Tim Harford writes about productivity:

There are so many things one could be doing at any particular moment, and so many variables — where you are, how much energy you have, whether you’re being interrupted — that the whole exercise can feel like a game of five-dimensional chess that frequently leaves even the most skilled and seasoned players bewildered by an unexpected move.

This was such a great description that I had to share it. His advice, drawn heavily from GTD, is:

1. Look ahead (i.e. do weekly reviews)
2. Clarify
3. Be content (Oliver Burkmean style)

💯, as the kids would say.

These were supposed to be Notes from a 6-hour trip to Boston, but mechanical issues delayed the inbound flight by 4 of the 6 hours, and since this included the 90 minutes during which I was supposed to talk (for 20 minutes) answer questions (10), and attend a panel (30), the lecture had to be pre-recorded and the questions will have to wait another day. So anyway:

• Despite the delay, I have to give kudos to JetBlue. I am not their frequent traveller — though that is now likely to change — and my status with them is “Group F”, yet they refunded the entire trip without fees and gave additional credit for the inconvenience. The gate staff was on top of reshuffling people with connections to different flights and they handled some heated situations with poise. Granted, I may have been more heated myself had the trip been higher stakes, but had it been higher stakes I would not have had such a tight itinerary. Hurray for risk management.
• The stakes are not high because I was able to pre-record and send out the talk as soon as I realized I would not make it there on time. Now, could things have gone better? Yes: using AirPods to record over the background airport noise led to less than ideal audio, and a few times I had to yell over a person who decided to take a phone call right next to me, but hey, it’s a free airport, I hope we had annoyed each other equally.
• Speaking of sound quality, of course there is a study that shows that poor audio quality leads to distrust (sponsored by Shure, by any chance?). The original article had some 200 of Amazon’s “mechanical Turks” — what a charming way to describe low-wage digital labor — listen to manipulated and clear NPR recordings and grade them by how trustworthy they were. Now, this rhymes so much with the now-debunked study of illegible text leading to better retention due to increased focus that I’ll decide to throw all of it onto the ever-growing pile of things that just don’t matter, and will keep telling myself that my sub-$100 Samson is more than enough, if I just used it more.
• But anyway, it is a good idea in general to pre-record your talks — maybe during a practice session? — and save the best take for cases like this. It will also help you get rid of ticks both verbal and facial which you won’t even notice until you see yourself speak. Nowadays even PowerPoint has built-in recording.
• And if you didn’t come here via the homepage and/or RSS, do have a quick look at the good and the ugly of Washington National airport, DMV’s premiere flight cancelation destination.

Ages ago, back when this was a Squarspace blog, I had a snippet that automatically added Amazon affiliate links to posts. No one ever clicked, until now.

This morning, I found in my inbox a gift card with my Amazon Associates payment, for the amount of…

$0.49. It’s a start!

🗃️ The analogue dashboard is working better than expected! This is how it started.

I love that micro.blog hosts blogs as static websites. But if I were ever to need a non-blog static website, FastMail would be my number 1, 2, 3… host of choice. They’ve managed my email for a decade and have been nothing but outstanding. ↬This day’s portion

Infrastructure Saturdays continue with some minor tweaks to the link underlining, which should reduce visual clutter. I have also spent an unreasonable amount of time moving the infinity symbol a few pixels down. Point of diminishing returns reached!

I vaguely remember learning about The Curator’s Code from Marco Arment’s blog and sharing his lack of enthusiasm: I still don’t quite grasp the difference between “via” (ᔥ per the Code) and “hat tip” (↬). But 10 years later, why not give it a shot? ↬Tedium.

If you want my eyes to glaze over while reading your cold email — provided it even made it through SpamSieve — please make sure to:

• misspell my name
• use HTML, preferably with varying colors and font sizes
• mention a 10% discount if I ACT NOW

🗃️ I am unreasonably enthusiastic about @chrisaldrich’s index card journal, having forgotten my Hobonichi Techo at work and spending this weekend noteless. Index cards seem to be as senility-proof as it gets. The article itself is brief, but the comments add some color.

My dad is visiting from Serbia, and maybe I am getting old and less tolerant, or maybe not seeing him for two years has made me more sensitive to how he does things, but I have been noticing more and more an unusual tendency of his which I imagine to be the consequence of his post-WW2 1950s Yugoslavian childhood.

There is the habit to save everything: every scrap piece of lint, every empty container, every cardboard box. This, I can understand. We don’t necessarily have the space to set aside every octagonal glass jar or a quirky spice container he encounters — and I cannot begin to imagine the packing process for his flight back — but these are at least pretty and/or may have a future use.

But then there was a pile of broken kinder surprise toys waiting to be mended with a glue that will inevitably be more expensive than all the trinkets combined. Or the shattered $15 IKEA picture frame ⊕ The frame in question is the RIBBA, which I am absolutely positive had cost less than the current $15 and had a glass front instead of the current plastic one. So it goes…, “because do you know how much this would have cost back home”. Or, back home, a bottle of white wine received as a gift from someone decades ago and saved for a special occasion only to turn to vinegar. And in parallel, the urge to never, ever use anything up to its last bit.

Chocolate? Leave last few squares in the foil until they turn white and inedible. Pot of coffee? Drink until there are about to fingers left, keep at room temperature overnight, then pour down the drain. Dinner? Purposefully eat around the best bits, then whether or not you are full place them in a glass container — preferably one you salvaged from the recycle bin — and leave in the deepest, darkest reaches of the refrigerator until other family members start wondering about the funny smell.

So to my list of standard Latin phrases I should add Ne quid nimis — nothing in excess — even when the excess is in saving.