269 - QQ 📋✅
QQ'ing about the queues that are queueing up in my life
Hey there, !
When I was chatting to a friend of mine, I realised that I kinda loved lists? I thought I was less type A than that, but I have so many lists for things that I even have a list of lists about all the things I have still yet to do:
- TV shows
- Movies
- Books
- Topics to write about
- Countries to travel to
- Cuisines / dishes to eat
- Specific restaurants for types of food (e.g. fried chicken places)
- People to see / catch up with
- Things to 3D print
- National parks to go to
- How many people in my life I need to go and tell to watch Lord of The Rings
I think of these lists as composed of discrete 'units' of time. A movie is like 2 hours (LOTR extended edition is like 11-12 hours); a tv show has 40 min episodes, but maybe spread out across like 10 - 20 episodes; books take me a while to read but maybe a week a piece?; writing is a day a week at least; countries take out time to go explore...I think you get the drift.
And the longer the lists get, the more time it's going to take to get through...which then makes me start to procrastinate watching them. The lists get overwhelming! It reminds me of an Emmy's opening bit that Andy Samberg did - there's SO MANY SHOWS TO WATCH - how can any one person watch 'em all!!
These are all, really, just queues - each of the lists is a long queue of things that are all bidding for my time, and I gotta try to prioritise them and work out what I want to do with the time I have in my life.
The effort to sort the queues, manage the queues, push certain things up or down based on what the last person I talked to about it said about it, or maybe it's awards season so that gets bumped up (I been flyin' through the Oscar movies for example) is important to do, but I know I'm always going to be missing out on stuff.
(Interestingly, I feel like the act of managing the queues - i.e. asking people for recommendations, doing research on what to watch / do, and reorganising those lists - is something that became its own bidding of time. It feels like progress when managing the queues, but you're just pushing food around your plate - at some point, you gotta dig in)
I used to get overwhelmed with all these queues, but I think over time I've gotten better at getting out of my own analysis paralysis through a few guiding principles:
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You aren't gonna get through it all so anything you do is already a good step forward - the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, right?
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At the same time, you have a finite number of each of these you can do for your whole life, so prioritising them is kinda important - but what's the best way to prioritise? I think the easiest way is to take advantage of motivation, that wily and ethereal feeling, and push up the things that you're loving in the moment. Feeling like watching The Office for the 50th time? Sure! Want to try and get through the pile of books next to your TV? Let's go. Don't think too much about it - analysis is good, 'til paralysis stops progress.
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On the other other hand, since your time is important and you're trying to use it best, you'll try to optimise what you think will be a better or worse use of time. I think that, regardless of good or bad, the actual doing of it will be an experience in itself! That is probably worth it, I think, even if it's bad, because at the very least you can tell people it was bad and that's a pretty fun experience in itself. For example, I watched Hundreds of Beavers over the weekend, which was kinda weird, but kinda fun (helped by the fact that I was watching it with friends!) - and now I get to tell you about it!
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Trying things is good for the newsletter, so I try to orient for new things. Otherwise I'll run out of Recommendations to tell you about!
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No-one's going to have the exact same set of experiences as you - as much as I haven't watched Breaking Bad, there a bunch of people I know who haven't watched Lord of the Rings (like...this is pretty much the whole reason I wrote this piece. Very seriously, if you haven't watched this trilogy PLEASE watch it I beg you. I have been horrified recently at the number of people around me who have never watched all three movies!!!!). So if you miss out on things, well, that's life. (except for Lord of the Rings...please watch it. Please.)
There's a sadness to seeing these lists get longer and longer as I grow older, and realise that there's only limited time to do these things. I guess it's just a good reminder to take action - do as much as you can in the time that you have, and enjoy the ride while it lasts.
Chat soon :)
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📋Today's Question
Okay same question as last week - have a go and let me know your thoughts! :D
✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Hundreds of Beavers - 4 stars - it's an independent slapstick comedy film that is about a trapper in Norrth America (?) trying to trap and kill hundreds of beavers (who are just extras dressed up in beaver costumes). Think of it as like...a live-action Looney Tunes, with some great film references, and some absolutely hilarious sequences. Oh also, don't watch it sober like we did. If I ever watch it again it'll be accompanied by a drinking game :D Still, highly recommended!!!
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The Substance - 3.5 stars - I attach my Letterboxd review verbatim:
I can appreciate what this movie was doing and it executed it really well
but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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They See Your Photos - a really interesting Google Vision Cloud implementation that takes your photos and makes astrological-type predictions about you...JUST from your picture. Eerily accurate with what it spat out at me...I know it's training the algorithm AI even more, but it's just fascinating to see this stuff.
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Running Pong in 240 Browser Tabs - people do the weirdest things. I love them for it.
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A Year of Telepathy - I hesitate to promote Elon content, but Neuralink has posted a reflection on their first test subjects who have been using Neuralink for a year. It's kinda beautiful and has obviously helped these people so so much. As much as Elon personally is detestable, pushing forward with this technology is really cool to see, and is directly impacting and helping people participate in the world again.
Note: I'm still working on the formatting and design of the newsletter and I know it's a bit squeezy but I'm trying to change things up to make it look better! Please bear with me!!