Becoming a better writer and Homo sapien.
This year’s bullet journal started with a small change. I’m writing the date for each day in the format YYYY.MM.DD
It looks like a software version number, and I like that.
Every day is another chance to patch some bugs or add a new feature. It reminds me not to see myself as static, but impermanent and capable of change.
From Dan’s Daily:
I was recently talking to a friend who runs a film production company. We chatted about the huge amount of archival footage he has amassed over the past 16 years.
One interesting thing he shared was that video quality advances so quickly that footage older than 8 years old is generally no longer usable on modern projects.
About a year ago my dad wanted to show the kids a recording he made of my high school performance of The Wizard of Oz (I was the Tin Man).
He originally recorded it with a VHS camcorder, then ported it over to DVD at some point, and we were watching it on a 4K TV.
It did not feel like you were right there in the APHS gymatorium.
This post got me thinking about how the tech we use to capture moments doesn’t hold on to them very long. But maybe for some things that’s okay. We don’t last all that long, either.
When you breathe in and you make one step, it means you have to stop running. And you have to oppose the tremendous force of habit energy always pushing you to run to the future.
–Thich Nhat Hanh
Nothing drives me nuts more than when somebody says, “Oh man, I have so many fires to put out. I got all these fires, everything’s urgent…”
[….]
To which I will say “So you’re being strategic about how you’re approaching everything right now?” and they’re like, “Well, yeah, but there’s so many fires.”
Do you know that firefighters legitimately will let things burn?
[….]
They go, you know what? Sometimes it’s better to let this burn so you can save this thing, as opposed to trying to attack the thing that’s burning and ignoring what could be next in line. Or the correlation and causation of what’s going on with the fire.
Mike Vardy, PM Talks S1E8: Urgency
I’ve used a lot of time in therapy lately to talk about issues with prioritization and trying to pare down my inflated list of Things I Wanna Do. Sara has an analogy about thinking of it as juggling, but some balls are glass and some balls are plastic.
Keep the glass ones moving, and let the plastic ones fall if you need to. You can pick them up later if necessary.
But this chunk of the PM Talks podcast series quoted above got at something else for me: Letting things go.
It’s not easy to look at something and either hit delete, or ship what’s there without those last perfectionism-influenced steps. It’s not easy because it feels like giving up.
But the savings in bandwidth, and the increased focus on the things that matter more? That would be a benefit. It’s not giving up, it’s giving space.
It also ties in to something from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity:
There exists a myth that it’s hard to say no, whether to someone else or to your own ambition. The reality is that saying no isn’t so bad if you have hard evidence that it’s the only reasonable answer.
This frames it a little differently, but also creates something that might be an easier ask than the question of “What’s most important out of all this?”
“What must I say no to?”
I’ve had a link sitting in my drafts folder for a bit that I wanted to point to:
A friend’s social media post, in which she discusses another person’s comment of “I really think a sizable proportion of the population has become addicted to being angry” with the sage response of “I think a lot of them are doing it because it’s more enjoyable to be angry than to be depressed.”
– bethanyg, “Choosing Happy”
And it wasn’t until catching up with Agatha All Along that I realized what I’d been waiting for:
ALICE
When mom died, I stopped believing everything she ever taught me. I was so angry. Part of me hoped that the road wasn’t real so that I could stay angry.
LILIA
Now you know that it was all for you. And that makes you sad. Sad is better than angry.Looking at these two, and thinking about a lot of what I’ve been seeing and feeling this year, it clicks for me.
Feeling angry? You can always blame it on the source of your anger for causing your reaction (even though it’s not true).
Feeling sad? Sure there may be events that trigger it, but it’s easier to understand in the moment that sadness is your reaction, and not something being forced on you.
Anger is a weapon looking for a target. Sadness is a wound that needs time and care.
This Builds Character