What a beautiful Saturday morning.
What a beautiful Saturday morning.
One of the most difficult things for me is starting something new. I love learning new things. Researching, comparing, reading about others who have done the same thing, I enjoy all of it. What’s hard is when it’s time to stop reading and start doing. Here are a few methods I’ve found that can help. Reframing the situation can make something difficult look less daunting. This takes a good sense of humor many times, but can help more than you’d think.
Wearing masks is polarizing now. Here’s the experience that changed my attitude about mask wearing while I lived in Taiwan. We Will Only Break Through Together | Adam Tervort
During the 10 years I lived in Taiwan, I learned a lot of things that surprised me. One that’s applicable to our lives now is that wearing masks can become a normal, accepted part of life. The thing about wearing a mask, and what helped me be comfortable with it, is that it’s really about others rather than about you. This was really impressed on me was when my younger son was hospitalized with the H1N1 flu.
One of the newsletters I look forward to each week is 3-2-1 Thursday from James Clear. (He’s the author of Atomic Habits, such a good book.) Short, impactful, and I always come away inspired. 3-2-1 Thursday Newsletter from James Clear
With a little bit of wrangling and creativity, you can add “focus time” to your daily calendar. Deep work only happens when we create time for it. Seek Out Time for Deep Work | Adam Tervort
If you’ve never read it, Cal Newport’s book Deep Work should be on your reading list. It proposes a radical philosophy of work: you need time to concentrate deeply on tasks in order to do work that matters. Recently on his blog Cal mentioned that Outlook, the email and calendaring app, has added a focus plan option where you can “establish a daily focus time routine.” If you use Outlook as part of an Office365 subscription, Microsoft’s AI service will try and schedule focus time for you based on your availability.
Read Why Nerds are Unpopular and sent it to my three teenagers to read. What an article. It’s making me think long and hard about the education system in the US. If there was ever a time to make a big change this is it.
What alternatives to “normal” school should we look at?
Last night’s dinner had all kinds of things from our garden: Thai basil with the chicken (three cups chicken FTW!), sweet potato greens, Chinese celery, and one giant banana pepper. So cool that our garden experiment is producing real food. 🥒
On my computer I love the option to have a window take up the entire screen. Not just to maximize it to cover the desktop, but filling the entire screen. As I write this I have only one window visible, no menu bar or icons in the dock. Do Not Disturb mode is enabled. Right now this computer is only capable of doing one thing. Knowledge work, the kind of work many of us do all day, revolves around writing.