In a last-minute change of plans we will be roasting our own turkey for the first time since 2015. Is this a good recipe and does anyone have a better one?

Signed: Clueless

Over the years, I turned from a book highlighter — because that is what they said you should do with textbooks — to a folder of corners and scribbler of marginalia. Here are three of my favorite mechanical pencils for that purpose. 🖋️

My first contact with GTD was through 43folders nearly two decades ago, and I haven’t looked back since. A few things did change since then. One adjustment was procedural, going from the DIY planner, I hope this is the right link. Far from being an eternal archive, the web churns at the speed of internet startups. through hipster PDA and Things to, ultimately, OmniFocus. And through the magic of personal blogs I know that the 7-year anniversary of my OmniFocus run is coming up. Tempus fugit. The bigger change was to the arguably most important part of GTD, the weekly review, onto which I added three lists that I glance at weekly and read and update at least quarterly. These are:

• The root commitment document, as suggested by Cal Newport.
• Privileged principles, described by Russ Roberts in his book Wild Problems.
• Favorite problems, which Tiago Forte mentions in his otherwise forgettable Building a Second Brain.

The root commitment document requires little elaboration as Newport himself gave clear instructions on what it was and how to go about making one. I view it as a contract with myself on which routines I should follow and how much flexibility I have in executing them. Through lockdowns and job changes it went from 1000 to 250 to fewer than 200 words now. Brevity matters. ⊕ Wrote he, in the third paragraph of what was supposed to be a 280-character post.

Privileged principles I use as simple heuristics, a hierarchical list of priorities phrased as “I am the kind of person who…” never picks their nose, let’s say, as a pure hypothetical. They do come in handy in those moments of distraction when ambient noise is high and willpower is low. At a higher level — and this is how Roberts intended them to work — having principles you value above others works wonders to reason through seemingly difficult choices.

Favorite problems I intuitively figured out by myself, but formalizing them was an improvement. Whereas privileged principles are what is top of mind when making decisions, favorite problems are top of mind when reading books and articles, watching lectures, etc, especially when those are not tied to a specific project. ⊕ Although, really, if a project you are working on isn’t tied to a favorite problem of yours, why are you doing it at all? There are many reasons why a paper on, let’s say, differences in T-cell development between mice, rats, and humans, may be interesting to someone, but your attention may be focused on different parts depending on your interests. Are you reading about a phase 3 clinical trial in atrial fibrillation because you are an electrophysiologist, a general cardiologist, a patient with a-fib, or a researcher interested in clinical trials in general? And if you are a lawyer, why are you reading it at all? Reasons for reading are not always clear, and if anything, knowing what your favorite problems are helps tremendously with triage.

So these are the three lists that aren’t necessarily part of GTD — heck, the first one may not even be a list at all — but which through trial and error I ended up integrating in my weekly review. I’m sure there are many more.

It took me a while, but I finally got it: The Road Not Taken is not about individualism and thinking different(ly), but rather about the narrative fallacy, hindsight bias, and contemplation of the counterfactuals. Brilliant.

Pre-weekend reading: How to nurture a personal library. Just lovely.

Miško (Mouser) the cat, living up to his name.

A brief experiment with Drummer reminded me how fun it was to write short, untitled, tweet-like posts throughout the day without having to be exposed to social networks. Drummer itself was too high-maintenance for the 2020s me, but Micro.blog is a (paid) service whose focus is — and the name does give it away — short, untitled, tweet-like posts with a light layer of social networking.

Which is to say, my old domain is now resurrected as a micro blog with a snazy Edward Tufte-inspired design. The RSS you get there should include updates from this blog, so subscribe to either but not both.

Drummer is an online outliner that enables quick, easy, and near real-time posting of text both long form and short — what we used to call blogs back in the good old days of two years ago. Dave Winer created it for his own purposes, but it works beautifuly with just your Twitter account as a login. Here is my page.

As things are still very much in progress, Dave recommended doing daily backups. Sadly, I didn’t, and as of today’s updates a few weeks' worth of half-baked notes are wiped out from the Drummer server (but thankfully not from the website they helped create). That’ll teach me.

Since posting to that page is on hold until everything is back in order, expect more — dare I say daily — updates here. Managing markdown files is not nearly as intutitive or pleasant to use as Dave’s outliner, but he seemes to be working on an OPML to markdown converter. That will be well worth the wait.

