Thinking in Public: Wearing blades as well as jewels (#01)
Happy 2024!
I'd like to start writing more this year, starting with dipping into the newsletter game. I'm calling it Thinking in Public, and I'll be writing about my process for learning about and making cool things in the open.
Remember why we wear blades as well as jewels. - Samantha Shannon, Priory of the Orange Tree.
In the epic fantasy book Priory of the Orange Tree, the Priory is a faction of female mage warriors who pass themselves off as handmaidens to important political figures with the goal of furthering their own goals. To maintain this ruse, members of the Priory must be able to fit in equally well at court, in the bedchamber, and in a fight. In short, they must be good at everything.
Sometimes, being a woman, especially in a male-dominated field, can feel like needing to be everything.
Even if you're not a woman, the knowledge work that many of us do can lead us to the point of exhaustion. Part of this is because we routinely fail to acknowledge the overhead that knowledge work comes with: the emails, the Slack messages, the meetings and scheduling. You could also call this busywork. There's also all the invisible prerequisities like research and looking for inspiration that are hard to quantify. Behind every Obsidian video I produce are years of taking notes on topics I didn't know would be useful, months of testing a new feature, and days of editing, planning, and post-production. All the stuff that's part of the process but is rarely seen.
But there's another type of work that isn't really overhead-- it's not part of the process, it's exhausting and tedious to do, and often we're not even asked to do it. Yet it contributes to overwork. So why do we do it?
Glue work
Tanya Reilly used the term glue work to refer to all the tasks we willingly take on "because someone has to," and that someone might as well be us... even if we're already struggling under our own workloads.
In my work in software engineering, glue work has looked like taking a break from coding to document coding standards for the company, mentoring a peer that's struggling, developing relationships with other teams I know we'll need to collaborate well with later, discussing market positioning with Product to try to change the requirements-- even though none of that ever shows up in my job description.
Glue work applies to solopreneurs, too. It can look like stepping back from the main thing I'm doing, like creating content, to participate in free market research for potential new tools, speaking on a podcast to help a new creator, overdelivering value I never promised to give, or giving 1:1 tech support to surprise and delight a stranger.
By Denise Yu, @deniseyu@mastodon.social
Glue work can be the jewels we adorn ourselves with-- because deep down, we don't think we're enough. We don't think our work is enough. So we get into a cycle of overadornment in glue work, accepting far more work than we should, in an effort to be enough. To be everything.
What if we already are enough? What if we're already on top of things? What if we're productive enough, our notes complete enough, our work useful enough?
Circuit breaker pattern
There's an interesting phenomenon I see frequently when performance tuning a system (usually a microservices-based one), where in the face of a lot of user traffic, the amount of communication between the multiple backend services must step up, to the point that sometimes, the communication itself causes issues. It's a "too many cooks in the kitchen" kind of problem, where they're all trying to do different parts of the same task and frantically sending each other messages to see if someone's work has been completed so that they can do their own work. Inevitably, someone slips, the others don't notice or respond appropriately to the error, and often, this leads to a cascading failure of the entire system.
In this scenario, the best thing to do is to institute what's called a circuit breaker pattern.
From Unsplash In collaboration with Vinicius "amnx" Amano
We can implement a circuit breaker by introducing a proxy, a machine that serves as a control mechanism to monitor and control the communication issues. Sometimes this involves dimming: reducing the amount of traffic that makes it to the system in the first place (either across the board or based on some criterion like task or user priority). Other times it involves exponential backoff: instituting controls around how the frenzied services respond to an error, so that they gradually request things less and less frequently from each other if they encounter an error.
In short, the circuit breaker pattern makes the system faster by making its components slower.
The circuit breaker pattern can be applied to the productivity of humans, too. We can reduce the amount of work coming out way in the first place (dimming) by having an automatic no list, using templates to say no, setting up boundaries, defensive calendaring, and using calendar blocking to quantify overhead. On the flip side, we could also be quicker to implement exponential backoff when we see we're overloaded by using nonviolent communication with ourselves as well as others, talking about emotions at work, letting the stress cycle play out even when the stressor is gone, and stopping ourselves when we're in a state of joyless urgency.
