Five notions to consider as you look at your life in relation to time and “getting things done”:

1. Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment.

2. Are you holding yourself to or judging yourself by impossible standards? Drop them.

3. In what ways have you yet failed to accept the fact that you’re who you are and not the person you think you ought to be?

4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? Everyone’s just winging it, you might as well get on with it.

5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your action reach fruition?

Ten Tools for Embracing your Finitude

1. Adopt a fixed-volume approach to productivity. e.g. Keep two to-do lists one that contains everything you want to do, and a second which contains things you’re actively working on, which should be limited to a small number of items (at most ten). Or, establish time limits for your daily work.

2. Serialize! Focus on one big project at a time and see it to completion before moving on.

3. Decide in advance what to fail at. Accept that you’ll do a poor job at things which you aren’t currently focusing on, and that should diminish the shame of failing.

4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete. Celebrate your daily achievements, since you’ll never finish everything that’s left. Keep a “done” list of what you’ve completed in the day.

5. Consolidate your caring. There are lots of problems in the world, but you only have a finite amount of attention. Pick a few causes and work towards them.

6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology. Make your devices as boring as possible: delete social-media apps and switch your devices to grayscale. Read on a kindle instead of your phone.

7. Seek out novelty in the mundane. Avoid routines when possible, walk a new way, etc. Experience each moment in greater detail, pay more attention.

8. Be a researcher in relationships. Adopt an attitude of curiosity in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome or successfully explain your position, but “to figure out who this human being is.” Curiosity is satisfied regardless of the outcome. Choose wonder over worry whenever you can.

9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity. Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind, act on it right away. Don’t wait until later when you can “do a better job.”

10. Practice doing nothing. Stop trying to evade how reality feels, calm down and make better choices with your time.

“One lives as one can. … The individual path is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other. … Quietly do the next and most necessary thing.” - Carl Jung

From Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf 📚

Summary: we need to look closely at how different mediums impact the acquisition and maintenance of the reading brain.

Like Kurt Vonnegut’s artist-as-canary-in-the-coal-mine, Wolf argues that the reading brain (i.e. deep reading) is the canary in the coal mine of our brain. If we compromise our ability to be contemplative, we lose the facility to think, collaborate, and create at the highest level individually, and as a culture.

The deluge of digital information around us is shallowing our reading; this fools us into believing that we’re thinking when we are not (at least at the same level).

Highlights:

“Systematically examine - cognitively, linguistically, physiologically, and emotionally - the impact of various mediums on the acquisition and maintenance of the reading brain is the best preparation for ensuring the preservation of our most critical capacities.”

“In a milieu that continuously confronts us with a glut of information, the threat temptation for many is to retreat to familiar silos of easily digestible, less dense, less intellectually demanding information. The illusion of being informed by a default deluge of eye-byte-sized information can trump the critical analysis of our complex realities.”

“Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the artist to that of the canary isn’t he coal mines: both alert us to the presence of danger. The reading brain is the canary in our minds. We would be the worst of fools to ignore what it has to teach us.”

“I will suggest that the future of the human species can best sustain and pass on the highest forms of our collective intelligence, compassion, and wisdom, by nurturing and protecting the contemplative dimension of the reading brain."

A couple of weeks ago I came across a Tweet about a (Silicon Valley?) entrepreneur named Bryan Johnson, who sold his company to PayPal for $800 million, and spent most of 2021 assembling a team to help him design a diet/exercise/sleep/supplement regimen focused on reducing his epigenetic age. He has “open sourced” this regimen and called it The Blueprint. He claims via a variety of measurements to have successfully reduced his epigenetic age by 5.1 years in 7 months.

This went viral, and because of the nature of the diet and supplementation involved, a lot of the reaction was predictably negative.I won’t go into the Blueprint now, other than to say that I found it interesting as I have dabbled in some of the same interventions – albeit with a vanishing fraction of the resources at his disposal.

On his site, he has a video walking through his typical morning routine of diet/supplements/exercise. At 25:43, he talks about the discipline of following his routine:

“It’s such a slippery slope, that if you allow one exception, for any reason, it sort of all falls apart.”

That has really stuck with me, as it describes what I experience.

I’m trying to setup routines in my own life to help me accomplish goals. However, I’m also a world-class rationalizer and procrastinator. I can – and do – talk myself out of sticking to routines with alarming ease. On the one hand, I think that flexibility is a virtue, but I also understand that for me that flexibility is a tool for avoidance and backsliding.

Johnson uses interesting techniques to limit avoidance, including eating the exact same meals for breakfast and lunch.

