Excursions avatar

Excursions

I don’t think I can use the Magic Mouse anymore. It is terrible ergonomically. My wrist pain after a long session on my desktop which had stopped happening to me since long. Pathetic!

I was very lucky with today’s Wordle. My attempt to figure out the characters got me the right result. Was it easy? Well it always is subjective with this game.

Wordle 314 2/6

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I got lazy, wasn’t reading much books. Just listening to audiobooks. Agatha Christie to the rescue again – she has pulled me out of the lull so many times before. She is doing it again.

I read a lot many long-form posts that are published with Substack these days. I know that’s anecdotal, but I wonder if Substack is becoming a blogging platform of choice for folks now. Or newsletters are newsletters no more? Well, what is a newsletter?

I like when a newsletter is more than just a list of links. Or a bowl of jumbled, unrelated recommendations. Not that I don’t enjoy them — I appreciate the effort that goes in curating these best-of reads. I have found them useful many a time. But deep down, I love reading letters. It reminds me of the days when I used to post handwritten physical mails to my family and close friends. Those words had an innate charm and closeness. I enjoy a newsletter that’s a letter first.

That tangential thought aside, I believe Substack is a publishing platform for newsletters first. But given the way it is set up, it is also a publishing platform for the long-form posts. If you don’t subscribe to a publication, most probably you are going to read it as a blog post. That’s what seems to be happening to me.

I wrote a long post yesterday which, as I read again now, am glad that I did not publish. I had made so many foolish assumptions, ideas half-baked. Thoughts not really thought through. I don’t want my long posts to be any of that.

Holding back on completed posts for a day or two, even after I have taken time to write it, has helped me.

Did you know you can import data directly from a webpage with MS Excel, as table? I didn’t. Just go to Data -> Get Data From Web -> Enter URL with table and boom! I used to copy the table and paste it in when I needed to. Just like they did in.. uhmm.. stone-age, I guess? đŸ€Ż

Over the years, I have had many wrong perceptions and I have realised that the assumption that how I experience something is precisely how everyone all over the world experiences it is the root for many. Now I pause, think, and only then make up my mind.

Twitter’s most committed users often love the service and hate it with equal passion, two feelings that can coexist without much cognitive dissonance. The platform is awful—but its delivery of instantaneous feedback to every passing thought is also addictive. It’s exploitative—but its ability to amplify any message is unavoidably powerful.

Source: Why Would Elon Musk Want to Buy Twitter? →

A Healthy Challenge

With many avenues of tracking and improving my well-being already around me, I have decided to make the best use of them. I know I am not good at maintaining a healthy routine for any meaningful duration. Yet, I want to give myself another chance to succeed at forming one by constant nudges and tickles.

A reference to Whole Life Challenge (h/t Halsted Bernard) with its pointed question “What is healthy to you?” front and centre came in handy. The tagline, “don’t try to fit health and wellness into your life. Fit your life into the context of health and wellness” resonated with me. I always had the tools that allow me to track my progress towards a healthy lifestyle; with the recommendations from this challenge, I know what I need to track. I am not undertaking any challenge, but I am going to follow along.

So, I am tracking the seven habits – nutrition, hydrate, exercise, mobilise, sleep, well-being and reflect. With health apps from Samsung and Google, I make note of everything I eat, being cognisant of my diet. I don’t want to cut down on anything yet, but just understand what goes in. Keeping myself hydrated is not a problem I face, I drink enough water regularly.

Though I already do the running and stretching pretty regularly, I am now consciously walking while carrying out the daily chores instead of riding my motor scooter. Though I can’t sleep with a watch on, I now manually enter my hours of sleep. Sure, I miss out on the detailed reports of my sleep pattern, but this is better than nothing. With the bedtime mode scheduled on my smartphone, the screen goes greyscale, reminding me to rid myself of the clingy device. It helps!

Building a habit for well-being has been difficult for me. Meditation, the only well-being activity that I know of, never stuck. I can meditate, but I don’t do this with the right spirit. A constant thought of “am I doing this right” keeps pestering me throughout, and I know I’m not doing it right. Well, who knew there are other well-being practises too – picking up a book, reaching out to a friend or organising a disheveled space. Ah, now that I can do. And do well.

All said, these are early days. I am just a week into tracking these habits and I have already missed out on a couple each day. (I am using a wonderfully simple app, Loop Habit Tracker, to track these). But I am allowing myself the leniency.

This post was sent as an introduction for this week’s issue of my weekly newsletter. I have realized the updates I begin my newsletter with every week get lost once it is out. So I intend to publish these as individual posts also.