The Mandala Dig
There is a book I want to make.
MAD ALAN’S MANDALAS.
The title is already decided.
The diagrams are not new.
I have been making them for at least five years.
Circles.
Systems.
Maps.
Relationships.
Ways of organising things I was trying to understand.
The idea is simple enough.
Put the diagrams online where anybody can download them for free.
Then make a physical book containing the collection.
The problem is that I do not actually have the collection.
I have the diagrams.
Somewhere.
They are scattered through Dropbox and probably elsewhere.
Different folders.
Different projects.
Different versions.
Exports.
Source files.
Images.
Things with sensible names.
Things with names that probably made sense for about twenty minutes in 2022.
So before designing the book there is another job.
Find the work.
This is not glamorous.
It is also exactly the sort of obstruction that can leave a project unfinished for years.
The diagrams already exist.
The intention already exists.
There is even a cover.
What is missing is an organised body of material from which the book can actually be made.
That suggested a CHOB.
Not:
Make Mad Alan’s Mandalas.
That is too large and too vague.
Instead:
Find and organise the mandalas.
Search the existing files.
Identify likely diagrams.
Separate genuine candidates from irrelevant images.
Find duplicates and versions.
Work out where editable originals exist.
Bring the results together into a collection that can be reviewed.
The outcome would not be a finished book.
It would be something more useful at this stage:
a known set of material.
That makes the work bounded.
There is a point at which the dig is finished.
We can say:
these are the diagrams we found,
this is where they came from,
these appear to be duplicates,
these have editable source files,
these exist only as exports,
and these are ready to consider for the book.
The investigation also exposed a larger problem.
Dropbox contains roughly 722 GB of my files.
The mandalas are therefore only one example of something that matters being buried inside a much larger personal archive.
That led towards questions about storage, moving away from Dropbox, using a NAS or SSD, and eventually having AI help organise the archive.
Those questions are larger than this CHOB.
They should not be allowed to swallow it.
The immediate problem remains pleasantly small.
Somewhere inside hundreds of gigabytes of accumulated work is a book I have already partly made.
The first job is to find it.