Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

Tag: Writing

  • #31: Momentum

    This week’s challenge has been momentum. How to find it. How to keep it. How to sustain it.

    I say it because my week was bookended by watching the kids, made necessary by some day care closings and shuffling around. Rewarding days, and one’s that I try not to take for granted. But trying to slide back and forth between dad mode and work mode all the time like that makes momentum very hard.

    The ideal state would be something like flow, where I could build up a bit of inertia and really dig into this thing or that, at home or with work. Flow was easier in my 20’s. These days it’s more about strategies that help me move around and stay productive.

    Breaking things up helps. Blocks of time help (I’ve gotten pretty good at writing in 30 minute chunks). But the most important part is prioritizing everything. I have to make sure that when I get a bit of time, and I sit down and do something, I’m not falling into a trap of making incremental progress on something meaningless.

    I once saw this called procastgress

    Progress is better than perfection, but it’s important to not fall into the trap of what I call procrastgress – little bits of progress that are not getting any closer to done, and in fact are just a form of procrastination. Procrastgress

    One thing I do is keep a list of all of the projects that I’m chipping away at.

    I call it my Incremental Progress List.

    It’s a big list of all of the things I can’t just finish as a simple task. In the larger productivity world, it’s probably something more like a habit, but I find that they have an end. Larger documentation handbooks or internal tools I’m working on at work. Organizing the garage, cleaning out the shed.

    I’ve added a progress bar under each project on the list. Every time I do a bit more, I tick the progress bar up. It’s a manual thing, based on more or less where I think I am. But it helps me to feel like I’m working towards something.

    Sometimes I have a spare 30 minutes, and when I do, I don’t want to have to think about what to do. So I check the Incremental Progress list, grab something doable, and chip away at another 30 minutes.

    The hardest part is getting that list in front of myself at the right time. It sounds a little bit silly, but I need to turn it into a habit that I mechanically reach for. It’s too easy for my brain to get distracted by actual procrastination otherwise. So that’s what’s next for me.

    Marcus Aurelius on choosing kindness.

    Try living the life of a good man* and see how it too suits you — a man who’s gratified by the lot he’s been assigned by the universe and satisfied with the justice of his acts and the kindness of his character.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Film List
    Comics List
    Add to Books
    Revolutions
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Read Brainpickings
    Publish Weeknote

    Notes Block – hello from the saved content!

  • #21: The art of letting go

    This week’s post is brought to you by the letter L. It’s all about letting go.

    My wife and I did a weekend project (including not one, but two trips to IKEA) to straighten up and declutter our playroom. Years of accumulated toys, junk, and forgotten happy meal trinkets had piled up and it was time for a much-needed purge.

    Right away, I needed to let go. First I needed to let go of things on behalf of my two sons. As I sifted through the piles of clutter, I had to make a decision about what goes in the donate pile, with very little input from my two sons. Letting go, on behalf of another, is a pretty unfamiliar feeling.

    But there was a different kind of letting go, of my own need for control and order. My wife’s method of quick and decisive action sometimes clashes with my own much slower and methodical nature. Both have their advantages for different kinds of projects but it’s clear that a quick burst directed at decluttering was going to be far more effective. So we did it her way and it was pretty successful.

    So in a lot of ways I spent much of the weekend letting things wash over for me. But it can be terrifying to cede control to others and let nature take its course. Of course the only alternative is to gather everything around you until it suffocates you into submission.

    In my life, I have found that I am a collector of digital debris. My computer is a mix of assorted notes, workflows, lists and various stashes of makeshift junk drawers in this application or that. I don’t know why I do it or who it’s for. But if I think too hard about it I’m forced to confront my own mortality and think about where it will all go when I’m gong. So mostly I just kind of avoid thinking about it at all.

    But learning to let go is a good thing. And that’s why I like this blog. It provides a bit of finality to an idea or a loop in my head. Writing helps me think it out. And these words hold more meaning than the hundreds of forgotten notes I have stored away. Writing helps me make sense of the debris. It helps me to let go.

