​LauraEarnest.com​

Deliberate Living Made Simpler.

“Don’t Do Speculative Coding” It’s intern season at work. This year we have two thoughtful and mature interns who are quick to pick things up. Working with interns can be a challenge, because it is typically their first exposure to the “real” world. One of our interns is making a system to keep our source data in sync by centralizing our retention policies. That means that we won’t come in to find that half of our data is gone because someone miskeyed a number in the wrong place. Our intern is thorough. And just like in school is trying to cover all the possible things that could go wrong. My colleague gave the intern a really good piece of advice: “Don’t do speculative coding.” What this means is we shouldn’t try to program for things that might happen in the future. Like we shouldn’t program for new databases that we may never have. We shouldn’t try to make things flexible for a product that currently doesn’t exist and behaves differently from anything we have now. Speculative coding is a good way to drive a programmer crazy, and make sure that the project is never finished. When thinking about it, though, I realized how much this principal plays out in productivity circles. Tools advertise as solving a bunch of new problems…but if you don’t have those problems, it’s nothing more than speculative programming. An example: a friend of mine was telling me about how he spent the entire weekend converting everything from OneNote to Confluence. His reason? OneNote might go away someday because the free version of OneNote was removed from Windows. I find that this goes along with the promises of many things to make life better/faster/easier. If a new tool/method is not solving a problem you currently have, it’s not worth weighting those claims in your evaluation. Agree? Disagree? Email me and let me know. Laura@lauraearnest.com.

Quick Productivity Tips

1. Take Time To Enjoy Nature: The world moves fast, and if we are careful, we don’t even notice what is going on around us. Most adults spend most of their time indoors, unaware of the changing seasons, and sometimes even the weather! By stepping outside and really looking around, even for a minute, you reconnect yourself to the planet and the world around you.
2. Back Up Your Address Book: Computer systems go down. Yes, even the cloud-based ones. Today, back up your address book to something else. If you use it in the cloud, bring it to your phone or PC. If it’s on your phone, back it up to your computer or the cloud. You get the idea. Redundancy is good in this case.
3. Create An Undeletable Folder On Your Phone: One of the annoyances of smart phones is the manufacturers install things that we can’t get rid of. Instead of letting them sit on your front screen (or any screen), create an “undeletable” folder and drag all the undeletable and unused apps into that folder.

From My Experience

I talk to my stepfather every Sunday. It’s something I enjoy - he’s got a great sense of humor and has always been loving and sympathetic. We video chat on Teams, which gives it a more personal connection, and we both get to see how the other is doing with our own eyes.

Inevitably he will ask what happened during the week. And as soon as he asks, my mind goes completely blank.

My daughter had the same complaint when she was an undergrad. “You tell me nothing is going on, and I come home and all this stuff has changed.”

I realized that I do have an idea of what happened - my bullet journal. I don’t do a huge amount of logging, but I do try to write things on the month page. Things like “moved the small fridge into the studio” or “watched Sheep Detectives” or “started studying Linear Algebra” or “rearranged the laundry closet”.

No, they’re not earthshaking events and will probably have no effect on either stepfather or daughter. But it is nice to review what I have done over the past week and realize that I did in fact have interesting experiences and events.

Articles This Month:

• ​My Bullet Journal Weekly Spread: I use my bullet journal weekly spread to organize maintenance tasks, long-term goals, and project deadlines—all at a glance.
• ​Why I Have So Many Pens: A Lesson in Impulse Buying: I break down my pen obsession, impulse buying, sunk costs, and how I learned to stop chasing “better” for good.

What Patrons Saw Obsolescence and Ownership​ I explore digital obsolescence and ownership, converting archives to universal formats like PDF and JPG to ensure long-term preservation. Why I Canceled Kindle Unlimited​ I canceled Kindle Unlimited to stop chasing shiny fiction, clear my backlog, and finally read nonfiction with real focus again. Become a Patron Supporting the blog on Patreon gets you exclusive benefits reserved for patrons. Check out the list of benefits and levels here.​