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Vimwiki with Google Drive on ChromeOS
In the past few years my work heavily shifted towards being mostly done in a web browser. Much of what I use today is email and documents, and Iām able to SSH into a dedicated Linux machine for rare instances of coding or running some scripts. Because of that my primary machine these days is a trusty Chromebook - really just a web browser with an OS stapled on top of it.
Iāve used Vimwiki extensively for nearly 10 years now: itās a fantastic way to organize my thoughts and everything I learn about the world, and it works with the tool I know and love - Vim. My Vimwiki followed me across machines, and I use Google Drive to keep it in sync regardless of the environment I use the Vimwiki in.
It took me way longer than I would like to admit to get Vimwiki working on my Chromebook: here lies the journey of getting the Vimwiki to work on a ChromeOS. There are three major hurdles I had to jump over:
- Getting Vim to run on ChromeOS.
- Getting Vimwiki, Google Drive, and ChromeOS to play together nicely.
- Getting the web view to work.
Good news is that ChromeOS allows you to run a Linux environment. Bad news, is that things canāt get a tiny bit finnicky.
First, set up Linux to run on ChromeOS via āSettings > Advanced > Developers > Linux Development Environment > Turn onā. After a few prompts and a freshly brewed cup of coffee, youāll have a Debian Linux environment running on your Chromebook.
Newly installed Linux is accessible from the terminal:
Pop open the terminal and update Vim and get the latest version of Python:
sudo apt install python3 vim
Download and install Vimwiki however youād like: there are extensive instructions on GitHub. If youāre anything like me, you might have a self-installing vim-plug, and all you need is just plop your existing .vimrc into your Chromebook Linux instance.
Now, for getting Google Drive, Vim, and ChromeOS to play together. ChromeOS and Linux are integrated well enough, and you can access your home directory through ChromeOS native file manager:
To share files in another direction, thereās a handy āShare with Linuxā option for files:
This option shares files with Linux via
/mnt/chromeos
. In Google Drive, I have avimwiki/
folder which containswiki/
andwiki_html/
. Iām able to share that folder, and update Vimwiki configuration accordingly:let g:vimwiki_list = [{ \ 'path': '/mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive/vimwiki/wiki/', \ 'template_path': '/mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive/vimwiki/wiki/templates', \ 'template_default': 'default', \ 'template_ext': '.html'}]
Now thereās a corner case I ran into when I had Vimwiki set up on a different account than the one I use to log into the Chromebook. Only the primary accountās Google Drive shows up in ChromeOS file manager. To work around that, I had to share my
vimwiki/
folder with the primary account, and then share that with Linux. The resulting directory was available through a/mnt/chormeos/GoogleDrive/ShortcutsSharedWithMe/...
:At this point Vimwiki works just fine: working with the wiki and generating HTML is functional. All thatās left is getting the generated Vimwiki to show up in the web browser. Ever since Chrome disabled local file access, I (expectedly) havenāt been able to get
:Vimwiki2HTMLBrowse
to function, since simplefile:///
URLs arenāt accessible for security reasons.Thatās where Python comes in, with itās native web server module. I made a small alias in my
.bashrc
:alias vimwiki="cd /mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive/vimwiki/ && python3 -m http.server"
Next thing you know, Iām finally able to access the generated web version of my Vimwiki via
localhost:8000/wiki_html
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The Eisenhower matrix
The Eisenhower matrix, sometimes known as the priority matrix, is an invaluable planning tool, and something I have been consistently using for the better part of the last decade.
As someone who has a short attention span and easily gets overwhelmed, I find Eisenhower matrix to be an invaluable tool in allowing me to focus on whatās important, rather than whatās right in front of me.
Oh, I still struggle to make sure that things that are important to me are what matters to others, but thatās a whole different battle - at the very least Iām able to keep my own head straight, and thatās a win in my book.
Without any further ado, I present to you the decision making framework developed and popularized by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States (and clearly a notorious efficiency nut).
Itās pretty simple, really. Take everything from your long single-file To-Do list, and place it on the matrix based on its urgency and importance. Work through the matrix in the following order:
- Urgent and important: get these done, now.
- Important, but not urgent: decide when you want to do these, actively make time for yourself to work on those.
- Urgent, but not important: delegate (read on below if you have no one to delegate to).
- Not urgent and not important: take time to eliminate these tasks.
Do now: a common pitfall
Itās easy to throw everything into the āurgent and importantā pile. In reality, thatās not often the case. If you find yourself throwing everything in the first quadrant - I implore you to think of your tasks in relative terms. Out of everything on your mind, Iām sure some things are more important than others.
I find that over time most of my work shifts into a single quadrant (usually the āimportant, but not urgentā), and I find it helpful to redistribute those, or populate the matrix from scratch.
