I have been writing fewer Columns lately. Some of the things I used to write about on here have transitioned into my Notes. Below are an excerpts from a few notes that would have been Column topics in years passed.
Of course, the beauty of having a hobby like this is that I owe a new post to exactly nobody. Especially not Nick1.
At some point approaching adulthood you came to the overly simplistic fundamental assumption: ”Productivity is Good”.
This is true sometimes, but there is nothing inherently good2 about productivity. Sure, if you’re productive, then by definition you produce a result… but results aren’t inherently good. Even “good results” aren’t always good.
Does the “productive activity” make you happy?
Is the result actually necessary?
Does the result make you happy?
Does it make the world better?
When you want to be productive and can’t, then it feels like “productivity is good”, but that ignores the question of why do you want to be productive in the first place?
Productivity is bad if:
Productivity is good if:
Productivity is great if:
Person A: “be kind, everyone is fighting their own battles.”
Person B: “why would I be kind? I will be brutal and relentless and ride into battle by their side.”
A surprisingly common turn of phrase that I have come across in my reading is:
Control your (blank) or your (blank) will control you
Where that blank is filled with:
Although I don’t specifically ever seeing these in this context, I feel like several books I’ve read could be summarized in this way:
I honestly dunno if this sort of Column is at all interesting. After having done the work to copy/paste the above, meh. Maybe I’ll just write about non-noteworthy things.
The weather is nice. Allergies are not.
Dune 2 was great.
I told a good joke today. The punch line was “You can have Juan, but not the other”. I’ll leave it to your imagination to fill in the run-up. Frankly any setup would work. Dynamite punch line. I had to stop myself from fist-pumping all over the room.
I’m not sure why I wanted to make this.
AOA - Analysis of Alternatives
BOB - Name
DOD - Department of Defense
EOE - Equal Opportunity Employer - Thanks D
IOI - Five, in binary - Thanks D
LOL - Laugh Out Loud
MOM - Best Person Ever
NON - Prefix meaning “not”
OOO - Out of Office
POP - person you should not hop on
SOS - HELP!
TOT - what a tater turns into
WOW - what a list I’ve made!
XOX - kisses and a hug
]]>Honesty means telling the true. My oldest, where the “h” in honesty isn’t silent
I am good. I feel healthy. My family is in a really good routine lately. Exercising enough. Eating decently healthy. Getting the chance to spend quality time together every day. I reckon this is what life is about.
My wife is great. She doesn’t get enough love on here. It’s occurring to me only as I write this sentence that this post will be the post that’s most recent during Valentine’s Day. I should have probably capitalized on that. She’s awesome, though. She competed in the finals at an international Sweet Adeline’s competition this past year in a quartet and with her chorus… and her chorus placed in the Top 10. Internationally. Teams that beat them were from Sweden for goodness sake. It takes people from halfway around the world to even compete. That’s more impressive than anything I know how to do.
My kids are great. My oldest started playing soccer. He’s still young, though. It’s more like he’s playing “go kick the ball maybe”, the game where the rules are optional and the points don’t matter. My younger is basically potty trained at this point. They are both growing a little bit each day. Every day feels wondrous. Perhaps because so many of them include the Curious George theme song at the beginning.
My other family is also great. My cousin/brother is going to become a dad. My parents are engaged in the lives of their kids and grandkids. They’re constantly helping out and I’m constantly humbled by how considerate and great they are. My newest family all seem to be on paths toward fulfillment. New marriages. New significant others. New shared hobbies. Life is looking up.
I’m reminded that each day here is not guaranteed. Love those that you have like today was the last time you could. Nobody can hear this advice enough. People are what life is about.
Our house is a never ending source of work to be done… but also I’m grateful to be able to do the work. You can love something and want it to be better. That’s what we have going on here. The ranch style house is still something I appreciate, compared to my previous house. It’s so easy to feel connected to the people living here.
The shower is a work in progress. Has been for about 2 years now. And when I say “about”, I mean “more than”. That’s a story for another day.
Things are in a good spot. I’m talking about the things I own. They are good. They are enough. More than enough, really. See the quote. The first one.
We got a Blackstone griddle for Christmas. It has certainly upped our food prep game. Used it about once a week thus far and enjoyed the heck out of it.
My iPad continues to be my favorite device I’ve ever owned. My watch is up there, too.
My most recent waterbottle acquisition continues to bring me joy as well as hydration1.
Ideas are what have consumed my brain for the past many weeks. My reading and notetaking have increased substantially. I go in waves with it. I’ll read a bunch, then stagnate somewhat. Right now I’m in “backlog of books” mode. See the Top 5. I’ve made 77 new notes this year. We’ve not yet reached Valentine’s Day. Over the past 1428 days I’ve created 1505 notes. That’s 1.05 notes added to the cache per day. Huh.
AI is crazy. I started using ChatGPT and bard Gemini more recently. It’s astounding how helpful it is. It’s also still one of the scariest things, too. All articulations of “humans vs AI” in movies I’ve ever seen woefully under-represent what the AI would be like. Ultron should have destroyed the Avengers.
My Podcast has made a comeback! It’s about movies. Click the image below:
Here’s another idea: a hoodie with abs sown into the front so you can look ripped and cozy. MAKE IT HAPPEN, FASHION.
I love & own Randall Munroe’s other books. Looking forward to this one.
A book about invention.
Thanks for the recommendation, Jonboy.
I just started this. I went in expecting this to be simply about GTD and Notetaking. It looks like it’s about more than that, which I’m happy about.
I actually just finished this.
The desire for more is not quenched by getting more. Slight rephrasing of a sign on the wall at Jimmy John’s
The statue delivery My 3 year old’s interpretation of what the Statue of Liberty is called
This is one of those sentence that will make me cringe in 5 years. It actually accomplished that task 5 years ahead of schedule. ↩
~6 months ago I switched by body of evergreen notes from Notion to Obsidian as part of an effort to give these notes the best chance of still being around in 30 years. With that came the loss of the free notes publishing service. While Obsidian is stellar, their subscription for their publishing service is slightly too pricey for my taste at this point in time1. So, I was unable to publish the 256 notes I’ve created since July, 2023.
