semi-regular user of TW. I had years of work notes in TW, with minimal amounts of customization to make my life easier. A programmer, I had also built into a system I’d written a Tiddlywiki-documentation-generator for user projects. I occasionally fiddled with trying to replace the documentation for a popular open-source project I maintained with TW. But that was it.

Then I decided that a new system I was maintaining would be best documented using TW. But I kept finding more and more complex needs, and I started asking here about various needs, and even giving back a little bit to the community.

So that was my my first serious usage of TW: as the documentation for a moderately complex system. Since then, I’ve also built, all to be used by a number of users:

  • A meeting notes/agenda tool
  • A long-form document that includes survey questions/results, research findings, lists of people and tools and how they interrelate
  • A second documentation-generator for user systems built using a tool I created and maintain
  • Documentation for two other systems, plus a not-really-published, but currently available Documentation Edition that became the basis for my various documentation projects
  • Two separate wikis to consolidate links to scattered documents, tagging and describing each one, with the long-term goal of using the tags to write an eventual organized and maintainable overview of this scattered documentation, and maybe one day consolidating it
  • My Periodic Table Demo, which started out as a demo of using data tiddlers but has morphed into what I hope one day could be an interactive educational tool for Chemistry students
  • A querying tool to select contact and demographic information from a large set of data tiddlers representing voters in my small town
  • An internal website for members of my local Democratic Town Committee, with large amounts of interactive data, acting like a combination of database, report engine, and website
  • A dozen or more smaller wikis for my own consumption

In all of these cases, TW has proven itself to be an extremely useful tool for the job, and, in several cases, an indispensable one. It’s been a very useful hammer!

12 Likes
Announcing a TiddlyWiki App for Apple Devices
#12

Really, a throwaway :heart: aint enough for that post!

:trophy:

might be more apt.

2 Likes
#13

I really don’t suffer that problem, I probably spend 4 hours a day minimum on my Tiddlywiki, it contains the knowledge base for my area of research and is connected to my professional activities. I do take time out to customise - for instance my recent plugin that helps me set a “next review” date for each tiddler I feel is important enough to revisit now and then to refresh. When I do write a plugin or customise I look for practical simple and elegant solutions but if it makes sense I will adopt an approach that might include a degree of manual operation as well as automatic - it’s all a matter of balance of time and effort but Tiddlywiki itself never becomes the principle “thing” - it’s all about getting on with the research, Tiddlywiki is only the tool that makes the impossible possible - by that I mean that my brain would be incapable of holding so much information to spot the connections I spot with Tiddlywiki - I have various options in my review plugin that allow me to not only review overdue tiddlers but to randomise the order they appear on the story river which increases the chance of reading two tiddlers which warrant a link connection between them.

I do get satisfaction when a customisation enhances my workflow but since I am much more interested in my main activity I don’t linger over it for long.

It’s perfectly healthy to get more interested in the tool rather than the work you might choose to use the tool for - if there were not people like that we wouldn’t have any tools !!! :rofl:

I just ain’t one of those people.

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#14

I have written many plugins in Tiddly Gittly · GitHub , they are usually small, and rapidly iterate using modern.dev framework.
making a plugin on weekend usually won’t consumes too much.

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#15

I so hear you! I think of this as classic executive-function challenge. The Y-task tinkering is “Oooh, Shiny!” compared to slogging along with the primary task.

On balance, I think TiddlyWiki’s flexibility has given me constructive ways to weed-whack my way through thickets of boredom. When work is feeling “dead” to my motivational circuits, I so often yearn for the low-hanging dopamine-fruit of an intuitive interface for the workflow that feels like a drag.

Compared to other rabbit-holes of procrastination (online shopping, sorting and speculating about MTG cards, opening up TikTok — gads!), there’s less debilitating guilt involved with the temptation to spruce up the view templates (or dynamic tables or fancy filter-pills or powerful cascade conditions, etc.).

Procrastination guilt is relatively low because (1) over the years I really have developed skills and tools that are useful, and (2) actually doing some work with the new fancy TiddlyFeature I’ve just built — even if I’ve spent a bit too long on it — is a natural segue to re-engaging with the otherwise-stultifying thing that I’m tempted to avoid.

In particular, I want to recognize the situation rather than let it take me by surprise. So I ask myself: is my executive function challenged on this task partly because of the navigational/cognitive friction of my task, and could some tinkering actually make a difference to this predicament, and return me to the task with greater poise and clarity? If the answer is yes, and I’m not under a stringent deadline, I tend to approve the side-trip.

Of course, some times I walk away from a work day disappointed that I’ve prioritized my time badly, and sometimes I walk away frustrated that some “easy enhancement” mirage has yielded nothing but technical confusion. And some times I indulge in a whole new intriguing TW project that is not really helping me with my actual work! (It may be 99% self-indulgent curiosity, and only 1% insight gleaned from proof-of-concept development.)

I think the suggestion by @TW_Tones — to know yourself, allow some diversions, but keep them within a timed interval — can be a generous way of meeting your temptations halfway. :wink:

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#16

Classic imagery!  

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#17

That’s the thing that confounds me… it’s not. I really, really want to do the “thing”,

But I just need to do a little bit of Y

because, as we all know, it’ll only take a minute. Right? :laughing:

Great post. You nailed it.

:dart:

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#18

This …

and this…

remind me of the American author, Earl Thompson. Just sayin’.

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#19

Thank you for this fantastic post!

And thankyou @CodaCoder for starting this wonderful thread!

#20

I think the desire to see the tinkering as bad is entirely subjective based on how we perceived the use of our time. We all have the same hours in the day, but we choose how to use them. You could be mindlessly watching YouTube or movies or TV shows, but instead you are tinkering with TW which is much more intellectually stimulating.

When I worked at an office job I had a tendency to tinker endlessly with various things, especially with spreadsheets. Now I can’t say every single hour I spent on these spreadsheets was the best use of my time, but what was the alternate? Doing something I didn’t want to do? We had a fairly open office format so it’s not like I could surf the web endlessly. In the end the tinkering saved me mental energy because optimizing a task made it much easier and I could focus on higher order tasks.

3 Likes
#21

At the end of the day isn’t putting off the inevatible what life’s all about? (Terry Pratchet line?)

#22

Discworld Reading Order Guide 3.0 (cropped)
Discworld Reading Order Guide 3.0 (cropped)1698×1787 542 KB

#23

I tinker a little but not too much. But I already had experience with too much tinkering on Emacs (where I have more than 2500 lines of configurations), so now I try to get more to the point x)

#24

Isn’t this the definition of yak shaving?