    I saw this tweet from Dan Brooks recently

    Which was a banger. And so that got me to read the linked article, a profile of billionaire Bill Ackman and his descent into social media fueled mania and paranoia over the last six months to a year.

    Look, Ackman isn’t especially stupid. Some of his ideas, particularly about the insular and single-mindedness of elite liberal arts institutions, are not without merit. But he’s also not especially smart. And he more or less got to where he is coasting on waves of luck and opportunity funded by generational wealth.

    When he was confronted by a new generation of people who had different ideas than the ones he built his fortune and empire—people who simply did not give a shit who he was, mind you—he snapped.

    The writings of John Michael Greer are, well, complicated. He is obviously prolific and has very strong, important ideas. But he can also be such a frustrating read for me because he is so beholden to his own fatalistic view of the future (which he has proved to be right about, on occasion).

    But I was really impressed by a recent article called The Three Stigmata of J.R.R. Tolkien. It describes how modern political events are viewed through the lens of intentionally binary and contrived fiction, and therefore leads to fallacies in our understandings about the world.

    The Great Fiction of AI. I first saw this Verge article mentioned by Dave in a dozen thoughts about AI.

    There’s a lot to say about this article, which was fantastic. It highlights the issues created by the tech industry’s over-dependence on scale and algorithms. But now it’s the tech industry, again, that are selling the “solution” to that problem (the one they created) by pushing AI downstream to every other industry.

    So they follow readers to the microgenres into which Amazon’s algorithms classify their tastes, niches like “mermaid young adult fantasy” or “time-travel romance,” and keep them engaged by writing in series, each installment teasing the next, which already has a title and set release date, all while producing a steady stream of newsletters, tweets, and videos

    Platforms like AMazon and social media have been prioritizing frequency over quality for years. It compelled writers to create at a more rapid clip. Now, AI enters the picture, promising to expedite the writing process but paradoxically feeding off the creativity of the writers themselves. Now we have a swirling mass of uninspired content generated by AI which is, in essence, consuming itself.

    That is, they’re using it not because they have something to say but because they need to say something in order to “maintain relevance” — a phrase that I heard from AI-using novelists as well — on platforms already so flooded with writing that algorithms are required to sort it. It raises the prospect of a dizzying spiral of content generated by AI to win the favor of AI, all of it derived from existing content rather than rooted in fact or experience, which wouldn’t be so different from the internet we have now.

    I wonder what snake oil the tech industry will have for us in another decade as a solution to a web polluted by algorithmically generated Markov chains disguised as AI content.

    Notes

    • Bluffs update
    • Pick out glasses ahead of time
    • Respond to the FW: WalkMe/Intercom Integration email
    • Follow up on SilverRock requesting a change to the auto-increment
    • Renew Salesforce API key
    • Approve Thomas’ time off
    • I like the format of this for links on the history of the web blog: https://tomcritchlow.com/2024/02/16/narrative-strategy/
    • March 6 – 1PM ET VIP
    • Should I use Kagi? https://kagi.com/pricing
    • With Kagi I could use the universal summarizer with my Raindrop reading mode thing https://kagi.com/summarizer/api.html
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #19: Managing the what

    I have found that a lot about managing people comes down to trust. Earning, keeping it, directing it. And I guess, subconsciously or not, I have been collecting some articles over the past few months about how to give a team autonomy while still driving and focusing on accountability. So this is just a reference for those articles as they start to congeal in my mind.

    My unified theory on how this applies to management is still a work in progress, but I can start with an initial insight from Paul Taylor.

    People are downstream of the system

    And that’s a critical observation. Individuals in an organization are undeniably influenced by the systems and processes that are all around them. Often, when it seems that these processes are breaking down, it can actually just be an indicator of a deeper systemic issue.

    First, look at your systems with a critical ye. What you’re really looking for is patterns. What appears to be happening over and over. Where are the most common breakdowns in communications. These are gaps, and are great starting points. These recurring issues represent gaps and serve as excellent initial areas for improvement.

