Doing the Work, Flipping the Status Quo, and Alphabetizing in Liquid

Today I learned:

Doing the Work

I used to be really interested in how people worked. When they get up, what their morning rituals are, what tools they use, how they use them, etc. While these things are interesting and tell a story about a person, they miss the point.

How someone works isn’t nearly as important as the fact that they are doing the work. They made the choice to do what it takes each day to practice their craft. The rest is minutiae.

If using the GTD method or having morning rituals works for you, great. But don’t think that those things are what really matter. If you’ve committed yourself to doing the work, you’ll find a way. If you haven’t committed yourself, none of the rituals or methods will make a difference.

This commitment is very difficult, but necessary.

Flipping the Status Quo

We all suffer from status quo bias. How do we overcome it? We can get 80% of the way there by:

Instead of asking, “Why should this be different?” ask “Why should this stay the same?” – This is especially powerful when confronting clutter. (By the way, the answer, “because it gives me joy” is a valid reason for keeping something. Change for change’s sake isn’t helpful.)

Recognize the difference between acknowledging a feeling and rationalizing that feeling to keep the status quo.

Source: Planet Money episode #683

Sorting tags alphabetically in Liquid

It was starting to annoy me that my tags were not in alphabetical order on my Today I learned page. So I learned how to sort them alphabetically with Liquid and I added anchor links with counts for each tag.

Here is my updated template code:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

{% assign sorted_tags = (site.tags | sort:0) %}
{% for tag in sorted_tags %} {% assign t = tag | first %} {% assign posts = tag | last %}
{{ t | downcase }}">{{ t }} ({{ posts.size }})
{% endfor %}
{% for tag in sorted_tags %} {% assign t = tag | first %} {% assign posts = tag | last %}
{{ t | downcase }}">{{ t }}

{% for post in posts %} {% if post.tags contains t %}
{{ post.date | date: '%d %b %y' }}: {{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}
{% endif %} {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

Sources: I cobbled this together from Michael Lanyon’s blog, Joe Kampschmidt’s blog, and the Liquid docs.