That’s changed now:
👉 My notes.
That’s the master index. The notes aren’t laid out so that they can be read end-to-end2. Instead, they’re this densely interlinked web:
Each of the circles in that image is a note. The lines between them represent hyperlinks. The color are bound to tags3. So, as an alternative to the link above, see the Top 5 for five somewhat randomly-chosen starting off points.
Despite how involved this whole thing looks, it’s really not all that crazy or difficult.
flowchart TD
A[Read something]
B[Think of something]
C[Hear something]
D(Write it down)
A --> D
B --> D
C --> D
E[Add to Obsidian & link to other notes]
D --periodically--> E
It just involves using an inbox to perform ongoing capture, and periodically cleaning it out. It’s nibbling at the elephant, a little bit, consistently, over time.
Note: I don’t plan to do this “linking to my notes everywhere” thing in most Columns. Doing it here because it’s the point of this post.
5 months ago I wrote about “local vs the cloud” and my intention to become (slightly) less dependent on hardware & services that might pull a Google. I presented my “so what” to illustrate what I was going to do about it. Since that time I also successfully moved my quantified-self system to something that’s modularized and portable. I can run it locally, too.
Yay me.
The following five notes were selected somewhat randomly, but represent a cross-section of my notes.
What’s a “wack”?. My 5 Year Old, in response to being told he had wax in his ears
Seltzer for my homies
Fintel
Gangster Bean Trading
Krista
I’m relatively good at extemporaneous speaking, so let’s see how this goes.
Erik
]]>I live my life one egg corn at a time
Nick, who will probably forget he said this
I’ve been doing the same basic routine for the past few years, for the most part. I don’t think I’ve ever shared it on here. It was New Year’s Resolutions time, so why not share a thing that I’ve enjoyed that I believe to be pretty alright.
Full body. No set “days per week”, but ideally at least 3. Each workout is built around three of the “big 6” compound exercises, one or two sets of accessory exercises, and takes around 45 minutes to complete.
Compound exercises 1, 2, and 3 are dependent on the day.
Day | 5x5 Lift | 4x7 Lift | 3x10 Lift | Accessory Focus |
---|---|---|---|---|
Day A | Squat | Bench | Pull Up | Chest |
Day B | Deadlift | Bent Over Row | Overhead Press | Biceps |
Day C | Pull Up | Squat | Bench | Core |
Day D | Overhead Press | Deadlift | Bent Over Row | Shoulders |
Day E | Bench | Pull Up | Squat | Shoulders |
Day F | Bent Over Row | Overhead Press | Deadlift | Triceps |
Proceed through the days A to F in order. Then start again at A.
Miscellaneous notes:
It’s not “optimal” to literally do the same routine for forever. Your body adapts to new loads and stressors, then you hit a plateau. This is the law of diminishing returns in action. To combat this, you have to change things up from time to time. But - if you’re constantly changing things up, you may not stay on any one thing long enough to progress it. So, the right approach is something in between. Many workout programs are scheduled to last for 8 to 12 weeks with this in mind. The approach to how you vary your routine up over time is something I’ve not paid enough attention to historically. That’s changing this year.
In 2024 I am going to do four different workout routines. Change things around and try to learn some. So for the next 3 months I’m not doing the routine from above that I’ve been using for years. Instead I’m doing a push/pull/legs routine, which plays nicely into my 3-2-1 goal1.
I haven’t planned the whole year out yet, but by the end of the year this table will be full.
Jan, Feb, Mar | Apr, May, Jun | Jul, Aug, Sep | Oct, Nov, Dec |
---|---|---|---|
Push/Pull/Legs | Dunno yet | Dunno yet | Only curls all day |
Eating slightly more | Dunno yet | Eating slightly less | Dunno yet |
One neat thing about this approach is that it lines up with my Generalized Fitness Benchmark tests. I will be doing the same test at the end of each 3 month routine. In theory this should allow me to objectively observe results of each time span.
Also, obviously, my Personal Data Warehouse keeps me honest.
This post is too long. I switched weightlifting apps after 8 years with the Strong App. I now use Hevy, which is essentially a clone of Strong, but with additional niceties. I recommend it.
Sadly, there isn’t a workout app that tracks per lift strength training progress and heart rate/pacing info during runs. So, my tools for fitness tracking are still an amalgamation of things.
Spotlight is a feature of iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. It is part search box, part command prompt, and it’s the main way I do LOTS of things on my iPad and Mac. It is single-handedly the main reason why I now get a little bit frustrated when I switch to my Windows machine or any of my Raspberry Pis (which run Linux).
The shortcut to pull up spotlight is cmd + space
. I use it for:
I have one again. Same name. “We Scene a Movie” wherever you get your podcasts. Or here.
I updated my public repo of “Tools I Use”. It’s current. Also it exists, if you didn’t know.
I’ve written two Columns’ worth of material on accident. My next Column will come in a week and be about my notes, which I’ve recently figured out how to re-publish to the internet.
Despite the cold spell. Despite slow progress on some long-term projects. Despite the terrible 3s. Life is really good. I’m happy. In case you were wondering.
They got rewarded for needing a crutch. Jeff Fuller - about people solving a puzzle using the clues I provided, rather figuring it out
3 weightlifting workouts 2 cardio workouts, 1 mobility workout ↩
Checking in on goals I set in Column #427, I did pretty well this year.
Goal: 150 workouts
Result: 152 workouts
This was a great year in terms of health. Through great luck I managed to avoid major illnesses. Our family was healthy, for the most part, the whole year - for which I’m incredibly grateful.
This was my 2nd-most-exercised year on record. As a result, I look and feel about as good as I ever have.
