The Deliberate #15

Check-In Round

“If you could snap your fingers and instantly be world-class in a specific skill what would it be?”

I was going to say playing guitar, but I’ve actually really enjoyed the process of slowly accruing more and more skill as I’ve deliberately practiced over the past few weeks. So, instead, I think I’ll go with “programming.” I’ve always been an avid watcher/lurker of the tech world and for whatever reason I never really dove into learning how to program other than the hand-coded HTML websites I made back in middle school and high school. It feels like a boat I’ve more or less missed at this point.

Follow-Up

I mentioned “quietly quitting Twitter” in the last issue and at the point of writing that I had been off the service for the better part of three or four weeks. In the past week or so, though, I’ve been slowly re-following some folks. I want to figure out a way to engage with Twitter in a way that feels organic, controlled, and useful without the turmoil and agita that often comes along with it. I’ve taken a step in that direction by being deliberate about who I re-follow: folks I’ve met in real life (or through my office hour) and folks who regularly Tweet about topics I want to learn more about (primarily Apple, tech, and org design). No celebrities. As little news as possible. No companies or organizations. Liberal use of the mute button. No notifications.

What Has My Attention

Introducing my new podcast, Fields of Work

I’m the oldest of five boys. My youngest brother, Max, is 10 years younger than me. He has been working on various farms for the past few years and since that seems to be as close as possible to the polar opposite of what I do, we thought it would be interesting if we started a podcast about work. We’re a few episodes in at this point and still getting our feet under us in terms of flow and sound quality. I’m having a lot of fun talking to him about something I know nothing about and finding some surprising overlap in what we do. It should be searchable in your podcast player of choice (I recommend Overcast if you’re on iOS).

The Surprising Benefits of Relentlessly Auditing Your Life

I’m a sucker for a good spreadsheet so you know an article titled “The Surprising Benefits of Relentlessly Auditing Your Life” is going to catch my eye. I love that the couple in the article discovered some pretty significant life changes they wanted to make by doing some relatively light self-tracking. This is quantified self at its best. In a somewhat related vein, Emily and I have started doing a weekly Action Meeting every Sunday which is a move straight out of my work playbook but is also proving to be a pretty useful relationship move.

An Evening With Griffin McElroy

I’m a huge fan of the McElroy family. From My Brother, My Brother, and Me, Wonderful!, The Adventure Zone, Monster Factory and so much more, I find them to be a hilarious and admirable bunch of creative dudes. This talk from Griffin McElroy (the sweet baby brother) is a more serious side that was a little strange but incredibly endearing to see. In this talk Griffin describes his professional path with all the twists and turns that eventually led him to the independent creative career he’s in now. It may be less engrossing if you aren’t deep into the McElroy catalog but I found it to be pretty great.

A Few Quick Thoughts on WWDC 2019

I’m still not writing as much as I want, but I did crank out a super short reflection after Apple’s recent WWDC keynote. 

Your Undivided Attention

I’m conflicted by the Center For Humane Technology. On the one hand, I think what they are working on is super important and it seems like a relatively thoughtful group of folks who are earnest in what they are trying to do. But then I read critiques of them and I realize maybe the situation is more complex than I thought. I DON’T KNOW. CHT is either great or its terrible... but they do have a new podcast out called Your Undivided Attention that I found to be pretty good.

Closing Round

• Listening: I did a little more work on my The Sound of High School (2001-2005) playlist (Apple Music only, sadly). If you’re my age and fancied yourself a bit of an emo fan then you’ll probably enjoy this nostalgia bomb.

• Working: Not much travel over the last few weeks. Quick trip to Philly next week. First vacation of the year is in sight! Also, I completely revamped my task management system. That’s probably a story for another day.

• Drinking: I ran out of good coffee and I needed something to bridge the gap until my new batch of YES PLZ arrived. Turns out the McDonald’s brand “McCafe Premium Roast” is surprisingly drinkable. A perfectly serviceable emergency coffee to keep on hand.

• Playing: Emily and I just played a round of Mario Kart while using the JoyCons in the little steering wheels. The hard-earned muscle memory from Mario Kart on the Wii definitely kicked in. I’ve still got it.

• Watching: Just started Chernobyl. ‘Tis good. Oh! And The Russian Five! As a kid who grew up as a huge hockey fan in Detroit in the 90s it was a crazy walk down memory lane and I learned a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff that 10 year old Sam was definitely unaware of. A great story, even if you aren’t a hockey fan.

Yours in intentionality,
Sam

The Deliberate #14

Check-In Round

“What was your first job?”

In 2nd grade my friend and I had two short-lived businesses. The first, my dad taught me how to draw a cartoon penguin so we created a “how to draw cartoons” book, stapled together some copies, and sold them to our classmates. We also got my mom to supply us with candy which we then sold to our classmates and my younger brothers. 

As far as jobby-jobs go, though, I started working at Target as a cashier/cart wrangler and as a deck refinisher at basically the same time in high school. Deck refinishing was far and away the better job, although I started to learn about flow during the mundanity of the cart collection job. I used to love figuring out the most efficient way to get all the carts into the store.

Making a "Good" List

One of my favorite things to pay deliberate attention to is my own brain. One of the things I’ve noticed about myself is that I seem to go through cycles of feeling particularly good about myself and what I’m doing followed by cycles of feeling particularly lethargic and crummy. Part of me thinks these cycles are more or less inevitable, but I’m also always looking for ways to make the high times last longer and the low times bottom out quicker. To that end, I’ve been trying to take time to stop and notice when I’m feeling particularly good and then capturing in a simple list the things that I’m doing or not doing. My hope is that I can return to this list when I’m feeling down and see if I can perhaps jolt myself out of a trough and back onto an upward trajectory.

In the interest of transparency (and maybe inspiration?), here’s my list from a few days ago:

• I’m not holding myself to an unreasonable expectation of waking up extremely early

• I’m spending less time lounging around, drinking coffee, and reading in the morning (less than an hour, generally)

• I’m using my calendar to basically “hyper schedule” my day

• I’m making a deliberate effort to eat fewer meals out (with lots of room for improvement)

• I’m trying to stay as focused as possible on client work Monday through Thursday and am pushing all of my internal work for The Ready to Friday

• I’m back to weighing myself consistently

• I’m tracking my sleep

• I’m trying to take the concept of “limit work in progress” more seriously in basically everything I’m doing

• I have a couple side projects going that I care about (The Deliberate and a yet unreleased podcast with my brother)

• I’m doing a couple Office Hour sessions per week

The next time you’re feeling particularly good about yourself/life you should give this exercise a try, too.

What Has My Attention

To pay attention is to live

“Well, the loon pays attention to what concerns him and you are to do the same, for attention is of the essence of our powers; it is that which draws other things toward us, it is that which, if we have lived with it, brings the experiences of our lives ready to our hand. If things but make impression enough on you, you will not forget them; and thus, as you go through life, your store of experiences becomes greater, richer, more and more available. But to this end you must cultivate attention — the art of seeing, the art of listening. You needn’t trouble about memory, that will take care of itself; but you must learn to live in the true sense. To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention; and, bear in mind most of all, that your spiritual nature is but a higher faculty of seeing and listening — a finer, nobler way of paying attention. Thus must you learn to live in the fullest sense.”