For me, figuring out how avoidance and backsliding manifest daily is an interesting challenge. The importance of the morning is huge; doing the same things in the same order to start the day is enormously beneficial, but at this early stage in my process is still somewhat aspirational. I am only succeeding about 60% of the time. When I do backslide/rationalize my way out of a routine, the impacts radiate out into the rest of my day.

There are so many easy excuses to not be consistent, and when I am in the moment rationalizing the “why’s” of a particular decision not to stick with a routine, they all seem reasonable. Even though I know in the moment that they are rationalizations.

So while not for everyone, for me, it seems like the discipline of “All or Nothing” is important for me to maintain discipline and meet goals.

Previously, I described how re-ordering my personal development tasks made it easier to write.

Well, there were consequences. I moved my workout – which is normally a 1 to 2 hour affair – to the afternoon. Yesterday I called it after 30 minutes. Mentally it was just a constant struggle.

Why?

First let me describe what my usual morning looks like. We wake up around 5:30 AM, have a cup or two of coffee while doing a bit of news, scanning and chatting with my wife. Around 6:30 AM or so I start the work out, which looks like:

15 minutes of Wim Hoff breathing

15 minutes of yoga

30 minutes of stretching

30 minutes to an hour of rowing, kettle bells, TRX depending on the day.

While I’ve often thought that the morning sessions had a centering sort of element, I didn’t appreciate how central that meditative aspect is. It totally didn’t fit with the rhythms of the afternoon, and I felt scattered and impatient. Perhaps someday I’ll revisit that as a challenge, but for now, the morning is magic, and I will respect that.

Today, I started the workout directly after one cup of coffee. Settled in nicely and really appreciated that “moving meditation.” Had some butter tea afterwards, and then began writing this post. It’s 9 AM – so a fair bit of time has elapsed here – but it feels good, and I think I can tighten up the total time (it’s Saturday and I’m moving relatively slowly). So hurray - respect the morning!

It’s taken me too long to start writing.

Most mornings, thanks to Gordo Byrn and Dickie Bush, I write a series of prompts:

What one thing am I grateful for?

What one thing am I excited about?

What virtue will I manifest today?

What’s one thing I’m avoiding?

What’s one thing I need to do today?

The past two weeks I’ve marked “writing” as both the thing I’ve been avoiding and the thing I need to do. Two weeks, and this is probably my first successful run at it.

Why writing? My previous post gets at some of it; essentially I want to clarify what I think, how I think, and why I think. I’ll go into more detail on why I’m focusing on that later. Doing this publicly adds a layer of accountability, and perhaps my process might help others. Certainly, I’ve been helped by others doing this publicly.

What’s making today work? Two things: tools and structure.

Tools

I’m a much faster typist than writer. My first instinct is always to start at the keyboard. But I’m also aware that the physical act of handwriting is a powerful tool for connecting “brain” and “body” (yes, they are the same). So this morning I grabbed a notebook and what you are reading here was handwritten in that notebook first. This is much easier, and I’ll have to think more about why. My first take would be that its difficult for me to type without thinking of an audience. (Previous work habits). Currently, that’s leading to a bit of paralysis – in particular in the act of starting to write.

The journal/notebook seems to alleviate this paralysis. Even though I know I’m going to type and publish this online, I’m feeling like I’m writing for me, which is 98% of the point.

Structure

This will certainly need to be a specific exploration/entry, but structure is perhaps the primary challenge for me. I’m working to start the day with a variety of “me” tasks.

I’m reserving the first few hours of the day for personal development – mental, physical, etc. I’m at my best in the morning, so this directionally feels right. However, I’ve struggled with sequencing the various “tasks”, which has allowed me to rationalize my way to failure. As I said, I’ll explain more later, but what is working today is that writing is coming before my daily workout (which is taking about 2 hours/day).

Today, I woke up, had coffee, prepared food for later, ate breakfast and then began writing; workout to come later. Previously the writing would be a “later” task, which allowed me to procrastinate, punt, and avoid.

It’s just one day, but it’s a win, and I’ll take it.

I’m terrible at thinking publicly. More broadly, I’ve gotten lazy about how I think and what I think - both in public and in private. It’s easier to consume ideas than generate them, and over the past decade I’ve definitely been a consumer. Smartphone scrolling, Twitter, etc, have all contributed to a real “shallowing” of thought that I’m interested in pushing back against.

I’m currently reading a fascinating book by the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf called “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World”. I’ll write more about it shortly, but the book explores our diminished capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. This is definitely speaking to (and about) me.

With luck and persistence, I’ll share here what I’m reading, thinking, and dreaming. Doing this in public isn’t comfortable for me, but as I stumble forward, re-toning a long unused muscle, perhaps others might find useful bits along the way.