why i’ll start a personal email newsletter

i listened to the samuel vasquez episode of obsessed with design recently and i was really inspired by his reasoning for starting a personal email newsletter. 

tbh, i was pretty critical of the practice up until i heard him explain why he started his. i thought it was pretty self-centered, self-aggrandizing, and mostly a form of personal boosterism.

but his logic and reasoning has totally changed my mind. in fact, he’s changed my mind so much that i’m planning to start one for myself in 2017. some of these reasons are his that i liked and some i came up with but here they are either way:

• let’s people know what i’m up to: more people ask me what i’m up to than i can reasonably respond to (not tryna be an asshole here, that’s just literally true. i wouldn’t have time to do any actual work if i kept up with everyone i know). i think a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter email can keep people in the loop about what i’m up to if they really want to know. the archive could also be a helpful tool as another form of personal public memory/reflection.
  
• allows people to send things resources my way. being up to date about what i’m doing i think could help people know what’s relevant to send along if they want: articles, rpfs, proposals, and things like job postings.
  
• allows people to make connections based on things they’re doing or seeing. whenever i update my job status on facebook, i get at least 2-3 people wanting to talk about work stuff. the newsletter could help people connect with me who are doing relevant work and want to either partner or think together or whatever.
  
• platform for sharing my writing. as i write more and hear how people appreciate it in different ways, i’m learning that a distribution platform could be a helpful thing. maybe the email could have a list of all the posts i wrote that week or something.

anyways, that’s what i’ve got right now as reasons for starting a personal email newsletter for 2017. they may evolve or change, but let’s see how it goes!

writing: 13:56
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 11:39

why getting the easy stuff "out of the way" doesn't work

since i’ve started my productivity coaching practice, i’ve noticed a common pattern. often when people are overwhelmed with the amount of work or tasks they have to do, they prioritize work poorly (that is, if they take the time to explicitly prioritize at all). 

anyways, doing the easy stuff first tends to start out intentional and end up with unintentional (but predictable) outcomes. it typically goes down like this:

1. make a list of all the things to do (intentional)
2. start by doing the “easy” or “quick” things first to “get them out of the way” (intentional)
3. spend too much time doing those things (unintentional)
4. have too little time to do the important things (unintentional)
5. submit shoddy work (unintentional)
6. be unhappy/unsatisfied (unintentional)

these unintended outcomes are the reason that starting with the easy stuff first is almost always a bad idea. there are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, that approach doesn’t work.

for some people, that pattern (i think) actually becomes a work avoidance mechanism. because they never leave themselves enough time to do the important work, whenever they produce something that isn’t up to even their own standards they have a somewhat legitimate fallback. “i just didn’t have enough time.”

sometimes it really isn’t a person’s fault that they ran out of time… but if it’s a common occurrence…

writing: 12:35
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 1:10

is retirement a bad idea?

i’m beginning to wonder if retirement is and was always a bad idea. reasons (bullet style because i haven’t organized the thoughts yet:

• doing meaningful work is one of the few things in life that consistently bring happiness
• given the above point, the narrative that people should only work up until a certain point (age? level of mental or physical ability?) and then they should be excused from the system is problematic. it frames work as something that is bad and needs to be escaped or given relief from. that made sense in a factory world where working literally shortened your life span… but the work world we’re moving towards is no longer like that (or at least it doesn’t have to be).
• most people that i know who are nearing retirement are struggling with it a lot. financially, i know many folks who can’t afford to retire. the cost of living is so high and their retirement payments are so low (often because of the jobs they chose in order to do meaningful and not soul-destroying work) that they won’t even even be close to living their current lifestyle. socially i know people who don’t want to be forgotten, by society or their families. working gives them a sense of purpose and community.
  
