So here’s a neat variation on the to-do list I’ve picked up from Mark Foster’s Secrets of Productive People, where he replaces what I have to get done with what I’m going to focus on as the primary entries on your notepad. The 5-2 The process goes like this: Step One: Put five tasks you […]
A few weeks ago, I read Ryder Carroll’s book The Bullet Journal Method. I’ve been using bullet journals for years at this point. Not the pretty art-pieces that you’ll find on the internet, full of scrolling calligraphy and Washi tape, but a series of beat-up journals that are filled with messy handwriting and scribbled notes. […]
There’s been very few stretches of my adult life where I haven’t woken up and reached for a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It’s a core part of my daily routine, as non-negotiable as urination and feeding the cat, and I’m hardly alone in the habit. One of the easiest ways to […]
For a few years now, I’ve lamented the death of blogging as a form with a widespread readership. While there’s still a few formats that have similar broadcast capabilities — a lot of my blogging impulses moved over to my newsletter around 2017 — none of them have the same capacity to provoke conversations and […]
It doesn’t take much to disrupt a habit once it’s established. Our habitual behaviours are often context specific, triggered to run in response to a particular form of stimuli. Go on a two-week break from work and those routines that run like clockwork go out the window — making it easier to adopt new habits […]
The negative effects of stress are magnified by a lack of self-efficacy and control. The more you feel like you’re unable to shift the needle in a stressful situation, the faster you inch towards stress induced burn-out. We often advise new writers to focus on the things you can control. You can’t control whether publishers […]
I’m a big fan of running playbooks to take decision making off the table, especially on low energy days when I don’t have the spoons for self-management. There’s a larger piece in the works on this—part of a series that’s been going through my newsletter of late—but it remains a work-in-progress because there’s a bunch […]
I’m a lot angrier than I used to be since the start of the pandemic, and I suspect I’m not alone. There are nine potential triggers for anger most people experience, and the one that inevitably catches us off-guard is being stopped. We are hard-wired to respond to any subversion of our forward progress by […]
Me, three weeks ago: “Time to replace my phone. The battery isn’t quite enough to get through a busy day without charging, and everything’s running slow.” I resented the expense, and the time required to switch everything over, but it felt like a necessary upgrade. Then I went through and cleaned off apps I didn’t […]
What does a recipe look like? If you looked one up in the old pen-and-paper days, there’s a familiar layout: ingredient lists; procedural instructions; a photograph to make your mouth water. These days, on the internet, the recipe has all those things… and a long, digressive story up top that contextualises how and why the […]
I never intended to become a morning person, but health issues pushed me into it. Evenings were a time of exhaustion, diminishing resolve, and brain fog, and so the first four hours after waking became the time of day when I brought my best self to a project. For the first year, I fought against […]
I’ve used RescueTime to track my computer and phone usage for a few years now, and it continues to be a surprisingly underrated tool in my kit. Today they sent in my year in review for 2020, showing me how I spent my screen time throughout last year, and it was really interesting to note […]
