Sunday 24 May 2026
I just saw an integer to the right of the Sunday on my calendar and it took me a second to realise what it was. Can you guess? I didn’t notice this at first but it is actually incrementing up by one each week. What threw me off was the fact that it was kind of close to the days of the week, so the one for this week was 22, and the week stared today on the Sun 24/05. And the previous week was 21 with the week starting on the Sun 17/05. It turns out its just the week number in the year. So I guess we are about 4 weeks away from being in the middle of the year. What a fun fact.
I managed to avoid using claude code today, I’m one day claude sober. Instead I spent a few minutes before writing this to plan out the rest of my blog project. I have always had little respect for project managers 1 because I’ve had a theory that as technology has got better and better you require less people actually doing work and the bottle neck becomes efficiently using those few individuals. The extreme case being you have one very capable software developer and a very good computer set up and a whole team of people above them trying to deal with all the stakeholders and prioritise the work for that one individual to do, because the attempt to train up those above him to actually do the work would not be worth it. Despite my dislike of the idea of being one of those people above the worker maybe that is something I will have to do when I begin working with AI on my little projects at home. To not waste my time be very disciplined with plans and have a clear prioritised list of what I want to achieve each session. This is mainly so I don’t get addicted to it and waste all my time. I need to work on a process on how to use it.
The other interesting thing I listened to today was the What did you do yesterday (WDYDY) podcast featuring Ben Elton. He is quite the prolific English writer who has written TV shows, musicals, plays, a whole bunch of stuff. He seemed to live a pretty idyllic life. Lots of exercise and lots of writing and lots of enjoyment of food and drink. I think a couple of things I took away
- most important thing for a writer is focus, if he sets aside 4 hours, he said he would be happy if he could stay focused for 2 hours
- writing is hard even for professionals (hence the need to stay focused)
- write as much as possible before editing (eg don’t write one paragraph and then edit, write 25 and then go back to first)
- write a lot, but most of it won’t be seen by anyone 2
Ciao