Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Notecards and ideas for the next 5 posts (or next 2 posts)

I made a tag for this ongoing goal: 64 posts in 64 days.

Alright so in my last post, this is what I said my next post would be:

My next post: A bunch of notecard drawings and the ideas for the posts.

I’m going to set an interval timer: 5 x 2 minutes

The goal: 5 topics to write about over the next 5 days.

I used Photo Booth so I can stay on my laptop (instead of finding my iPad or camera to take a photo of it) and in FLOW for this writing session

And here… we… go:

Okay so I ended up writing 10 topics to try to narrow things down from. I’ll just re-write the text for easier reading.

  1. Ray Croc – The Founder
  2. D. Perell x Seth Godin – Typepad to WordPress
  3. Lessons from 100 in 100
  4. Why I use WordPress
  5. 3 easy meal prep
  6. Getting slightly back into cooking
  7. Swings, get-ups
  8. My podcast habit change
  9. The Big Picture
  10. NBA x Hollywood

Then the idea was that I’d actually stick to the intervals and sketch a concept from five of the topics.

Instead I just drew 2. One with a rough animation idea and then spending most time on the second animation idea. (I wasn’t planning to do any of the animation at all initially.)

Definitely failed the batch goal but am happy with one of the animations, so overall it’s a fine outcome.

This is the notecard for “Ray Croc – The Founder”

his blogThis post would be about how I watched “The Founder” last night and how the big reframe became looking at McDonald’s as being in the restaurant business to really being in the real estate business. Lesson: Know what business you’re (really) in.

This is the notecard for “D. Perell x Seth Godin – Typepad to WordPress”

This post would be about Seth Godin’s appearance on David Perell’s podcast (“Seth Godin: Writing every day”). This is the animation I was happy about. I’m trying to convey Seth Godin talking about the importance of location. When he’s got his blog editor UI open, he knows exactly what he’s there for: to write that day’s post. He also mentioned he switched from TypePad to WordPress. I’ll write about how I always return to that idea of writing in the editor.

Simplification (when aiming to write every day)

 

I spent a little too much time on the header image. But I think it was worth it. The book quote I’m trying to illustrate is from“High Output Management” by Andy Grove:

But in both widget manufacturing and administrative work, something else can also increase the productivity of the black box. This is called work simplification. To get leverage this way, you first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists. Every single step must be shown on it; no step should be omitted in order to pretty things up on paper. Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart so that you know how many you started with. Third, set a rough target for reduction of the number of steps. In the first round of work simplification, our experience shows that you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction.

I have a current goal of writing 64 posts in 64 days. I’d link to the post where I explain why and what the plan is and all that, but I didn’t write it yet.

The first few days of a challenge are easy because you’re excited, you’re motivated. To successfully keep the pace up, I know I’ll need to simplify the process for when that initial motivation is gone.

With writing, there can be a bunch of steps and it’ll be important to eliminate some or learn to batch single steps ahead of time. Here are some of the steps involved in a post

  • Choose a topic
  • Grab a relevant quote from a book or a podcast
  • Write a draft
  • Think of something to draw
  • Draw the notecard
  • Animate the notecard (optional)
  • Revise
  • Put everything on WordPress
  • Publish

Some of the steps have sub-steps. Many of the steps can come in any order (I can draw the notecard right after the topic). There are tradeoffs doing the steps in any order. For example, sometimes a step will need to be repeated depending on how a different step goes.

  • If I write the draft then draw the notecard: Then other ideas might come up in the notecard and sometimes I’ll need to re-write with references to the drawing.
  • If I draw the notecard before writing the draft: Then other ideas might come up while writing that aren’t captured in the image. I might need to re-draw the notecard.

These are small things that sort of move where the revision has to happen (either revise the writing after drawing or revise the drawing after writing). Or I can just build up more discipline about not adding ideas when working on a step.

No sure answer and it could even depend on the topic.

With that said, it’s probably better to just pick one order and stick to it. Because there’s a thinking tax to always having various open steps to pick from.

My hunch: whichever step is easiest to do in batches should come first.

