Active Recall!

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“Tiny Experiments” book note: My PACT (10000 steps, 1000 words, 100 reps, 10 pages, and 1 habit)

10,000 steps, 1000 words, 100 reps, 10 pages, and one… something. This is a list of daily things that I’d feel good about if I repeated it for years. Walking, writing weights, and reading. It’s the one that I’m trying to think through and come up with for a pact. An idea from Tiny Experiments that stands for Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable. I might just use the “1” for a 30 day PACT each month to experiment with a new habit and practice breaking it down into something very small. Like I will meditate for one minute for 30 days. I will post one short for 30 days. Or I will share one book note for 30 days trying to figure it out.

“Tiny Experiments” book note: How to stop procrastinating

The section I read today was about procrastination and the issue can be a head problem, a heart problem, or a hand problem. If you think that the task is not important, then that can be a head problem, and what you need to do is look at your strategy and then either reinforce that the task you’re working on is important or pick a different task that goes more toward your overall vision. If it is a task that feels like it’s not exciting, that can be described as a heart thing, and in that case, you want to find ways to make the task more enjoyable to do. You can pair it with something, work with someone else, even just remind yourself of the importance of it towards the overall vision. And then the last one is if you find that the task is just too hard, that’s where it’s a hand problem. You need to find a way to improve, just come back to it and focus more on leveling up in that skill.

Info Diet: 10/6/2024

I heard something somewhere about how facts can be the best cure for writer’s block. If you get stuck on something, back up and start writing facts down.

Similarly, I think reviewing my content diet and sharing some of it each week could be a good way to (1) get past writer’s block and (2) create a base to generate ideas for the upcoming week. It seems like a sustainable thing and something I can time box.

I need to accept that this list won’t be comprehensive. If I don’t share a link to everything I found interesting that week, that’s okay! Alright I better just get to this list.

Books I’m currently reading

  • “I am Pilgrim” by Terry Hayes: Great so far, but also I’m only like 50 pages in of 600-ish. A friend recommended it to me after I told him I started reading “The Terminal List” series. This year I’ve read a lot more fiction than usual—Jack Carr and Don Winslow making up a bunch of it. And my only wish is that I had been reading way more fiction in the past.
  • “The Jaws Log” by Carl Gottlieb: I love these books. Production diaries? I think there are a few different terms. Sometimes they’re director memoirs. Or some memoirs are more about the things the person worked on rather than their personal goings-on. Anyway, the main takeaway so far is that filming a shark and having an animatronic shark were pretty new so that was a huge part of the puzzle when making the movie. And the genius of not showing the shark through most of the movie was driven by constraint of how hard it would have been to show the shark throughout the movie.
  • “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” by Ed Zwick: I started this and skipped and read the chapter on “The Last Samurai” because it’s one of my favorite movies. But I’m back to where I was and will read the entire book. What I learned: if Tom Cruise says yes to your movie, you now have an unlimited budget. Need to do a research trip in Japan? Sure. Need to house and transport 100s of extras for the battle scene in New Zealand? No problem.

Alright that’s it for now

I had a shorter time to write today. I want to time box this to an hour but today I had 20 minutes. And I’ll accept that as god enough for now.

Notes on picking what to work on

The comfort of writing into the void of a blog.

I won’t worry too much about overhtinking things. I’ve been in a rut with making things online. I got a couple Shorts out last week and that felt good but then it didn’t seem quite as sustainable.

I’m writing this at Philz.

While I was packing my bag with way too many books I was starting to think, “Okay what output would make the time worthwhile?”

I was starting to think about, okay, I can write scripts for some Shorts, that would make it worthwhile.

But then if the output is Shorts, I’m probably better off just staying home and filming some Shorts. The bottleneck is usually visuals, either filming or making a slideshow.

So if it’s strictly about the output, I would’ve stayed home.

But I then I remembered, wait, I love being at a coffee shop and writing. My hall of fame for coffee shops where I’ve spent a lot of great time messing around on my laptop:

  • The Bean on 1st Ave & 9th St (NYC): Sadly, it’s closed. I didn’t see it listed ont he website so I clicked around on Street View to figure out where it was and now it’s a corner store. 10 years ago I had aspirations (and a daily affirmation lol) to work in tech. So I’d bring the 15-inch MacBook (Retina baby!) to The Bean and would tinker around in Framer and Sketch. 
  • Whatever that coffee shop was on Avenue A & 4th St (NYC): This was the closest coffee shop but it didn’t have a ton of seating. One summer I decided to actually read (but not actually understand) Infinite Jest and took it here a few times to bang out like 0.5% of the book with each go. 
  • The common area at Chelsea Piers Fitness (NYC): Okay not a coffee shop but I’d spend many mornings here around the time I was starting all things Active Recall. Lots of ideas that only 10% panned out. Love it. Tried to replicate it at an Equinox when we moved to the Upper West Side. Couldn’t. Then we moved to SF.

And I haven’t quite gotten back to doing that in the bay area.

Alright that was a lot about how I like writing at coffee shops. I should find some quotes about doing things for the intrinsic joy of doing those things in the moment.

Oliver Burkeman: The problem with the content diet analogy

When I hit some kind of block, I often return to something like, “Okay let’s just review my content diet.” What have I read, watched, or listened to lately?

