While closing a task in most of the task management systems, including to-do lists, you can set it to any of the available states. So, basically, you could say it is completed or fixed etc. There is one state in there that always tickles my funny bone, “won’t do”. I mean, that’s an official way of giving the middle finger, isn’t it? Learn to mark issues with that state and you have found the best way to say no.
Is a third booster shot proven to be helpful for all? Nope. So I don’t understand the rush to administer it to all the populace just because you can. You know what would be better use of those shots? Making sure each person in the world is fully vaccinated.
I’m cleaning the list of the RSS feeds I am subscribed to. There are a few subscriptions that I have no interest in today. They simply get marked as read every few weeks. Plus the list is missing a few voices I follow that regularly write long form posts. Time to curate again.
The tension is simple: If a platform is carefully vetted and well-curated, it meets expectations and creates trust. If it’s too locked down and calcifies, it slows progress and fades away.
Seth Godin talking about how open platforms are always in risk of becoming spammy and losing the trust of the users. I entirely agree — it’s a path that most platforms, open and closed, follow.
They enjoy the carefree attention from the excited early adopters who associate with the core values of the platform creators. But as the platform grows, it attracts users which would neither share the excitement nor the patience of the early adopters. They get noisy — they want to use the platform like their old one they are comfortable with. They need features that they are used to, not what the platform provides.
So, eventually, the tension that Seth refers to above gains prominence.
It’s crazy how one’s mind works. Here are two posts separated by 4 years. I recently published one a couple of weeks back. I had published another in 2017. Both the posts talk about a similar observation, about the constant fight between the coder and a writer in me. It reads in such a similar manner. The choice of words, the structure, the flow. It should be pretty apparent to anyone who reads it that both the posts come from the mind. From the same author.
Surprisingly, when I wrote the recent post, I had no clue that I had written about the same topic earlier some time. In a way, then, the adage that “there’s no original work being written, but just rewrites” is not that far off.
Ulysses looks to be a really great app for writing all types of posts. Sure, it does not work cross platform - something I dearly wish it did. But I have iA Writer for that. My big problem at this point is I have no clue what editors I am paying for currently, for which platforms and in what form - subscriptions from Google Play Store, App Store or I have them out right purchased. I need to sort this mess up pretty soon. Sigh!
Now that I think about it, the overall messaging space is a mess and personally it’s a frustrating issue for me. We are so close, yet so far. Here’s what I want.
- A service for messaging folks, share text and images
- A service for voice/video calls
- A service that does both 1 and 2 with apps across platforms - mainly iOS, Android and Web
This will allow me to not worry about device on which I am using it.
iMessage and FaceTime combination is brilliant, but Apple continues to see them as differentiators for its ecosystem. I don’t blame them — but it hurts me. I interact with only a handful of people that own an Apple device.
Google, well, decides to live in a fantasy world where there can exist no perfect messaging app. They get close to finding that right solution and throw it all away.
I had hopes from Microsoft. But for some reason they seem not to be interested in consumer space. Skype is ugly, its too bloated and the experience is terrible. It is not easy for families to join from.
WhatsApp, amidst all the mess, remains the only solution that does the required to any extend. It’s a terrible experience, but at least it works.
Google’s inability to decide the story of its messaging apps is laughable. Sure, there’s some dev in there who looks at the old screenshot of Google Talk and says, “we should have never stopped working on this.”
That app has a special place in my mind. Just like Google Reader.
China puts limits on playing video games →
Children and teenagers are now banned from online gaming on school days, and limited to one hour a day on weekend and holiday evenings under government rules
Is that really a government? That sounds utter crazy!?
You can have a broad sense of direction without a specific goal or a precise vision of the future. I think of it like jazz, like improvisation. It’s all about meandering with purpose.
– A quote captured by Oliver Burkeman in The Antidote
Ah, the new iMac is in the house and am setting it up as a, well, new iMac. No restore from backup. Or time machine. What’s that I have to do? What’s that I should do? What’s that I can do? 👨🏽💻☺️
I came across this suggestion from Oliver Burkeman a few time in the last couple of weeks.
What if you worked on the basis that you began each day at zero balance, so that everything you accomplished – every task you got done, every tiny thing you did to address the world’s troubles, or the needs of your household – put you ever further into the black?
Basically, the idea is to keep a done list rather than a to-do list. I am absolutely certain that it benefits one’s morale. I know that because I have been maintaining a form of done list – just that my method is different. For me, the two lists are complementary. I use a to-do list as a way to free my mind of the burden to remember things I need to do.
I do not set a target, an end date, for any of the tasks on the to-do list. So, they are not burdensome to me as my day begins. I look at the list, prioritize and just plan it through the day, if possible. A bullet journal helps me here - and also acts as a done-list. More the crosses on a page, more is the satisfaction.
There a few people who are natural “gifters”, I am not one of them. Why is it so hard to choose gifts? The gift cards have saved me to an extent when I need to gift acquaintances. But I get stressed every time I need to gift a loved one. Not that I don’t care – rather, my problem is that I care too much.
I finished reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath. I wanted to love this book - the premise is brilliant. But it reads like a textbook, and that’s no way to make a message stick with your readers. For that matter, that doesn’t even look to be the author’s intention.
To start with, the book lacks a clear, central idea that every chapter circles back to - it’s all over the place. It digs into the history to find and describe every event, research or anecdote where a difficult message was conveyed effectively. Once it does that, the author summaries his understanding of why that worked.
First, the author nonchalantly tells you what the learning is – “Which message do you think works best? Of course, second”. I’m sorry, but let the reader come to that conclusion. Don’t beat him on the head till he gives up and agrees in frustration.
Second, each time the reasons that the message was effectively conveyed in each story are too varied – it references almost every phycological/managerial techniques - Maslow’s hierarchy and five whys and on & on.
