A thought for the year, from the aforementioned Prof. Taleb:

Likewise, I don’t read letters and emails longer than a postcard. Writing must have some solemnity. Reading and writing, in the past, were the province of the sacred.

From How I Write, to which I have linked before. Good essays much like good books are worth re-rereading.

For all the hate X gets, you can still find nuggets of good information, Nassim Taleb and the Taleb-adjacent being a prime example. Here is one such post, from Juani Villarejo, shown here in its entirety for those who would rather not go to X to see the original:

Parkinson’s law says that work expands to fill the available time.

Jevons’s paradox states that every increased efficiency, will raise demand rather than decrease it.

And there is a work asymmetry:
Probably there are many more things you dislike doing than things you like.

Conclusion: If you allocate time to work, all the time will be filled with tasks to do.

If you make your work more efficient, your time will be filled with more tasks (demands increases).

But by the asymmetry, tasks you dislike doing have more chance to appear than tasks you like.

So when you make your work more efficient your time will always tend to be filled with more tasks you dislike doing.

Corollary: Never ever efficientize (sic!) the things you like doing. Take all the time and enjoy them slowly. They also serve as a defense wall against the things you dislike.

The links and emphasis are mine. For all its pretenses to the contrary X is still a horrible platform for anything longer than 300 or so characters and does not allow for hyperlinks.

Updated the now page for the first time in two months, with a list of board and dice games we played this week. It is more than I’ve played since, well, this time last year!

Having three school-aged children in three different grades of (thankfully only) two schools means an unending barrage of information emails and class email newsletters that are — don’t get me wrong — absolutely delightful to receive but also become a game of “find the actionable item and its due date”. That game is no fun, and if it’s a class trip permission or payment may in fact end in tears.

I tried watching a Tinderbox journaling tutorial on Youtube, and it was just way too much overhead for me. But the beauty of Tinderbox is that you can have as much or as little structure as fits my needs, and my needs are modest… for now.

Sebregondi and Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.

I don’t remember how I came about this history of the Moleskine notebook but oh what a history. “Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse”, yeah right.

And I would have absolutely no complaints if it weren’t so ridiculously expensive for what you get. I want the Costco of premium mediocre notebooks, not the Nordstrom.

Seven years ago today. Time flies!

For the past few months I have been trying out both Tot and Bebop for quick note-taking, and Tot has a clear edge: the Mac app. The biggest loser is Drafts, which has become way too bloated for my needs. So it goes…

Oliver Burkeman writes about what it means to be done for the day:

If you’re caring for a three-year-old, or stuck in meetings, from 9am to 2pm today, the fact that the annual departmental review “needs” completing by 3pm is irrelevant. It’s not going to get written. So maybe “done for the day” will have to mean jotting down a few preliminary ideas for it instead.

I had to find this out through trial and error over a few decades, but you don’t have to! He also has a new book out soon, available for pre-order.

Dave Winer has some good advice:

I’m often tempted to offer advice to the parents, but I won’t offer it unless asked, except this. If you have children, there’s a good chance one or more of them will not have children, and you should love them the same, and provide models of acceptance while they’re growing up, by bringing childless people into your home, so the kids know that this is one of the legitimate choices in life, offering proof that you won’t love them any less if they go down that path. And here’s the hard part, imho, for people with children – keep that promise.