Say you’re on WordPress, and say you have a code block.

This is a code block.

That’s fine, but with code I usually want monospace:

This is monospace code.

The way to do that is as follows:

1. Create a code block.
2. Click "More" (the downward caret) in the formatting menu that goes with the block.
3. Click "Keyboard input".

As you can see above, you can apply it to individual lines or to all the code, just like formatting any other bit of text.

I had to search a bit to find this, so I’m posting primarily as a reminder to myself.

These steps work as of the time of this writing. They could always change.

Two fundamental computer science problems that anyone who’s studied the topic will recognize are searching and sorting. These are intuitive enough at a high level:

• Search algorithms scan a bunch of data to find what you’re looking for
• Sorting algorithms take a bunch of data and re-arrange it into some order (that may be alphabetizing, grouping, labeling, whatever)

We use these principles outside the classroom as well. Consider email. The modern “knowledge worker” is inundated with emails, and there’s a certain subculture that constantly strives for “Inbox Zero” as a solution to the problem. I would argue that’s not the optimal strategy for most people, most of the time.

Inbox Zero is a strategy that’s heavy on sort and light on search. You want to classify emails, put some in folders, capture the information from as many as necessary, and delete as much as possible. That’s often useful, but a little bit of upfront work can handle a lot of that for you, and when you take those steps the Inbox Zero approach becomes much less attractive than it superficially appears.

As an example, here’s my strategy, which consists of a couple of sorting strategies and then (mostly) letting search handle the rest.

Sorting

The first sorting mechanism I have is the simplest one: unsubscribe to as many lists as you can. That’s great and for most commercial services I’ve done it, but I also receive emails from…

• the Beowulf cluster mailing list
• auto-pay services
• the Earlham CS admin mailing list
• the Earlham faculty mailing list
• the ECCS GitLab instance if someone pushes an update
• our wiki when someone makes a change

I don’t need every single message in all of those categories, but I know I’ll need or want some of them, so I can’t just delete them. That’s where filters come in.

I rely on (entirely too many) email filters on my Mac Mail client to handle preprocessing for me. Each filter applies a set of rules to incoming emails based on certain information in the email, often sender or subject contents. It takes many minutes/few hours to set up initially, but adding to it incrementally is quick and simple after. For that reason, it’s most of the sorting I ever do.

Those two tactics – cutting subscriptions and running filters – account for all of the sorting I do more than once every couple of months. That’s because I want the power of…

Searching

The major downside of deleting emails (especially if you then clear the trash, as I imagine most Inbox Zero people want to do) is that you can no longer search the content. Even if you think you’ve written everything down and downloaded every document, there’s a chance that something you consider unimportant now will become important later. Your ability to remember the context of an exchange depends on how well you’ve captured the details in your notes, and you may not know all the details you need for a long time.

The ability to search every message a human being has sent me in the last several months is handy. It’s not something I do all the time, but it has high value on the occasions when I do it. I’ve recovered many documents, resolved ambiguities during meetings, and revived forgotten but important conversations by doing this.

Why Inbox Zero?

Space is cheap, (human) time is expensive, search is extremely useful, sorting is only modestly useful… and yet we spend a lot of human time rearranging messages. Why?

I think the answer is obvious: It looks and feels nice to have a squeaky-clean inbox. An inbox full of messages feels like clutter, and clutter is a stressor.

That’s a perfectly valid reason! It’s why, a couple of times a year, I reach for Inbox Zero myself. I’ll apply a bunch of sorting to my inbox: deleting, archiving, moving things to new folders, etc. It’s just not necessary most of the time. My attention, like most people’s, is much better devoted to getting work done than to maintaining a clean inbox.

Most of the time, I’m happy to search 773 emails rather than sort 773 emails. Go to Inbox Zero because you want to, not because you think you must.

UPDATE: I promise I wrote and scheduled this post before I saw the most recent (Friday July 26) XKCD cartoon but I’m happy with the serendipity:

There are three aspects of being a member of a group, team, or organization, particularly in the domain of knowledge work.

Some parts are prescribed, others created, and others discovered. How well-proportioned or closely-mixed those three are varies based on the group and may change over time within a group.

The parts that are prescribed to you probably consume most hours on most jobs. The group needs you to do things: attend meetings, make and execute plans, run the systems, provide and receive feedback, whatever it may be. “Do your job” usually means “do the things we know we need you to do and pay you to do.”

The parts you create give the greatest autonomy and represent the most obvious place to make changes. This is where a person can intentionally, in advance, define the role. Some jobs leave almost no room for this, others actively encourage it, and most are in between. I’m fortunate to be in a place that’s heavily biased toward experimentation.

This overlaps with the aspect of a job with the potential for surprises: discovery. A person being proactive in a role, actively hoping to advance a group’s cause, and willing to step out of their comfort zone will probably discover new options in a role that they can’t imagine in advance. By contrast, someone else might find that their role diminishes because of lack of work, interest, or passion. In an organization that is open, changes rapidly, or is new, discovery may be a large portion of the work.

I’m still working out the balance of these at my current workplace. Open communication can clarify each of these and how they intersect.

Some skills are like riding a bike: you never really forget.

Others are like training a muscle: if you don’t practice continually, the skill atrophies and it takes extra work to build it back up.

Writing and tech are both more like muscles. My current project is to rebuild and then expand my competence in both.

In practice that means:

• more reading
• more writing
• more coding

I’m keeping it fairly basic for now, but building up intensity as work and interest requires.

As a student and then a self-employed person, I went through several phases of experimenting with programs and devices to do my work. These have been the ones that have stayed with me.

