[Busywork is satisfying (swoosh) and easy (ding), so do it cautiously. Email can lack affordances for priority while allowing anyone to send you one, which can easily get you absorbed in what other people demand of your attention. If you can do it hungover, it’s less valuable.]
[Increase your anti-fragility by honing keystone skills: public speaking, writing, sales, technical sensibility, design, and negotiation.]
[$10,000 per hour work is invisible and may produce no results for years or decades.]
[Divide the monthly price by average usage to get the hourly cost. Per hour, people might be paying about fifty cents for online streaming, a dollar or few for games and movies, five to fifteen for their creator subscriptions.]
Most items appear in the timeline at the time they were created.
If an item attribute can be updated, such as by completing a to-do, a small update line appears at that time in the timeline.
If an item is scheduled for a future date or time, it appears there instead, and a simple update line appears at the time it was created and / or scheduled.
I see updates appear in my timeline when she schedules something. This is a very helpful transaction or record; I now know she set up an appointment for something I’m going to with her, or that she set up a meeting in the future, without any kind of extra “notification” feature, and without having to check future dates regularly for updates.
The more you hit “review later”, the longer it takes for the item to return, allowing items you’re less interested in to “float away” from you without requiring more destructive or detailed actions.
you can’t edit an existing note. Instead, you build on past notes using replies: you can reply to any past note with a new one that goes into your timeline now, forming a thread.
Much easier to compile buckets for ideas when you don’t need to label them—this is why people can write so much on micro-blogging platforms.
I don’t care about what gets ranked on Google, I’m not trying to optimise for the people who come from that channel.
People who arrive via search are just looking to get a question answered and move on. That’s great and I hope I can help them, but they are not the reason I’m here. This site is here for the people who stay a while, have a look around and then send me an email to start an interesting conversation.
I’ve been feeling similar lately, but erring on the side of continuing until there’s a specific reason to stop; there’s some underlying fear of losing something in the future that I can’t describe. The data is kind of boring—maybe the whole notion of this analytics exploits a ‘wanting to know where people come from’ and the deep-seated desire for connection. I’m curious in your case, why not ‘just’ make a filter to see the non-search data?
I definitely believe in meaningful connections as the fundamental focus for myself; measuring this might be valuable but not necessary for me, I’d prefer to hear people’s stories of change over seeing numbers. Wishing that your ‘search query’ returns results 🙏🏽☀️.
[Each new tab feels like a choice: how do I want to spend my time?]
What a ’new tab page’ this is! I prefer queries (via keystroke launchers like Quicksilver or ‘Command-K’) over big lists, but this is beautifully personal and makes me drool; stable options can leverage muscle memory and reduce distractions. 👍🏽
Provokes me to wonder about social patterns and ‘formats’ like /now or ‘daily note’, ways of organizing that many people can practice and share so that we can all learn from each other.
Good luck finding books that somberly advise corporations on how to encourage a dangerous reliance on unsupervised individual inspiration.
A company needs to be able to treat its employees as interchangeable and expendable, both individually and collectively. It needs to be able to periodically layoff 17% of its workforce to cut its margin overhead by 1% and temporarily boost its stock price by 5%, without having to endure existential upheaval to its ongoing business processes. It needs to be able to double and redouble recklessly in size for the same dubious market reasons, without those people all piling up in the lobby where their chaos is visible from the street.
The key to these flexibilities, as we have understood at least since Henry Ford, is to formalize the operational roles so that their function in the overall system is symbolic and anonymous. As long as people are just units inserted into well-defined slots, the machinery doesn’t need to care who they are.
The secret truth of business advice is that it’s mostly about how to grimly extract residual value from the luck you already had, and the unearned love you were already unguardedly given, because there’s really no method for making more of it.
[I offer: space away from the rat-race to reflect, breathe more deeply, move deliberately; a good bullshit detector; place to practice, prepare, or role-play tough future conversations; help to find the right amount of stretch in your development goal without overdoing to short circuit progress; encouragement if you need someone telling you to quit your job.]
[Improve your interpersonal dynamics by seeing the relationship as something that can be co-designed in process rather than ‘agreed upon’.]
[My formal training is in engineering and agriculture. I coach because people ask me, not because I’m certified.]
[Smaller organizations might not be able to afford leadership coaching from professionals but can afford peer-to-pear from like-minded companions.]
[Phase 1: shake the tree, ask everyone; prioritize money and invoices; support yourself mentally as it might not ‘appear’ succesful to others or even to you; keep operations simple to start quickly.]
[Phase 2: the real transition starts here; notice what gets the strongest reaction from clients; shape the work closer to your deeper interests and passions; share with others; increase visibility, maybe by writing blogs; find peers or start your own community; don’t partner or build an agency; don’t lock into a niche.]
[Phase 3: raise rates; find more senior and expensive work; zoom in where the market wants what you enjoy delivering; publish consistently; formalize business apparatus and legal entities; don’t hire, outsource, or operationalize; avoid getting complacent now that the money’s good; don’t burn out; stay visible; don’t lock into a niche.]
[Phase 4: say no to the work from previous phases unless money’s tight; find support from other senior indies to charge 10x your phase 1; keep learning and publishing; avoid offering ‘packages’ that trap you in phase 3 work.]
[Phase 5: are you presenting yourself to C-suite stakeholders?; can you take equity in your clients?; what do you want to spend your freedom on? and what is needed to sustain that for 15–20 years?; embed your real self in any book or conference you feel tempted to create; can you say no to phase 4 work?; what does phase 5 work look like?]
messaging that bombards us daily: fear and compliance are the new virtues to signal and will ensure our survival.
I also wonder how they process the contradiction of seeing our society celebrate those who disrupted history with peace and compassion, while persecuting those trying to do the same today.
Imagine luring each ant into a small individual-ant-sized box with honey, then scattering the boxes. This “maximizes the revealed preferences” of each individual ant, but it kills the ant colony as surely as boric acid.
our legal system is fundamentally oriented around individual rights, not group rights. No group has the property right to any individual. (No group, that is, other than the state).
[Make a fact hit harder by converting units into everyday objects: from “One large tree removes 2.2M BTU from the Earth’s atmosphere” to “One large tree is equivalent to 10 air conditioning units”; “0.1 square miles of the Amazon are destroyed every minute” to “50 soccer fields worth of the Amazon are destroyed every minute”; “Carbon savings of 800,000 tonnes per year” to “Carbon savings equal to 450,000 fewer cars on the road per year”.]