Active Recall!

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Unpack ASAP

Shane Parish: “What’s one habit you’ve changed recently that has had a profound impact on you?”

Ed Latimore: “This is really silly, but it’s true: I wash the dishes as soon as I’m done eating.”

I just finished unpacking. I started unpacking pretty much right when we got home from the airport, after a 12-day trip. Our flight was delayed 4 times and we arrived around midnight.

I’m exhausted but I kind of new it would take some time to wind down and actually fall asleep.

Luggage can be a weird psychological anchor if you don’t unpack. It took me a week to unpack on our last trip. The bags just sit there and remind you that you’re lazy over and over throughout the day.

Like dishes, unpacking is one of those things that you have to do anyway.

And it’s not like email where replying creates more responses to reply to, in an infinite loop. Unpacking does differ a bit from dishes, which you could make reasonable efficiency argument for: you can do them when there are more than a few in the sink.

You can actually finish packing completely. All the more reason to do it as soon as possible.

Don’t get very good (at things that don’t matter)

Tim Ferriss in “The Four Hour Work Week”:

“Here are two truisms to keep in mind: 1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. 2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important. From this moment forward, remember this: What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.”

What are you too good at?

I got pretty good at outlining ideas quickly. Which meant I also got very good at not finishing work on different ideas. I practiced starting writing and got very bad at finishing writing.

Are there skills you’re practicing that might be automated in the near future?

In his Building a Second Brain course, Tiago Forte describes getting very good at organizing his music library. He had a nice workflow going, developed over years.

And then it was entirely replaced by iTunes Match.

Don’t become the best at organizing dirty dishes in the sink. Or becoming the best at tying shoelaces.

Or becoming the best at transcribing audio completely manually.

Many valuable skills will become automated or much easier with tools to augment yourself. Here’s Michael Bierut in “Now You See It”:

“Design work that would have taken me a week in 1980 can now be done on a personal computer in less than an hour. Cutting and pasting, when necessary, is a special task performed in the basement, often by interns. I get the impression that this kind of work, to which I once applied myself with the pride and intensity of a master chef, is now regarded as a chore akin to dishwashing.”

Entire roles won’t be replaced quite as quickly as self checkout replaces cashiers. But aspects of roles will no longer need specialization.

Take a look at skills you’re actively developing. Are there more important parts of the workflow to practice?

Master skills that are worth mastering.

Ace, stock, and flow

From “Creative Calling” by Chase Jarvis:

“I explained that my philosophy was always to work on things that were deeply personal to me and on either end of the spectrum: gritty, cheap, and raw or polished and precise. To me, everything in the middle—“best practices” and “industry standards” and “whatever the competition is doing”—created forgettable results. I felt pretty insightful until Alex revealed that he’d called his hotel the Ace because that card is simultaneously the lowest and highest in the deck. Genius.”

Chase’s philosophy reminded me of the concept of stock and flow for creative work. From Robin Sloan:

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

The ace can represent both of these things.

The ace can be the highest card in the deck, the stock, the work that takes the longest and will be busted and re-visited by people for weeks, months, years into the future.

The ace can be the lowest card in the deck, the flow, the documentation that is easy to produce but helps you stay in touch with your audience.

That ace can be combined with other lowly cards to create a straight. A strong hand depending what you’re playing.

Being in the middle risks spending a lot of time polishing something people will forget about within a couple taps and a scroll.

  • Don’t spend an hour editing a 15-second check in
  • Only one rib in the BBQ contest will get judged, so pick and polish that one
  • People might miss your single tweet, so find different ways to share the core idea

An ace mindset keeps you away from the middle.

You don’t need more

“You don’t need more money. You don’t need more free time. You can always do it.

Play is a state of mind–it’s a way to approach the world.

Whether your world is a frightening prison or a loving playground is entirely up to you.”

— Play It Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety by Charlie Hoehn

While reading Oliver Burkeman’s “Four-Thousand Weeks”, I’ve been thinking a lot about time. I have enough money and even enough time. I’m not balling out or on sabbatical with weeks of time free. And that’s the point. Enough of each isn’t an unreachable number for many people.

Knowing how to spend it is another thing. Burkeman points out the oddness of looking at time as a thing to spend in the first place.

Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.

Working out seems a worthy cause, because it makes the rest of the time better. And, hey, maybe it’ll get you a few hundred or thousand more weeks. Working out is also nice because it’s easily compartmentalized in a day (you can very much completely finish a work out) but it can be an obviously infinite game that you aren’t constantly looking to finish. Even if you could get a six-pack in six weeks, you’d need to work to keep it.

Other things aren’t as obviously infinite.

You think you can play after you’ve finished all your work. That made sense in elementary school when you could finish all your work. It makes less sense with knowledge work.

I have a few friends who are nurses, and they can’t exactly bring their work home with them. They do seem to enjoy their long stretches of time off a little more than friends in tech. Who take a few days of vacation to phase shift into relaxation, if they ever do at all.

In any case, you shouldn’t wait for a vacation to play.