    But also, attack the why and make sure it’s shared. One strategy is to Manage the What, Not the How. This approach encourages clear alignment around shared goals through transparency. . It requires leaders to focus on defining the objectives and desired outcomes without micromanaging the specific methods by which the team members achieve these results.

    The key to exceptional management is to get great at defining the “what”. As a leader, you need to know how to create alignment, how to clarify what you expect, and how to communicate all of it.

    Clarity in communication and expectations sets the stage for a team’s success. When leaders excel in explicating the “what” – the objectives, targets, and benchmarks – they provide a clear direction for the team to follow, a clarity that enables the team to understand the purpose behind their work and align their efforts accordingly.

    There are nuances to this approach. There might need to be greater control over the how for team members that struggle to collaborate or are more junior. But on teams comprised of more senior, experienced individuals, the strategy of managing the “what” can be adopted as a systemic approach, empowering team members to leverage their expertise and take initiative. By establishing clear goals, leaders can trust their teams to determine the most effective “how” – the processes, techniques, and strategies – to reach those goals. In doing so, leaders encourage innovation and drive accountability through autonomy.

    All of which is tied up rather well by another article I have read, which extends the Cathedral and Bazaar metaphor to management. And I think it most clearly articulates the vision I have for myself as a leader.

    The bazaar manager is like the organizer of the bazaar. Leaders in this style tend to have a broad vision, a flexible plan, and a flat network of roles and responsibilities for the team. The manager acts as the facilitator, the coach, and the enabler of the team’s work, defining goals and objectives and providing guidelines, feedback, and resources, while empowering the team to define their own tasks, processes, and standards, encouraging them to explore and innovate.

    As a facilitator, the bazaar manager does not dictate each move but rather sets the stage for innovation and creativity. The managers role here is to provide clear goals and objectives-the what-while giving some latitude to the team to approach problems in their own unique ways.

    It is a form of leadership that trusts in the capabilities of the team members and their ability to collaborate effectively. And so trust remains at the center of it all.

    Chapter 34 of East of Eden begins like this:

    A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”

    I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us…

    It’s a short, precise, poignant chapter. Around 900 words later, it ends like this:

    We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

    I want to write the whole chapter down and take it with me wherever I go.

    Oliver Sacks with a prescient reflection on the irreproducibility of the human mind:

    in contrast to a computer, that nothing is ever precisely repeated or reproduced; that there is, rather, a continual revision and reorganization of perception and memory, so that no two experiences (or their neural bases) are ever precisely the same. Experience is ever-changing, like Heraclitus’ stream. This streamlike quality of mind and perception, of consciousness and life, cannot be caught in any mechanical model — it is only possible in an evolving creature… One is not an immaterial soul, floating around in a machine. I do not feel alive, psychologically alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling — perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me. I am that stream — that stream is me.

    Notes

    Today:

    • WP Mail SMTP check in
    • Scorecard
    • Publish this post
    • Review collections (add to async and management collections with what we have in “To Sort”)
    • Start prepping the paperwork
    • Book a vision appointment
    • Watch first part of Vonnegut
    • Garbages

    Add to notebook:

    • Have to do taxes soon
    • Spray for bugs  
    • Look at tree in backyard 
    • Carpet cleaning in playroom
    • Review Tina’s updates to core process
    • Check on Plugin updates
    • Follow up on Mail devlierability


    Week focus:
    – Visual regression workflow
    – Passport and elementary school docs and paperwork
    – Sportsengine – WP Mail SMTP
    – Sportsengine – prep next steps in combined deploy
    – Spray for bugs

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #17: Our Personal Worlds

    Kening Zhu has a suggestion. Use your digital space to build a world, and don’t worry so much about an audience.

    instead of “building an audience,” build a world. build a digital garden-ecosystem, that exists — first and primarily — for itself. a world that doesn’t need likes, traffic, subscribers, or clicks — in order to validate its existence.

    My thinking, in this moment, has become much slower. I have tried to focus my mind on building thoughts, and layering together ideas. And so the idea of building a world, my world, is appealing. This year, I want to begin creating my own.

