Zach Phillips on generating work before building a system
A common experience I have as an unbearable software nerd: I get a peek at a system that a prolific person uses to create their prolific output and think “God, Microsoft Word? Are you an animal?”
I then go back to tinkering with my Grand System which has generated nothing yet.
While I do think it’s a tragedy that any person is still using Microsoft Word, I’m looking in exactly the wrong direction.
For at least the last 4 years, each night I have taken off my Apple Watch, and placed it on a charger next to my bed along with my iPhone. So for the time I am asleep, or at least trying to be, my phone is within arms reach on a standup charger.
This helps tremendously as I always have a bedside clock on hand that glows with a subtle bump to the table, and I can be at the mercy of my alarm within a few seconds.
I’m at risk of starting to sound like a broken record. This strange habit exists in me that I want to do loads of things but just never quite get around to them. I want to make videos, have a podcast, and publish loads of blog posts. The truth is I have no reasoning for wanting to do any of these things though, other than posting to the internet.
There is no desire in me to preserve my life in writing or video.
Andy Matuschak about working with the garage door up:
It’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette. Anti-marketing. I love reading other people processes.
I have seen people over the last few days start to wonder what to write about on their blog. Asking questions about the topics they cover and also publishing posts about what they aim to do. It’s great to see more people typing out words and realising that it really doesn’t matter what you write about.
Personal blogs are a strange thing, they are not new, they’ve been a round since pretty much the invention of the internet.
Alan Lightman in his book In praise of wasting time:
We in the “developed” world have created a frenzied lifestyle in which not a minute is to be wasted. The precious twenty-four hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced to ten-minute units of efficiency. The whole book plays on variations of this quote. Goes around the houses and through various anecdotes to instil in its readers that this notion we have of having to fill every waking minute of life with something is preposterous.
I told you I was going to keep on top of this and share my Homescreen regularly. You might not take much from this one compared to last month, but after inspiration from Homescreens relaunching I want to share anyway.
The main thing that has changed is the amount of gaming I am doing on my phone. For years I avoided it because I thought it was a waste of time, and not something I wanted to be doing.
Matt Birchler on wanting a delay tweet button:
People sometimes act like outrage and fake news is only a problem for Twitter and Facebook, but it’s a problem for any form of social media, as these services live and breath on those quick dopamine hits you get from posting some witty rejoinder or boosting something that supports your worldview. After all, on social media we can all be experts in whatever we want.
Karen Hao on Facebooks misinformation addiction:
The algorithms that underpin Facebook’s business weren’t created to filter out what was false or inflammatory; they were designed to make people share and engage with as much content as possible by showing them things they were most likely to be outraged or titillated by I know I keep bleating on about this but it’s easy to forget this, so it’s important to remind people that you come across that don’t understand.
I don’t remember the first time I thought about killing myself. It has to have been too long ago for my mind to recall, or it’s blocked from my conscious thought. I do remember the ups and downs of earlier life.
For the longest time I thought what I felt was just how everyone else felt. There wasn’t an even level of happiness, nowhere near. It was a constant wave of highs and lows that was impossible to predict.