What you might not want to do is turn everything you’re read into some kind of meal where you need to scrape everything off the bone. There’s value in the activity of reading itself even if you aren’t processing everything through a system that then ends up in your second brain.

(I do like all the second brain, externalized brain, etc. stuff but my 15,000+ notes in Evernote probably indicate a swing too far far in that direction.)

Here’s what Oliver Burkeman says

Oh, this, you know there’s this whole world, I’m sure you’re aware of the world in general, right? Of people sort of using different note taking apps, obsidian, external brain type thing,

That’s a great thing, and I try to do it myself. But there’s a way of doing that becomes this kind of attempt to kind of like eat all the knowledge that you’re exposed to.

And so another point that I’m making in keeping with the sort of rivers and buckets ideas there…, is that’s not the primary point of reading. I’m all for people taking notes about really interesting things that leap out at them.

But the benefit of reading, say, a really good book is not to sort of squirrel it all away for some later moment of use. Which is the same old problem of postponing everything to the future.

It’s because if it’s a good book, it will change you a little bit in the activity of reading it.

Okay I thought I was going to do a bunch of different quotes about picking what to work on and how important it is to pick the joy of the activity itself. 

(On the other hand… I do buy into the idea that for a specific output we can work on stuff that is so far removed from the actual output itself. Anyway. Accepting two ideas at the same time and all that…)

But coffee shop time has to end and I have to head out. This one highlight will do for now.

Check out Chris Williamson’s full interview with Oliver Burkeman: The Savage Irony of Trying to be Productive

Oliver Burkeman’s book comes out in a couple weeks and I can’t wait to read it and overhighlight it.

Building a tiny creation habit

I was thinking it’d be good to write notes for 3 book highlights daily. I’ve been re-reading (okay, listening to) “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg. 

The essence of Tiny Habits is this: Take a behavior you want, make it tiny, find where it fits naturally in your life, and nurture its growth. If you want to create long-term change, it’s best to start small. 

It was a reminder that it’s probably good enough to start with 1 book highlight daily. And even that is a little bit too big for the framing of a tiny habit. It’s the whole “floss one tooth” thing.

What if it were even smaller than writing notes for one book highlight? I made it smaller by reducing the number of highlights. I can now separate into the two activities.

1. Picking a book highlight

2. Writing a note about the book highlight

So I could just start celebrating by picking a highlight to write about in the first place.

That might still be too big to be “tiny”. First I should just build the habit of going through some book highlights every day. Luckily I have an old system set up for that. I have a few different book highlight digests from Readwise.

Gaming, Creativity, Fitness, and the uncategorized digest.

Unfortunately I’ve tended to ignore these. So it might just be a matter of picking a good prompt for when to read through one of these and picking one highlight to write about then moving that to WordPress.

More to think about here. Anyway here’s a second highlight from the book. Which highlights that you can practice getting better at looking at habits and thinking up solutions. BJ Fogg does a behavior swarm with index cards:

When I first started researching and experimenting with Behavior Matching, I bought a lot of index cards. With practice, I learned to Magic Wand a Swarm of Behaviors very quickly. I’d set a timer for five minutes and see if I could write down twenty-five behaviors on the cards. (Easier than you think.) Then I’d sort the behavior cards and plot them on a Focus Map on the kitchen counter. It was like solving puzzles.

25’s a lot so here are 5 behaviors I can have to publish one small thing daily.

1. Go through my Readwise emails

2. Open MarsEdit on my laptop

3. Have a template in Obsidian

4. Set Obsidian up to post a draft to WordPress

5. Put one single highlight in Drafts every day

All of these would make it easier to get into an editor that can publish to this blog.

Find the fun (even if you’re not making DOOM)

John Romero, in “DOOM Guy”:

As a game designer, playing the game is essential, not just to test out the features you’ve created, but to find the fun. Sometimes, that fun isn’t in the things you thought were features, as was the case with the early Wolfenstein, or worse, the features are getting in the way of the fun. This is why completing an early “first playable” of a game is so important. “First playable” is an industry term and defines the point at which the core loop of the game is completely playable. For a first-person shooter, that core loop is often something like this: Players and enemies can move, shoot at one another, take damage, and die.

I set a timer for 10 minutes and the goal is to grab a book highlight and share some thoughts on it. That makes it a little bit of a game. It makes it a little bit more fun.

I haven’t written on here in a bit. I want to find the fun in it though. I’ve continued writing daily, though more back to private writing. I was writing in Google Docs for a few months and have recently given Obsidian a second try and have been really liking it this time around. It’s gotten to where it does increase the fun of writing.

Or maybe it’s the engagement of writing? In any case, I’m enjoying pulling up a weekly note and filling in daily prompts. While not Morning Pages as prescribed by Julia Cameron, my daily writing in Obsidian does seem to accomplish the idea of being windshield wipers for the brain.

One of the prompts I fill in daily is around my information diet. So I just try to write down 1 thing I read, 1 thing I listened to, and 1 thing I watched lately. Over a few days repeating this, I realized that it’s the section that’s the most publish-able of my private notes.

And I have a place to publish them. So I may as well post here.

Different blogs through my life have been a place where I’ve been able to find the fun in writing.

(Though not as fun as playing or making DOOM. Oh on that note, check out this video I made where I loaded DOOM textures into the world with the Vision Pro.)