Novelist Mark Haddon Quit Twitter. Not Because It’s Terrible, But Because It Prevents Him From Being Great

I’ve quietly “quit Twitter” as well over the past few weeks but the notable thing about this article is that Mark Haddon uses precisely the same metaphor I’ve been using in conversations with folks about why I felt the urge to step away. In his words, “I am taking a long break because every tweet had begun to feel like a peep of steam through my whistle — Listen to me! Listen to me! — which reduced the boiler pressure I needed to write another novel.”

In mine, Twitter started to feel like a place where I could blow off creative steam without actually having created anything I was particularly proud of. Now, I let that pressure build until it comes out somewhere with a little more room to breathe... like this newsletter or an article.

Attention is the beginning of devotion

I keep reading things that make me believe I need to read Mary Oliver. Here’s another article to add to the list. “Attention is the beginning of devotion. The idea exhilarates, but it also saddens. If the attention of humans can be so easily filched by a machine—or, more precisely, the companies that operate those machines—then it follows that the capacity for devotion is damaged along the way. Any parent who has felt the twinge of shame that comes with the belated realization that a social-media feed has taken them away from a conversation with their child knows this to be true.”

Closing Round

• Eating: Brother and sister-in-law came to visit so we had to take them to Founding Farmers, obviously.

• Working: Vacillating on whether I want to keep my dedicated WeWork space or if I should just lean into the simplicity of working from home when I’m not with a client.

• Listening: I was skeptical when I found out Tycho’s forthcoming album will feature vocals. That concern has been slightly assuaged by the fact I’ve had Pink & Blue on repeat for the better part of two weeks.

• Drinking: I have a seltzer problem. Emily and I don’t let ourselves buy it with every grocery trip but when we do we go nuts on it. Pair it with working from home and HOO BOY. **burp**

• Reading: Have read a series of books that are all of a similar theme that have left me mostly dispirited but with a hint of optimism: Utopia for Realists, Betterness, and Winners Take All.

• Playing: Overwatch has its tendrils deep inside my brain nowadays. Have started playing some Competitive ranked matches in the past few weeks and have been marveling about how different the game can be when rankings and points are involved.

• Moving: Not enough. But realized I was trying to run in pretty dilapidated shoes. Got some new Sauconys and trying to hit the pavement more frequently now.

• Writing: Mostly by hand with an Apple Pencil in GoodNotes while sitting on the porch at night, it seems like.

Yours in intentionality,
Sam

The Deliberate #13

Check-In Round

"What has your attention"?

The newly formed crack(s) on my phone’s screen and how I’m convincing myself not to get it repaired as a reminder to maybe use it less. Like, some kind of digital memento mori.

A Journal Glimpse

This week I’m going to do something a little different and just share something I wrote in my journal the other day. One of my favorite things to do is to fire up the Notes app and use my Apple Pencil to hand write a journal entry that I’ll transcribe into Day One at a later date. I wrote this entry last night as I sat on the balcony and listened to the rain:

“I think part of what I’m wrestling with is that I’m trying to think and write about “big” things (meaning, living a “good” life, etc.) which can be overwhelming, but through the lens of the mundane, which can seem trite. The end result is that I get too overwhelmed to write about the big stuff (“who am I to be writing about this anyway?”) and when I turn my attention to the small stuff it feels inconsequential at best, glib or naive at worst. How do I crack this nut? Simply naming the phenomenon as I just did, is probably a good start. Other than that, I’m inclined to say that I should just start writing about the mundane stuff the best way I know how and try to connect it to the bigger ideas as I can.

Traditionally, I have struggled when I don’t have a clear picture of the whole project in my head and I think that’s why I’m struggling to just write regularly. I don’t have an outline so therefore I think I can’t write.

I think I struggle with figuring out how to write about this stuff in a way that isn’t just my narrow perspective. I keep trying to say things about “work” and then realizing there is no such things as a universal experience of “work.” Maybe I should just start relentlessly writing about the very specific and sometimes weird things I do? Ground it 100% in my experience and don’t even try to make it more broadly applicable? Maybe just literally write about my inability to write cogently about this stuff? And maybe through that process I’ll learn what I actually have to say?

I’m putting too much pressure on myself to be profound. Working at The Ready has made me second guess whether what I have to share is actually worth it. I feel pressure to make sure everything I write will always impress my incredibly bright colleagues. That’s too high of a bar. I need to get out of their heads and crawl back into my own.”

What Has My Attention

• Ryan captures a lot of what I think I mean about “deliberate attention” in this article about how you choose to engage with activities or circumstances that are less than ideal. It’s about having a fundamental engagement, rather than disengagement, with what’s going around you. It’s about how you use your ability to pay attention to craft an experience for yourself that ultimately helps you in some way.

• Margin is what allows things to run smoothly, especially when plans go awry. Agile software development teams do this when they limit their work-in-progress but somehow it seems like people struggle with adopting this concept when it comes to how they live their own lives. I see it with my clients all the time. Calendars that are booked with back-to-back meetings all day long with no wiggle room to speak of. A schedule like that requires a complete lack of surprises to not get knocked askew and once it does, it sets off a chain reaction of problems. True adaptability and productivity is leaving enough margin in everything to allow you to respond calmly and creatively.

• There’s a big difference between snacking on a book and letting yourself sit down to a full course meal. Sometimes I get into periods of time where I read in very short bursts and whenever I’m able to break myself out of that mode I find myself enjoying my reading much more.

• I don’t think I have anything insightful to say about this video other than it made me laugh very hard.

Closing Round

Eating: Had an extremely delicious dinner at Jaleo in Crystal City for the second time. And after being kind of underwhelmed by Epic Smokehouse the last couple times I went, I had a pretty incredible rack of ribs and coleslaw this time around. There’s something about that restaurant, though. I’ve been there three times and I’ve forgotten my credit card their twice.

Drinking: Working through a bit of a backlog of my YES PLZ coffee beans. Tasty, as always.

Reading: Still very much on a minimalism/simplicity kick. Finished The Importance of Living (it had its moments of deep wisdom and even more moments of deep misogyny) and am now flipping back and forth between How to Do Nothing and The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan. Oh, also listening to Utopia for Realists on Audible.

Working: Had back-to-back full-day workshops with the client last week and I was struck by how utterly draining that can be. It gave me flashbacks to my teaching days where I was constantly exhausted and dreading the next day. In the moment, when I’m in the room and doing my thing, I love it. It’s the evening after, when I know I have to do the whole thing again tomorrow, that’s tough to handle. This week should be a little calmer, even though I have a quick trip to Raleigh for a half-day workshop.

Playing: Played Super Smash Brothers Ultimate for the first time ever (which is also the first Super Smash Brothers game I’ve ever played). For whatever reason I never really participated in the SSMB craze back in the day. It was fun to play with my buddy across the country, though. We also played some Super Mario Kart, just like old times. When we were roommates in college it was the primary way we divvied up household chores.

Listening: Stumbled across a band called Heron while perusing my New Music Mix on Apple Music. A good addition to my Sound of Productivity playlist.

Yours in intentionality,
Sam

The Deliberate #12

Check-In Round

"What has your attention"?

Wondering why it took me over a year to buy some chairs to put on my balcony. Sitting outside during summer storms is one of my favorite things.

Follow-Up

I moved this newsletter from Tinyletter to Mailchimp last week. When I sent myself a test email it was sent to my spam folder so I hope this is making its way to everyone. You might want to consider adding samspurlin@gmail.com to your whitelist. Then again, if you’re reading this then you’re probably not struggling with it being marked as spam. Conundrum!

Also, I realized a few folks signed up using the Tinyletter link (it’s scattered around Twitter and in a few article footers, still) after I sent last week's issue. If that was you, you probably missed it. See it here.

