This is the 60th monthly article on this blog — thus wrapping up the fifth year of doing this. Five years! It’s wild to think of how much has changed in that time. If it’s not obvious from these articles, I’m having a lot of fun over here.
Speaking of changes: this month I adopted a few more habits:
- I’ve adopted the Demi Adejuyigbe rating system — refraining from spreading (unqualified) negativity with how I log the media I interact with
- I’ve sworn off mindlessly scrolling short-form video content. I’ll still click into YouTube Shorts if they look interesting and show up in my feed, but I won’t “swipe up” — and I continue to refrain from using TikTok.
I’ve also stumbled upon a new way of tracking the work I want to get done. The short version is: in addition to doing “Getting Things Done”-style lists, I keep one concrete “do now” list, and one “vague list,” which represents more nebulous tasks that I still need to get done that need more consideration before the next step is more clear. This has been extremely helpful for me — I really feel like I’m flying through complicated work. If you’re interested in hearing more, I wrote a blog post about how it works.
Speaking of blogs: I’ve folded “Joe’s Tech Leadership Blog” into this one, migrating the content over here. Since I’ve moved back over to posting solely on this one — including on leadership topics! — I figured it was now time to let my sense of frugality take over and stop paying monthly for a hosted instance of Ghost.
Finally: I started a Discord server for folks doing cool stuff in Richmond, Virginia. (👋🏻 Hi, RAD!) It’s still brand new, but I’m having a fun time chatting with these folks; I’m getting the exact type of constant learning and inspiration that I had felt like I was lacking.
articles
This month, I wrote 6 blog posts:
- You don’t need a system. Just do the thing.
- A full page day
- The Demi Adejuyigbe rating system
- Feedback loops
- on memory
- Vague list, action list
music
Here’s the playlist of fresh jams for the month:
films
This month, I watched 2 films:
- Into the Well: The Making of Animal Well
- Assassin’s Creed
Have I mentioned that I love Letterboxd? You can follow me there.
books
This month, I finished 4 books:
- Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
- James by Percival Everett
- The Hardware Hacker by Andrew “bunnie” Huang
- The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
failbetter
This month, failbetter published:
stats
This month:
- I typed 831,966 keys and clicked 104,513 times.
- I listened to 1,276 songs.
