DEV Community: Huw Fulcher

A kinder way to reach our goals

Huw Fulcher — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 15:26:17 +0000

Originally posted on my website

The best intentions

It's 2023, goals, aspirations and habits are being scribbled down by people round the world. All of this is being framed by a thought, "what should I be doing better this year?". It's a pretty standard thought that everyone has and I'm not saying that it's bad but that it might hamstring us more than we think.

For me, the pressure to do things better has had a two fold effect on my mental health and also my ability to get things done. The weight of achieving goals for the year that I am unprepared for and not realistic about traps me in a feedback loop of failure and fear to try and do.

3 rules for kinder goals

To try and correct this and have a healthier relationship with my goals this year I've come up with 3 rules:

Explore not do
Steps not cliffs
Reflection not metrics

Explore not do

I've been starting to read Building a Second Brain recently and tentatively deciding on whether to use it or if it will send me down the productivity rabbit hole again.

In the middle of this and also reflecting on how to look after myself and still progress I've been struck by a concept from the book. While it's focused on what information you should capture I think it can be a helpful lens for our goals as well.

Tiago Forte in the book talks about Richard Feynman and his
12 favourite questions that acted as a filter for what information he would choose to look into.

The main characteristics that caught my eye were that they are meant to open ended and spark curiosity. This is a much healthier way to think rather than worrying about missing information that might be useful someday.

For me the questions I've thought of so far (in no particular order) are:

How can I maintain a faith-filled marriage and family?
How can I get the most from the content I consume?
How can we simplify the web to make consumption more mindful and easier?
How can we connect better on the internet?
How do I be a disciple of Christ rather than "doing" Christian things?
How do we serve our local church better?
What is my ideal career? Working for a company or working for myself?
How can I be more consistent in my habits and goals?

This exercise felt liberating. I was giving myself permission to investigate things rather than coming up with ways to do them.

Then I had the light bulb moment of how this links to goals. While the actual action of working towards a goal is inherently doing something, what if our motivation was exploration rather than "because xyz"?

Taking one of my quarterly goals of "Eating 1800 calories a day fitting in the right macro nutrients" I could define my motivation as:

"I want to be healthier to be fit and capable and respect my body. I want my mind to be clear to reduce stress on myself and on my family."

While this motivation is great, for me it places expectations and pressure on myself. What if instead I made it more interesting?

"What would it feel like to lose weight and make healthier choices?"

I'm shifting the focus from doing something because I should to something that motivates me.

Steps not cliffs

Another problem I would have with setting goals was that I was always too ambitious. I would either have too many simple goals or less goals but with impossible heights to achieve.

I made my progress for the year a bit like climbing a cliff. I've never done climbing but I have it on good authority that it's exhausting, difficult and dangerous the further you go up.

So when I would be working towards a goal and fail (in something like a habit) I would end up plummeting back down to the bottom, my streak back to zero (I've written about why streaks are bad here). This would play havoc with my self-esteem and motivaiton, what's the point if I never get to the top?

Instead I've tried streamlining my goals this year. The simpler, the better. Rather than going to the goal's gym and trying to deadlift 400KG I'm going on the crosstrainer and building up my discipline muscles.

By making my goals a set of steps to climb up, falling off a step isn't going to hurt anywhere near as much as falling off a cliff.

Reflection not metrics

This last "not" ties in with exploring rather than doing. If we are trying to "do" a goal we are going to be inclined to measure its success by metrics. How many days in a row? How many days overall? What's the best combination of mood, time of place, alignment of the planets to achieve this goal? Measuring our goals can suck our energy and detract from what we are trying to do.

If we're asking questions as the motivation for our goals then we need to provide ourselves with some answers. The great thing about this rather than metrics is that it feels more holistic. We're actually spending time reflecting on how our goals are shaping us into what we want to be rather than blindly ploughing on.

The best analogy I can come up with is that by focusing on metrics, we're "playing" our lives like a video game, how high can we get our score? By reflecting we're instead "inhabiting" the video game of our life, taking in the sights, the sounds, the experience itself.

It's still a theory but spending more time on reflection than measuring will give us deeper alignment with our goals and with our lives, fulfilling us more.

Life isn't a game

This is the longest post I've written ever but in essense it boils down to:

Don't look for the high score, look to live the experience through your goals

I want to reiterate that I don't think the "doing" mindset is necessarily bad. I think it works for people with a lot of drive but I have found it to be toxic for myself.