A Very Miyazaki Week

Over the past week or so I’ve been devouring documentaries on the legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki. It started with the first three episodes of a four-part television series and then the film The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.  It has been a fascinating glimpse into the life and work habits of somebody who is unequivocally one of the masters of his field. 

I’m struck by how Miyazaki’s demeanor and outlook on life isn’t at all what I would’ve expected from someone who makes such fantastical and whimsical movies. He’s certainly not an upbeat and happy dude. As he says, “Making films is suffering,” and I don’t doubt that he’s serious when he says that. Large parts of his creative process seem to be utterly wrenching for him.

I also found it fascinating how on the one hand he is kind of a solo creative genius in the sense that he creates the overall story and style of the movies he directs, but at the same time he leads a studio of over 100 animators who he has to work with to actually make his movies come to life. Miyazaki seems like a profoundly difficult person to work for and yet his stature in the field is so rarified I can see why people want to come work for him.

Anyway, it has been fascinating learning more about Miyazaki and the way he works. I guess that means it’s time to actually see one of his movies, eh?

What Has My Attention

• I really like finding interest and meaning in the mundane. Greasy spoon diners and familiar fast food are a few of my favorite things. I love this article about artists who have formed strong connections with mundane spaces.

• A very cool organization, the Center for Humane Technology, is apparently hiring. If I wasn’t already at my dream job I would probably be trying to figure out how to work here.

• I’m guilty of always trying to turn hobbies and interests into paid side gigs. A side effect of my digital declutter last month, though, was the decision to pick up guitar again. I’m striving for mediocrity and loving it, so far.

• I can very easily fall into a fiddly hole where I spend too much time playing with new apps and tools rather than focusing on what’s actually important. Reverting to primarily default apps is an interesting exercise in figuring out what I actually need in order to do my work. It’s always less than I imagine.

Closing Round

• Eating: Weekends are for pancakes.

• Drinking: Working my way through a bag of Ethiopian beans from local roaster Commonwealth Joe and have the latest from YES PLZ waiting for me in the wings.

• Reading: I’ve been craving books about minimalism recently, for some reason. That has resulted in re-reading Goodbye, Things and reading The Minimalist Mindset for the first time. Still working my way through The Importance of Living, too.

• Work: Last week was one of The Ready’s thrice yearly “dark weeks” where we don’t do client work and instead focus on internal, org-building work. I spent a lot of time clearing out the cruft and little tasks that seem to accumulate throughout the year. I like to think of it as removing friction so that the next trimester can run smoothly.

• Playing: Fired up Destiny 2 again after a couple months away. Still working my way through the story and am really enjoying it.

• Listening: Say Anything’s latest, "Oliver Appropriate", (Apple Music/Spotify) is making me feel like I'm in high school again and Tycho’s (Apple Music/Spotify) new single has seemingly been on repeat all week.

Yours in intentionality,
Sam

The Deliberate #11

Check-In Round

What has my attention?

How much traveling wrecks my daily habits. Last week I did a trip from DC to Tennessee for a few days, then drove to Kentucky for a few days, then flew back to DC for a day, and then flew to Orlando for a day and a half. These trips weren’t hectic or stressful but I still managed to adhere to almost none of my daily habits. 

I gotta get myself one of these portable routines.

Main Topic

No main topic this week. You may have noticed that there’s been a longer than usual gap between issues and that has largely been a function of feeling like I didn’t have anything good to write about here. I’ve been accumulating links like crazy, though, so I’m going to let those carry the bulk of the work in this issue.

What Has My Attention

• Everyone seems to be in the business of giving advice about how to avoid digital distractions. Now, medieval monks are getting into the mix.

• Gosh, these principles that Gabrielle Hamilton and Ashley Merriman articulate for their restaurant are top-notch. Particularly this one, “be thorough and excellent in everything that you do, even when no one is looking. Even in the dark. You pull the chair out and clean the corner, even if no one is going to notice.” There’s a lot more that I could pull from this article, too. “That’s the joke of Prune, that we just pretend to be a restaurant. But we’re actually an institute for living. We hide behind the fried eggs, and we hide behind the marrow bones, but really what we’re doing here is trying to change the whole goddamn world, one lamb chop at a time.”

• I bring a different kind of attention to my work when I do it on my iPad. I think there are a lot of reasons for that, but the primary one is probably the fact that I’m usually running one app at a time whereas an a desktop device I can have way too much going at once. I highly recommend exploring whether you can do your work using an iOS device. You may not be able to, which is totally fine, but it’s an interesting experiment in figuring out what is essential in your workflows. This article made me think about my own iPad-first journey.

• I admire and envy folks with a rock solid daily routine so much. As Austin says, “set up a day that work and do it over and over again.”

• A really honest and interesting reflection by an elite athlete who gave up Instagram and directly attributes doing so to her new level of success. There aren’t a lot of professional athletes in the world, but there are a lot of professionals out there. I want to be elite in my field, too, so even though I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve climbed in my life I found this article extremely relatable.

• Having a “because” is a great indicator that you’ll be able to stave off burnout and find meaning in your work. “When it comes to work, we’re usually not searching for a job that makes us wildly happy all day, every day; we know that’s not realistic. What we’re seeking is work that makes sense in the context of who we believe we are. And because we have to give things up in order to do it — leisure time, rest, seeing our families — the grade-off has to feel worth it.”

• On the one hand, this is just another article where a well-meaning old man raises concerns about the spread of digital and social technology. On the other hand, it offers this great framework about what’s tough about getting old: It’s not that you become incurious about the new things that are happening in the world, but that it’s hard to get used to the fact that old things disappear. The stuff I take for granted now, like someone who was born before the rise of automobiles, may become like horses as a primary source of transportation. Namely, absolutely removed from my day-to-day life. That’s weird to think about. Also, this is written by Oliver Sacks shortly before he passed away and it’s hard not to take the writing of someone who knows he doesn’t have long to live extremely seriously.

Closing Round

• Eating: I felt like I was in a bit of a rut with my grocery shopping and cooking recently so I literally made a list called “Extremely Healthy Food That I Also Love.” This reminded me that I love mangoes and that I can buy mangoes and eat them whenever I want. Although, I haven’t mastered how to cut a mango so I mostly buy them pre-cut, which fills me with shame.

• Working: Gave a talk recently that went fairly well (self-assessed as a B+). It reaffirmed for me that I want to build out the speaking aspect of my career as much as possible. On the personal front, I’m still trying to integrate all of my various writing into one place, SamSpurlin.com/blog. A lot of formatting broke when I imported some of my old writing so it has been a slow process.

• Listening: There’s a new Tycho (Apple Music/Spotify) single which means there is a new album not far behind. I’m ridiculously excited.

• Reading: I just finished listening to Betterness by Umair Haque and I thought it was really, really good. I also inhaled Robert Caro’s new memoir/advice about writing book called Working the day it came out. Currently reading /The Importance of Living/ by Lin Yutang.

• Creating: I’m in the early planning stages of a new podcast project with my brother, Max. If you know about our two chosen career paths you might have a sense of what it’s going to be about. Stay tuned...

Yours in intentionality,
Sam

The Deliberate #10

Check-In Round

What has my attention?

This handsome new logo! Thank you to Halee for crafting it. If you have some freelance design needs, you should definitely talk to her.

