#MundaneLife
Still living that pandemic bread life.
What Has My Attention
Last week it was Clubhouse FOMO. This week it’s Twitter “Super Follows” FOMO. I’m learning there are always extremely attractive excuses for changing your mind about a difficult thing. There’s probably a way to squint my eyes and say, “Well, the landscape has changed and given the information I know now, I should probably hop back into he social media world.” But neither Clubhouse nor Super Follows, or anything else that’s developed by a company that makes money from monetizing as much of my attention as possible, is likely to change the reasons I felt like I needed to make the drastic change I did. Missing out on a way to possibly make money from my use of Twitter doesn’t change the fact that it had become a distraction that kept me from doing the difficult things I want to see if I can do. In the case of Clubhouse, choosing to not engage with a new social media service doesn’t change the fact that I want to create things that aren’t social media-based.
I promise that this newsletter won’t become my ongoing journey/journal of what it’s like to quit social media. To give myself some credit, though, unceremoniously ripping out a huge part of how I spent my time for the last 10+ years has certainly created waves that aren’t quick to settle down. Soon, though. Every day this is feeling more normal.
One way I’m trying to be more deliberate about how I use this newfound space is with a morning writing routine that I’m experimenting with. On the first day of trying to honor this intention I did a long stream of consciousness exercise to quickly capture my thoughts, concerns, and overall intentions. I didn’t intend for it to be a piece of public writing but upon reflection, and minor editing, I thought it might be a moderately interesting and potentially useful glimpse into the way I think about creating a routine. It’s much more than creating an intention and saying, “I’m going to do this thing now!” There’s years of similar and adjacent personal experiments that have told me what will and won’t work for me and my personal context. There’s the understanding how how a new routine doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can see the article here and the actual entry in my Personal Experimentation Dashboard here.
What Has My Attention
Max and I continued our weekly release schedule of our podcast, Fields of Work. This week Max talks about all the work he’s trying to get done before things start to get really crazy for him. One task involved an empty can of baked beans and a flame thrower. Farming is weird. We also talk a bit more about my whole leaving Twitter thing and how this time is different. Listen to the episode here or search for Fields of Work in your podcast player of choice.
Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less, one of the most surprisingly good and thoughtful books I’ve read recently, is working on a new book “…on the ways that algorithmic platforms have flattened culture, across both digital and physical spaces.” I’m excited to follow along in his newsletter.
Steven Pressfield has written some of the most impactful books I’ve read about the creative process and doing great work. He was recently interviewed by Tim Ferriss and I really enjoyed it.
Paul Millerd shared an interesting service he’s been using to find worthwhile longreads. It’s called Matter and I’ve been playing around with it a little bit the past few weeks. My Is This Social Media? antennae are up but to the extent it simply surfaces meaningful things to read and doesn’t become a place where I feel like I need to be interacting with folks all the time, I’m curious about the role it can play in my informational ecosystem. If you want to check it out, reply to this email and I’ll send you my invitation link.
Cal Newport’s new book, A World Without Email, is out (and here’s a snippet that was recently published in The New Yorker). It isn’t an insta-read for me the way Digital Minimalism was, but I’m intending to dig into it once I finish my current batch of books. I’m kind of mentally gearing up for it because I have a feeling it’s going to make me mad. Not because I think email is great, but because I think the further Cal gets into writing about the corporate world the more it shows that he’s an academic who has never worked in the corporate world. And as someone who straddled both of those worlds, and is now deeply ensconced in working with huge organizations wrestling with extremely complex problems, I have very little time for people over-simplifying things that resist being over-simplified. But, hey, maybe I’ll be surprised.
Things I'm Playing With Recently
Moving away from Goodreads as my reading log. Trying StoryGraph instead.
As mentioned above, Matter, for surfacing interesting things to read.
A paper-based Kanban board using mini-Post Its.
Lightweight practice golf balls so I can hit in the park across the street from my apartment building and chip balls at Emily while she’s working in the office.
An Awair air quality monitor in my office.
Speks, the most satisfying desk toy I’ve ever had.
Until next time,
Sam