    Writing about our quest for knowledge and answers, Steinbeck once described the ways in which we try to erect a world around our beliefs:

    An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones.

    And this is a key point. Your world is never done and it will often need to be recreated. A world builds over time, and it responds to the changes of our lives. We can’t be afraid to scrap what we have and redraw our own maps.

    If I were to build a world around my ideology and my passions and my thoughts, what would that look like? What are the chapters and how are they organized? What grows from it? I’m not sure yet.

    In the midst of an invasion into Belgium that early French revolutionaries believed would “liberate” the country into liberty, only to have their own values turned against them by a foreign country that felt much more like it was being occupied, the infamous Robespierre had this to say.

    Freedom can never be found by the use of a foreign force

    Robespierre would go on to be rather forceful about freedom not too long after that, but it’s an interesting anti-war sentiment that rings true all these centuries later in our post-Enlightenment age.

    Steinbeck, on the reason for being:

    The truest reason for anything’s being so is that it is. This is actually and truly a reason, more valid and clearer than all the other separate reasons, or than any group of them short of the whole. Anything less than the whole forms part of the picture only, and the infinite whole is unknowable except by being it, by living into it.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #16: The build vs buy dilemma for personal decisions

    AKA The Tinkerer’s Dilemma

    As is probably true for people like me who work in code, and futz around in different note taking apps and personal blogs, I am what you might call something of a tinkerer. And so I often am faced with something like the build vs buy dilemma. But this internal tug-of-war does not revolve around organizational purchasing decisions. It’s more a battle of personal choices, of opting for one methodology over the other.

    By “build” I don’t mean crafting a full-blown application from the ground up. I’m talking about putting together a collection of some light coding and no code solutions. This gives me something more closely aligned with my own personal workflow at the expense of all of that technical, maintained overheead.

    On the other hand, “buy” doesn’t necessarily imply shelling out money for acquiring an off-the-shelf application (a lot of these apps are free). It’s more like buying in, embracing an existing approach and methodology. It’s about capitulating to a particular way of doing things, and trying to bend it to your will.

    My notetaking and general organization tasks have been served by Obsidian for the past few years. Its unique blend of features suits my needs perfectly, and I’ve managed to create a system that is good enough, and that I don’t mess with all that much.

    The other day, though, I got to thinking about something different. I had an urge to develop something similar to a second-brain app – akin to Obsidian or Roam, using my personal WordPress site. I immediately started mapping out all of the different blocks and plugins and little features that I would want to see in something like this.

    And then a night passed. And I thought about it. I began going over the realities of this new project. That initial flash to my brain was energizing, but time makes fools of us all. There were enough details to consider and challenges to overcome and time investments to spend to make the whole thing immensely daunting. Regardless, the very notion of this venture sparked a sense of intrigue and excitement that is, to my tinkerer’s mind, worth exploring. At the intersection of creativity and practicality, I found a new project that’s brimming with possibilities and potential learning experiences. Maybe one day I’ll give it a shot.

    Cassidy is kind of annoyed at React. She’s not the only one.

    Reading through one of Cory Doctrow’s recent posts about the open web, I like that he paused on a point that I find particularly important about the web.

    The web wasn’t inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee’s decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a completely opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as “branded communities.” The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn’t even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

    The web wasn’t inevitable. It was a gift at the intersection of a perfect circumstance. That’s why so many people have attempted to control it and centralize it and turn it into something that it’s not. Next time somebody tries to tell you that such and such platform embraces free speech, just remember that the web is open. It’s free by default.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #15: Finding focus in the new year

    I’m thinking a lot about focus this week. There’s something about a new year that makes you look forward. I spent the last year trying to clear away time for things that were important to me or to my work: larger projects, time for reading books, for spending time with my family, for writing here and on The History of the Web.

    And that was, somewhat to my surprise, pretty successful. At work, I have been spending more time on priorities. In my personal life I’ve been able to find the time I wanted for writing and reading and organizing my thoughts.