I’m particularly happy with this result, because it was accomplished in spite of a pretty debilitating injury I incurred thanks to a shovel and some dirt. See if you can tell when it happened.
Another note on exercise - I’ve continued doing ~3-4 self-imposed fitness tests per year. This system I proposed in Column #379 continues to work.
Goal: <125 times
Result: 134 times
This was a minor failure. Ultimately I’m not too upset about it. What’s more interesting is what correlations you can draw from the data and my life.
Goal: …generally drink better
Result: fairly successful
I’m not much of a drinker, but I’m also not completely abstained to water. My tracking here is limited to those beverages that I consume that I don’t consider “healthy”. So, this doesn’t include things like water, tea, black coffee, and powdered drink mixes. Everything outside of that we’ll call a “less healthy drink”, which can be roughly divided into ~6 categories. My consumption of less healthy drinks did fall by 30% from 2022 to 2023. Interestingly, I had exactly one less healthy drink per day in 2023 (assuming I don’t drink before midnight (bad assumption)).
What’s slightly more interesting to me is the mix of drink types. I’ve broadened out. More categories. More even mix from each category. Not shown here, but even within categories things have broadened out more.
I track it. It’s been better this year than any other year on record. Crazy what happens when your kid learns to sleep through the night. Life is better and I am good at sleeping enough and at consistent times.
Goal: 150 new notes
Result: 230 new notes
This was the year that my collection of permanent “Evergreen” notes made the move from productivity multi-tool Notion to the more fit-for-purpose application Obsidian. This transition was not without some level of sacrifice1, but ultimately worth it. The notes are much more durable and in my control now that they are on my own computer. Also you get some benefits like this neat graphic showing the 230 new notes (and the connections between them) that I added in the past 365 days.
I wrote 21 Columns this year, including this one. This was a marked increase from years passed. I didn’t have a goal for writing Columns, but I’m pretty pleased with the year in blogging.
I made heaps of doodles and little ad-hoc things I didn’t track.
My media consumption dropped this year. It wasn’t just my lack of books and movies, I also didn’t really watch much TV or play many games. This was due to a few factors. My kids are of the age that I can’t watch really any of the things I’d like to watch with them around. I spent way more free nights working on projects. Due to both of those factors, my intake of YouTube (filling in the cracks between things) has increased considerably.
Goal: finish 18 books
Result: finished 13 books
I read 13 books. This was less than I’d hoped for. Podcasts took over my book-listening to some extent.
The best was probably Recursion by Black Crouch. The worst was probably Nine Perfect Strangers.
Goal: finish 30 new movies
Result: finished 20 new movies
I finished 20 new movies this year, and re-watched only 5. This I expect to increase alongside the relaunch of my movie-based podcast.
The best was Across the Spiderverse. The worst was Ant-Man: Quantumania.
I watched TV on 79 occasions. While that sounds like a lot, I’ll point out that’s only about 1.5 sessions per week. Also, as I’ve mentioned before, my tracking method for TV is a bit, strange. I don’t track individual episodes watched, nor time. I simply track name of show and date. So I could watch 10 episodes of Stranger Things in a day, and that shows up as 1. Meanwhile I could watch one episode each of Gen V and Invincible in an evening and that shows up as 2. Despite the poorly-controlled capturing mechanism, my TV intake is has pretty consistent over the past 5 years.
I watched 21 unique shows this year. The best of them was Jury Duty. The worst of them was Secret Invasion.
Videogames I played on 47 occasions, but 30 of those occasions were Tears of the Kingdom, that’s rounded out by 4 sessions of “I Expect You to Die 3”, 6 sessions of Mario Wonder, and 7 of Walkabout Mini Golf. My gaming is incredibly “bursty” and associated with particular games.
Looking at those results, you might conclude I’ve been less engaged with media than usual this year. That is true, to some extent, but I think a large portion of my media-intake switched to YouTube and podcasts. I don’t actively track those, because they’re tracked for me. I doubled my (already huge) podcast listening time from 2022 to 2023.
The real problem is YouTube. YouTube has almost certainly taken up more screen time than TV shows and movies combined.
There are a number of issues with the data surrounding my relationship with YouTube. First, Google doesn’t make “time watched” available for anything other than the past week2. Secondly, my account is signed into YouTube on the family TV. So I reckon a lot of the increase starting in 2019 was comprised of videos watched by my children. All that said, the trendline is both clear and troubling:
This Column is going on long, and I don’t need to write a ton about my social life, relationship, and family on the internet. I track some high-level aspects of these things. They all didn’t receive enough attention in 2023, and will become a higher focus in 2024.
This has been a productive year. The following is an incomplete list of things we did.
We took a few! Las Vegas (x2!). The Black Hills of South Dakota. Lake of the Ozarks. These are projects, per my definition. They took work to do and resulted in a thing.
I wrote about this already! See here. What I didn’t write was my personal disappointment with the amount of time I sunk into the project. It was meant to be the final ground-up rewrite of the system. That’s still the plan, thankfully. It is better now, too.
I migrated my branding from “Get in to Win” to the more personalized “Aaron’s Puzzles”.
While I haven’t fully locked in a new “overall” logo, I’ve settled on a design that I like. Each box with its own color palette. The overall logo (as of right now) is the one on the top left.
This puzzle box was made in 2022… but I reimplemented the digital aspects of The Vault in SvelteKit. Essentially a ground-up rewrite.
My Puzzle Box for 2023 was The Cookie Jar. Its specific contents are meant to be a secret, but it includes:
We made our house better by:
In Column 441 I wrote about my Notion-based personal productivity system. One part of the system was left off for the sake of simplicity - areas. Here’s that graphic again, with the inclusion:
“Areas” is an idea I’ve lifted from Tiago Forte’s “PARA Method”. They’re those things in your life that don’t have an end date. Some facet or feature of your life that you have a responsibility to maintain. Things like health, finances, relationships, work, et cetera. I’ve chosen to represent those in Notion as a database, which is linked to my Goals and Projects databases.