Follow-Up

• I probably should’ve held off on sending that last newsletter until I published my article recapping weeks two and three of my digital detox, since I published it thirty minutes after sending the newsletter, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

• I attended friend of the newsletter Sean Blanda’s third Pilcrow House event a couple weeks ago with Amazon Chronicles writer Tim Carmody. Pilcrow House is a Philadelphia-centric event series all about having conversations around important ideas. I’m excited to see what else Sean has up his sleeve for this thing and if you’re in or around Philadelphia this should be on your radar.
  

How to Use Systems Thinking in Your Career

I was recently asked to come to a university class and answer questions from the students in a Systems Thinking class. The idea was that these young folks were going to be graduating soon and would be entering systems (i.e. getting jobs) and the instructor (hi Jeff!) thought advice coming from someone closer to their own age and experience level might be more helpful. These students will presumably want to have influence within the systems they’re about to join but they will lack the currency (reputation, experience, expertise, etc.) to have much leverage. With that in mind, how can young folks use a basic understanding of systems and systems thinking early in their careers?

Systems have nodes, right? Generally, nodes that are extremely well connected to other nodes tend to be more “important” to a system than nodes that are off on the periphery without many connections. Becoming an important “node” in an organization could happen because you are an expert on a specific topic, process, problem, etc. Over time you become known as the person to talk to related to X. This is the realm of Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work books and the general idea that you build career capital by deliberately developing useful skills over time.

Young people should strive for this, but it can be daunting to think this is the only path available to you when you’re first starting out. That’s why I think it’s more interesting to think about being a different kind of “node” when you’re extremely junior in an organization: a super-connector. These aren’t nodes that people seek out because of some kind of deep and narrow expertise, but nodes that are sought out because they are extremely broadly connected to other parts of the system. To bring it back to the realm of specifics, I’m talking about being extremely good at seeing the connections between disparate parts — both within and outside — the organization. It’s about being creative in the sense of seeing connections (relationships, ideas, partnerships, collaborations) that other people don’t (or can’t because of years of intellectual/bureaucratic inertia).

The nice thing about becoming this type of connector is that it’s fundamentally about being insanely curious. Early in your career, that’s probably the most important characteristic to have, anyway. Nobody expects you to be an expert, yet. Nobody expects you to have the answers. You haven’t been indoctrinated by your field/industry so you’re more likely to see connections that are invisible to folks who have been thinking and operating the same way for years.

Anyway, I thought that had the makings of a neat idea. More to come on this topic, I think. I asked on Twitter how people would answer this question and got a couple great answers (see below). If you have something to add I hope you’ll consider hitting reply and letting me know!

Links

• My digital detox made me realize how problematic and accurately named “feeds” are. They always somehow manage to make me feel gorged and simultaneously also pretty empty. Austin’s idea to spend more time searching and less time scrolling feeds really resonates. LINK

• I’m a sucker for videos of craftspeople doing their thing. In the spirit of Jira Dreams of Sushi (free on YouTube apparently?!), check out a day in the life of this sushi master. LINK

• I mean, the title of this article kinda encapsulates my whole thing, right? LINK

• I am not a religious man but I’ve always been fascinated by monastic life. LINK

• Apologies if I’ve linked to this before, but I really like David Sparks take on how he spends his birthday and the end result of this year’s ritual. More intentionality sums up my focus for this year, too. LINK
  

Closing Round​

• Eating: Too much delivery. Chinese food is great. Pho is great. Pizza is great.

• Working: I went to SIOP this week. It was... not so good.

• Listening: I listened to all the podcasts when I came out of my digital detox and now I have podcast flu.

• Reading: Just finished Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey (3 stars). Just stopped reading The Excellence Dividend by Tom Peters, not because I don’t agree with him, but because I don’t think I can take several hundred more pages of what appear to be his loosely organized notes.

• Playing: I’m teaching Emily how to play cribbage tomorrow night.

• Writing: Not enough.
  

Until next time!

Your friend in intentionality,
Sam

The Deliberate #9: Unfiltered email is bad for your health

Follow-Up

No real follow-up this week. The digital detox is still on (just finished week 3) and I have some thoughts that’ll be captured in a soon-to-be-written article. Otherwise, let’s keep it rolling!

Unfiltered email is bad for your health

A few days ago I remembered you can set up Gmail filters that automatically detect certain types of email and take action on them on your behalf. I’ve been having a lot of fun noticing which emails hit my inbox that could actually be filtered in a useful way. For example, I subscribe to a handful of newsletters but I never actually want to read them in my email program. I want to send them to Instapaper which is where everything I want to read is stored for later. Now, any time a newsletter is sent to me it is auto-archived and immediately forwarded to Instapaper. Similarly, my apartment building emails me when I have a package waiting at the front desk. Now, whenever they send me that email it gets auto-archived and automatically sent to my Things inbox (which is where I keep my reminders about stuff I need to do).

This means fewer emails in my inbox, which is always a good thing. It also eliminates the manual step I usually need to take to get the information where it needs to go.

If you aren’t regularly looking at what’s hitting your inbox with a skeptical eye and unsubscribing liberally, or making filters, then your inbox is probably much worse than it needs to be. If that doesn’t stress you out, good for you. For everyone else, see what you can prevent from ever hitting your inbox in the first place.

Check out Google’s support doc about creating filters if you’ve never made one before.

Links

1. I remembered I wrote an article for 99U a long time ago that summarizes why I’m so interested in attention. LINK

2. I read more than most people and I agree with all the advice Austin lays out here about how to read more. LINK

3. I’m a big fan of Basecamp and Jason Fried. As you might imagine, the man who wrote a book about working calmly has some good things to say about how he works. LINK

4. Speaking of Jason Fried, he was just on Shane Parrish’s The Knowledge Project podcast. I enjoyed it. LINK

5. Startup CEOs (and everyone else) need to do less. LINK

6. This was me in elementary school. Bologna sandwich, baby! LINK

7. Are we optimizing ourselves to death? LINK

8. I’ve obviously gotten over the awkwardness about sharing mundane stuff about my life, but if you need the nudge then this might help. LINK

Closing Round

• Working: We re-branded The Ready’s newsletter a few weeks ago. I still write it, though. You should check it out if you don’t already subscribe.

• Eating: I dug the crock-pot out this week and used it for the first time in over a year. I kind of forgot how great it is. Throw in some ingredients in the morning, go about your day, and then you have dinner.

• Listening: Lots of Post Malone. I heard a song I liked during the new Spider-Man movie and that sent me down a deep Post Malone rabbit hole. This playlist is a good starting point if you’re like me and way behind the times.

• Drinking: Yes Plz coffee every morning. Tap water every day. Living large!

• Reading: Almost finished with 1Q84. This is my second Murakami book (other than What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I also love). He’s quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.
  

Your very exciting friend (email, crock pots, and tap water in the same email?!),
Sam

The Deliberate #8: Beyond workism as we currently know it

Follow-Up

I just wrapped up week 2 of my Digital Minimalism-inspired digital detox. I accomplished 6 “anchor days” this week (days where I successfully read, write, meditate, and work out) which is far and away the most successful week I’ve ever had when it comes to daily habits. Turns out it’s relatively easy to do those things consistently when you’ve removed almost every other distraction from your life. More to come on this in a future article.

Oh, also, they found our luggage.

Beyond Workism as We Currently Know It

I like work. I studied organizational psychology in grad school, I used to run a website called The Workologist, and I work for a company that helps organizations — and the people within them — work better. 

Despite my obsession with the nature of work, I’m on board with those who decry “workism” as defined as a glorification or worship of work for the sake of work. I’m not interested in perpetuating that culture of overwork, burnout, or organizational masochism that has gained in prominence over the past few years.