Schedule: mindful use of time
One of the goals of the Eisenhower Matrix is to increase visibility into how you spend your time. While itās easy to spend most of the time in the āurgent and importantā quadrant, the best work happens in the āimportant, but not urgentā section of the matrix. Thatās where the best use of your time is, and thatās where most of the energy and attention should be spent.
Otherwise youāre just running around like a chicken with its head cut off, although I can sympathise with the difficulty of getting out of the urgency trap. Itās not trivial, and probably downright impossible in some cases.
This is where the biggest pitfall of the Eisenhower matrix lays in my experience. You want to maximize amount of time spent in the āscheduleā quadrant, but you donāt want to end up with a massive list that becomes a yet another To Do list, because one dimensional To-Do lists suck.
Delegate: to whom?
Not everyone has someone to delegate work to. Or not everything can be delegated. In these cases, I treat the ādelegateā bucket the same as āeliminateā. Hopefully that wonāt come back to bite me in the future.
Eliminate: itās hard
I really like following up on things, to a fault. I donāt like leaving loose ends, unanswered emails, or unspoken expectations. I find it helpful to schedule time to explicitly eliminate certain work, and communicate explicit expectations to everyone around me about that. Because of that, thatās where the most of my procrastination happens. Telling people ānoā isnāt always easy, and I still donāt have the best process for combing through the āEliminateā quadrant.
I know many people are a lot more comfortable letting unimportant things quietly fall through the cracks, and thereās nothing wrong with that.
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High stakes email checklist
Iām making a little cheat sheet for myself. As I progress in my career, much of my work revolves around communication, and Iād be remiss if I donāt share a formal framework I use. I like checklists, spreadsheets, and anything else that organizes the world around me, and itās fun to make one about communications.
Checklist
This is a checklist for high stakes emails, letās dig in:
- Goals
- What are you trying to accomplish? Why? (It could be worth asking why multiple times.)
- Will this email help you accomplish the goal?
- Can the goal be summarized in a single sentence? If not, itās probably not specific enough.
- Audience
- Who is the audience?
- What does the audience care about? How can you connect the subject of your email to things they care about?
- Does every recipient need to be there? Whoās missing?
- What action do you want the reader to take? Is there a clear call for action? For executive communications (who have notoriously short attention span), youāll want to both start and end with the same call for action.
- Content
- Is there a nuance that would be lost in email that requires face to face conversation? Does this need to be an email?
- Does every sentence and paragraph support your goal?
- Does this need a TL;DR?
- Is the narrative structure in place? Is there a clear beginning, middle, and end? No need to write a novel, but without this the content risks being disjoined.
- Impulse
- Is now the best time to send it? Friday afternoon is almost always a no-no, unless you purposely want the reader to pay less attention to the issue.
- If this was shared broadly, would you rephrase it? If yes - you definitely
should.
- To double down, if email is about someone, write as if that someone will eventually see it. Itās fine to be candid, itās not fine to be rude.
- Are you angry? Upset? I get notoriously cranky in the late afternoon, and avoid sending anything important until the next day - or, if time sensitive, until taking a short break or a walk.
Example
Letās apply this to an example. Say, Iām writing a book, and the editor Iām working with hasnāt been responsive. Iāve tried talking to them about it, but theyāre not responsive. I think itās the time to escalate to their supervisor.
Hereās the quick, dirty, and impulsive draft I would write:
Hello X,
Y hasnāt been responsive when reviewing the chapters, and itās really difficult to get back to chapters after a whole week passes by. By then I donāt even have the context! Iāve raised this multiple times and to no avail. Can you please get Y to be more responsive or find another editor for me to work with? I havenāt been able to make meaningful progress in a month!
Pretty brusque, isnāt it? I donāt normally dissect every email like this, but sometimes it helps to take a closer look and formalize the decision making behind each sentence. Thankfully, much of this becomes habitual over time.
Goals
First things first, I want the editor to be more responsive. Why? To have a shorter feedback loop when it comes to making changes. Why? To make it easier to write - itās difficult to come back to the chapter after a long amount of time passed. Why? This pushes back timelines for each chapter.
I donāt really care about how to achieve this goal: the same person can be more responsive, or maybe I get a new point of contact to work with. Maybe there are other options I havenāt considered.
To summarize in a single sentence, the goal is to āreduce the feedback loopā.
Audience
The audience is the editorās supervisor, or maybe someone else from the editorial team whoāll have the incentive to escalate.
I know that the timelines are very important to this publisher, which is something I can use. I can frame the concerns around impacts of the timeline - even if itās not something I necessarily care about myself.
Since there are multiple ways to achieve my goal and I donāt particularly care about how, I can make the call for action open ended. Iām doing this because Iām comfortable with either outcomes - like the editor not being to improve response times, but the publisher providing more leniency around the schedule - which, while isnāt ideal, still helps.
Content
As multiple people can help me accomplish a goal, and I might not be aware of all of relevant parties - email format works best.
