frozen octopus

I finally finished moving 800+ album listens from my old blog to this one. While it feels great to have everything under one roof, the process was a serious slog.

The technical side was a mixed bag:

• Setup: It took several hours of spreadsheet slog to get the data ready for the merge.
• Import: Once the data was clean, the actual import was a breeze.

The "Water Torture" Workflow

The biggest takeaway wasn't about the tech, but about my habits. I have a tendency to take giant projects and drip-feed them over months. I’ll set a repeating task like "Add all albums from today’s date" to make the work feel manageable.

I used to think "five minutes a day" was the best way to keep moving pieces forward. I've realized now that there's a mental toll to keeping a project in "active" status for that long.

Lessons Learned

I got my head around a couple categories my tasks can get sorted into:

• Slow Burn: Things like drum rehearsal. Five minutes a day is perfect here; consistency builds muscle memory.
• Burn Through: Data migrations and administrative overhauls. These are better handled in one focused "sprint" rather than being dragged out.

Dragging out a "Deep Dive" task is just mental water torture. I’m keeping that in mind when I look at my task list. Are there any other lingering projects I can kill or complete once and for all?

When I want to open an app on the MacBook, I have a keyboard shortcut setup to open the app launcher. The key combination I chose is preventing me from using a different shortcut to open the downloads folder. Since I live in the downloads folder, I had to decide on a different plan.

I decided to go all in with Spotlight. It is weird, I know, that I don't use Spotlight or the Documents folder. So I started in on doing everything with Spotlight. My life is now command-space, a right arrow push, and type the first couple of letters of the app name. It is one extra click, but it is very smooth.

The only issue is my muscle memory keeps trying to use the old shortcut. It has been days now, and my fingers keep hitting opt-command-L. It has gotten to the point where I am noting each day I keep hitting the old shortcut. How long is it going to take to unlearn a keyboard shortcut I have used for at least 10 years? Probably more like 15-20 years, maybe.

On the topic of keyboard shortcuts, a shortcut I use religiously has stopped working. I had shift-command-T set up to let me tag a file or folder. It was amazing because I have the Hazel app set up on my downloads folder to perform magic when a file is tagged. Ever since Tahoe was released, that has stopped working.

I thought it was a conflict with the Better Touch Tools app. That is not the case after some troubleshooting. If I relaunch Finder, my tagging keyboard shortcut works. After a while, it just stops working. It is very odd. Shrug level odd.

Also, when I try to tag a bunch of files at the same time, none of them get the tag. Again, odd.