Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

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.)

How I listen to audiobooks (with Kindle and Audible)

I started listening to”The Terminal List” during runs and… it’s awesome.

I gave up on listening to fiction audiobooks a few years ago. I’ve always wanted to (and still want to) read a bunch of sci-fi books. I thought I’d start by listening to a bunch of Neal Stephenson’s books. I tried to listen to “The Diamond Age” while walking around New York. I’d stop paying attention for a few minutes then need to back it up a few chapters. Then at some point I’d stop paying attention for longer than that to the point that it was hard to even figure out what part to back it up to.

But I gave fiction audiobooks another shot when I started running a few months ago.

One thing that helped: switching genres from sci-fi to thrillers. I started with Don Winslow’s “The Power of the Dog” trilogy

A second thing that’s helped: being able to play audiobooks in the Kindle app with the reading indicator. Now I’ll often drop the combined $20-$30 to have a book on Kindle and Audible. You used to be able to add the Audible book for $7.50 for a lot of books. But it seems like there’s probably some sort of change in publishing deals that’s made that far less common with newer releases. Anyway, when I get lost it’s a lot easier to back things up to a place that I remember using the Kindle app because it’s easier to skim through text than it is with a combination of skip forward/skip backward buttons. 

Third, sort of along with the above change, the Kindle app allows you to do an infinite vertical scroll with most books. The audio syncs so that if you scroll enough to where the current word is off screen, the audio will start back at the top of the screen. You can also highlight a word and start the audio at that word.

I listen at 1.5X when running.

I listen at 2-3X when reading the text version on Kindle. I play the audiobook to get the word indicator at the same time. At 3X, I’ll have to backtrack sometimes but listening at the same time helps keep me moving forward in the book. If I’m on my phone, it’s also a nudge to not switch to other apps.

I’m reading more and I’d bet I’m retaining more. Though in my head I’ve also pared back the importance of retention or trying to understand every last detail of things. The man wants revenge. Sometimes I’ll look up who he’s currently brutalizing and remember, oh yeah, that’s why this person is a scumbag.

“The Power of the Dog” by Don Winslow – 5 Reactions

I want to write more about books as I’m reading them and I should always take the time to write about books I finished. I’ll just try to get 5 points down or something like that.

1. I need to finish this trilogy (along with a few other series): I remember seeing the subway takeovers for “The Force” a few years ago when I lived in New York. I didn’t buy the book then but now I want to read all of his books. But I’ll definitely start with the rest of the Cartel trilogy. I’ve read the first book of a few series in the past few months: ”Fourth Wing”, ”Hyperion”, ”Red Rising”, and now “The Power of the Dog”. I’ll likely jump right into ”The Cartel” (Book 2).

2. Now that’s how you weave stories together: I don’t read a ton of fiction, but it’s been a while since I’ve read something with the stories of multiple characters coming together so well. It’s been over a decade since I first read “Hyperion” and I remember it coming together in “The Fall of Hyperion” but it doesn’t quite happen in book 1. “The Power of the Dog” is tied up nicely on its own. I actually sort of don’t want to read book 2 because I worry about what might happen to characters I’ve grown attached to.

3. Always cool to know places in books (so having both New York and San Diego in it is a treat): Major cities I’ve lived in: Seattle, San Diego, New York, and San Francisco. Most of the time it’s New York I’ll get a kick out of seeing in media. (Top of the list for me is from Succession: My wife and I met at the “You are not serious people” karaoke bar on 32nd street in New York.) This one had a lot about San Diego. Though it’s a different time from when I lived there, I enjoyed mentions of Horton Plaza, Fashion Valley, Chula Vista La Jolla, etc.

4. No character is black and white (well except one): Cops with twisted motives. Honor amongst thieves. Governments and churches in cahoots. Multiple times through the book, Winslow’s able to quickly make you care about what happens to characters. He goes through their upbringing and you see the paths taken that eventually justify decisions that would otherwise seem crazy. Then there is one character who is pretty much evil. Gives other characters the creeps. Gives me the creeps.

