As I write this my son is playing scales on his double bass. (Tomorrow morning he has an audition for the high school orchestra, which is a big deal for an 8th grader.) Scales are one of the most important and most boring things to practice on an instrument because they give the player a chance to work on small chunks of difficult notes over and over. It’s a great analogy for how all work should be done.
Recently I was part of an off-site planning meeting. My company flew people from different parts of the country to Portland for three days. Part of the success of these types of meetings is of course the human aspect—when you get together in person you form closer bonds—but our great success this time came in the creative leaps we made. We owe this success to the process put in place before the meetings.
One of my New Year’s goals this year is to do a good deed daily. It changes my day when I have a goal like this top of mind. I set out with the thought that I want to be helpful and do some good for the people around me. There have been a few times when I was able to do something significant, but generally it’s small things: holding a door for someone, smiling at people, taking the time to talk, and sharing some of what I know.
I have a good friend who made his own dining room set. It’s a beautiful table with chairs and benches. It’s the kind of thing their family will be able to use for a long time and will always have a lot of sentimental and practical value. My brother is an auto mechanic. Once when he was visiting I asked for help fixing a burned out headlight bulb. We spent a very interesting hour talking and taking apart the wheel well of my car.
Over the past year I’ve had a significant change in the way I deal with goals and habits. For a long time I wasn’t a person that set goals. I felt better without them, and was able to get more done when I wasn’t setting goals. (I blame Leo Babauta for sharing this idea. I really took it to heart.) I thought about things I wanted to do, but I wouldn’t go through the process of setting goals or tracking them.
I love the idea of replacing digital habits, particularly ones you use a phone for, with analog habits. It can seem quaint, or old fashioned, or even hipster-ish, but I’m always delighted at the great experiences I have when I consciously choose to use a physical object instead of a digital one. Handwritten notes, hardback books, and typewriters. So much fun. Cal Newport, author of the great book Digital Minimalism, issued an “Analog January” challenge.
Ever since Apple introduced a dark mode for macOS I have enjoyed using it. I’m not a hacker who works late into the night coding, in fact I’m very much a morning person who heads to bed pretty early, but I appreciate the way dark mode windows tend to lessen the strain of looking at a screen for an extended period of time. Apple has done a nice job of making default system applications dark mode friendly, and many application developers give this as an option as well.
I’ve recently started a program that involves a lot of online reading. I deeply dislike reading in a web browser. Here’s what I do when I have a lot of web-based reading to do. The Problem Reading in a web browser is a pain. There are ads, popups, sidebars, and a whole list of other things that take away from the content itself. It’s also an inflexible format as far as the reader’s ability to customize the reading experience.
It’s the time of year when we think about where we are, where we want to be, and what we should do to get there. I love the new year. Setting goals can be great and keeping new years resolutions, even for a few days or weeks, is a good thing. As you take time to set goals, consider adding some “Do Not” goals to your list. Instead of adding more and more things to your already busy life, decide what things you want to subtract or stop doing.
I love to read blogs. There are so many amazing resources available online on so many topics. When I decided to cut back my device time as much as possible, this was the first thing I missed. I wanted the knowledge available on websites, but available to read in a non-screen medium. The simplest solution is to print everything. I don’t want to do that. It’s cost prohibitive in the long term and very wasteful.