At the same time, though, I think there’s a whole world of “positive workism,” or what I’ve taken to calling “reformed workism,” that is very much worth our exploration. This is what I tried to tackle in a brief and introductory way in one of the articles I wrote this week. I want to shift the workism conversation toward an internally-focused and subjective experience of work and ask people to wrestle with the difficult task of owning their moment-to-moment reality at work while at the same time helping to create environments, organizational and political, where a healthier relationship to work can be cultivated.

That’s still pretty ambiguous and I think part of this newsletter project and the writing I’ve been doing for the past several years has been poking at the edges of this line of inquiry. There's a lot to untangle, most notably the immense amount of privilege that is just draped over every part of this conversation. It’s something I want to acknowledge and explore without letting it prevent me from following some of the interesting paths that I think we’ve just taken the fewest of steps down.

Good Stuff

Given my focus on workism this week, there’s lots to share about work, why it’s great, why it’s horrible, and better ways to think about it. I’ve shared a few of these in past issues but in the name of keeping a theme together I’ll share them again:

• Why do we work so hard? 

• Want to love your job? Read this article

• Workism is making Americans miserable

• America’s professional elite: Wealthy, successful, and miserable

• How millennials became the burnout generation

• Why are young people pretending to love work?

And unrelated, but still interesting:

• 'Time moves too quickly!’

• A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you

• Building a second brain: An overview
  
  

Closing Round

• Drinking: Yes Plz coffee is a coffee subscription (rising from the ashes that once was Tonx) that delivers some of the best beans I’ve tasted in plus a high quality ‘zine each week.

•  Eating: We, The Pizza has an excellent name for a DC-based pizza joint and they make a pretty good pie.

• Listening: I’m firmly back on the Spotify bandwagon and I’ve been exploring some playlists to accompany me during work over the past week. Chill Lofi Study Beats, Mellow Beats, Lo-Fi Beats, Paus., and Minimalism have all gotten repeat listens.

• Working: Diving deep into progressive org structure (Niels is always good inspiration) and optimal operating rhythms this week.

•  Watching: Emily and I are still deep in Brooklyn Nine-Nine land. This is going to be another one of those shows like Arrested Development, Parks and Recreation, and 30 Rock, that leaves a hole in my heart when it finally wraps up.

• Playing: As part of my digital detox I’m not playing any solo video games right now, but playing with a friend is okay, so once or twice a week I jump onto Overwatch to play a few rounds with a good buddy from college. There’s depth to this game that I didn’t perceive when I first started playing it.
   

Your pizza fueled friend,
Sam

The Deliberate #7: I lost my luggage so apparently also my deliberate attention

Follow-Up

Email newsletters are a cruel master for the lazy editor. How many people noticed my attempted joke in last week’s issue that required me to strike through a couple words — that ended up solidly un-struckthrough?

Attention and frustration

I’m writing these words as I sit on a screened-in porch overlooking a golf course (the sounds of an older gentleman saying, “Oh son of a bitch!” As he hacks his way out of a sand bunker just drifted by) on a beautiful and breezy Florida morning. On Friday, Emily and I took an early flight from Washington D.C. to come down to Naples for the weekend to visit her parents. When we got to the terminal, the gate agent asked for volunteers to gate check their bags to their final destinations. We each had a carry-on and since we were going to be boarding pretty late in the process, we figured we’d simplify our lives by taking the offer to gate check. 

We landed in Florida (via Atlanta) to no bags to be found anywhere. And now, 24 hours later, still no bags anywhere. They haven’t surfaced at any other airport and nobody at the airline can tell me where they might be. It’s feeling more and more that we may have seen the last of them. 

Objectively, this is a relatively minor situation. We arrived to a fully-stocked home full of extra toiletries and clothes we can borrow. We are only here for two days. We have no fancy plans that require us to be dressed in any particular way.  We didn’t have any computers in our bags. We’ve mostly just lost clothes, toiletries, and some expensive dental-ware (me, a fitted mouth guard for sleeping; Emily, a retainer — we are sexy people). 

The situation is minor and yet I’m struck by how much it has impacted the quality of my attention. Being thrust into an opaque bureaucracy I don’t trust and can’t influence has consumed more of my attention than I would’ve expected. I’m frustrated and annoyed and the vague idea of “improving my attention” seems trite and stupid. My digital detox has been largely ignored over the past 24 hours as I took to Twitter to try to demand satisfaction/information from the airline and well, you know, now that I’m here, maybe I’ll just browse my timeline while I wait for them to DM me back. Oh, what’s that? Thirty minutes of mindless scrolling? 

I’m blessed to very rarely have to deal with bureaucratic incompetence and rigamarole (I mean, other than what I do for a living... but that somehow feels different). I suspect that if I were poorer or marginalized in some other way this would potentially be a much larger part of my life. And if that were the case would I still be so interested in personal development? Would I be able to adapt to my surroundings and still carve out some of my attention for personal growth? Or would so much of my attention be consumed by the day-to-day of living that I would look to someone like me, or a newsletter like this, and roll my eyes?

Bonus Reading

 •  Being poor changes your thinking about everything. LINK

•  Your brain on scarcity. LINK

•  The good-enough life. LINK

•  John Siracusa’s great games list. LINK

•  How I ditched my phone and unbroke my brain. LINK

Closing Round

 •  Drinking: Dunkin’ Donuts K-cup coffee.

•  Eating: Two burgers yesterday. Vacation mode, engaged. Beach body, disengaged.

•  Reading: Finished Figuring. Ultimate verdict, pretty good. Working on book 3 of The Expanse, Abaddon’s Gate. 

•  Listening: A little worried that listening to music all the time is becoming another one of my digital detox “leaks.” We’ll see. This week has been more Cloud Cult and also just letting Spotify serve up some tunes from my high school days.

•  Watching: The Red Wings continue to lose all the time. The season is mercifully coming to a close, soon.

•  Working: Aaron’s book, Brave New Work, has been out in the world for a couple weeks and we’re starting to see some early returns for The Ready. I’ve been thinking through how we can better handle inbound requests.

Until next time!

Your unexpectedly-more-minimal-than-usual friend,
Sam

The Deliberate #6: The sharpening of attention through potential pain

I can’t remember the last time I learned a new skill where the stakes for not being successful were bodily harm. I’m talking, of course, about alligator wrestling learning how to ski. Somehow, despite growing up in a locale with long, cold, and snowy winters, I had never gone skiing in my entire life until a few weeks ago. It was probably mostly a function of it always overlapping with hockey season in my youth and then being a poor teacher and then poorer graduate student for most of my 20’s. Nonetheless, a few weeks ago I found myself looking up at a mountain in New Hampshire with skis on my feet and a full day of either a.) learning how to ski and having fun or b.) failing to learn how to ski and not having all that much fun.

To cut the story short, I did successfully learn the basics such that I was able to go up the chairlift and find my way back down the mountain multiple times without completely beefing it.

The reason I bring it up here, though, is to quickly explore the effect that high stakes has on attention. While I took to heart the advice to keep myself under control at all times, there were a handful of moments where I found myself going over some ungroomed/bumpy snow with slightly too much speed with trees slightly too close for comfort where the quality of my attention was sublime. There was nothing other than me, the snow, and trying to stay on my feet so I wouldn’t have to be taken down the mountain on a stretcher. In a classic example of finding flow, my available skill was ever so barely in balance with the challenge I was being presented. 