    Now I’m looking forward with a bit of a question mark. I don’t actually know what my goals are right now. What I’m looking to get out of the next year. I’m ready to try something different. So I did what I usually do. I searched around. It brought me to a new book about mindfulness called Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha. It seems practical and approachable. Clearing my mind and finding focus? That sounds right up my alley.

    I’m looking forward with a flicker of uncertainty. My goals feel a bit hazy and out of focus. But I have settled on one thing—I’m ready to share things up and try something new. I poked around some search engines and checked a few things and stumbled onto at least one intriguing book. It’s called Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha. It appears to be a practical guide to mindfulness and meditation, a practice I am admittedly a little wary of. Yet, the idea of clearing my mind and focusing better? That sounds like something I could do.

    I’ve returned to Steinbeck for the third time in less than a year in his culminating work East of Eden. It is broad—in length and in scope—but maybe its most admirable quality is how much it takes its time. Grapes of Wraith oscillated between its socially charged narrative and didactic monologues injected by Steinbeck himself. So it’s most brilliant moments live in either the world of the story and its dynamics or in Steinbeck’s soliloquies.

    East of Eden feels different. As it drifts along, Steinbeck pulls on various threads. Different characters, different locales, and all the contrives of an exciting plot. As you read, however, you realize that Steinbeck is pulling from different POVs which blend together a contradictory worldview both confused and in awe of the march of progress.

    And then Steinbeck will do what he does best. Sits himself in the middle of a scenario as a conflict converges and extracts the truth and message in it. East of Eden is fascinating for its thematic density and allegorical connections and autobiographical story. But it’s also sharp and personal and familiar and in the first quarter of the novel, that’s what I’m enjoying the most.

    Things I wrote this week:

    John O’Donohue on the artifice of beginnings:

    When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. All our beginnings happen within this continuity. Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time. A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #12: Web Components, Web Technologies and Things that Last

    The magical moment of web components and design systems

    There’s something in the air this holiday season that’s got everybody talking about web components. Scott Vandehey sums it up nicely: Web Components are Having a Moment. A lot of this was kicked by off by some reason posts about using “Light DOM” vs shadow DOM (which Eric Meyer concisely summed up for us). The basic difference being that, at the expense of losing some features of shadow DOM and greater encapsulation, you can very easily style a web component from outside the web component. And for a lot of people, that’s enough to make it click.

    But for me, the light bulb moment came this week when I got around to reading Brad Frost’s recent deep dive into design systems, The Design System Ecosystem. This is the line that caught my eye:

    We’ve helped organizations build design systems in a multitude of technologies over the years, but as time goes by we now heartily recommend one specific technology to build a core design system for the web: Web Components. Web Components are a standard, part of the web platform itself. That means they’re interoperable with any web framework or technology, they’re lightweight, they’re themeable, and they’re self-contained.

    Brad has been doing this kind of work for a very, very long time. And he works with heavy hitters in the enterprise world with tons of legacy systems and tangled implementations to sort through. The kind of thing I find myself in each and every week as well.

    And for that use case, Web Components fit like a glove. They can be layered on to just about any system and be fitted to adapt it. Combine that with some selective components that utilize Light DOM, and you may even be able to swap in pieces of a UI layer, ad-hoc and as needed, as time goes on, bundling in the JavaScript with the component, but without having to change any of the CSS or styling for a site.

    All of this has prompted me to do a couple of experiments on my own, and so far I am quite enjoying the simplicity of web components, and the fact that they are just web technologies all the way down.

    What it’s like to write on the web

    Here’s a conundrum. We have a medium that’s been around for thirty years. It’s the major source of information around the world, and it’s the most prolific and vast streams of words, and media several orders of magnitude over. And yet it’s often still talked about as a proto-medium, something lesser than. Decades ago, authors like Steven Johnson (who wrote Interface Culture and is now working on NotebookLM over at Google) were trying to figure out how the medium of hypertext was going to separate itself from others and become a fully expressive new form.

