Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

What to do if you can’t type an apostrophe

I very clearly can’t just sit down and write without being distracted the entire time.

Some distractions from this morning:

  • My apostrophe key wasn’t working. I’m using an old Magic Keyboard plugged into the iPad Pro. (Like the one that you’d get with an iMac, not the new iPad accessory.) I was starting to suspect that the keyboard was broken after using it a few times in the past couple months. That just didn’t seem right. These things have always felt pretty rugged. Keys sometimes didn’t register and I thought it was a battery or bluetooth issue or something like that but this time it was plugged in. In the past I couldn’t really reproduce the issue but this time I noticed I very clearly couldn’t type a single apostrophe. Okay the key is broken. But then I held shift to try the right quote and it worked. And it worked again every time. Long story medium: had to change a keyboard setting from Automatic to US and it worked.
  • I made a date shortcut in Shortcuts. I started typing in iA Writer with Evernote open in the side panel. Which I think could be good when I need my notes but then I got distracted because I wanted to add a date to the writing in iA Writer and there’s no shortcut for that. Then I remembered Evernote has shortcuts to insert date and time so I did that in there and copied it and pasted to iA Writer but that felt clunky so then I made a two step shortcut to copy the date to the clipboard. I’m guessing there are text expansion apps to do things like this or something like Drafts could be used to do this. But I know how to do it in Shortcuts so I used Shortcuts.

And now, to paste…

Apr 21, 2020 at 8:04 AM

Eat that!

I was listening to an Automators episode a couple days ago where they walk through shortcuts they have for daily briefs.

I think this would be a cool use case to anchor around if you’re learning Shortcuts. There’s plenty of people who probably see Shortcuts in a video, think it’s cool, but then don’t really have anything to use it for.

In that case it can very much be a solution looking for a problem.

But here’s the problem it solves really well: there’s so much resistance in the morning and being groggy isn’t quite the peak condition to be in to fight it.

I wrote about a BJ Fogg episode yesterday and finished reading his book Tiny Habits in the past week. In the episode, he says something along the lines of:

  • Design your habit for when your motivation is at its lowest

I can always tap an icon on my phone.

It’s usually one of the first things I do anyway. I’m just going to try to swap out Instagram for a daily brief shortcut. And I won’t even have to sprint through a cave running away from a giant rolling boulder.

BJ Fogg: Build tiny habits with positivity | Podcast Note

Some takeaways:

  • His second universal habit recommendation: Learn an instrument—He says that practicing an instrument for 15 minutes every day can be huge. You get to practice focusing, learning something, and it can be relaxing. His first universal recommendation? He calls it “The Maui Habit” (here’s a talk he did about it). When you get up and stand up for the first time each morning, say “It’s gonna be a good day.” If you actually don’t think it will be, even better. That’s when you say “It’s gonna be a good day… somehow.” 
  • Use positivity—I enjoy BJ Fogg’s approach which is focused on positivity. Do things that you already want to do. If you want to start working out again and you always hated lifting weights but enjoyed running, well, you should start by getting back into running. (BJ Fogg also recommends stepping back from a workout or diet goal and thinking about what you really want out of it. I found at a certain point that the motivation to live healthier is to have more energy through the day and to feel good rather than look better. That’s helped me get more consistent with working out.) Build on top of the things you’re good at. It’ll be easier that way.
  • Building habits is a skill—It’s probably one of the most important meta skills you can do for yourself. Similar to learning how to learn, practicing building a habit means that you get better at building awareness and breaking systems down into their pieces and building them back up.
  • Epiphany (can’t plan for this), tiny habits, or context changes (can sometimes be impractical if they’re to be effective)—These are three ways to change behavior. Basically go for the tiny habits because you can be deliberate about it and do it without making drastic changes like moving to a different country.
  • Tiny habits, tiny celebrations—Just finished a handful of push-ups? Say to yourself “Great job!” Just finished a few squats after using the restroom (your prompt)? Put on a song you love and strike a power pose. He acknowledges these things can feel silly or trivial or both. But you’ll re-wire yourself to look for small wins. (Again, positivity!)
  • Don’t separate the habit and the celebration—Another important thing for celebrating: do it right away. Don’t postpone your happiness for when you’re retired or something like that. At the smaller scale, don’t treat yourself to ice cream at night for doing your push-ups in the morning. Your brain won’t make the link between behavior and celebration.

And now, blogging about blogging…

While listening to this episode, I got inspired and opened my laptop up to write a quick post.

I want to build a smaller publishing habit. A daily one where jot down some thoughts about a podcast I listened to in, say, 7 minutes. Five of those in the week would take 35 minutes. At the end of the week I’ll have 5 podcast episodes that I’ve written a little bit about which I can gather up into The Listener, my weekly newsletter with podcast recommendations.

This time, some things that took it beyond 7 minutes

  • ~5  minutes making the notecard in Figma
  • ~2 minutes gathering the podcast links and formatting that in the post
  • ~20 minutes actually writing (I started with 3 bullets in mind and added things as they came to mind)
  • ~10 minutes distraction

I’ll keep cutting it down. Cut out some of these meta thoughts, stick to three bullets, get a little more focused, get faster making the notecards and formatting things. And I’ll aim for a little more breathing room.