High stakes put an edge to attention that I find extremely useful and enjoyable. Are physical high stakes the only thing that does this? Is it more skillful to be able to bring that quality of attention to even low stakes activities? Is this why Cal Newport’s advice in Deep Work to set potentially unreasonable deadlines for yourself works? Did I just write a whole article about flow and not realize it until just now?

All I know is that I’m ready to go skiing again.

Good Things

• Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction: I can be a very unsympathetic person when it comes to reading because a.) I don’t have kids (which means I have lots of time for reading), b.) I like to read, c.) I’m a relatively fast reader, and d.) I read a lot. At the same time, however, I can still feel the tugs on my attention that try to distract me from diving deep into a book.

• Workism Is Making Americans Miserable: I was introduced to a new word in this article — workism. Basically, the idea of worshiping work almost like a religion. The article equates workism with hours worked but I immediately started thinking about what workism would look like if you were obsessed with how you worked rather than how much. More to come on this, I think...

• Beliefs: I’m in love with the idea of capturing my beliefs into some kind of living document and revising it over time. This is such a good example of what it could look like.

• Why the Siri Face Is All I Need from My Apple Watch: I pine for a future where all my devices are excellent at giving me contextual information and notifications. Basically, I want my devices to know what I’m doing, what I should be doing, and to help me take action in that direction. The Apple Watch is the closest thing to that right now and the Siri face is where the action happens. This article convinced me to give it another go.

Closing Round

• Playing: Cribbage With Grandpas (iOS). Yes, it’s a video game where you play cribbage with a grandpa. And yes, you can customize your grandpa.

• Eating: I got a pizza stone and I learned how to make homemade dough so I’m turning into even more of a pizza fiend than I was before.

• Listening: Cloud Cult (Apple Music/Spotify) seems like one of those bands I should’ve been listening to since college but somehow I only got turned on to them in the last year or so. They’re incredible.

•  Working: How do you teach a smart person to do the work we do as an internal change agent? I’ve been wrestling with a coaching curriculum centered on organizational change for the past few weeks.

• Drinking: I accidentally bought dark roast coffee. I’m drinking it under protest.

• Reading: Still working my way through Figuring by Maria Popova. I can’t decide if it’s terrible or great. I also re-read Digital Minimalism last weekend. More to come on that...

• Podcasts: I’m in the midst of a digital detox (see Digital Minimalism above) so I’m podcastless at the moment. Prior to kicking off my digital detox, though, I listened to the multi-episode arc of the Apollo 13 mission on the Brady Heywood podcast. It was so, so, good (and talk about a situation requiring the sharpening of attention for all involved...)
  

That’s it for this week. As always, feel free to reply to this email to say hello. If you’re so inclined forwarding this to someone you think might dig it is the best compliment you can give.

The Deliberate #5: Stigmergy and the Deliberate Use of Attention

A good thing about having a notoriously porous memory and a large back catalog of writing is that looking through my old writing sometimes feels like I’m seeing these ideas for the first time. Occasionally, I find myself nodding along and thinking, “Wow, sometimes I'm smart,” and more frequently I cringe with every word read. Recently, I was digging through my Medium archive, which has some of my writing from as long ago as 2015, and stumbled across an idea I really like and want to do more with.

Essentially, the idea is that you can and should make changes to your environment to help you take the action(s) you know you’ll want to, or should, take in the future. It’s called “stigmergy.” The canonical example is putting something that you must absolutely not forget to take to work literally in front of the front door so you have to move it or step over it to leave in the morning.  By doing this you've changed your environment (put something that normally doesn't belong in front of a door in front of a door) so that you'll take a specific action (take that something with you when it's time to leave).

The reason I like it is not because I necessarily have a huge list of things that fit into this category but because I know the feeling of wanting to capture the moments where I’m feeling inspired and full of positive energy such that I can reap those benefits when I feel shitty and super low in energy later. It’s like leaving little messages in bottles or power-ups for my future self when I know I’m gonna need it.

It strikes me as a particularly savvy way to harvest moments when I’m using my attention well so that I can use that mindset again in the future. It also requires the humility and self-awareness to know that this feeling of being so on top of things isn’t going to last forever and I should do what I can to make the runway to get back to this state of mind as smooth as possible.

A couple quick examples:

• I know that drinking water is important but sometimes I forget to do it first thing in the morning because water isn’t coffee and the only thing I want in the morning is coffee. So, one day when I was feeling particularly motivated to make sure I drink more water I put a recurring reminder in my phone for 6:45 AM (about 15 minutes after I generally wake up) that says, “Drink some water, ya dingus.” It generally makes me chuckle. And then I drink some water.

• I know that walking through a few specific steps at the beginning of my day can set me up for a really productive and positive day. Basically, it’s simply spending 5-10 minutes getting situated, turning on my “focus music”, reviewing email and Slack for open loops, reviewing the tasks I’ve given myself for the day, and setting one big “most essential thing” that I’m going to work on first. When I do that, I generally have a good day. Do I feel like doing that everyday? Hell no. But the fact that it’s captured in a little recurring checklist that’s waiting for me when I sit down at my computer each morning means that it’s easy to do it even when I don’t want to.

• If I know I’m planning on working out later I’ll put my contacts in (rather than wear my glasses) and will put on my workout clothes as early as possible. This sends signals to my brain that I need to go workout. If I’m still sitting here in my workout clothes and a complete lack of sweat when it’s time to get ready for bed then I know I messed up.

I would love to do a better job of creating more of these things for myself in the future. It seems to start with an awareness of when I’m feeling good and humming along and the humility to realize that this isn’t always going to be the case and that I should try to find a way to leave something behind that the really lazy, bored, uninspired, and surly version of myself might be able to pick up and use to make himself a slightly better version of himself/myself.

Links

Robert Caro is one of my writing idols

I was going to save this link as a reason to write something long and profound but I feel like that window has passed. Anyway, here’s a new article about Robert Caro, maybe my favorite living author. He writes incredible biographies (The Power Broker and a 5-volume series on Lyndon Johnson) and is one of my favorite examples of what dedicated and relentless focus can accomplish. This article from 2012 about his writing process is sublime, too. Also, he has a new (non-biography) book coming out that I just insta-preordered.

Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan

My colleague and founder of The Ready, Aaron Dignan, has been hard at work on a book for the better part of two years and it was released today! If you’re interested in a better future of work — one built on trust, autonomy, and continuous participatory change, then you should check out Brave New Work.

How Steinbeck Used the Diary as a Tool of Discipline, a Hedge Against Self-Doubt, and a Pacemaker for the Heartbeat of Creative Work by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings

Awhile back I read Grapes of Wrath and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath back-to-back. It was a pretty good move and Working Days is one of the most inspiring books I’ve read in a long time. Turns out Nobel Prize-winning authors think they’re shit writers some of the time, too. 

Closing Round

• Watching: Season 2 of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Michael Schur is my favorite creator in TV (The Office, The Good Place, Parks and Recreation).

• Reading: Just finished Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport and The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester. Working on Figuring by Maria Popova.

• Playing: Recently started playing Overwatch again with a friend from college. Picked up Destiny 2 and have been extremely impressed with it so far.

• Listening: If you went to high school in the early 2000’s and were into indie, emo, or alternative rock then you might like this playlist I made.
  

With five issues under my belt I feel safe asking you early adopters to consider forwarding this newsletter to someone you think might enjoy it. It has been a blast to write and I'm looking forward to keeping it going for a long time.