Some notes app

I use Apple Notes for on-the-go notes and once in a while move everything over to Microsoft’s more structured OneNote for long-term storage.

Freedom

Usually my self-control is pretty good. When I’m reopening Twitter for the fourth time in an hour and quickly running into the same tweets I just saw, I know I need the intervention of an external force. Three clicks of the Freedom icon on my Mac and I can block Twitter (and any other distracting site, if I need to) for as long as necessary.

A browser

If the Internet is something you use, this is important. I use Chrome but I have Firefox on all my devices as well.

A terminal*

Ever since I learned to use Unix in college, setting up a terminal (or the Windows subsystem for Linux on Windows 10) is always one of the first things I do. My .bashrc has been incrementally expanded and contracted and relocated for a few years now, allowing complete and portable customization of my shell environment.

(*–pedantic: Yes, it’s technically a “terminal emulator“. No, this particular language difference does not matter to me.)

A text editor

For code, short messages, drafts, and occasional distraction-free writing, I always have a text editor. The default programs are fine, but I like Atom on my Mac and Microsoft Visual Studio on my Windows desktop. If I’m running a terminal I use vim.*

*If you’re torn in a Unix environment, just use the one you learned first – vi, vim, emacs, nano, whatever. In almost all cases, the differences are less important than loud people say online.

An office suite

In 99% of cases this is Google Drive. I use it for word processing and for my sprawling budget spreadsheets. Collaboration is easy, the interface is pleasant, and it’s free. Microsoft Office has more features, though, so if I need more tools than Drive supports I turn to Office. Exception: I use Keynote on my Mac for presentations because I like it quite a lot. I seldom use any other presentation tool.

A scanning app

I don’t like to carry around a lot of paper. I digitize my receipts and other paperwork whenever I can. When I had a desk I could use a document scanner, but now I just use Scanbot Pro. Once I have PDF’s and upload them to the cloud, I discard the paper copies. I will almost never need them later anyway, and a few megabytes on a computer is better than several drawers in a file cabinet.

I do keep paper copies of tax documents and papers that are significant as paper artifacts, but everything else gets scanned.

Some bibliographical tool

This I used more as a student (and now faculty member) and I hesitate to include it in a list I’d prefer to be general, but it saves a lot of time. Most people can use Zotero. I work in CS where most people write in LaTeX, so I use the BibTeX format instead whenever I can. Usually citation contents can be directly exported in that format from the site where the source was accessed, but if not the LaTeX world is well-documented and most labels (e.g. “author”) are intuitive.

What I don’t use

I’m not a strictly minimalist person, but a lot of the utilities and helpful programs you can find online aren’t necessary. Investigation, installation, configuration, and maintenance take time that could be better used elsewhere, in return for questionable time savings in the long run. I don’t use a window manager on my Mac, for example, because mostly managing windows on my Mac is fine with the built-in tools.

Being cautious about what I install helps save time and delay the inevitable buildup of system cruft that has to be purged once in a while.

This is it

There are a dozen other tools I’ve used: QuickBooks accounting software, map/direction tools, chat clients, maybe an email client, etc. In specific cases, those are worth exploring and probably worth running. This is a list of what I consider a solid foundation for productive work for most people.

Millions of people are self-employed or run small businesses, and millions do one of those for a while and then move to something else. It’s hard for me to imagine that any of us has learned something unique to us individually.

It’s also incredibly easy to find other writers talking about it, sharing the things they learned, and the lists have a lot of overlap. A lot of the lessons also come across as pedestrian.

Still, I wanted to do a retrospective of my own experience. I wanted to approach it from a somewhat narrower perspective. To compile my list, I asked: What made an impact? What lessons did I learn from starting, running, and closing a one-person business that will cause me to act differently than I acted before I ran the business? Here are some of my answers, which of course I reserve the right to revisit.

People will give way more power to you than they should, and you have to be ethical about that.

I always asked permission before going into people’s files. And yet I was consistently told, “Oh, there’s nothing in there that’s secretive or anything, do anything you need to.” This was stunning to me.

I also saw the downside of this trust, repeatedly: computers bricked entirely by the IT support scam industry exploiting predominantly elderly people with little computer savvy and trusting hearts. On a few occasions I saved the computer only because of the sheer laziness of the scammers: one locked up a Windows computer with a particular encryption tool and set the password to “123456”.

Work honestly, and beware people who are willing to do otherwise.

Sometimes you fail. That hurts but it’s (probably) okay in the end.

This was especially true late in the business, as I was winding down and could see I had too little time to finish everything. I had a few uncomfortable phone calls and text exchanges trying to establish a compromise that met as many of my (understandably) annoyed client’s needs as possible within some tight time constraints. The end results were good for none of us but acceptable for all of us.

You will make mistakes and fall short. And that’s (usually) fine, if you patch it up as best you can, make amends, and learn from the experience.

Location is important.

I did not quit because I didn’t like the work. The job itself was fine. A few projects were great, a few were terrible, and most were in between.

I quit because the place I was living didn’t have what I needed for personal and social fulfillment (I’ll likely return to this topic in the future). I’ve never wanted to define my life around economic considerations alone, and I have the luxury of making that choice. When I got the chance at a job that paid about the same, in a place that in other respects was much better for personal development, I took the opportunity and left.

Coda

I closed down but mostly consider the business a success. I started because I needed to generate money for student loan and car payments. I made some money, got a few nice things, built my confidence, and proved my self-sufficiency. I figured out a few things I don’t want to spend my life doing. I could hardly have asked for a better first job after college.