You know, I might as well start posting about how I handle ADHD stuff too -- those moments of little practice-sharing to remind my future self of things that work, and maybe other people might find some of this useful as well? Yeah, that.
One of the things I've done to get my ADHD brain more tamed (applicable to non-ADHD folks too!) is to freewrite-out-loud at the beginning of a writing sprint, letting my thoughts meander while leaving traces that eventually arrive at pretty reasonable small concrete tasks. This is the self-instructional freewriting from today, unedited.
I need to get the data into the results chapters; they should be the backbone of those chapters. (I feel like I've done this at least a half dozen times before. Guh repeated drafting process. Guh guh guh.)
I'm worried about the open licensing for Gary and Alan's stuff, but should not think too much about that right now. Tomorrow, Stan can start to help me pull out of that thinking hole. Right now, the important thing is the data.
I've got a list of stories on these post-its; I can try to type them up and see where they cluster. The largest clusters are D&D and UOCD, and there are individual conversation/disagreement stories inside them. I think these are going to be collections that get edited into dialogues -- I already have some really worked-over pieces for UOCD and D&D, and the Alan/Mark disagreement; I have indexes by page number in this document beside me.
I need to find a name for what I'm doing methodologically; at some point I should probably just ask Patti to help, or reach out to methodologists (which I should get more in touch with, honestly). I wonder if I can do an intro/letters sprint at some point, and be brave about reaching out to people I don't know who... do really awesome work... and... yeah.
Back to the topic, though. What's my intermediate artifacts here? I've got about an hour on this sprint clock before I need to get home and change for the exercise that's going to keep me in gear.
Intermediate artifacts... well, first I want...
1. A grouped list of story clusters (I know I have multiple extended versions of this, they were for different purposes, do it AGAIN.)
2. Look up the status of each of those story clusters; which ones have existing drafts? And then, from the index: which transcripts and which page numbers do I pull from?
3. Turn page numbers into line numbers and pull the data. No, Mel. You are not allowed to write another Python script for this.
...stop there for now -- the next step will be pulling out these stories and I know we'll insert them into the chapters soon... but remember how much easier the chapter drafting was when you had the stories whittled out already? We're doing this again. So focus in on these three steps. Let's do it.