Basecamp tools for personal calmness life
Makzan’s Dispatch 2020 week 27—29
From time to time, I keep coming back to the previously used software. When this keeps happening, I know which software to stick with. So far, Things and Basecamp are so far the tools that I keep coming back most. So I know I shall build my workflow around them. Things for productivity and Basecamp for life calmness.
How I manage my life in Basecamp?
The HQ is called “MZ Life”, which I have a list called “Purpose of my life”. I ask myself the 50,000 ft questions there: Why do I exist? What is the purpose of my life?
I create one task list every day and add comments there. It acts as my daily work-log. At the end of the day, I save the list as PDF for archiving. This is an updated approach to my GitHub-issue-per-day approach.
I write diaries in “Auto Check-ins”. Basecamp sends me an email every evening and I just need to reply to the email to record my diary.
I keep a “Thoughts” board that I write down my thoughts. When I have different views on the same thought, I leave comments there. It is a list of how my mind changes from time to time.
I keep a “Today I Learnt” space which I store files and notes that I transformed from my daily readings and online course learning.
I store the web links that I encountered in a “Web Surfing” feed. These are the links that I mostly won’t need to revisit, but if I do, I know where to find them.
It gives me calmness when I store things in Basecamp. I know the past of myself was there. The future myself can come back and connect the dots whenever it is the time. And currently, I am just focusing on the current view, without any distractions. No more worrying about other pieces of stuff because I know they are there.
Links worth sharing
→ Three CSS Alternatives to JavaScript Navigation
https://css-tricks.com/three-css-alternatives-to-javascript-navigation/
The /menu solution is a good choice with a combination of Turbolinks page caching.
The key to use a horizontal scrolling menu is to make the last item appearing half on the right edge. If the items divide the width space evenly, people may not notice the menu items are horizontal scrollable.
Checkbox and details allow many CSS-only toggling UI.
There is a fourth alternative that uses anchor link and footer menu. Make the “menu” links to `#footer-nav` and put a “Back to top” link in the footer navigation.
Whatever menu solutions used, we shall also make the most important menu items always visible because “Obvious always wins”
→ To grid or not to grid
https://sarahmhigley.com/writing/grids-part1/
→ Style Stage
https://stylestage.dev/
It reminds me the CSS Zen Garden. And the creator behind them, ModernCSS.dev, has many valuable CSS posts.
→ Mmhmm.app
https://www.mmhmm.app/
A neat screencast recording software that saves tons of time to create selfie video presentations.
→ Managing risk with the NASA Risk Matrix
https://nesslabs.com/nasa-risk-matrix
In their own words, the NASA Risk Matrix is “a graphical representation of the likelihood and consequence scores of a risk.”
Code worth sharing
→ Conic Gradient Border
https://codepen.io/argyleink/pen/pogZxaZ
→ JaidedAI/EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40+ languages supported including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai
https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR
Until next week,
Thomas Mak