Narrative structure here is simple - I have a problem (the beginning), hereās why itās bad (the middle), letās fix it (the end).
This email is short enough not to require a TL;DR.
Impulse
As my concern is about a particular person, I have to talk about them. I donāt want to avoid candor, but I can approach the situation with empathy and assumption of best intentions something along the lines of: āI understand X has other commitmentsā. Focusing on facts and leading with empathy would help here.
Having an unresponsive editor is definitely frustrating, so itās worth taking a step back, and maybe paying extra attention - thereās no use having frustration show through.
The result
After running through the checklist, we end up with (what I hope is) a better, more actionable, and less icky email:
Hello X,
When working with Y, it takes up to a week for me to receive feedback on the chapters I wrote. I understand Y is working with multiple engagements, but Iām concerned about the timelines for the book. If we continue as is, itās likely weāll have to push publishing date by X months.
Could you help me find a resolution here?
Itās short, omits unnecessary details, and leaves the reader with a clear (but open ended) call for action. Now, all thatās left is to schedule send that email in a morning, and wait for a response!
- Goals
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Exercising online privacy rights
Following Europeās 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California passed its own California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2020. I wonāt pretend to understand the intricacies of the law or the differences between the two, but from what I understand this gives you the right to know exactly what data of yours do businesses use, and request that this information is to not be sold or to be deleted.
As a California resident, I decided to dedicate a long weekend to exercising my privacy rights. The long weekend turned into a week worth of back and forth with a dozen-or-so companies, and me having a much better idea of what information about me is out there.
Turned out many large websites provide privacy dashboards where youāre able to review and see information collected or inferred about you. But most of this data is hidden behind a formal request process which takes a few days to a week.
First, I decided to stroll through Googleās privacy settings. There are two ways forward: privacy dashboard, or full-on Google Takeout. Google Takeout allows you to download an archive of everything Google has on you, which took a few days to process, and is near impossible to go through while keeping your sanity. So I decided to play with the privacy dashboard instead.
Google Maps has location history of most places Iāve visited for the past ten or so years (creepy, but I found it useful on more than one occasion), and YouTube and Search history stores thousands of searches. I already had Assistant history disabled, since storing audio recordings is apparently where I draw the line when it comes to privacy. Targeted ad profile was an interesting thing to look at, accurately summing up my lifestyle in 50 words or less. I ended up disabling targeted ads from Google (and all other services as I went about on my privacy crusade).
Google had some of the finest privacy controls compared to other services, with actionable privacy-leaning suggestions. Googleās not known for its services playing well together, but privacy is where Google feels closer to Apple experience - everything is in a single place, surfaced in the same format, easy to control, and plays well together. Given the amount of transparency and fine grained control, I feel pretty good staying in the Google ecosystem.
Next I looked at LinkedIn. Outside of the expected things ā emails, phone numbers, messages, invitations, and a history of just about everything Iāve ever clicked on, a file labeled āinferencesā stood out. Whether LinkedIn thinks youāre open to job seeking opportunities, or what stage of career you are in, or if you travel for businesses, or if youāre a recruiter or maybe a senior leader in your company.
Since LinkedIn is a professional network, all information I share is well curated and is meant as public by default ā and I found LinkedIn privacy settings in line with my expectations.
As an avid gamer, I went through Steam, Good Old Games, Ubisoft, Epic Games, and Origin privacy details. Unsurprisingly, the services tracked every time I launched every game, shopping preferences, and so on. Thankfully the data seemed confined to the world of gaming ā which made this level of being creepy somewhat okay in my book.
I also looked at random websites I use somewhat frequently ā Reddit, StackOverflow, PayPal, Venmo, AirBnB, and some others ā not too many surprises there, although I did end up tightening privacy settings and opting out of personal data sharing and ad tracking for every service.
Last year I requested deletion of all my data on Mint, Personal Capital, and YNAB (You Need a Budget), and to be honest Iām a little relived that I didnāt have to look at the data these companies had on me.
Amazon data sharing turned out to be the scariest finding. Until now I didnāt really self-identify as a heavy Amazon user, but that turned out to be a lie: Prime shopping, Kindle, Audible, Prime Video.
The amount of data Amazon kept on me was overwhelming: Kindle and Audible track every time I read, play, or pause books, the Amazon website keeps full track of browsing habits, and Prime Video has detailed watch times and history. Most of this data ties back into real world ā including nearly every address I ever lived at or phone numbers I had.
Even scarier, despite never using Alexa, I found numerous recordings of my voice from close to a decade ago ā me checking status of the packages, but a few of me just breathing and walking around. I found no way of deleting these, as they didnāt show up in any privacy settings (including me installing an Alexa app just to get into privacy settings).
