The Status Report is dead – long live the Status Report.
I was never happy with the status reports. I do believe there’s value in sharing what I’m spending time on, but attempting to structure it as a blog post just didn’t feel right. That’s why I spent a few hours this week cobbling together a solution, which I’m calling Status Reporter.
Status Reporter isn’t particularly revolutionary: all it does is track what I’m working on and save the results in an SQL database. I do think I’ve found a few clever ways to optimize this for my own personal use case, however.
I’ve been interested in tracking my work in the past, but I’ve been reluctant to do so, because of the amount of overhead that would be required. But my hope is that Status Reporter will take care of that for me.
Here’s some of the activities I’d like to track:
I’ve also included a column for notes, so I can mention specifically what I’m focusing on. For writing, this could be a specific sub-chapter, or a specific topic when doing reading and research.
For the rest, I’ll have to enter them myself. I started with some basic buttons, that allow me to quickly start and stop activities as needed. But then I started working on the key idea: connecting it to a Large Language Model.
With a basic local multimodal LLM, I can now send messages in natural language and have it fill in entries for me. I can type something like:
And it will fill out the entry for me.
Even better, it’s flexible: if I’m out and about, I can just write down my activity and start and end times in a notebook or even the back of a napkin if I have to; when I get home, all I need to do is take a picture, send it to the LLM, and it automatically enter the activities into the system.
This project is still in development – the module for image recognition is working, but I still need to connect it to the main project, and I’d like to connect it to Whisper transcription for voice updates – but I’m very happy with the results so far. The potential for data mining in the future is also intriguing: when am I the most productive? How much time do I spend on plotting? What’s the average ratio of writing to editing?
So, no more Status Report posts. Instead, I’ll be doing daily Status Reports, which you can find at:
When I get a chance, I’ll see if I can set up something more elegant on the website, but as always, I strive toward what is good enough for now.
Going forward, my plan for Mondays is to focus more on topics relevant to the book, as well as the general writing process, both techniques I’ve developed and areas where I’m still struggling – the meta-writing, if you will. Fridays will remain focused on the novel.
However:
Since I’m essentially freestyling with I’m Writing a Novel and I’m relatively new to the format, I’ve had some issues figuring out how to balance scheduling and ensuring posts remain both concise and substantial. Last week I had an idea for a post, which we’ll call Idea Y. I wrote 500 words for Idea Y, but then quickly realized Idea Z naturally followed. But after a quick rough outline for Z, I realized it would be foolish to proceed without setting up both posts with Idea X.
All of which is to say: I will write new posts every week, but there may only be one if I need time to do more research or find a better way to arrange my ideas.
Also, frankly, I don’t want to spend too much time blogging. My primary focus is Razors. I’ve cut myself some slack in these early days as I get IWAN up and running, but moving forward I expect my time spent on the project to drop considerably (and thanks to the Status Reporter, I can actually make sure that happens).
But all in all, I think this is for the best. The garage door has opened wider, while still leaving me free to focus on what really matters.