Maybe 12 minutes would be a good goal.

12 is nice because 5 weekdays would lead to 60 minutes of total writing for the posts

12 is also nice because 2 of them just about equals a pomodoro session (1 minute off the 25 minutes).

Anywa, I’ll catch you tomorrow! (Maybe.)

A 1-hour tinkering goal

Okay so I want to undo some stuff that I did with the WordPress theme. A couple weeks ago I wanted to bring back the sidebar for individual posts. 

UntitledImage.png

 

Also just learned you can edit the markup for images and save custom templates (to do things like adding the shadow above).

Mars Edit - Style selection in uploader

This should be pretty useful if I want to continue adding sketches to posts and writing directly in the editor.

Oh yeah so this is getting away from explaining the tinkering goal. When I tried to bring the sidebar back a couple weeks ago, I tried digging around different theme settings and all that and after an hour or so I remembered I just hid it with CSS.

Time to bring it back! I’ll set a one hour timer and then bring it back and fix the style up. I’m also experimenting with recording this session as a timelapse after watching this video.

Here’s a picture of my setup.

Setup

And actually I think I can pull the timelapse up here. Which was supposed to be a timelapse of me tinkering but is now a timelapse of writing this post.

Work session wp

 

 

Small motion test

Just doing a bit of a motion test. I wanted to try a little bit of text animation with Figma. I finished That Will Never Work earlier this week and want to make some video book notes about it. But I should probably remember to start with text and all that, to make sure that things go smooth when making the video. Smooth is fast and all that.

Workout Log (04/15/2020) — Molting

Writing this after working out. Did Simple & Sinister (20kg two-handed swings, 16kg get-ups).

There’s a scene in this episode of Cobra Kai (s01e07 “Molting”) where Johnny Lawrence talks about some things that happened in Karate Kid. They cut between him talking about what happened and then scenes from Karate Kid showing what actually happened.

Let’s say some of the retold story doesn’t match up 100%.

Everyone does it.

I just finished reading That Will Never Work and the author talks about how the neat origin story (got tired of paying late fees one day) they told the media was a very cleaned up version of the messy reality. It’s always something to keep in mind when reading memoirs and biographies.

All stories are edited in some way. Intentionally (to compress timelines) or unintentionally (faulty memory).

Which reminds me, I need to finish reading Rebel Without a Crew. It’s Robert Rodriguez’s memoir and it’s a collection of journal entries. While it’s curated and edited it’s likely much closer to the reality of the time than a biography written 15 years after events happened or Johnny Lawrence talking about events 35 years later.

Rodriguez captures a lot of the mundane, tedious work that goes into making an independent film. Especially before digital tools were available to everyone.

Which makes me think of Chuck Klosterman writing about high school:

Whenever I try to remember friends from high school, friends from college, or even just friends from five years ago, my memory always creates the illusion that we were together constantly, just like those kids on Saved by the Bell. However, this was almost never the case. Whenever I seriously piece together my past, I inevitably uncover long stretches where somebody who (retrospectively) seemed among my closest companions simply wasn’t around.

I’ve been trying to write a little bit every day about how the day has gone during quarantine. Every day is so similar that the days will blend together looking back.

A lot of people are recording video and making things and sharing them while at home. A lot more than would probably journal if this happened 20 years ago. The curation for sharing things publicly is happening in real time. If we look back on this in 35 years it might look like all we did was play games and talk to each other with while switching to wackier and wackier webcam backgrounds.

One issue with writing right in the editor

I’ve mentioned the idea of writing in the editor more than a few times. Through all the inconsistency of writing posts for this blog and in making content on other platforms, three things really get me to finish publishing things:

  • Writing in the editor
  • Writing with a timer
  • Writing with distractions blocked

I’m just going to brainstorm some issues with each individually. (In an effort to think through how to combine them to become really effective at writing and finishing things.)

If I write in the editor, it’s harder to block things, because I need to block all other websites while writing in the WordPress editor. And I can use a physical timer, which does work pretty well. Nothing’s as good as having the timer right where I’m writing, which is to say that I can always get writing done when I’m using Cold Turkey Writer. And finishing posts often means that I need to add links to things. I can probably do things like throw some TODOs/TKs in there and then add the links later in a separate phase. I think this is something to practice in isolation and get good at separating these things. I’ll add it to the list of experiments to try below.

If I write with a timer, I usually get a draft done but then I don’t really give myself time for fixing up links and revising things and often am just in the middle of a thought. I can’t just hit “Publish” right then and there. I need to break the times up into stages and actually respect those stages and build up the discipline (through practice) to stick to the outline.

If I’m writing with distractions blocked, using something like Cold Turkey Writer, I’ll often end up with a bunch of writing and then I need to take the steps to move it to the editor. The best thing might be to use something like Cold Turkey Micromanager with a different editor. Cold Turkey Micromanager + MarsEdit + Figma might do the trick to really finish a post every day.

Experiments to try

  • Really practice writing in separate phases: offline writing with TODOs and TKs (20 minutes), add links (5 minutes), revise and schedule on some other day.
  • Try the Cold Turkey Micromanager + MarsEdit + Figma combination for writing the initial posts. I’ll need to add links later but that can be done with that second session and maybe it’s just a browser that’s allowed at that point so that I can add links in.