The Deliberate #4

I never said this newsletter would be weekly but part of me knows that I’m shooting for a more-or-less weekly schedule. I was hoping by never putting words to that intention I could slip by it without it noticing. It has been over one week since I sent the last installment of this newsletter and unfortunately that intention was far more attentive than I thought and now I’m sitting here feeling bad for not sending something sooner. 

I’m not one of those romantic writers who seems to be powered by self-loathing and poor decisions. My self-loathing and poor decisions show up as deciding that the best use of my time is definitely trying out three new email apps or, in a bygone era, updating all the metadata on my MP3 collection. It definitely doesn’t drive good writing. 

On the other hand, though, a met deadline is like a burst of positive energy. In what is probably going to be the least relatable metaphor ever, it’s like when you’re playing a racing video game (for some reason the early 2000s arcade version of Cruisin’ USA is stuck in my head) and you hit a checkpoint and the timer that was counting down to your failure resets. A wave of relief, a brief moment of thinking “I have SO MUCH time now,” and then the quick reversion into “Oh shit the time is running out.” (Hey, it makes sense to me.) 

All that is to say that commitments to myself (which is really all deadlines are, right?) are important. Not in an objective life-or-death sense but in more of an energetic and emotional life-or-death sense. A met commitment is a burst of identity reaffirming energy and a missed commitment is a a new piece of ammunition for the inner critic who is all too happy to chime in about my shortcomings. We all need more of the former and much, much, less of the latter. 

A little while ago I learned that these commitments that are either met or missed don’t even have to be OFFICIAL commitments where I’ve consciously said to myself, “Samuel, my boy, you’re going to run every day for a week!” (My inner voice who tells me to do good things sounds like a Victorian Dad.) It’s the UNOFFICIAL commitments, the little subconscious shoulds and coulds that seem to count just as much as the official ones. It’s the Quiet Little Voice that says, “I know I should journal everyday,” or, “I told myself I wanted to make sure I at least went for a walk everyday,” but never makes itself known enough to officially register as This Is a Thing I’m Doing Now that’s the real killer. 

It makes sense to not want to disappoint Victorian Dad. He/we were so clear about what I was supposed to do! It was probably written on my whiteboard or on a post-it stuck to my computer for God’s sake! It makes a lot less sense to feel bad about disappointing the Quiet Little Voice but apparently the emotional repercussions are the same. (Turns out.)  

I’ve gotten better at identifying that Quiet Little Voice and telling it to either speak up and make its expectations explicit or to shut up and stop trying to run my life (hence my relatively new Anchor Habits of RunWriteSitMove). 

I thought I had a pretty good handle on it until I realized I was feeling bad for not writing a new issue of my explicitly non-weekly (but apparently implicitly weekly) newsletter and couldn’t think of anything to write about because I felt too bad about not writing to get outside of my own head to figure out a good topic to write about so I just wrote about paying attention to the little voice in my head that sets deadlines and commitments without me even realizing it and I threw all respect for run-on sentences out the window. 

 Whew.

 Also, I still don’t know if this thing is going to be weekly or not. I need to go have a chat with my Victorian Dad and Quiet Little Voice.

Hot Tip 

Figure out what expectations you have for your behavior that you’ve never actually captured and written down. Capture those bastards and interrogate them. Is this a good thing that you want to do for real? Then do it for real and celebrate when you’re successful and hold yourself accountable to failure! Is this an irrational thing that you don’t want to do? Tell your Quiet Little Voice to find something else to fixate on because it ain’t gonna happen. Rinse and repeat forever.

Links 

•  No links today! Look how much I just wrote! You still want links after this?! I never promised links. 

•  I even included a new section called Hot Tip and you went ahead and kept reading to the second bullet while probably hoping for a link. Shame.

•  Fine. One link. I liked this article about being a “bifurcator” a whole lot.

Until next week (maybe),
Sam

The Deliberate #3

I see two major (and opposite) approaches you could take when trying to be more deliberate with attention. 

The first is to simply be much more selective about what event enters your awareness. This is the realm of digital minimalism (anyone else stoked for Cal’s book?), Essentialism, and the recent obsession with Marie Kondo and The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. This is the approach that resonates most clearly with the way my own brain works. I’ve been a minimalist in most ways for a long time and when I’m really feeling on top of my game I really have a lot of sources of information locked down. 

The other approach is to care much less about restricting the streams of information that enter your life and instead be extremely comfortable dipping in and out of the streams at will. Folks who are really comfortable with this approach must not feel any obligation to keep up to date with these sources of information. They aren’t Twitter timeline completionists or Inbox Zero adherents. As Rands puts it in a recent podcast of his I listened to they’re good at “tasting the soup.”

I always discounted this way of operating but I’m becoming more and more interested in how I can adopt more of it. If I’m honest with myself, sticking to the minimalism approach of attention management sometimes feels like a losing battle. There’s a constant vigilance that can feel righteous and sacred on my good days and exhausting and Sysiphian on my bad days. How nice would it be to not care about following thousands of people on Twitter or worrying about the backlog of TV shows that you said you wanted to watch or letting the notifications pile up on Slack? Dip in, dip out, move on. 

I look to something like Apple Music as an example. I have at my fingertips what seems like all music that has ever been created and tens of brand new albums and playlists algorithmically selected for me every day yet I don’t feel any overwhelming urge to “complete” Apple Music. It’s just a thing I use when I want to and forget about it the rest of the time. It makes me wonder what else I could treat more like that rather than as an open loop that I desperately need to close in order to feel better.

I’ve taken a small step in this direction over the past couple days. This probably sounds crazy to most people but I actually created projects in Things to keep track of which video games I was playing. I didn’t want to have too many in progress so I figured if I visualized how many I had “active” I would be less likely to try to tackle too many at once (which I know can make me feel scattered). To the surprise of no one, putting video games in your task management software is a great way to make them feel like work.

Can I extend this elsewhere? To Twitter? To RSS? To email and Slack? Who knows! Am Ion the verge of a digital rumspringa just in time for Digital Minimalism to come out and probably rock my world like everything else Cal Newport has written? 

Stay tuned.

Links And Whatnot

•  Rands, of Rands in Repose fame, rebooted his podcast called The Important Thing. I enjoyed its very short initial run and the new episodes are pretty good too. I particularly liked The One About Information Consumption (which is where I first heard the “tasting the soup” metaphor I mentioned above).

•  In December I helped facilitate a session at the Work Awesome and Inbox Awesome conference. We kicked it off with a 10ish minute talk about The Ready and org design before breaking into groups to do an activity (which the video captures but I can’t imagine makes for very compelling viewing). We then reconvene at the end for a 10-15 minute discussion and Q&A. I’m pleasantly surprised at how the talk portion turned out.

•  Should the long thing I wrote at the start of this newsletter be an article instead? I was thinking it’d be a good topic for a newsletter and then I started writing and writing and writing and it turned into something kind of long. Too long for a newsletter?

•  I keep forgetting to mention that I try to do a daily “open office hour” everyday that anyone can sign up for by going to my Calendly link. If you’ve ever wanted to talk about The Ready or org design or positive psychology or hockey or anything else with me you should grab a slot and we’ll have a virtual coffee together.

•  I love being pleasantly surprised. You know what recently surprised me? How good the TV show Letterkenny is. For what started as a goofy YouTube series about small-town Canadian life has turned into a still very goofy TV show about small-town Canadian life that has actually grown a heart and a pretty astute progressive voice. I’m naturally disposed to like it considering my Southeast Michigan upbringing (I’m pretty close to as Canadian as you can be as an American) and many years of hockey playing but I think anybody could actually love this show. You may need to leave the captions on and brush up on your hockey player lingo but if you give it a go (S1 and S2 are good, S3 is meh, and S4-6 are incredible) I think you might also be pleasantly surprised. It’s raunchy as hell so put the kiddos to bed before you pop it on.