Finally, suggestions like be simple/concrete, don’t bury the lead, capture attention etc are easier said that done. They are a set of skill that all understand they should have, but not every person has in equal doses. Please, your suggestion cannot be “become a master public speaker or leader or designer”.
Sigh, it was frustrating to read through this book. Ironically, it fails to follow the message it wishes to convey - talk about one message, be simple and concise. It would have stuck with me then. 📚
I am reading two nonfictions on psychology, The Antidote and Made to Stick – both so different in messaging and their tone. I love the former and am just listening through the later, unaffected. One makes me pause and ponder. Another’s just all over the place – no clear message that sticks.
I haven’t started watching the second season of Ted Lasso yet. Rather, I am rewatching the first season, an episode every day – I love how I feel every time I watch this series.
Yep, that’s how even I experience the web today. And I have already complained about that – a terrible state we browse in.
“You are more useless than a footer on an infinite scrolling website” :p
I published another issue of Slanting Nib today. I enjoy the workflow that I have struck with for these past few emails. It’s not a burden to draft them over the two weeks and publish with Ghost. Anyway, you can read the issue online. Please subscribe and share.
On Making Space for More
Hello Friend,
Over the last weekend, my wife and I decided to clean all the closets and drawers. Pretty soon, we extended the sphere to cover every nook and corner of our house. The idea was to go through each section of our home, find all the junk lying around unused, and get rid of it if it does not justify the space it occupies. In a way, I was working under the guidance of my wife - the most organized person in my eye. She is very particular about organizing stuff, and here is the process we had followed.
We selected a closet, took down all the contents, and then worked on them. We segregated them on multiple parameters – when was this last used, is that usage still applicable, is this here just for emotional value and so on. Then, we tagged and ordered them. Finally, we grouped them into containers whose sizes varied from small boxes to huge travel sacks.
As the sun was on its descent in the sky, we worked on an under-bed drawer. It was a massive unit - enough for a person to sleep comfortably, albeit breathlessly - but it had no compartments. So, naturally, the stuff was just spewed all around, making the whole drawer appear super untidy. Not that any of the items in there were soiled. Many were even untouched, unused. What the drawer was lacking was an arrangement of some kind. So, we got down to work. We grouped and stored the stuff into the large storage bag-cum-organizers that we had recently ordered just for this purpose. The difference that simple activity caused was immense. The drawer still contained the same things, but it didn't resemble the mess earlier.
As the night dawned, we breathed a satisfying sigh, proud of what we had achieved. The cabinets looked clean, and we made space in the whole home. I felt even the home must have breathed a huge sigh of relief - after all, we had relieved it of some burden.
The slight effort that we had put in to evaluate, dump, segregate and reorganize stuff in our home had made our abode look cleaner, spacious.
And you know what I realized? I do apply the same process we used to organize our home to my mind too. A slight effort I put in occasionally to evaluate, dump, segregate and reorganize my thoughts leads to a calmer and receptive mind. I dump the thoughts onto the pages of my diary, not trying to organize them in the process. I meditate as I evaluate the thoughts hovering around. Sure, sorting and reorganizing thoughts is not as easy as moving stuff to the storage bags. But to me, a form of bullet journaling helps organize the ideas.
This process of journaling and meditation is an act of housecleaning for my mind. It declutters it, makes it a lot less messy when I look inwards. At the same time, it frees it up to welcome more ideas. Just as it did recently to our home.
Anyway, here is the selection of three brilliant essays on life for this week.
"We Are All Confident Idiots" by David Dunning →
Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all. And over the years, I’ve become convinced of one key, overarching fact about the ignorant mind. One should not think of it as uninformed. Rather, one should think of it as misinformed.
An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.
"My Failed Attempts to Hoard Anything at All" by David Sedaris →
It helps to look at which shelves are bare. That teaches you, I suppose, what you should be hoarding. Most of the people I see in lines these days aren’t real cooks. I noticed at my neighborhood stores that all the canned spaghetti sauces were gone, the horrible ones that taste like ketchup, as well as the frozen pizzas and burritos—stuff we never eat. Toilet paper is gone, too, of course, as are paper towels.
"English Is Not Normal" by John McWhorter →
To be fair, mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon worldwide, but English’s hybridity is high on the scale compared with most European languages. The previous sentence, for example, is a riot of words from Old English, Old Norse, French and Latin. Greek is another element: in an alternate universe, we would call photographs ‘lightwriting’. According to a fashion that reached its zenith in the 19th century, scientific things had to be given Greek names. Hence our undecipherable words for chemicals: why can’t we call monosodium glutamate ‘one-salt gluten acid’? It’s too late to ask. But this muttly vocabulary is one of the things that puts such a distance between English and its nearest linguistic neighbours.
Postscript
I have recently started writing more long-form essays by choice, which I publish along with the issues of this newsletter. You can receive even these essays via email if you are interested. Just let me know. Or you could, of course, subscribe to the good old RSS feed.
I have published the below essays since I delivered the last issue of the newsletter.
Have any recommendations or feedback for me? I would love to hear from you. Just hit reply, or you can even email me.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
-Amit
This trend of closing off the doors to the content on the internet is getting extremely frustrating now. You can’t read anything from even a slightly well-known publication before they ask you to create an account or subscribe. Absolute bullshit!
We respected the lone tree, standing tall. Alone.
“As some richer countries hoard vaccines, they make a mockery of vaccine equity.”
Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the Africa director at the World Health Organization, said in an online news conference.
We’re providing more to the rest of the world than all the rest of the world combined”
Mr. Biden said in another press conference.
Both might be be true - but one reeks of elitism, an indifference to the world’s suffering.
That’s one angry, cuddly Autobot! 🤖