One particularly useful feature of having a literal list of Areas to work with is that the goals I’ve set for this year are associated with the members of this list. Setting my goals was a commitment inventory exercise I accomplished on accident. Nice.
Anyway, the system works really nicely. I recommend it.
More of them. For each year only comes but once. These boys are less young every day. We need to get our time in while they still think their parents are cool. I’d like to take one or two more than we did this past year.
I want to find the balance between in too deep in coding projects, and too long between drinks, now scared to touch it. Right now I’m planning on adding a couple of capabilities to the PDW.
I’d like to focus a bit more on the house in 2024. The basement needs work. There’s a shower that’s still an empty void. Every time I do a thing to improve the house I think to myself “man, why did I wait so long to do this?”
Technically, this is already done! More to come - both in terms of podcast episodes and things to say about it.
In 2022, I made The Vault.
In 2023, I made the Cookie Jar.
In 2024, I’ll make something new. I’ve already got ideas I’m excited about.
While this website is infinitely better than its previous instances (e.g. tumblr, blogger), it’s still not as in my control as I would like. Under the hood, I’m using Jekyll, which is a Ruby-based static-site generator. I’m thinking I’ll move to Astro, which is Node-based and capable of much more than simple static site generation. My goals are pretty simple:
]]>What’s up? Chicken butt! Alexa, add chicken butt to the shopping list! My 3 year old has been hearing interesting things at daycare
Procreate is the de-facto standard application for creating digital art on the iPad. It’s the clear winner. So, when the team that built Procreate created a brand new app aimed at making animation, I was very excited. “Procreate Dreams” is out now. It’s a one-time $20 cost.
Procreate Dreams aims to make animation more approachable, more discoverable, and more fun. I’ve been playing with it for a week or so now. While I’ve got no specific goal in mind yet, I’m starting to get the hang of it. I’m looking forward to incorporating “animation making” into my tool belt of creative capabilities.
Honestly if you’re buying an iPad and an Apple Pencil, you should plan on dropping $40 for both Procreate apps. They’re the best.
Here’s a dumb little animation I made.
This Column was essentially just about the Top 10 & 5 below.
You shouldn’t do this, assuming you have a phone. But you can.
Between Apple Arcade and emulation, the iPad is a capable video game console. You can pair a PlayStation controller to it and go.
There are a ton of apps for this. See Column #430. Infinite paper. Infinite canvas. Infinite idea capture.
This blog post was written on my iPad. It will be posted from this device, too. There are a vast number of apps you can use for writing stuff. Obsidian, Notion, and Google Docs all come to mind, but there are literally hundreds of others.
There are multiple levels of music production available on the iPad. You can use virtual instruments, or plug your keyboard, guitar, or whatever into it and capture your performances. Either way you can then edit it to your hearts content.
I recorded and edited my podcasts on my iPad. When I get another podcast, I will use the iPad again. Ferrite Pro.
While people who make a living doing CAD work probably aren’t going to turn to the iPad as their favorite device for doing it, I’ve been very successfully using it for the past few years to model projects I build before I go actually try to build them. You can even use the iPad’s Lidar scanner to capture digital representations of spaces and objects.
Procreate Dreams AND Final Cut Pro have both come out for the iPad this year, and have turned it into a fully-capable video content creation platform.
People use iPads for their professional productions. Procreate. Photoshop. You can produce amazing things, and the cost of admission (for Procreate, at least) is pretty low!
Such an underrated way to take in a movie. Headphones and an iPad. You’re locked in. It’s like airplane movie experience, but without the airplane.
The iPad is still my favorite way to browse content on the internet.
Despite being more powerful than the Nintendo Switch, the iPad’s gaming library lacks truly compelling entries. I think the main issue is the economics don’t work out to make games that depend on external controllers, which are 100x better for “proper video game” playing than using virtual touch screen controllers. Probably 90% of folks who own an iPad do NOT own a controller that paired with it. It’s a bit of an economic chicken-and-egg problem.
No games → no mass controller adoption.
No mass controller adoption → no games.
One mildly annoying limitation of the iPad - your audio input can’t be used by two apps simultaneously. If you’re recording a podcast while on a Zoom, you cannot also use your voice recording app.
This is a mostly solved problem if your iPad is running one of the “M” series chips. Mine is from the generation riiiight before they announced the “M1” and thus my 2nd-screen support is limited to screen mirroring only, which is not useful.
Honestly I am filling space. There’s no built-in calculator, which is silly.
The iPad is still a crappy computer for doing coding work. There are sort of workarounds you can use, but they all are so much worse than having a proper terminal, file system, and IDE.
Honestly if they solved this problem, I could easily see myself going in on the iPad 100%.
]]>Moo-seum - is that a place where they have cows? My 5 year old - I assume he heard this as a joke and didn’t come up with it himself,b but it caught me off-guard either way.
I don’t see a world where we can each have our own JARVIS.
15 years ago1 when Iron Man debuted in theaters, I would have said it would never happen because I didn’t think the technology would allow it. I still think it can’t really happen, but longer because of the technology - instead because of trust. I think with the recent(ish) jump forward we’ve seen with AI, it is arguably already possible (or very close to it) to make everyone their own personal JARVIS - see here for some evidence. The thing that will (or won’t, but perhaps “should”) stop it from happening is the issue of trust.
The problem is a matter of whose best interests the AI will serve. Tony Stark built his own assistant. He knows whatever response he gets back will ultimately trace back to the influences he baked into the system.
But people en masse will never program their own AI. People won’t understand how it works. So how can they ever trust that when they ask their own personal Jarvis to schedule an appointment for the closest restaurant that serves a good tamale, that the restaurant picked will have to do with your tastes or the restaurant who paid the AI maker the most.