•  I DIDN’T MEAN TO WRITE THIS MUCH I’M SORRY.

Until next time,
Sam

The Deliberate #2

Follow-up: Starting the first issue of my newsletter with a link error feels like some kind of bad omen, right? Thank you to those who reached out and alerted me to the fact that I messed up the link to the tweet about learning and body paint. Here’s the correct link. Sorry about that! 

I finished reading The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal (of Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me! fame) last week. It was a weird, but very good, book. Part memoir part and love letter to running it covers a lot of ground. I particularly enjoyed the following passage: 

“Then as time went on, I started to give up my headphones for training runs as well. I am typing this, obviously, staring at a screen. The computer is also playing music, which I enjoy as I write. When I finish writing in a little bit, I will go have myself some lunch, and of course I’ll play some music or news, and maybe even look at another screen. After lunch, I’ll go rake some leaves or do other tasks, with headphones firmly in my ears; I’ll enjoy music over dinner, and then finish my day by watching another, larger screen, with some content that, I hope, can command my entire attention. If I don’t leave my headphones behind when I run, I wouldn’t spend a single minute of my waking life free from input.” 

This speaks to the sense of connectedness I’ve felt between my various anchor habits: reading, writing, exercising (running), and meditating. When I’m meditating well it’s easier to run for longer distances. When I’m running consistently I seem to have the focus needed to write. And when I’m writing consistently I feel like running. The causation direction between all of these habits are bidirectional, for sure. They all orbit around a central theme of cultivated attention. They all pull from a central well of being able to focus deliberately. The more I can remember that these practices don’t happen in isolation the better off I think I’ll be. 

“I think about my motion, and my breathing, my muscles, and their state of agitation or stress or relaxation. I note my surroundings—the downward slope I would never notice driving this street, the hawk’s nest I would never see for lack of looking up, the figure in a window caught in a solitary moment of their own. I think about the true meaning of distance—about the learning that comes from running a mile in your own shoes. I think about blisters and bliss, and the voices quiet.” 

It’s early — and slow — days for my own rekindling love affair with running and this book helped remind me that a running practice is also an attention practice. 

Deliberate Links 

•  I recently read The Coddling of the American Mind by Jon Haidt and Greg Lukiandoff and Blood Sweat and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier. Both were good and have generated some potential writing topics for this newsletter. I’m currently working on Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson, Abbadon’s Gate by S.A. Corey, and OpenSpace Beta: A Handbook for Organizational Transformation in Just 90 Days by Niels Pflaeging and friends. 

•  I’ve gone through periods of time using only my iPad for all of my work (I’m writing this on my iPad right now, actually) and this article is a great entry point if you’re thinking about trying to go iOS only in your work life. 

•  This article was making the rounds recently about how you should just consider not responding to your emails because Inbox Zero is an impossible ideal to reach for. Go ahead and read it, but do me a favor afterward and watch Merlin Mann’s actual talk and check out some of his original writing where he first introduced the idea of “Inbox Zero”. The media has absolutely destroyed the interesting nuance of the original idea.

•  After reading Blood, Sweat, and Pixels I stumbled across this article by one of my favorite authors, Clive Thompson, about the doomed game Duke Nukem Forever. I vaguely remember the excitement around this game way back in the day and reading this article was a.) a fun walk down memory lane, and b.) an interesting case study in the lack of creative constraints (e.g. unlimited money). Also, turns out the game did eventually come out and it was bad.

•  I’m kind of in awe at how closely David Foster Wallace read self-help books.

Let’s wrap this issue there, eh? Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter over the last week and especially to anyone who shared it with a friend. I’m not going to explicitly ask for help spreading the word about this, yet, because I still feel like I’m very much still figuring things out. For now it’ll just be our own little (poorly kept) secret.

 Until next time!

The Deliberate #1: Welcome To The Deliberate!

Howdy! I don’t quite know what this is, but I'm pretty excited to figure it out.

The plan (to the extent you can call this a plan) is to use this space as a much-needed sandbox to investigate, interrogate, and generally explore some ideas that have latched onto my brain and up to this point have refused to let go. I’ve hit the limit of what I can make sense of on my own so I’m hoping the structure of committing to a semi-regular newsletter and the possibility of dialogue stemming from what I share helps me push these ill-formed ideas into something more cohesive.

And what are those ideas that are bouncing around my head? Some mix of:

• Attention (what it is and why it’s so precious and why we’re all so bad at using it)

• Positive psychology (the science of all the good parts of being a human)

• Organization design (how do organizations function best?)

• Personal development (how do people function best?)

• Entropy (why it’s the driving force of basically everything)

• Minimalism (the cultural phenomenon and how it’s about more than just not having a lot of stuff)

• Essentialism (saying no to everything that isn’t essential)

• Personal productivity

• Meaningful work

I’m able to explore most of my org design ideas on The Ready’s newsletter, which I happen to write, but I’ve slowly been accumulating a list of things I want to write about that don’t feel like they fit with it.

At the end of the day, I’m interested in what it means to be deliberate about everything (hence the name of this here newsletter). I worry that the ability to be deliberate is rather systematically being quashed by our modern technological and cultural ecosystems and I want to explore what I think about that alongside other folks who find that interesting.

As far as the logistics of this newsletter go — here’s what I’m thinking:

• I’ll send one every time I’ve accumulated enough stuff to make it interesting. That probably won’t be weekly but it’ll probably (hopefully) be more frequent than monthly.

• It’ll consist of some sort of original writing related to something I’ve been thinking about and then I’ll share 3-5 links of things I've read/watched/listened to recently that I think fit into the theme of The Deliberate.

• If people respond to anything I’ve written I’ll incorporate that into the writing, too (with your permission, of course).

• And all of this is subject to change, of course :)
  
  

My Writing Elsewhere

Let’s start with three articles I’ve recently published on Medium. First, I finally took a stab at getting my ideas about entropy and organization design into writing. These ideas have been hanging out in some amorphous state basically since I withdrew from my PhD program. It feels good to finally have them out and I’m excited to keep pushing this line of thinking.

Next, I took a look at 2018 and some of the key lessons I’m extracting from the year. This newsletter was actually conceived while writing this article.

Finally, here’s a look at my 2019 yearly theme which I’m calling The Year of The Deliberate.

Oh, and I revamped SamSpurlin.com. It’s a real work of art.
 

The Deliberate Elsewhere

• Tiago Forte is one of my favorite personal development thinkers and his latest article is a pretty great deep dive into personal knowledge management systems and tagging. Key takeaway — think about tagging the status, usage, or context of a piece of information rather than it’s contents.

• Shuhari is a mental model for the phases of mastery that comes out of the practice of aikido. It comes from quite the different intellectual and theoretical model than the Dreyfus Model but it makes me happy to see some conceptual overlap.

• This Twitter thread (which is actually just an excerpt from this article) is straight fire. I didn’t expect to have my understanding of learning fundamentally shifted by an article about professional body painting, but hey, the Internet can be a weird and wonderful place.

That’s it for this issue of The Deliberate. I truly appreciate the handful of you who have already signed up for this thing based solely on what you already know about me. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, or feedback. I’m also continuing with my nearly daily open office hour and I’m always happy to chat.

Until next time,
Sam Spurlin