• 1994: Fifth grade; I am charged with editing the school newspaper. There is an Intel 386 PC at home that is about to be upgraded to a 486 and do something more than run Lands of Lore.
• 1996: Seventh grade; I typeset a book of poems¹. The school newspaper becomes the school magazine — in layout only; the publishing schedule remains haphazard — as I upgrade from Word 6.0 to QuarkXPress
• 2000: High school starts again after a freshman year interrupted by NATO bombing. I make the town library’s official website. It is a php hack job laid out in tables instead of the newfangled and to me unknown CSS; it still wins an award.
• 2002-2008: Med school; I typeset a book here and there and occasionally help out with the library website.
• 2009: Teaching assistant, Institute for histology and embryology, Belgrade School of Medicine.
• 2010: Resident, Internal medicine, JHU/Sinai, Baltimore MD.
• 2013: Chief resident, Internal medicine, as above; I understand the benefits of not being invited to a meeting.
• 2014: Clinical fellow, hematology/oncology, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda MD.
• 2016: As above, but also Chief fellow ex tempore for the joint NCI/NHLBI fellowship; my hatred of poorly-run meetings intensifies.
• 2017: Staff clinician, later to be renamed Assistant research physician, Clinical Trials Team, Lymphoid Malignancies Branch, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda MD; the 1994 me marvels at the word salad trailing the title.
• 2021: Chief Medical Officer, Cartesian Therapeutics.

It is easier than ever to organize and attend a meeting, which should scare the living daylights out of anyone who doesn’t organize or attend meetings for a living. It used to be that only middle management had to deal with a series of 90-minute meetings all 15 minutes apart in which they had no specific role, which had no effect on their task list, and which left them no better off than they’d be if they had just read the minutes.

We are all middle management now.

My own experience with middle management was during chief residency and I learned quickly that the more administrative aspects of it just weren’t for me. But I also learned a few coping strategies, modified below for the video conferencing age.

• A short ad-hoc meeting is better than a long email thread. Email is a brilliant technology, but it just wasn’t meant for frequent back and forth between any number of people. It always amazes me when someone sends an email with five direct recipients and ten more addresses cc’ed, and then expects to have a productive conversation. ⊕ I believe Cal Newport wrote a whole book about this issue which is in my ever-growing To Read pile so this will remain just a belief for the foreseeable future. Pre-2020 the excuse would have been that everyone was too far apart to attend a meeting, whether in another time zone or in a different building on campus. No longer.
• A short standing meeting is even better than an ad-hoc one. Few things in any line of work need someone’s immediate and undivided attention. Issues can usually wait: if one project is on hold because a decision needs to be made, there will be others to work on. If they can wait a full week, why not batch them and bring them up with your boss/employees/co-workers/contractors at a weekly meeting. If they can’t wait for more than a day, make it into a short daily meeting held at a set time. We have these meetings all the time in medicine — we call them rounds, and they have worked well for more than a century.
• Frequent short meetings are better than infrequent long ones. Setting one up used to be hard logistically: from booking the right sized room on time to making sure the timing works out for everyone — not to mention having to include a buffer for getting to the conference room and setting up AV. With that much overhead for a meeting of any length, of course the default was at least 60 minutes, if not a full hour and a half. Now even a 90-year-old can tap a link on their oversized phone to log onto that Zoom meeting while quarantining at home. The negligible cost of starting a meeting may mean they are more frequent, but it should also make them shorter. Much shorter.
• One day full of meetings is better than all five weekdays broken up with just a few per day. When in meeting mode, it takes me at least 30 minutes to get my bearings back to doing other work. Mode switching is a fixed cost and it’s best done infrequently. I therefore have a day dedicated to meetings, and if I have any say whatsoever in when a meeting will be held I try to do it then. Wednesdays. If you need to have a meeting on a different day, try to have it as a bookend — morning and afternoon rounds are a good example of this.
• Finish off a meeting with a task list and the designated person(s) for each task. You will probably have missed something, but that’s OK since you’re still at the meeting and others can fill in the gaps. Send off that list as an email to all attendees. Congratulations: you are now the meeting’s Most Valuable Attendee. If the meeting ends without anyone being able to come up with a single task, it should not have taken place. ⊕ This excludes staff meetings mandated by this or that accreditation agency, which turn into venting venues by design — though even then the tasks should be to set up smaller, more meaningful meetings to deal with concrete issues that may be brought up.This is an important lesson. Take note of whomever called the meeting and try to avoid attending their meetings in the future.
• Bonus tip: If you are setting up a one-on-one meeting with me, and you are the one sending out a calendar invite, do enter both of our names ⊕ My default name for those kinds of meetings is just “Milos <-> Person 2”. in the meeting title. I have too many meetings with myself on the calendar and it’s getting hard to keep track.

If you liked this, you may also enjoy my lukewarm take on handling email.