Wednesday, January 23

The weather felt colder than ever when I woke up this morning. I didn’t mind though because my new hibernation regime has started to pay off. I woke up feeling completely refreshed, having woken up in the middle of the night for forty minutes, made some notes about something on my mind, and gone right back into a deep sleep.

It occurred to me that I had begun to experience the benefits of the medieval second sleep I had spoken to the students about on Monday and yesterday.

I left the house in a flurry of snow. I arrived at Arcada in a thick snowstorm. Jutta phoned me to ask if I could tell her students that she had got stuck in a snow-powered traffic jam in Sippo.

I carried on with the Innovation students and at 11:00 I chaired an online Nobanet meeting; the first one since Eija had announced her retirement and, in effect, handed the project over to me.

I looked at Todoist in Kerala. I installed it on my iPad and played with it, wondering if this might help bind things together. In the week that I have been using it seriously it has proved invaluable. I spent some time in the afternoon getting it working the way I want it to work, and I felt confident that I had indeed found what I had wanted.

Todoist has the ability to create projects inside projects, as well as tasks inside tasks. This allowed me to set up the same organisational structure for my tasks as I have in both Dropbox and Evernote. It also lives everywhere (on my phone and iPad, in Chrome, Firefox and Outlook, and as a desktop app if I want). This has allowed me to use it to add things as they occur to me. Jutta said that I should email Jolanda as we walked down the corridor and I added it to the inbox as she spoke.

I sat and planned out two large projects (planning a new course and an application), and added all the students whose theses I will supervise as projects inside the Thesis project inside the Arcada project.

I realised that the real test will not involve setting things up but in looking back in three months time to see if I have kept up the habits it requires, or whether (like Trello) it soon revealed a raft of hidden constraints and limitations. So far, though, so very good.

At 17:30 I began my first conversation of the year with Scott Cunningham. Elize popped by to remind me about the Fulbright scholarship, and I told her the details I had discovered. Scott and I then talked about the illusory nature of movies, which I had thought about in India, after reading Graham Harman’s book on object oriented ontology. I argued that, using Peirce’s terms, they existed neither as existent reals nor as non-existent reals. Rather we should see them as contingent reals.

Scott kinda agreed, using kinda in the sense that Daniel Dennett means it.

At 19:05 I leapt out of the building and into the snow. I waited for a tram and eventually caught a bus.

At Itäkeskus I find a 93K bus waiting for me and grab the available front seat. The air feels monochrome, and a woman intent on catching the bus offers almost the only colour I can see. The bus starts and a downfall of snow starts with it.

I will not get home until after 20:00 which, under the new system, means that I will have a brief chat with Irma and then go straight to bed.