5. If you love Narcos and Sicario, “The Power of the Dog” is a no brainer: My path to this: Dune 2 came out and I watched with my wife then we decided to go through all the [[Denis Villeneuve]]’s movies we hadn’t seen. Started with ”Prisoners” (chilling), then “Blade Runner 2049” (awesome), and then “Sicario” (loved it). Each one got me into Reddit and YouTube explainer rabbit holes. ”Sicario” got me of course reading about the CIA—beginner level stuff like I only learned from the movie that they don’t operate domestically. At some point a comment said something like “Read ‘The Power of the Dog’ to learn more about how the cartels rose to power.” I’m glad I did.

Other current books I’m reading: Finishing up Andrew Huang’s “Make Your Own Rules”, started Junji Ito’s “Uzumaki” and don’t know if I’ll finish it because it’s creeping me out at night already, and I also started Ryan Higa’s “How to Write Good” because I want to read more books by YouTubers since I’m enjoying Andrew Huang’s book so much.

Dan Kennedy x Rian Doris: write when you first wake up

Dan Kennedy in “No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs”

On the other hand, I believe you can train and condition your mind to your schedule. I, for example, have trained my subconscious mind to solve assigned problems and to write advertising copy or content copy for me while I sleep. Scoff, but virtually every morning, at 6:00 or 7:00 A.M., I go directly from bed to computer, put fingers on keyboard, and race, race, race to input all the copy pouring from my subconscious, which it has accumulated during the night and has been impatiently waiting to get it committed to the printed word. It feels somewhat like having waited way too long to pee, rushing to the bathroom and barely getting your clothing out of harm’s way before explosively powered urine floods the bowl—not that I’m comparing my writing to pee. Others make that comparison, and I’ll leave them to it. But now, when I have to write, I have to write!”

This reminded me of a recent episode of Rian Doris’s channel/podcast. He talks about removing all the things before the start of something. Mastering friction.

Action sports athletes can jump off or lean and go over some edge and they’re immediately immersed in the work. The more you can make your work resemble that, the easier it will be to stay consistent.

Something Rian Doris recommends: work right when you wake up. If you’re a writer, start writing a minute after waking up. Your brain during sleep and your brain in the fog where you can’t remember your dream no matter how hard you try… is very similar to your brain when in flow in work. You can hop right in if you jump into work right after waking up.

That said I’m very interested in the flow vs. deliberate practice debate. Maybe it’s a false dichotomy. Practicing both is good. Being able to be deliberate about both is good. Sometimes you need flow to perform well. Sometimes you need deliberate practice and struggle to actually increase your skill level.

In any case, I need to sleep now. Maybe when I wake up I’ll hop right back into writing another post.

Cal Newport: The overhead stacks up (so focus on one thing at a time)

Cal Newport talks about overhead tax in “Slow Productivity”:

Further, imagine it takes seven hours of core effort to complete a single report, and each report that you’ve committed to write generates one hour per day of overhead tax (emails, meetings, occupied mental space, and so on) until it’s completed.[*] In this thought experiment, if you commit to just one report at a time, giving it your full mental attention until it’s done before you agree to start working on another, you’ll complete reports at the rate of one per day (assuming you work eight hours per day). If, on the other hand, you agree to take on four different reports simultaneously, the combined overhead tax of maintaining all four on your task list will eat up half your day in logistical wrangling, effectively doubling the time required to complete a single report. In this example, doing fewer things ends up producing more results.

When you have too much work in progress, there’s too much overhead tax. It’s not just filling in the existing gaps in your day to day. It starts to create the default framing for your day, then you’re trying slice your actual projects into the gaps remaining.

In the old rocks in a jar analogy, overhead tax is the sand that fills the jar in the first place. You don’t even have to put the big rock in first to get its overhead tax sand.

You can fill an entire day with overhead tax. It’s one type of fuel for procrastination.

You can prevent it from stacking so much by parking projects in a backlog. Though, just stretching the parking lot analogy, there are different ways to park.

If you really can’t put it on hold, it’s like double parking someone with your hazards on to run into a building. It’s still going to generate some overhead tax and take some mental energy on the backburner.

To truly remove the overhead tax, you’ve got to find the equivalent of an unmetered unreserved un-everything’d parking spot. At a team level, this could be a team backlog where a project actually might not be assigned to you at all. So you can focus strictly on what you’re assigned to and others trust and follow the team’s system. They can see what’s on your plate and you’re allowed to focus on it.

I’m now thinking of eating at a buffet while double parking someone so I know there are too many metaphors here.

Time to run.