    And in some ways, it just never has. Megan Marz reflected on that very disconnect in her piece, Poets in the Machine. Lamenting the lack of critical recognition that online writers receive simply because they happen to be writing online, she writes:

    The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down.

    And yet, online writers helped to define a new voice, one that would be impossible without the web. It’s a style that Johnson participated in, and helped to define. And it’s one that has now made it’s way into other forms of popular culture. And so I don’t know if I agree with Marz that online writing even needs formal recognition, but I do think it’s a disservice to set it apart from “serious” writing so callously.

    A Mindful Universe

    I listened to an interview with Marcelo Gleiser on the Why is this Happening podcast, and they briefly talked about Gleiser’s book, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future.

    I thought what Gleiser had to say on what a mindful universe means was one of the most poetic and clarifying ideas I have ever heard:

    And if we weren’t here, with the narrative of creation or trying to figure out what the big bang is or what an atom is or what is democracy, the universe would not have a voice. And so one of the fundamental things that the only reason we have a voice is that we exist in this planet that allow us to be here…

    … And so the mindfulness is that with the emergence of humans in this planet that started to ask fundamental questions about existence, the universe gained a mind, too. So in a sense, the universe is thinking about itself through us.

    John O’Donohue on the light that lives within us all:

    There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • What’s the next move?

    Parenting a toddler is getting up at 1AM for your toddler with an ear infection and at 3AM to help them find a squishy ball they lost in their bed but it all being worth it for the endless joy it produces.

    Short week, Thanksgiving. We’ll see if I can get some inertia.

    Reading

    I finished The Bullet Journal method for the second time. I got a lot out of it again, even though this time was more of a skim. One thing I’m focusing on is logging more than just simple tasks and events. This stood out (emphasis mine)

    You can view your Bullet Journal as a living autobiography. It allows you to clearly see what the rush of life tends to obscure. You can track the decisions you’ve made, and the actions you’ve taken that led you to where you are. It encourages you to learn from your experiences. What worked, what did not, how did it make you feel, what’s the next move

    If I could sum that up, it’s probably: slow down and think about it. That’s a lesson we can all learn, but one that I’m particularly thinking about for how I log in my journal.

    That used to be something came so naturally, especially in my college years, when I considered a future in academia. And I’m not sure if its the natural distractions of life or the interruptive modern era that makes that so hard these days.

    Some hope for the future of the web? A good point made in in Today in Tabs about a decade or so ago, when publications like The Awl began to break through with a new form of independent media:

    The Verge seems to be doing fine, some of the others kind of still exist, pretty much everyone is laying off staff and making ominous noises about replacing the rest with AI soon. But if I know one fact (and I do) it’s that there will always be people with no other interests or life skills except finding out what’s happening and writing it down. You can give them big paychecks, but it won’t make them work any faster. You can fire them, but it won’t make them work any less. The moneyfolk come and go from media for reasons I will never understand, but when they’re gone—when things look the most bleak—that’s when your true reporter goblins come out to play.

    Who knows what the future of the web holds, and who knows what journalists and creators will do? The only thing that’s certain is that once a generation, they are counted out, and once a generation, they find a new path no one had thought of.

    Drive is a bit repetitive, but it certainly… drives… home its point. Intrinsic motivation is a very really think and it can be encouraged and it is a bit counter-intuitive. But once you wrap your head around it, it starts to make a lot of sense.

    Writing

    Maya Angelou, echoing the kind of thing you hear all the time from writers:

    Writing is a part of my life; cooking is a part of my life. Making love is a part of my life; walking down the street is a part of it. Writing demands more time, but it takes from all of these other activities. They all feed into the writing. I think it’s dangerous to concern oneself too damned much with “being an artist.” It’s more important to get the work done. You don’t have to concern yourself with it, just get it done. The pondering pose — the back of the hand glued against the forehead — is baloney. People spend more time posing than getting the work done. The work is all there is. And when it’s done, then you can laugh, have a pot of beans, stroke some child’s head, or skip down the street.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote