Today’s quote in the Hobonichi planner — from their CEO, no less — is a good one:

It’s not so much that people who don’t practice, or don’t practice enough, want to play hooky. They just don’t know what to practice. If they knew what to do and how much to do it — how to practice and what goals to aim for — I think the situation would be completely different.

It reminded me of Tyler Cowen’s deliberate practice routine

The new and improved list of recommendations made using the new micro.blog interface is now on my profile. The next step is to figure out why they’re not showing on this page even though I’ve included the shortcode.

Today was carved out for converting my ye old Blogroll to the new format by exporting all the RSS feeds I follow to OPML and then doing a little bit of cleanup, but of course a little bit turned into a lot and I couldn’t stop fiddling and where oh where has the day gone?

Until next week!

I’ve delayed it for as long as possible, but for reasons beyond my control I have to start using time tracking software. The question is: Bluebird, RescueTime or something else entirely?

Writing and editing are distinct skills. As I gaze into a stream of text that someone else wrote and several more people edited, as I try to make sense of the reds and the greens and the teals of Word’s tracked changes stacked on top of the red squiggles and the double underlines, as the nested comments flow one after another until my (aging!?) M1 MacBook Air begins to stutter, I realize that, at heart, I am a writer.

Happy New Year!

The perks of being born in late December, after the (Gregorian) Christmas but before the New Year:

• No office birthday cakes
• A few big gifts instead of many small ones
• Birthday cards don’t pile up on top of work email
• Guaranteed time off to reflect on the impermanence of life

Middle age has been on people’s mind lately. As I’ll hit 40 in a couple of weeks I am well within the demographic, but haven’t given the matter much thought. Oliver Burkman’s newsletter from today nicely encapsulates my view on the matter, which doesn’t lend itself to crises of the midlife sort once you have it, though obtaining it may possible constitute a crisis.

He writes about “clenching”: trying to preserve meaningful moments in formaldehyde, or wasting your life away on optimizing it for those meaningful moments while they fly by you. In contrast, you can acknowledge the moments for what they are — ephemeral:

Sure, you can have a hundred tea ceremonies. You can ever have them all with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then the moment evaporates forever.

On the days I let myself move through life in this unclenched way, things tend to feel much more naturally enjoyable. Not because I’m trying to make myself appreciate them, or self-consciously “feel grateful” for them – but simply because I’ve (temporarily) suspended the other agenda that was getting in the way.

This way of looking at life does not come naturally to everyone. Certainly not to me; as a 12-year-old reading Around the World in 80 Days, I thought Phileas Fogg’s optimal ways of doing everything were the bees knees. Then I started workin in health care and I saw that:

1. We are optimizing ourselves to death.
2. People can get terribly sick, or injuured, or both, and be bed-bound, or debilitated, or die, at any moment and for any reason, and quite often for no reason at all.

And I started thinking about life the way Burkman described, more or less. Which I did around the time we had our firstborn, a bit over a decade ago — too early for that event to qualify as a midlife crisis, but maybe I was ahead of the curve. But if you are going to have a crisis of your own, I suggest it being of the sort that turns your life away from clenching.

So, it’s done. I am at my low point of X usage. I’ve muted all but a handful of accounts (re-inventing lists in the process), and realized that I can do once-per-week wellness checks at most and not miss out on anything of importance. Now I only need to stop checking the Washington Post home page, and my media fast may begin.

I, for one, am still digesting Thursday’s dinner. There’s a reason why Thanksgiving is but once a year!

I reject the premise of this article, which ignores the option of talking to people’s face to face — the (actual, not stated) preferred communication method of every generation.