I’m coming to the same conclusion I come to just about every year:

  • I should play video games/computer games with close friends in other cities, especially because a lot of us have Oculus Quests
  • I should lean into effortful fun to meet up with friends where I live
  • I should do the very scary thing of making new friends where I live
  • (And I should get back to podcasting with Wally, because creating with friends leads to the best creations and the best friendships)

You probably have time in your life now to play. Maybe you don’t have the people, but they’re worth finding as well.

You have enough.

Ramblings: Christmas Eve edition

I’m sitting in a massage chair at my parents’ house. My usual routine when home is to tag along with my dad to the gym, but it’s closed this morning. So I’m just going to mash on the keyboard for a few minutes.

Some spoiler-free thoughts on things we watched in the past week

    Spider-Man: No Way Home: As good as everyone says it is. I’ve listened to a few podcast reviews about the movie and one of the interesting points for the future is that they absolutely nailed this movie. And they happens to still include Sony.
    Venom: Let There be Carnage: I don’t know when 2.5 hours became the standard running time for big movies, but I don’t like it. Can’t stay awake. I liked all 90 minutes of Venom: Let There be Carnage and probably would’ve hated if it were another hour.
    The Matrix: Resurrection: As good as the sequels.

And on what I’ve been reading this week

  • “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman: Wonderful book about time and how skewed our view of time has become. We try to get faster at work tasks but we then fill the freed up time with more work tasks. We measure the effectiveness of leisure by how well it recharges us for work. (When the effectiveness of leisure is like the utility of art.) Even if you’ve bought into the idea of spending money on experiences over material things, it’s easy to get caught up in trying to have the most experiences. A great read heading into the new year and reflecting on how you spend time. A lot of it is probably spent on things that don’t matter.
  • “Hell Yeah or No” by Derek Sivers: A collection of essays from Sivers’s blog. He seems to have figured out how to live a calm, unrushed life. Sometimes, like right now, that feels like exactly what I want. Then the new year kicks in, things start moving, and I’ll switch back over to reading stories about hustle and will get back into deferring happiness for later.
  • “Dune: Messiah” by Frank Herbert: I just started this but I’m still very interested in this world.
  • I also finished Dune recently. Brian Herbert’s afterword in Dune has a paragraph that makes me think, “Oh I never want to be a writer”:

  • “Growing up in Frank Herbert’s household, I did not understand his need for absolute silence so that he could concentrate, the intense desire he had to complete his important writing projects, or the confidence he had that one day his writing would be a success, despite the steady stream of rejections that he received. To my young eyes, the characters he created in Dune and his other stories were the children of his mind, and they competed with me for his affections. In the years it took him to write his magnum opus, he spent more time with Paul Atreides than he did with me.”

    • There might be a limit to how far you go with creating a deep work environment.

    They have a better relationship later and, of course, Dune is a timeless work that has entertained millions and inspired countless other stories that came after it. So that might have been the cost.

    What I don’t want to do is end up in that kind of work-before-family state without having a master work to show for it.

    All these different books about time have been making me think that it’s totally fine to spend time on a solo podcast simply as a fun hobby.

    Captain Sinbad: Planning

    In his video “How to Reinvent Yourself in 2022“, Captain Sinbad talks about a 5-step process to prep for next year. It’s a nice mix of looking back and looking forward:

    1. Wins
    2. Losses
    3. Set goals
    4. Mind storm
    5. Reflect

    A year feels like it goes by fast so it can be helpful to take the time to actually look back at what you did. You did more than you think.

    I’ll jot some things down right now.

    • Wins: Married Amy (and pulled off a safe pandemic wedding), gave Booster a good first year on earth, had some work success, officiated a wedding, and had some sustained consistency with working out
    • Losses: Hit my highest body weight in the middle of the year (which did then lead to some success mentioned above in trying to fix it), really couldn’t get focused in the creator side of things, and could probably just be more present in many aspects of life.
    • Set goals: Buy a house with Amy (and get Booster a yard), get in the best shape of my life (some combo of bodyweight + strength), and keep at it with the creator pursuit.
    • Mindstorm: The house thing is sort of weird as a goal because it’s not entirely something that more effort moves the needle on, for fitness I’ve hired a coach for 3 months, and the creator pursuit might start with changing the domain to active-recall.com and actually participating in the Ship 30 for 30 writing challenge.
    • Reflect: Do these goals matter? Health for sure. A house would be nice but I definitely don’t want to fall into the someday-isle thinking of “Someday I’ll be happy and that someday is when we have a house”. I’ve been happy with far less space.

    The creator pursuit is something I’ll need to do a little more reflecting on. I just re-read Derek Sivers’ essay “How to do what you love and make good money“:

    Do something for love and something for money. Don’t try to make one thing satisfy your entire life.

    I already do something for money. And on many days open up The Five-minute Journal (okay, the app) and write “I have enough” then go on the rest of the day wondering how to get more.

    Maybe some of that is because some of what should be my art pursuit is tied to some future where it replaces the for money side of things. And I don’t actually take the time to improve in the art because the other side of things is more interesting or just a more effective distraction.

    Again, more to reflect on.

    In the meantime, this is probably the day of the year to close this blog editor and get back to watching football with my dad.