Experiments with Gatsby

I follow GTD (Getting Things Done) to organise my work, and one of the key stages in the GTD workflow is that of Reflection. I do this through Weekly Reviews. The idea is to dedicate an hour every week to reflect on the week that was, and accordingly plan for the week ahead. It’s an opportunity to extricate yourself from the tactical and re-focus on the strategic. If you’ve ever found yourself floating from week to week, staying busy yet feeling unproductive and overwhelmed, I would strongly recommend the habit of doing Weekly Reviews. No matter your personal productivity system, it’s a truly impactful practice that can help improve your relationship with time.

I’ve iterated a fair bit on the format of my Weekly Reviews and over time, arrived at a practice that’s become a quasi-journaling exercise. I have prompts that get me thinking about how I feel about the past week, what went well and what didn’t, what my priorities should be for the upcoming week, etc. To add a bit of colour to the activity, I also make note of things I would like to associate with the past week, eg. things I’ve been watching, reading, listening to, etc. Over time, these records have grown to become like a private weeknotes repository.

Recently, when I came across Derek Sivers’ nownownow project, it struck me that I could share parts of my Weekly Review notes as a now page. This site is built with Gatsby, and the simplest way to accomplish this would be to just add a new page and keep updating it with the contents from my latest Weekly Review. But I didn’t want a typical now page, i.e. a static snapshot of what I’ve been upto lately. Instead I wanted to maintain an archive of each week’s notes, with the most recent post being the basis for the now page.

This also served as a good excuse for me to familiarise myself with all the Gatsby Magic powering this website. So I’ve recorded the steps I followed to accomplish the desired setup using Gatsby’s Node API & Actions and will be updating this post with the details. Coming soon.