Once you get to the ultimate “can give you any answer” machines, who decides what’s right? We continue to wade into this strange world of having to code-in ethics. Coding ethics into the machinery we have around is actually already a thing. If you’re in your self-driving car and someone runs out in front of you… should the car swerve off the road to avoid them? Or should it plow them over to minimize risk to its occupants? These questions are actively being asked and I’m real curious about the cross section between ethics and engineering.
The future is crazy, and the future is now.
Speaking of self-driving…
Among our friends and family, we were early adopters of electric vehicles. It occurs to me that there’s a >90% chance anyone reading this probably won’t already own one. So here we go. Opinion time.
Two years ago when we started stately looking at vehicles, getting an EV felt crazy. Now that we’ve had one for the past 14 months, it feels totally normal. The Model Y is the most popular EV right now in terms of sales. It’s in the top 5 best-selling vehicle overall in the United States in 2023. It’s everywhere. I used to drive by Teslas and think “oooo how fancy”, but that feeling is gone now.
I don’t think we are overly fancy. I think we just so happened to need a new car at the same time that an EV made more sense. Today, if my older, internal combustion engine car were to suddenly go kaput, I would probably replace it with a second Model Y.
Technically we already own two:
Turns out my tattoo is a typeable character if your computer supports a modern version of unicode.
𐦝
On my windows machine, that displays an empty square. On my Mac and my phone, I see the eye. Neat.
My next tattoo should also be a Unicode character. Right now I’m thinking “§”, which I think is a pregnant snake.
I’ve had the most consistent energy levels I’ve ever experienced lately. Midday slumps and evening crashes are something I was really struggling with for the past 2 or 3 years. These are correlated with some changes I’ve implemented recently. Essentially all of these are from the Huberman Labs podcast, so shout out to Whitney for the recommendation. See the Top 5.
I used to love Marvel movies. Now I just like them.
It’s hard to know what to do once you’ve reached the end of a 10 year, 22 movie climb and hit the absolute pinnacle of box office success. Hindsight is 20/20 and I honestly love that they tried to do something different, but the unfortunate reality of the MCU is that it grew too big, too quickly. In 2021 there 5 different TV shows and 4 different movies. It’s just… too much. What’s crazy is that I actually enjoyed basically all of them. But I’m not a typical viewer. People other than me were already starting to say “this isn’t my cup of tea”.
Where the MCU really started to make even me lose some of my fervent adoration was in the back half of 2022 and basically all of 2023: Wakanda Forever. Love and Thunder. Quantumania. All movies that should have been great. All of them wound up being pretty disappointing… and then there’s the TV show “Secret Invasion” as a crappy little cherry on top. The bad has been outweighing the good.
At this point, public perception has soured on the MCU. I see headlines everywhere saying “they’re doomed”, which I think is hyperbole - but when I went to watch The Marvels this past weekend I was expecting for it to be “just fine”. And that’s what it was. It didn’t get me hyped. I haven’t thought about it since.
I miss being an uber fan. Maybe I’m just getting older. Maybe they’ve lost their swagger. Who knows. I’ll still keep going opening night for now - even if it’s just out of habit.
Recently grocery stores have started carrying higher-powered caffeinated drink mixes. Previously they only had crystal light with caffeine, which is 60mg/packet. New brands like Celsius and Alani have entered the market with proper high-powered 200mg mixes. One of those actually does the job.
I have been trying to get out and do a 10 minute sunrise walk around the block to set my circadian rhythm and get the mind and body going. It’s a really nice way to greet the day.
I skipped breakfast for a week out of necessity a couple weeks back. After a few days I realized I really didn’t miss it. I’m leaning in. Actually started up 30 Day Challenges again with this as the first tone. It’s been great thus far.
I make coffee every morning, but now I don’t start drinking it until 120 minutes after I step out of bed.
I started actually doing cardiovascular exercise. Been doing about 8 miles a week, super slow paced. So definitely nothing crazy. But I run now. Did 3 miles yesterday and didn’t feel like dying afterwards. That’s nuts.
Come on, bro. My 5 year old, who’s taken to calling me “bro” when we play Mario together
Whelp. Crap. I originally wrote “12 Years Ago” here and now I feel even older. Iron Man was 15 years ago. ↩
So strap in or bail out now.
I’ve already written several1 times describing “The Life Tracker” before, so I’ll skip some of the pleasantries. Here’s it in a 🥜:
This post is a brief celebration and retrospective on having hit the 10 year mark.
Out the gate I did a pretty good job of organizing the system. My goals were well thought out. I iterated on how the system worked where I found deficiencies. I developed an increasingly well-honed system… up until the 5-year anniversary. I then spent 5 years in tinker town trying to make something that seems incredibly simple on the surface work out.
It turns out cardinality is one of the single hardest concepts to engineer a system around.
5 years ago, in order to satisfy my desire to track some things that may happen multiple times per day (e.g. movies I watched), I decided to grow beyond my “everything in one big spreadsheet” system. I’ll be honest, I’m pretty sure it was better before it got so complicated. That problem could have been solved with orders of magnitude less effort & fewer lines of code.
If I hadn’t gone through the pain, I wouldn’t have grown. I would have learned way less.
I’ve tracked well over one hundred different types of things over the past 10 years. Here’s what I’m still tracking today:
Everything marked wit the 🤖 robot is tracked wholly passively through automations. Mostly using the iOS Shortcut app automations. Every single other tracking element other than the Nightly Review I can track using just my voice using Siri Shortucts (or online, whatever).
This rewrite took a while. Frankly, way longer than I expect. Way longer than I was afraid of. Longer than I would have ever even imagined.
The process itself was arduous. In all, I wrote:
I’m not planning on writing about “how it all works” here. I just added this page explaining how it works in more detail.
There’s such a thing as “desired difficulty”. As anyone who’s ever used an invincibility cheat code in a video game will tell you, if things are too easy they lose their fun. If you aren’t struggling some, then there’s no meaning behind it all.
