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Hello friend,

At the start of July, I decided to curate my daily content consumption with a personal algorithm. Today I’m sharing findings from my experiment, first with an overview for everyone and then a deeper dive for paid subscribers. If you’d like to read quarterly behind-the-scenes letters like today’s email and gain access to twice-a-month co-working sessions with me, you can do that by upgrading below.

I love being married to Kris and living with our two big cats and one tiny dog. I love going on walks and pontificating about art and queer history and memes and watching The X-Files together. I also love alone time, and while I wake up every day grateful to live with my best friend, I sometimes pine for living alone because I did more solo creative and restorative activities when it was just me and the cats in our 1-bedroom apartment.

Something magical happened this month with my personal algorithm: I engaged with more reading, listening, and creative activities on my own and still got to enjoy my time with Kris doing our sweet routines together. This balance is something I’ve been curious about for years, so how did it shift in just one month?

I stopped mindlessly (and stressfully) scrolling on my phone.

I know that sounds too easy, but for the sake of my experiment this month, it was actually quite simple for me to set up two modes on my phone using my Brick (a sensor that blocks certain apps/sites). My daytime mode runs from 7am-6pm and my evening mode runs from 6pm-7am. Both of them block Instagram, news sites, and online shopping. The evening mode also blocks work apps.

I prioritized my genuine desires.

I permitted myself to prioritize the solo activities that genuinely excited me and to de-prioritize the things that didn’t. When I leaned into my actual desires, the activities that kept me glued to screens or in my home office longer than I wanted organically fell away. This gave me more time to dedicate to my personal algorithm. While I didn’t complete everything on my list for this month, the things I was able to complete felt life-affirming in a way that only some good ol’ self-exploration can.

I read 6 books in July! Yes, 6!

I listened to a full album in one go!

I took Friday on slow meditation walks and she got to sniff the ground to her tiny heart’s desire!

Let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of what these shifts actually looked like.