As you’ll soon read in a comically long “what I did on my summer break” post I’m writing, almost everything I do on a day-to-day basis when I’m working on the s
The Flotilla Letters: Catching Up
I’ve been chugging away on the Crowbar Handbook which you can read as I write each section (recent sections include How to Ditch Your Stuff, What to Do About Work, and Eat Well for Less).
Habits vs. Workflows - Cal Newport
Productive Pondering As I transition from the slow freedom of summer to the constrained energy of fall, my thoughts have been gravitating back towards nuts ... Read more
go live a life you're actually interested in
nothin' but blue skies from now on
Some of you know that I work part-time with the team at Graze Social. It seems gauche to talk about a day job in your passion project newsletter, but in this...
nothin' but blue skies from now on
Some of you know that I work part-time with the team at Graze Social. It seems gauche to talk about a day job in your passion project newsletter, but in this...
Disquiet – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
I am currently writing weekly here and have all my 2020 posts here.
Things I’ve been thinking lately
Notes I kept coming back to this year. On death, on bodies, on playing, on not chasing happiness, and on living close to the things you love.
Change Is Good, But It’s Also Really Hard
Last month, I took a little break from all the hustle and bustle of the Internets and decided to focus on trying to get a better handle on my daily life. It included eating right, working out and, …
Strategies for Long Projects - Ben Brostoff
I’m in the middle of three multi-month to a year projects right now: Writing a book Running a marathon Building a ...
On Writing #3
Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.
Robert Hanks · On Putting Things Off
Job gone, I sat around trying to write, managing bits and pieces, but earning very little. And then my marriage drifted away too, leaving me, in Alan Partridge’s phrase, clinically fed-up boo-hoo. My wife, having said she would leave, took two and a half years to find a way of doing it – there is a small consolation in not being the only procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the LRB commissioned me to write about Richard Hughes, who wrote A High Wind in Jamaica. I like Hughes and it seemed like a job I could get on with. I cheerfully settled to the research, reading the novels I hadn’t read, rereading the ones I had. Then I started writing, or that’s what I told myself: some paragraphs, some sentences, a sketch of a plan, then some rewriting, rearranging, scrubbing, more rewriting, more scrubbing, pauses to reconsider. Then I did some more research: the short stories, the children’s stories, the poems and plays, the journalism, Richard Perceval Graves’s biography, then back to the rewriting …
Work is a cult, here's how to escape
Good and Bad Procrastination