If this had all been an app I downloaded then blindly followed, there’s no chance I’d still be using it 10 years later. The pursuit of building this has been my longest surviving hobby, behind this blog you’re reading now.
That said, I’m very ready to move onto what’s next.
You’ll hear more about the Life Tracker some other day. But hopefully not for a while.
Tracking media is a large part of the reason I wanted to start tracking things that happen might happen multiple times per day. While I don’t have a decade of data for these, I do have 5 years. Which is still a ton.
My movie watching has died off since I started tracking. I used to watch a movie every 5 days or so, now I’m down to a couple times a month. This includes Netflix and Video-on-Demand type movies, but does not include movies I put on for my kids to watch that I’m not really watching. My re-watching of movies I’ve already seen before has gone waaay down.
Television I never really figured out “how” I wanted to track. If I binged something like “Squid Game” in one night, do I want to track that I had one session of watching Squid Game, or do I want to track the number of episodes of Squid Game? Or the time spent watching Squid Game? I wound up doing what was easiest, and just tracking sessions. Some of these were multiple episodes, some were not. But the gross trend is about right, less television overall:
I couldn’t find a more elegant way to present those data. That’s a screen grab from pdw.one.
Hey every year I’ve watched a least one sports game. Sports!
I’m not a big video gamer, it turns out.
The only real takeaway here is that I play video games about 50 times a year, except when I started playing Super Smash Brothers online in 2020.
I wish I found an easy method to track the amount of time played in each game. The Switch has some functionality for that, but nothing I can easily tap into.
Honestly there’s not a ton to see here. My weight’s never been too dramatic. I included my min & max measures from each year to give a sense of range, but mostly cause otherwise this is a boring chart. Included because I figure most people would probably track this, so it would be a conspicuous absence.
I track where I sleep each night as a proxy for travel. My phone wakes up at 3:30AM, pings my location & sends it to the cloud. For some reason, in 2022, I really stayed at home. That’s >20 days at home for every 1 day out. Crazy. Glad to see I’m trending up in 2023 - and the holidays haven’t even begun yet.
Aside from sleep location, I’ve tracked several other aspects of my sleep throughout the years. Before I bought an Oura ring in August 2019 my dataset was limited to when I went to bed, when I woke up, and the number of minutes that elapsed in between. Looking at “time in bed” (above), things look pretty consistent.
…since buying the Oura ring I’ve had access to time actually spent sleeping. This shows that, pretty consistently, don’t actually sleep for 45 minutes to 1 hour of the time I’m in bed. Interestingly, the birth of my first child corresponded with much less time in bed, but the birth of the second child corresponded with a permanent increase in my time spent in bed. Probably because two kids makes you tired.
Mostly for pseudo-completeness, that’s the standard deviation of the time I spent in bed. For those of you who didn’t pay attention in stats class, standard deviation is a measure of how “spread out” the data are. The smaller the standard deviation, the closer we’d expect a typical data point to be to the mean. TL;DR - I’m getting more consistent with my bedtime since the birth of my boys.
My interest in exercise jumped hard from 2015 to 2016, but aside from that has more or less stayed pretty consistent. I took up more yoga in 2020 and 2021 to make up for the lack of sports during the pandemic. I’m happy to say that the 2023 line is on pace to rival 2016 for my most active year.
Every night I write down a few sentences about how I used my day and how I’m feeling. It’s the most valuable thing I do. I can see “on this day” for the past 10 years of my life. There’s no way to summarize these data in a way that’s interesting or appropriate for public release. It’s there, and it’s the most valuable thing in all of this.
I do, however, have something to share. Each night I also rank how satisfied I was with the day on a scale from 1 to 10, and how my current health is doing. It’s probably the work of The Hedonic Treadmill, but my daily satisfaction rankings have not changed much since I started capturing them.
I do get progressively more satisifed with my days as the week goes. I think this result is probably typical. On a related note - tomorrow is Monday.
…and checking for seasonal affective disorder… no I think I’m good. I get less healthy through the summer, that was surprising - but it’s mostly in the noise.
And that’s all that’s fit for public release.
So what did you learn from doing all that? Whitney & K80
An incomplete list: #76 - introducing the concept, just before I started. #83 - after tracking one week, what I originally came up with. #92 - after one month. #205 - after one year, felt big at the time. #242 - 1.0 → 2.0, and already thinking about 3.0. #250 - 3.0. #339 - five years tracked, another deep-dive, @around v5.0 here. #386 - where things started getting complicated. #391 - seven years tracked, v8.0. #395 - the good one, an actual look at the history of this. #435 - where I missed the deadline I set for myself that i just crossed 6 months later ↩
10,000 surviving lines of code. In all I’d estimate much closer to 100,000 lines were written ↩
My favorite philosophy:
“Less, but better” is a recognition of the limits of our time, energy, and capacity. Its meaning is ambiguous, but intentionally so. All interpretations of the phrase are good. Here’s 3 ways to look at it.
If you want to achieve the things you do at a high level, you can’t be doing too many things.
Chase two rabbits, lose them both. If you pursue your dream, you have a good chance of making it happen. If you chase ALL your dreams, you may find yourself getting nowhere1. Do more by doing less, it’s not a platitude, it’s the truth. Pick a goal, pursue it relentlessly. Don’t succumb to target confusion.
In order to love the things you own, you can’t own too much. Humans are born with the natural inclination to have a favorite shirt. You have one or two favorites, for sure. The question is, why do you have the shirts that definitely aren’t your favorite?
It’s better to buy two $60 shirts that you absolutely love and it is to buy 12 $10 shirts that are just fine.
Do the research. Get the good one. Once you have it, love it. Maintain it. Don’t buy a glut of crap you hate fixing when it breaks down. Buy the good thing that you are happy to spend the time on to keep in good condition.
