I was talking to a friend the other day about how one solution to the feeling of "there's not enough time for everything" is to just want to do less. It's a little facetious, but if you care less about doing certain things, there's more than enough time in the day. This is most relevant as I prepare for having a second kid and expect the limited "free" time I have to shrink even more. It can sometimes be a challenge to find time for the things I enjoy doing (aside from time with Serena & Liz), especially at the end of the day when I just want to lay on the couch and watch YouTube. But I realized something else, beyond the advice of just "want to do less" which is still accurate.

I think for a lot of people, especially myself, there can be a divide between what you spend most of your time on (work) and what you do outside of that. And as my time slowly dwindles and somehow the number of things I want to do gets longer, there comes a time where I just can't do everything. But. One way to free up a lot of time is to make what you spend most of your time on (work) what you want to do outside of work. That gives you up to 8 hours of additional time in the day.

This isn't new and it isn't novel. But it's something I've forgotten but am thinking about more. I find my desire to build things or work on things can stem from a lack of creative fulfilment in what I'm doing for work. Otherwise I'd be doing it already! Another small example that helped was getting a running stroller. I wanted to spend time with Liz and Serena, but also exercising more. Once we had a running stroller we could do all of those things at once, instead of separating exercise from spending time together.

Anyway, just a random thing that's been on my mind as I countdown to our growing family (<4 weeks!)

What I'm working on

Speaking of how to spend my time, I've been working on a few different things lately. The first is a writing project that I've been trying to finish for a few months now. It's an attempt at an interactive essay, inspired by Bartosz C's articles or Dan Hollick. It's about what makes a knife sharp, attempting to explain it from the molecular level. There are two things that make this a challenge for me. First, I had no idea of the answer so I had to do a lot of learning. Second, I want to have a bunch of interactive diagrams/simulations which are difficult to design and build, my forte. Pair that with a high inner bar and this thing might never get done. It's close...

The other thing is a personal app called Aardvark. It's an app I built for tracking App Store metrics for my other projects. It was tedious to check the data using Apple's app and wasn't organized in a way that matched how I wanted to see it.

So I (with most of the heavy lifting done by Claude Code) built an app. It's been mostly done since the start of January and I've been using it daily. There are some small things left to tweak around data consistency (small, but basically the only important thing the app is supposed to do) and then decide if I should release it.

Just for fun I also put up a new page on my website called my Work Log. It's a bit like a work diary of what I'm building. You'll see there are other things I've been building, but I'll cover that next time.

What I'm reading

Okay this newsletter is longer but that's because I've kind of fallen into a format I will attempt to follow: what I'm thinking about, what I'm working on, and what I'm reading. Onto the final part. Here are some articles I've enjoyed and shared with friends.

1. Skills are cheap now. What's your superpower? - Understanding where you fit into an AI-powered world can be overwhelming. Hilary, former Head of Product at Whoop, writes about how to find out what your superpower is and has a Custom GPT too. It's eery how right it feels. This must be what astrology is like.

2. Claude code psychosis- When Claude Code makes everything feel possible, what do you actually do with it?

3. Text is king - This article is about why reading & writing will (hopefully) forever stay as the best medium. I'm biased but I choose to believe it. And perhaps the decline of reading is being overblown.

4. Going founder mode on cancer - Sometimes you need to see what someone taking something to 100 looks like to recalibrate your own scale of 0-100. That's what this is about. But also an exciting glimpse into what the future of personalized medicine could be in 10 years.

By the next newsletter I'll likely be +1 party member. Hope you're well.

Steven