Circuit breakers are a line of defense. They can be difficult to institute because they require saying no early and often. They have sharp edges-- on purpose-- because sometimes we have to draw blood to make others back off.
To be sustainably and happily productive, we must remember why we wear blades as well as jewels: to protect the core of who we are from the world that wants a piece of us.
Stuff I'm consuming
- 📕 Jorge Arango's book Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind through Connected Notes is out, and it's a methodology-light take on thinking through digital notes. I'm featured in it, and I also reviewed it. Buy it here and use the code NVDH for 15% off until January 26th.
- 📝 Obsidian released the results of an independent security audit by Berlin-based Cure53, which had them improving some vulnerabilities in Obsidian Sync and local file access via plugins, among other things. This is a positive signal that the team is taking security seriously.
- 💻 KNHaw created an Obsidian clipper for the Thunderbird email app that sends bits from emails to Obsidian.
- 🎥 The Obsidian Excalidraw plugin now supports image cropping and masking within Obsidian, bringing more visual capabilities to a predominantly text-based tool.
- 📝 TfTHacker wrote a FastStart Script to make Obsidian faster on mobiles and older devices, something that I've complained about.
- 🎥 Andy Polaine interviewed Oliver Reichenstein about iA Writer's new authorship feature to distinguish when text has been pasted from AI.
- 📕 I've started reading YouTuber Ali Abdaal's Feel Good Productivity, about reframing productivity as fun.
- 💬 The nomination list for the yearly Obsidian awards, Gems of the Year 2023, has been released, and as always, it's a treasure trove of the best plugins, themes, tools, and content related to Obsidian for the last year.
- 💻 Canvas Candy is a paid upgrade to the Obsidian Canvas feature that I've been trying out. It's also created by TftHacker, developer of the Strange New Worlds plugin.
- 💻 Noteshare.space by Maxime Cannoodt is an alternate to Obsidian Publish that I've been looking into. It seems similar to Obsius Publish, which I've covered previously, but better documented and supported.
- 📕 Good Talk by Daniel Stillman is a book I finished recently about applying principles of design to improve the flow of conversations.
- 📱 I've really been loving the mobile app Snipd for podcast consumption - here are my AI podcast notes for the Cortex Podcast's episode on 2024 Yearly Themes that it generated for me.
- 📝 Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin's Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again is a love letter to open-source, decentralization, and web3, and a strong statement of some values I also hold dear.
Changelog
Here's stuff I've created in public in the last month.
NVDH - PKM and productivity
- My workflow for making videos with Obsidian is a behind-the-scenes look at my video creation process
- Why I'm not setting objectives in Obsidian is about why I'm going with a yearly theme this year
- I interviewed information architect Jorge Arango about Links vs tags vs folders: knowledge gardening for Obsidian.
- Note taking templates I use in Obsidian is a walkthrough of how I'm using the Obsidian Templater plugin in my personal vault.
- My Daily Tech for work and play is a fun list of all the physical gear I use every day.
- How I refactor notes in Obsidian reframes the development concept of refactoring for note-taking.
- The last 100 notes I edited on my public Obsidian vault.
Grafana Labs - observability and performance
- 🇪🇸 (Spanish) Enteniendo los sintéticos, on the case for synthetic monitoring
- An introduction to eBPF monitoring, with Nikola Grčevski
- Observability for AI microscopy, with Chris Field and Mihail Volkov
- Getting started with OpenTelemetry, with Juraci Paixāo
- Distributed tracing and Grafana Tempo, with Joe Elliott
Adobo & Avocados - intersectionality in tech
- Building technical communities, with Tara Walton
- Learning about glue work and quiet quitting, with Vernon Richards
- DevOps culture from a tester's perspective, with Lisa Crispin
- Personal branding for engineers, with Marie Cruz
Thanks for reading! Obrigada por ler!
Nicole
If you'd like to support me, you can buy my course Obsidian for Everyone, now discounted to 150 EUR, sign up for my Patreon, or tell others about this newsletter! Some of the links in this issue are affiliate links, but I only use them for things I love.