Another interpretation of the phrase “less, but better” is that simply having (or doing) less IS better. That’s it. It’s not that you spend an equivalent amount of resources but on fewer (but nicer) things/activities, it’s just having fewer things or activities. We are wired to acquire things. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so, too, does your calendar - if you let it. Same could be said of the empty rooms you have in the house you just bought.
The problem: our ancestors, the creatures we evolved from, never had the capability to worry about “too much”… now it’s trivially easy for anyone of even modest means in a developed country to find themselves over consuming, over indulging, and over extending themselves beyond what’s healthy or what would make them actually happy. You are often better off having less than you’d probably want. I think more often than not.
The terms “values” and “principles” can be nebulous. I think a good way to ground them is to consider them, along with “methods” as a hierarchy of increasingly concrete things.
Values are concepts.
Principles are general verb phrases.
Methods are specific actions that are examples of the principle in motion.
Value | Principle | Methods |
---|---|---|
Charity | Give what you can to those who need it more | I will donate 25% of my bonuses and volunteer one day per quarter at XYZ shelter |
Simplicity | Do the simplest thing | I will favor plans with the fewest moving parts. I won’t reinvent the wheel. I will apply the [[Pareto Principle]] rather than do it all. |
Much like the term “high concept2”, people use the term “steep learning curve” to mean the opposite of what it should literally mean.
If it takes forever to learn something, it would have a shallow learning curve. It takes a long time to climb. If it’s steep, then that would mean you learn it quickly.
I like iOS 17. Shortcuts are faster now. Standby is unnecessary, but nice to have. Weirdly the improvements to the phone app may be my surprise favorite thing.
Apples | Oranges | |
---|---|---|
Category | Food | Food |
Sub-category | Fruit | Fruit |
Sub-sub-category | Round fruit | Round fruit |
Sub-sub-sub-category | Palm-sized, round fruit | Palm-sized, round fruit |
Price | ~$1 | ~$1 |
Lifespan | ~week | ~week |
Color | Red or Green, typically | Orange |
That wasn’t hard.
I recognize the irony of making a Top 5 about “Less, but Better” into a Top 10.
The Pomodoro Technique is when you choose a task to do, set a timer for ~20 minutes to an hour, start the timer, then perform dedicated work on that task until the timer finishes. Between each timer session take a few minutes to take a break. This is a specific implementation of the more generic concept of “Time Blocking” - setting aside specific a block time to work on a specific thing. When done properly - you’re preparing for the work before it starts, removing distractions, and focusing solely on the task at hand. It can be a great way to get things done.
Less time, spent better.
The Pareto Principle states that 80% of the outcome of a process/system are driven by 20% of its inputs and that by controlling just those inputs you can greatly affect the outcome with relatively little effort. The Pareto Principle can (and should) be applied to basically every system or process you want to improve.
There are a ton of examples of the success of a rigorous and intentional application of the Pareto Principle, but my favorite is Costco. They don’t stock every possible option and permutation of the goods they carry. If you want olive oil, you MIGHT have two choices. They realized that 80% of the sales came from 20% of the products… so why have the other ones taking up shelf space that you could be using to sell other, unrelated high-performance goods?
Fewer products, highly vetted for better quality. Better profits and loyalty.
When it comes to decision making, Daniel Kahneman suggests we are often better off using simple algorithms (with as little as 2 independent inputs) rather than our subjective opinion.
Expert judges who took into account dozens of factors and weighed them all in their heads did worse at predicting flight risk and risk of committing additional crimes than a simple decision algorithm that only took into account the age of the criminal and whether or not they have committed prior offenses.
Fewer inputs. Better consistency of application. Better accuracy.
According to Atul Gawande, the good checklist should have 5 to 9 items, fit on one page, and only cover the heavy hitters. Anything longer will wind up not getting used.
Less text, better consistency. Better results.
For the 90%-100% of you who read this who don’t code, the heading “YAGNI” isn’t a typo, but instead an acronym for a coding principle I suck at.
👉 YAGNI = You’re Not Gonna Need It.
Don’t write code for “imagined” use cases or requirements. Write code to fulfill actual requirements when they show up. I suck at this. I think a 80% of the lines of code I’ve written over the past 4 months was eventually deemed unnecessary and deleted.
Fewer features, better conceptual integrity. Better (faster) results.
I am not an expert in nutrition, but from what I’ve read one of the main mechanisms behind the purported benefits of intermittent fasting is simply that you end up eating less. When it comes to eating for most 1st-world people, less **is** better. Beyond that, though, your meal preparation also benefits. You’re preparing one fewer meals per day. You are less likely to get burnt out on cooking. You’ll cook better foods more often. Intermittent fasting is very much less, but better.
Eating less often, but eating better.
People who travel infrequently carry armloads of bags through the airport, dropping stuff on the ground every time they hit some form of transition. People who travel a lot tend to pack the same thing (or darn close to it) every time. There’s a devoted fanbase of the concept of one-bag travel. This is bringing less, but better stuff with you when you go places. If you can get over the fear that you won’t have a thing you need for an imagined scenario, you can find yourself enjoying the moment a lot easier when you get there.
Carrying less, but more thought out stuff. Better travel experience.
Phrase I’ve heard before which is the essence of **less, but better**. It’s what John Doerr suggested Google should do a while back.
Do less, but do it better.
Meditation is many things. I’m no expert in this either, but one thing I’ve understood meditation practice to include is the intentional cultivation of focusing on less (e.g. your breath), but focusing on that harder. This trains your mind to focus on what’s important.
Less mental chatter, better presence.
Most people associate “minimalism” with possessions. In reality, owning minimal things is only one particular form of minimalism. You could take a minimalist approach to all sorts of things.
Less clutter, better freedom. Less to maintain, better average level of maintenance. Less to do, but doing it better and more fully.
