Keeping busy with everything is really hard.
When I’m out of work, I noticed that my time keeping busy skyrockets. When I’m employed, I have stricter boundaries on the time I spend. I avoid as much as possible having work bleed into the slivers of time I have to myself (and that I give to others). But this cycle has been really hard. I’ve been let go from my last role the day after my last entry. It was extremely painful to have to sit in the meeting - despite having work on the table I’ve been grinding on and being told I had a deadline the week after that, it was all unnecessary. I remind myself that business is impersonal, which is the mantra for the industry. That explains the rush for corporations to move from “Big Data” to AI as the less humane operations can be, the most justification they can have around creating an artificial booming job market (something I wrote shortly about on LinkedIn) while more people (like myself) are struggling to get by.
I’m deciding to work on “week notes”, something I’ve seen folks use in tandem to a newsletter to produce things. Here’s the one for last week in reflection. It’s a way to prevent myself from doing “vomit posts” and keep my critique and thoughts in a place where it’s easier for me to expand. It also restores the closest thing I have to a weekly sprint to write about things and keep it transparent. One of my personal failings throughout my career was not keeping a good public log of the things I’ve done at companies. I’ve found that when I’ve conducted interviews, I’d go through this in advance to talk to things they’ve worked on - it makes the conversation not just more meaningful but personal.
I’m not going to bore you too much with things here. But I do want to note that Wednesday is my birthday and if you want to nudge something, I’d ask that you try one of the following:
Reading what I wrote about labor in Kernel online if you haven’t yet and telling me what you think!
Tossing maybe $5 for a comic book to prevent me from starting another historical or political book!
Sending me photos of your pets, something fun you’ve done the last month or some act of kindess you’ve done for someone else.
Expect a “30 In Review” thing sometime this week, this time quoting parts of my own journal 😬