I’ll choose a topic and aim to always draw the main concept before writing. It’s easier to batch topics and notecard drawings than it is to batch writing. (Unless it’s just outlines, but let’s leave that out for now.)

My next post: A bunch of notecard drawings and the ideas for the posts.

The phrases of habits

Last night I started writing an outline for a new video about habits. The goal of that video is to share the frameworks from “The Power of Habit”, “Atomic Habits”, and “Tiny Habits”.

Maybe I can draw some sort of chart showing how the frameworks are related.

Here’s a draft of that:

Black is for “The Power of Habit”, blue is for “Atomic Habits”, and red is for “Tiny Habits”. It does help me see the similarity between frameworks.

Here are the groups of phrases:

  • Cue, obvious & attractive, prompt & motivation
  • Routine, easy, ability
  • Reward, satisfying, motivation

Motivation is shown twice because it’s baked into the beginning (attraction increases motivation) and end of the habit (reward increases motivation).

I’ll keep working on this.

How not to save $40

Right now I’m mailing out a bunch of packages to the groomsmen at my wedding. (Like the rest of the world, they don’t read this, so it won’t be a spoiler.)

I printed out some stuff and am on the last leg of mailing these things out.

Of course, I want to procrastinate, so I put a 7-minute timer on and am writing the draft of this post.

Today’s lesson: break projects down into smaller tasks.

Actually, that’s sort of the lesson. That’s what I got forced to practice today. I ordered 4 things and mailed them to myself to then mail them out to my friends.

It crossed my mind at the time that I could just have them sent directly to my friends. The message would be less personal, but I could still include a couple lines.

I should have done that in hindsight.

Some tradeoffs of not doing that:

  • Have to pay shipping to each of them, which looks like it might be $30 per person instead of the $7-15 guess that I had.
  • Mental cost of the packages sitting in our apartment for a couple weeks because I knew it’d be a pain to pack and ship these things out. (I was right!)
  • The hours I’ve spent today getting these things all set up.

I’ll break down all the things I needed to do today, which I’ve slogged through likely because it’s a Saturday and I’m in no rush. (Remember: time box things!)

Here are all the speed bumps today:

  • Getting all my friends’ addresses
  • Finding pictures to send to them (this was actually fun, but then it ended up taking longer than I planned)
  • Figuring out my FedEx account
  • Resetting my FedEx password
  • Finally getting to shipping estimation and then learning I needed to create a shipping account within that account and then finding out it can’t be created online right now
  • Didn’t have enough packing tape. (this was just a stupid one that felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back. For a few minutes, I really thought I was done for the day.)

Now to take a couple trips to FedEx to carry the boxes.

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Update: After finally shipping things out like an hour after writing the above…

Two trips to FedEx, not bad, even carrying boxes each time. It’s a short walk.

Two times waiting in line at FedEx, pretty bad! It’s a long wait.

While the estimates I had were off, one of the packages rang up at $80 to ship. That’s when I remembered that it costs more to ship if it’s farther (further?) away. And it does seem to be mostly by volume rather than weight.

Update: After some light research on this, I definitely could have cut the cost in half with a smaller box. Which I had, because I shipped these in different sized boxes. And picked the nicest, largest box for the Miami package.

There’s a measurement called volumetric weight that’s used. You’re not charged for volume and weight. You’re just charged by the higher of the two, after volume is converted to volumetric weight. I didn’t realize it’d be double.

I could have said no when it rang up so that I could go home, unpack two boxes to get a smaller box for the Miami package, then taken an additional trip.

Anyway, all this reminded me “Happy Money”, one of my favorite books about money. Here’s a quote:

Whether driving for an hour to get gas that is five cents cheaper, waiting in endless lines to get a free sample of the latest PowerBar, or taking an entire afternoon to abscond with a cheap umbrella, we too often sacrifice our free time just to save a little money.

In this case, I did the opposite. Paid to save an hour. It seems worth it right now. My willpower was completely gone. FedEx was closing so this would have been either (1) a very stressful hour to try to rush to make it in time or (2) an hour the following day and many hours in between being annoyed that I’d have to go the next day.

