The world online would have us believe that everyone else’s life is better than ours. No matter how great the universe is when you look around you, there are always ones that appear better. You can stare at the photos, read the words and watch the videos and never fail pick out things you wish for your own. It’s easy to see positives in others but not in yourself.
Even if the portrayal is far from the truth.
My daughters toy says this to me every time I hand it to her. Its nighttime based vocal cues and music prods her towards winding down and going to sleep. For how long who knows, but it helps her drift off. I’ve never really paid attention to this until today whilst thinking about the very same things.
I’m not old, but I’m not as fast as I used to be — me to my wife after a run Whilst trying to up my running millage now the weather is better, I am forever having to tell myself to slow down.
It’s only a few months since I covered my reading flow. It’s something that has changed a lot in the last year due. Motivated by my desire to take more advantage of the time spent engrossed in a book or catching up on my queue of online articles. This doesn’t matter when and where I am doing this, but one thing I’ve come to rely on is highlighting and being able to read them back.
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.