New Year, Same Nervous System?
Happy 2024.
I hope that this first week has you feeling engaged with a new year, and finding footing in new consistencies, plans, and looking out at all the opportunities that exist and will continue too unfold.
I tend to extend my planning and reflection into the first few weeks of January. I started this, when I realized in Covid, that my mind needed more time to exhale than my body did. I fight to not succumb to the inertia that can arise as a year ends and another one begins. I also just don't like the idea that the clock moving has to move me.
System Scaries
Systems do things that intentions point towards; tracking what would otherwise be ignored. For a lot of my professional career, I built systems from outcomes, not from process. That was functional to a point, and in many respects, you do not know what you do not know. But when you do know, you have a chance to simplify, if you can pause long enough to step back. I am still learning to do both.
As a notorious collector of tools, gadgets, and things on the internet. If I think it looks cool, I index it. I like knowing how to find cool things, and I am often inspired by them. This is good.
What is not good, is that I often do it as a coping mechanism when I am either delaying a decision I need to make, finding insights into a new gadget that I think, will 'help' with the underlying issue. The issue remains the same; not doing the thing, but thinking about the thing, leading to shiny new toy syndrome.
Doing that though, first required an admission of my own disregulation. Most of 2023, I was fighting to get more regulated in both how I worked, and what I used to help me work. It's easy to push it off for symptoms; fatigue, brain fog, general malaise. Plus, the year was hard! All of that being true, I still was not helping myself get clearer or more defined across what I wanted to do, largely because I take pride in knowing what to do and when to do it.
Life can often is an exercise in engaging with uncertainty, not removing it. I learned that in harder ways than were necessary in 2023. But knowing your goals separate from someone else's is a tricky endeavor. Not because you are trying to have someone else's, but because there is an attraction in goal setting that is pernicious.
In 1988, philosopher Rene Girard coined the term memetic desire, describing how many things we want, is often based on whether these things seem as an attractive goal to other people, and not actually what we say we want. You can see this phenomenon in most consumer brands, but especially in luxury goods.
Tools work in much the same way, because so much of what we do, is driven by the idea of what we have, and what we do not have. Knowing what enough is for you and what you actually want, is such a large competitive advantage, that recognizing it takes much longer than what it meant.
The mythology surrounding a new tool or technology, isn't about it's usefulness. No one debates whether an Instant Pots were a hit product (bankruptcy notwithstanding). It is the time it might take to learn how to use it in a way that is effective for you, that is the deep cost of any purchase.
If I don't have time to go through Open AI's prompt engineering, I can just go find the prompts I want to use instead. There is always a market for condensing knowledge to save someone else on time they do not want to spend. The tyranny is in too many options with diminishing time.
This is why good books and classic albums are are always a technological marvels. The book that has influenced you the most, that you would recommend to a dear friend, buy for a younger cousin, they all contain scenes, stories, and architecture you did not have to build yourself, and can reap the benefits of.
Stack Well
For 2024, I am working to play nicely with my nervous system, instead of against it. The irony is that I did not know I was working against myself, until I discovered what felt better when working. One of the key components to that is the kind of stack I choose and build.
I describe a stack as a customized sets of things that you design to help you you do more, or extend your own ability to do something. They should be customizable, modular, and mastered by you. Since time is a precious resource, what you take time to measure is important. If ideas improve my writing about them, then your fluency improves by using them. That's why this year, I'm considering what I use, and how i use it, as much as I think about what I am doing.
Here are a few that have made the 2024 cut:
Tool | Use Case |
|---|---|
A place where my wandering mind can make a home and organize my own compulsions. | |
Keeping track of people in my network coherently and joyfully. | |
Video calls suck way less. | |
It feels like how Tumblr used to be. No pressure, all leisure. | |
How I remember the things I read, highlight and annotate. | |
Where I go to read things. | |
The answer too "how do I find that tab from 15 days ago I never meant to delete." | |
Makes scheduling time much easier, if you have to do something asynchronously. | |
Apple Notes | Old faithful here, and great for jotting down ideas that work in the here and now or you can come back too. |
Unlike a reasonable spades player, it is acceptable and necessary to reneg, especially when something in the stack is no longer useful or beneficial. This is an iterative process, and so far I have learned that I have far too many things vying for my attention in terms of what I want to get done. The point is to match where you are, with what you need, not the other way around.
Shelf Reads
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BIG JOY:
Robin S performing 'Show Me Love' in Europe with a live symphony and dj. PURE BOP.
Talk soon.