All of this gave me pause. It feels like the privacy controls are either lacking, hidden, or spread out thin across Amazonās various apps. And Iāve only briefly scanned through the data Amazon had on me.
Thatās where I had to take a break.
I have accounts with hundreds of services, and I have no idea how my personal data is used, and what itās joined with. As Iām go on about my daily life, Iāll start tightening privacy controls, and maybe deleting services and their data where possible.
Itās just too creepy for my taste.
While you have control over the services you have accounts for, companies and ISPs collect a trove of private information on you even while youāre not logged in. For that, I strongly recommend using a VPN. Iāve been using PIA since 2019 and Iāve been very happy with it. Wholeheartedly recommend.
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Experience with financial planners
As Iām starting to write more about early retirement, I think more and more about financial planners and advisors Iāve talked to along the way. The first financial planner I ever talked to (whoās been now fired from a role of my financial advisor and promoted into a position of friendship) reminded me about the beginning of the journey after reading one of the FIRE articles Iāve posted earlier this month.
Iāve talked to half a dozen financial planners over the past 5-or-so years. Some of those conversations have been very influential, and some have been more aggravating than anything else ā but it was a net positive experience for me.
The aforementioned financial advisor Iāve had the pleasure to talk to was a colleagueās spouse. Iāve voiced my interest in early retirement, and we decided to sit down and run through a financial overview.
Iāve learned a lot from this meeting, and the advisor helped me frame my knowledge, and fill in the gaps for everything Iāve learned on the Internets. The biggest value came from leveraging tax-advantaged accounts and employment benefits: maximizing 401(k), IRA, and HSA contributions, leveraging IRA backdoor and 401(k) megabackdoor (I just talked about these in detail in āAccessing retirement funds earlyā). We discussed fund selections, risk profiles, and even touched on housing. It was great to have an opportunity to have someone who knows what theyāre talking about answer all the questions that built up over the years.
The conversation had profound impact on my initial portfolio and investment strategy, and set pace for early retirement planning. With the confidence of having my plan and assumptions validated, I went on with my investments (employing the āslow, boring and steadyā strategy, if youāre interested).
After some time said colleague and his spouse became our family friends: and I donāt much care for doing business with friends.
After that experience, I struggled to find the person I would work with for a prolonged amount of time.
At some point I thought I found āmy guyā: a financial planner who was familiar with early retirement, and was eager to do additional research for just about any topic I could ask. Unfortunately for me it didnāt take long for āmy guyā to soar through corporate ranks and get promoted past working with individual clients.
This is where the cracks started to show. For many financial planners, early retirement refers to age 55. And that makes sense ā retirement in your 30s is such a niche topic! Most financial planning tools donāt account for this. Things like tapping into 401(k) or IRA balances before age 59 1/2 is not something supported by the rigid financial projection tooling.
Your typical financial planner will not be intimately familiar with the intricacies of early retirement ā or any other niche topics for that matter. And thatās okay. Because financial professionals still know their shit ā and itās much easier for them to make professional judgement about things your smart ass found online.
The best financial planners I talked to were willing to listen and put in work outside of our calls. Those folks would understand my concerns, supplement their answers with research, and come back with educated opinions.
A model that works for me is providing my questions and concerns in advance of the call, giving the advisor time to research niche and domain specific questions.
Financial planners worked for me especially well for two purposes:
- Confirm that my understanding of something is correct.
- Tell me about things I donāt know or havenāt thought about.
This is where a financial planner pointed out that I misunderstood 401(k) contribution limits, or didnāt consider implications of varied cost of health insurance in retirement. This is the person I bombarded with an hour worth of questions about my auto insurance or the need for umbrella policy.
One time fee advisors worked best for me. I know some folks who moved assets under management for a certain percentage of those assets in fees, and are now trying to get out. This worked okay for them early on, but ended up not being what they want as they became more financially savvy. And it turned out to be oh-so-expensive in the long run.
And there are many things I had to watch out for along the road. Some advisors Iāve talked to seem to have no idea what theyāre talking about, and just sound misguided. And itās not solely my opinion - sometimes I would write down something a person would say, ask for independent opinion, and get back āWhat drugs are they on? I would like some of that!ā
Thereās also the question of their interest.
Some financial advisors might be inclined to sell things like lucrative whole term life insurance, and while in certain cases itās appropriate, it might not always work for all individuals. But it sure as hell pays well for those advisors, so itās hard to fault them for peddling the insurance.
The United States has a fiduciary system thatās supposedly requires a planner to work in your best interest (I personally learned about it from this Last Week Tonight show episode).
If youāve done a lot of your own research (and especially if you havenāt) ā it certainly wouldnāt hurt to talk to professional and review your decisions. Someone who has an idea of what theyāre doing can go a long way in making sure youāre not heading down the wrong path ā and if you are ā youāre doing it with full awareness of the trade offs youāre making. Just be mindful of pitfalls when doing so.