I hope this helps you or at least gives you food for thought. Let me know what you think!

How to integrate TinaCMS with Jekyll

Huw Fulcher — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:31:06 +0000

Originally posted at huwfulcher.com

Introduction

TinaCMS, the successor to Forestry has just gone to v1.0, bringing a stable, open-source, git based CMS to static sites. I've just started using TinaCMS with my site and I'm actually writing this post using it!

While there is some documentation on adding TinaCMS to a non-NextJS site there are few extra steps that are needed to get it working nicely with Jekyll.

1. Install TinaCMS

npx @tinacms/cli@latest init Note: Docs as of (10/11/2022) specify a --static flag, this is removed and won't work
Choose whatever package manager is preferable
Choose Other when asked for a framework
(Optional) Use Typescript, it is recommended
When asked where public assets are stored specify the top level with /. Jekyll considers all folders that are not prefixed with _ to be public. Storing tina in the assets folder will cause issues with pathing later on.

2. Configure TinaCMS

a) Update package.json

Replace the content scripts with the following (or add based on what you need):

"dev": "tinacms dev -c \"bundle exec jekyll serve\"",
"build": "tinacms build && jekyll build",

Run npm run dev to check no errors are present. You should be able to navigate to localhost:4000/admin/ and see the TinaCMS interface.

The admin folder should be at the top level of the directory.

b) Edit schema

At this point TinaCMS is looking at content/posts for the .md files to display and edit. For Jekyll this path should be _posts/. To fix this we can edit the config.ts file in .tina.

i. Update media folder

TinaCMS supports uploading and embedding media in your markdown documents from the web editor. The media property in config.ts controls where this folder is placed. For Jekyll, this should be under assets. Change media to:

media: {
  tina: {
    mediaRoot: "uploads",
    publicFolder: "assets",
  },
},

You can change the mediaRoot name to whatever you like, this specifies the folder name under assets.

ii. Update schema path

Under schema the different types of content are defined as a list of collections. The only collection present when first creating TinaCMS is post. Each collection will have a path variable that defines where TinaCMS should look for the associated files. Update this to _posts.

Once done your collections should look like this:

collections: [
  {
    name: "post",
    label: "Posts",
    path: "_posts",
    fields: [
      {
        type: "string",
        name: "title",
        label: "Title",
        isTitle: true,
        required: true,
      },
      {
        type: "rich-text",
        name: "body",
        label: "Body",
        isBody: true,
      },
    ],
  },
],

iii. Tidy up existing posts

Depending on if you're doing a fresh Jekyll install or already have an existing blog, TinaCMS prefers filenames to be .md rather than .markdown. Update those accordingly.

Now when you access localhost:4000/admin/ and got Posts you should see your existing markdown files.

iv. Updating the schema

At this point you can happily use TinaCMS to update or create new markdown files but it will be restricted to only being able to interact with the title and body. If you have any additional frontmatter it will ignore it. To resolve this you can update the fields section of your config.ts. Using the starter jekyll site I've created one below:

fields: [
  {
    type: "string",
    name: "layout",
    label: "Layout",
    required: true,
  },
  { 
    type: "string",
    name: "title",
    label: "Title",
    isTitle: true,
    required: true,
  },
  { 
    type: "datetime",
    name: "date",
    label: "Date",
    required: true,
  },
  { 
    type: "string",
    name: "categories",
    label: "Categories",
  },
  {
    type: "rich-text",
    name: "body",
    label: "Body",
    isBody: true,
  },
],

Go ahead and try creating a new markdown file using the editor. You should see it appear in _posts but there's a snag... Jekyll requires a specific naming convention to know which markdown files it should show:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.md

Thankfully, TinaCMS allows us to customise our own filename conventions. Add the following to your post collection just after path:

ui: {
  filename: {
    readonly: false,
    slugify: values => {
      const date = new Date();
      const day = date.getDate();
      const month = date.getMonth() + 1;
      const year = date.getFullYear();

      let currentDate = `${year}-${month}-${day}`;

      return `${currentDate}-${values?.title?.toLowerCase().replace(/ /g, '-')}`
    }
  }
},

This will take the title you specify, slugify it and prefix it with the current date. When you save files they will be in the correct format for Jekyll to find!

Wrapping up

This just scratches the surface of the customisation you can do with TinaCMS. It has the ability to add custom components, fields, templates and a whole lot more. If something in this guide doesn't work get in touch with any of the social links below and I'll see if I can help.