busybee fluffy rambles

Okay so a couple months ago I finally rearranged my bedroom, having spent four years here and finally realizing that the layout could be a lot better. It was a one-day project where I was just rearranging stuff and it’s made a huge difference to my quality of life, but it didn’t require any cash outlay, just a lot of energy and such.

While considering that stuff I also started to consider a rearrangement of my living room (for the same reasons), and Sunday I started to enact that plan, only to quickly discover that the particular furniture I have wasn’t a good fit for things and that my idea would make a bunch of aspects of my living room way worse.

My pain flareup is finally subsiding today, and also I had a followup appointment with my ENT and another CT scan on my sinuses, which found that I do not currently have sinus polyps, although I do have a mild deviated septum. The ENT thinks it’s not necessary to get surgery and that I can just continue to manage the occasional sinus infections as they come up, and that my usual ongoing management strategies are the way to go (which I assume means saline rinses and Sudafed, although we didn’t actually discuss those at all).

Here’s some stuff about stuff.

The last few days I’ve been having yet another awful chronic pain flareup. So it’s been one of those time periods when I kind of wish I didn’t have a body, or at least didn’t have to exist so much.

This time I don’t even know what brought it on, it just kind of came out of the blue, after a whole week of being too fatigued to do anything substantial.

I’m trying to finish up my remaining commitments for strawberry jam although everyone waiting for music from me is understanding and not in a huge rush. There’s one piece I want to get done today because the team is trying to wrap up development today but they also waited until the last minute to give me a specification for what they wanted so I’m not feeling too bad if I can’t get anything done for them, I guess.

For now I’m just going with Notion. Some aspects of its UI really piss me off and I especially wish I could turn off the AI bullshit and get it to stop trying to guess what I mean when I’m trying to FUCKING TELL IT WHAT I MEAN (especially since it always gets it wrong, but its guess overrides what I’m trying to write in the first place, please software developers stop doing this shit!!!) but it at least gives me the project/task nesting I need and its workflow is flexible enough that I can add the columns that I need.

The various responses I’ve gotten to yesterday’s post tell me that I need to be a bit more specific about what I mean by a “project,” because how it relates to my work is very different than how the various project-tracking tools do it.

Project-tracking tools think of a project as being a distinct set of work items, often shared by an entire team, going for a single end-goal deliverable. The tasks for a single project live on the project’s own board, and they do not intermingle.

However, in my situation, I am making music for a whole bunch of separate projects (external to me and my own planning), but which I want to all have visible in a single place. Some of these projects might only need one track. Some of them might need a dozen or so.

Hey! As I’m trying to get more serious about my music contracting stuff, I’m looking for a better way of managing my projects and requests and so on.

Here’s the criteria I’m going for:

• Self-hostable (and ideally free)

  I do not want to be beholden to someone company’s capricious whims about the future of their exponential growth platform.

• Public vs. private vs. shareable items

  It would be super useful for me to be able to link to a page which tells people how much work I have pending and also maybe be able to designate items as whether the public can see the specifics.

  Having a means of letting people also see progress on their specific items would be great, but not a requirement.

  I definitely need to be able to make some specifics or even the project/task names hidden to the public, but I still want people to be able to see that there is something going on even if they don’t know what.

• Nested items and/or project groupings

  When working on music, I want to be able to see what work needs to be done on a per-project basis, but also be able to see what work needs to be done in general. Ideally this would be a “containment” concept (i.e. sub-tasks of a larger task) and not a “relation” concept. Which is to say, there needs to be actual hierarchy.

• Freeform text entry for projects and tasks

  Usually client requests come with a whole bunch of information that needs to be browseable, and keeping it associated with the request itself would be stellar.

• Kanban view

  Being able to see the tasks in terms of a pending/in progress/delivered/complete view where I can move stuff from left to right as it progresses would be super helpful.

  Ideally things in the “complete” column would automatically age out.

• Priorities and due dates

  Sometimes a task has to get done by a certain time. Sometimes a task is a “nice to have.” Sometimes a task is just a placeholder for what work might eventually need to happen.