Welcome to the new blog portion of dausign.com. From around 2012 - 2015, I kept a wordpress portion of the site strictly for blogging. The majority of posts were from the 2 years we lived in Seoul. I had purchased a few vintage compact cameras and used to post those photos on a near daily basis. After we moved back to New York, I stopped taking photos, and stopped posting.
About a few years ago, a change in hosting had led to a failed migration of the wordpress database. Thus, there was a broken blog for a while. The main dausign site was also years old. I had redesigned it right before looking for a job.
It was finally time for a refresh. I had built and deployed a few test react sites through netlify and wanted to try out their free cms and jamstack. Using a boilerplate, I was able to get a site up and running, but I sat on that template for a few months toying with gsap animations with the dausign logo or toying with different components. I was a little stuck getting caught up on small details and was letting it sit for far too long.
From the mixture of these 3 books and concepts, plus a new pressure of looking for new work, here was my formula for finishing my site:
From the Getting Things Done philosophy, you should write out every task organized by each project and schedule so you don't have to worry about making mental notes that end up fragmenting your mind. Using Todoist I set up a dausign project with all the tasks needed to complete it.
This can be done in todoist where you mark what tasks need to be done for that day. For example, I wrote "Create mock for work page" which took me about 5 minutes, and then started coding from there.
In Atomic Habits, one way of starting a new habit is to commit to spending at least 2 minutes on your new habit. Starting something shouldn't be a challenge, so if you at least show up, and take it from there, you're already in the mindset. I did a few hours a day, so I was good to go.
In Deep Work, the main takeaways for me was to just remove all distractions and just consciously not check my email or instagram. Just knowing that taking 5 minutes to read a blog post, or check my email can actually derail my productivity. I'll leave important email notifications on, but that's it!