• it seems silly that we have a massive childcare industry (one that is unaffordable for many people) and all these senior citizens holed away in retirement communities. why not combine those two excess capacities (peers inc style)?
• even when people do retire, many folks i know are still doing meaningful work. my step-dad retired a while ago, but now he uses his time to enjoy his land, fish, and is also trying to grow 90% of his food. if growing almost all of your food isn’t work…
• there is so much knowledge and wisdom in folks who have lived a long time. sure, some of it may not be relevant anymore, but some of those hard-earned lessons are timeless. when we push older intelligence out of the workplace, we doom our organizations to repeat avoidable (already experienced) problems.

i wonder if reversing the narrative of retirement would create an opportunity to intervene in several socioeconomic problems at once… i’d be curious to talk to people who retired from shitty jobs and see what they’re up to now.

writing: 14:10
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 3:40

the problems of layered systems that are out of pace

there’s a chapter in resilience (specifically page 244) that discusses what happens when systems that move at different paces intersect. i’m not totally sure what the implications are for me, my work, and the people around me, but it’s an interesting point to cover.

different types of systems at different scales operate at different paces. the book’s example: the pace of market transactions move much faster than than the time needed to recover nutrients in the soil on a particular plot of land. things can get really messy when systems are layered in ways that cause them to be out of sync. when the demands of a global food system require production at a pace that’s too high, the likelihood of the land being pushed past the point of recovering goes way up.

the situation can gets even messier when there are power imbalances between the different systems. expanding on the above point, global market systems move with the power and force of global corporations, while people who are in tune with the land and its needs tend to be individuals, small place-based communities, and indigenous people.

when people operating at these different levels are unable (or unwilling) to understand each other and everything in between, well… it’s problematic to say the least. and then, when things like capitalist market economies expand and become the dominant forces in places that had sustainable, functioning communities and make it impossible for them to turn back… fuck.

relevant resource:

• ancient futures (ht maureen white)
  
• the economics of happiness - tedx talk by helena norberg-hodge

writing: 12:14
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 6:26

on being too busy to sleep and exercise

this is an extension of the post i was writing yesterday about being too busy to sleep and exercise.

something i’ve learned from being a part of the infinite growth program is that we all have strengths and weaknesses but some of those are accentuated or hindered by systemic forces in our society. for example, you may naturally be a hard worker but when society rewards men for overworking whereas it punishes women for that, the impacts of society on your well-being affect how you build a healthy personal system. i bring this up because of the two points i wanted to expand on from yesterday’s post.

first, i think that overwork of highly-educated, highly-skilled people is a significant part of why our society isn’t moving forward as quickly as it could. part of that is because overwork undermines our society’s capacity to love well. the other part is that individuals not having limits on how much work they’ll do means that corporations get to hire fewer people. if paying one person 100k had the same societal implications as paying two people 50k, that would be fine. but i would argue that full employment has better societal outcomes than paying a few people tons of money and requiring everyone else to work for low wages or be rely on public resources & services. there are many reasons for that, but i think at the very least, it’s because i think we need a society where everyone and everyone’s work is valued. when some people’s work is highly valued (think computer programmers and ceos) while other people’s work (childcare, cooking, art) is under-valued or not valued at all, this is problematic.

second, i think the current work structure in our society (i have friends working in silicon valley who think that their 120k salary is small and other friends who are still driving for raises and bonuses on top of their ~450k/year salary) makes it possible for some people to find all their meaning in their work. this makes it easier to create & maintain class divisions.

i think it takes empathy and relate-ability for people to love each other. and it is really difficult for someone who makes 120k to understand the life of someone who makes less than 40k. whether it’s a language barrier or a physical segregation based on housing or a cultural (the daily life of someone who owns multiple homes is very different from someone who has rented for their entire life, for example) barrier, it’s just really hard.

so what do i think that means? i think the means we need to find more ways to get people whose skills are highly valued right now to defect from capitalism and consumerism (my friend caroline’s workshops on ‘enough’ might be one good way to start very soon…). i think fixing our socioeconomic system will require pressure on many sides and one of those sides is getting wealthy people to stop believing that wealth is more valuable than almost everything else.

hm!

note: today i’m starting to add writing time and research, formatting, & editing time to the footnotes on my posts. it’s mostly for me, but i think it might be interesting for other people, too.

writing: 19:52
spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 4:40