Much like this packing and shipping project, this post is too long.

Writing, starting from a spreadsheet (sort of)

Okay so quick update on the whole waking up thing. Today I tried waking up with the Apple Watch, which is great because it vibrates your wrist. This means it doesn’t disturb my fiance when I’m waking up.

It also means it’s easy to turn off and go back to sleep, which is exactly what I did this morning. Still was able to get kettlebell swings in though.

I have a todo for writing a post about how I want to write 64 posts by the end of the year. It’s a post per day starting with the post I wrote the other day about posting just to post.

To get back in the swing of things, I’ll need to have some sort of system to fall back on when I don’t have a topic to write about. Today, I’ll try this: Open up my recent Readwise emails to find a book highlight and then I’ll write about that.

So here’s the highlight I picked, from “Storyworthy” by Matthew Dicks:

Moreover, by placing these most storyworthy moments in a spreadsheet, I could sort them for later use. I could copy, cut, and paste these ideas into other spreadsheets easily, allowing me to ultimately separate the truly storyworthy ideas from the ones that merely had potential.

I happen to be writing the first draft of this post in a spreadsheet. (Sort of.) It’s nice to see an overview of the different topics I have in mind so that I can slowly work toward those 64 posts.

This is recently inspired by David Perell’s daily writing, which seems to be on his blog under tweetstorms: https://www.perell.com/tweetstorms

I’ve done 100 posts in 100 days in the past. Most recently in 2016: http://franciscortez.com/100-days-100-posts

That time, it was probably inspired by Seth Godin and then probably a bunch of other copywriting material I was reading at the time.

Actually… I just read my first post from that series: http://franciscortez.com/two-crappy-pages

It’s inspired by Tim Ferriss (“Two crappy pages”) and then a couple 100-day programming challenges: 100 days of Framer and 100 days of Swift.

It’s a reminder of how memory works. Which is to say: it often doesn’t.

I don’t remember those at all.

So I’m really happy that I have it captured somewhere. And now I’m looking forward to what this next attempt at writing daily will capture.

Actually getting up when waking up (and the steps I took to prep for it)

I got up this morning and, for the first time in weeks, didn’t crawl back into bed. There was a time, probably even less than a year ago, where the thought of snoozing didn’t cross my mind.

It was a win to get one step closer to that.

Here’s what worked:

– I set an alarm on my phone and put my phone on my desk so I’d need to stand up to turn it off.

– Note: I also used to use my phone to listen to a podcast (usually an old Rewatchables episode) to sleep. Last week I got a $30 MP3 player. It’s clunky but it has a sleep function. I threw 2 episodes on it and that’s it and now I can listen to something to bed without being tempted to scroll on my phone.

– I mixed up a pre-workout (BCAA + caffeine) and stuck it in the fridge.

This worked. Why? Here are some hunches:

– The alarm matters but the position doesn’t. I used to wake up on my own before 7AM but never re-adjusted since moving from NY to SF a month ago. So I do need an alarm (trying 6:30 AM right now). I say the position doesn’t matter because I’ve had it at the desk for a few days and will just walk over, turn it off, and walk back to bed no problem. (The problem is that I usually don’t end up falling back asleep and then am both tired and frustrated that I didn’t use the waking time to do something.)

– The $30 MP3 player has been great. I fall asleep when I finally stop stupidly patting myself on the back for thinking of buying it

– Is BCAA magic? Probably not. But the last time I significantly lost weight, I was using it before and after workouts. It might just help curb hunger and that’s a good enough benefit for me. For the caffeine, why not coffee? It’d probably wake me up but I wanted to try to build a new cue. Coffee usually means I’ll sit down and work. I want the artificial pre-workout flavor first thing in the morning to taste like the beginning of a workout.

Another useful step: I started using the apartment complex gym. (Mask on! Empty at the time with huge garage style doors open for ventilation.) I have the same weights for kettlebells at home, but it probably takes 1-2 minutes from my door to the gym door.

1-2 minutes to a complete environment shift. Hard to beat.

(Let’s see if I can keep it up!)