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Blaise Pascal
Don’t half-ass two things… whole-ass one thing. Nick Offerman
In general a good thing to shoot for is optionality, where you have a trial period persueing a dedicated end. You run multiple low-cost experiments and see which ones look promising based on their emperical results. This works well for sampling totally different goals, and it works for using different means to achieve the same goal. Less, but better does not mean “Do only this thing even if it’s not working”. ↩
In my experience most people use the term “high concept” to mean complicated, per Cambridge Dictionary - based on an interesting and attractive idea that can be explained in a simple way. ↩
If you feel like you’re not as healthy as you’d like to be, give yourself a break.
It’s hard.
I’ve never done it.
Despite what I myself have said on this very blog - what is “healthy” is so incredibly dynamic that it is pretty forgivable to be overwhelmed by or confused by what the “right” thing to do is. Everything (EVERYTHING) is situation-dependent, and no one thing works best in all situations.
As they say:
There is no ‘best move’ in chess.
Short of cyanide1, the health impact of every single thing you consume looks like this:
The height, width, and offset-from the Y axis of that distribution varies immensely from food-to-food, drink-to-drink, person-to-person, and is confounded by seemingly infinitely many other factors that you cannot pull out in any real-world setting. What’s more - this curve isn’t unique to the things you put into your body, it also perfectly describes what you do with it.
As they say:
The dose makes the poison.
All of that was preamble to what I wanted to say here - it sucks there is no such thing as an infinitely repeatable recipe that scores well along these dimensions.
If things were easy, there would be some sort of miracle Goldilocks food that maxes out every single dimension:
But no such food exists. Worse, because health is dynamic, things aren’t always consistent:
As you move across the consumption curve, you cross the critical point where additional consumption produces less healthy results. As you saturate the palate they get less tasty, too.
So this puts us in a state where we need to constantly vary what we eat, which is not easy if you’re cooking for yourself and not cheap if you’re eating out.
It’s an impossible task to maintain high marks across all four dimensions over time. The best thing you can do is try to balance which dimension(s) you’re sacrificing for any given meal or snack. Eat at an expensive but healthy restaurant one day, then have bagged popcorn the next. Make yourself a full meal from scratch later. Then eat a simple but bland salad.
As they2 say:
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
So it’s impossible to win all the time, and no one approach will get you there. Is that depressing? No. It’s just complicated. Finding your way through those complications and achieving intermittent success is rewarding.
It’s satisfying to cook a great, healthy meal. It’s fulfilling to complete a good, hard workout. It’s exciting to find a new recipe that produces tasty results quickly. It’s delightful when you discover some new thing that saves time or money on food. It’s thrilling to set a new PR.
If healthy living was a “solved” problem, then we’d get bored with it.
Life’s a struggle, but there’s meaning in the struggle. Everything that exists can have some level of appreciation if you’re willing to put in the work to appreciate it.
As they3 say:
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
I’m not about to blaze4 a new trail, this is a common opinion. The best kids show, bar none is Bluey.
This fictional family of blue heelers from Australia have taught me and my family real-world, real valuable lessons - and made us laugh while it was doing it. My kids see themselves in Bluey and Bingo and the fantastical games they come up with. My wife and I see ourselves in Bandit and Chilli and how they support their children and each other.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve taken away from Bluey is that it’s not only possible but also my obligation as a father to put in the effort to find the fun in time I spend with my kids. Often times, that’s easy. Being around them and simply observing what they’re doing can be quite fun; but simply observing them and tending to their obvious needs is not enough. There is a deeper level of happiness and satisfaction that you can get to as a parent, one that will strengthen your relationship with your kids and give them the chance to experience the magic of childhood - if only you’re willing to put in the work.
As they say:
…Mom! …Dad! …Bingo! …Bluey!
Some things in life are simply fun. Eating ice cream, going real fast on a ride. These are pleasurable.
Some things in life take a lot of effort to make fun, or only become fun after the fact. Doing a hard workout, solving a problem. These are enjoyable.
There’s a difference between “pleasure” and “enjoyment”. We typically enjoy pleasure, but not everything we enjoy is pleasurable - nor is every pleasure enjoyed. A hard night’s work producing a new piece of art may not be very pleasure-filled, but it could be quite enjoyable. Meanwhile a beer, drunken hastily while we focus on problems at work or the bad call a ref just made - although pleasurable, may not be enjoyed at all. We are predisposed to seeking pleasure, even when it doesn’t bring about enjoyment. It’s a flaw in the human condition.
Bluey has made me realize this in practice. I have put in the work. I have gotten off my phone and played games where I was controlled by a magic asparagus, or I was the claw machine grabbing them their own stuffed animals from off my lap, or I rolled balls after them as they jumped out of the way just in time, Raiders of the Lost Ark style.
Every time I do it, it’s work.
Every time I manage to do it, I’m so glad I did.
As they5 say:
Enjoyment is cultivated. It’s more difficult, but infinitely more worth your while.
Even if Bluey didn’t offer up life lessons, it would be worth the price of admission simply because it’s funny. My 2 and 5 year old laugh at parts. I laugh at other parts. Often we’re all laughing together.
Who cares if it’s the popular opinion - Bluey is incredible. I will fight you about this.
Specifically you, Nick.
You’re wrong and you should feel bad about your wrong opinion.
…Where the “Marvel project” is some obscure comic story line. Headline usually accompanied by an image that suggests it’s one of the mainline movies.
On principle alone I will never open an article whose title contains the word “slammed”.
Critics Slam Trump Co-Defendant Jeffrey Clark Over Bizarre Burning Man Attack. Actual headline in my Google News feed
Arguably there’s probably technically some sort of safe dose of cyanide. I just wanted an evocative start. Sue me6. ↩
They = Thanos, specifically. ↩
They = An equally talented philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche ↩
Blaze and the Monster Machines is also a good show. Shout out to my main man Pickles. ↩
They = me. My Notes say this. Source: the book “Flow”. ↩
Actually don’t. ↩