2024-10-31

🤔 More thoughts on Linear Processes

Household Chores

I don’t love doing dishes.
But we have a nice process that makes it easy to do a little at a time.
Same with laundry.
Something about this reminds me of a Kanban planning scheme I designed for work a while back.

Kanban

Actually, I think these are all examples of Kanban systems. In Kanban, the flow of work is not necessarily represented by paper cards or digital representations of sticky notes. A basket that moves laundry from the bedroom to the laundry room is a form of Kanban.
Maybe these are all Linear Processes.

Non-linear processes

I think I tend to think of home organization as a non-linear process. It’s big, complex, and overwhelming. To make progress, I may need to hire experts and spend days organizing and engineering systems to maintain organization. A flurry of intense activity is required in a short period of time. Otherwise we may wind up with half the house inside out and unusable, making things worse.

System Design

But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe we can design an organization process that is nice in the same way that the dishes, laundry, and Kanban planning are nice. A process where incremental progress can happen a little at a time. Where a little work yields a little improvement. This would make the effort a lot less overwhelming. A lot easier. Progress could be made.

Linear Organization

What would this linear home organization process look like?
I’m imagining a system that looks like combination of Kanban planning and laundry.
My wife and I can collect ideas on a Kanban board.
A little at a time, we can expand and define these ideas, adding critical details about goals, outcomes, and the steps necessary to move ideas to reality.
When an idea is well fleshed out and we agree it should be done, we can start working one little step at a time.
The execution plan should be linear to be well behaved.
Each step should leave the house in a state of minimal disruption.
We don’t want a closet organization project paused in a way that prevents us from getting dressed on a daily basis.

Much Ado about Planning?

I pause and reflect.
This feels almost revolutionary.
Exciting.
Novel.
Wow.
A way convert a big, overwhelming, potentially disruptive venture into a series of small, easy, safe steps to achieve a goal.
Designing linear processes!
Wow. So sophisticated. The welding of abstract mathematics to tame menacing real life projects.
Or is this just planning?
Write down a goal. Split a big project into little tasks. Complete work a bit at a time.
Peer into the future. Simulate activities. Look for problems in the simulation. Write down the steps.
Do people do this all the time?
Am I discovering something obvious?
I can’t tell. Maybe I’ll ask around.
I guess it doesn’t matter much for me.
Whether planning or designing linear processes is obvious to the rest of the world or not, it’s useful to me.

Blogging

I think this is also a linear process.

I get an idea
I open my phone
I write a few words
I publish my notes
I revisit an idea
I revise prior writing
I publish again

I can write and publish a little at a time and my website grows on its own.
I did a bit of planning when I started this.
And I’ve done bits more over time.
A little more structure here, a little more writing there.
Continuous, gradual, incremental improvement.
Pretty cool, I think.

A Test

⏳ Let’s see how easily I can find my notes on setting up this blogging system to drop a link.
My blogs posts are currently untitled (minus the date), which makes the Reflections index of limited use.
But I can search for key terms, like “obsidian publish” and see what comes back.
Boom second of 2 results: 2024-04-21. Easy.
Thank you, me from 6 months ago! Look what we’ve done! 😊

Okay. Enough for now. Back to my morning routine…

Static APIs

Under certain circumstances, it can be beneficial to replace servers hosting a web API with a pre-generated set of data hosted as static files.
I’ve seen this idea bare fruit at work in the past and I’m about to apply the trick again in a new context.
Does this pattern have a name?
I’d like to reference some literature on the topic while planning this project but I’m struggling to find much source material.
After a few searches, groping in the dark for key words, I came across the term static API. This is an apt label for the pattern, but the sparsity of search results has me wondering if there’s a more common name for this pattern.

A few blog articles come up in web searches:

Similar concepts:

caching
memoization
precomputation
static site generation

bagrounds.org

Explorer