I’m talking about even those moments when inspiration strikes. You have a “brilliant” thought and you sit down to write but what comes out is banality. Your sentences don’t flow and your words can hardly express what’s really in your head. It all feels like a farce.
– From The thing about writing by Rebecca Toh
Yep, that's me. That's why I can't rush my writing. When I do, it always ends up as crap. The best advice I've seen on writing was a post here on Read.Write.As, about waiting a day or two before hitting the Publish button. Allow yourself some time to sort through the jumble of words coming from your head.
But writing is also my vice. It is an obsession, all consuming, something that I can't stop thinking about even when doing other things. It is a habit I cannot shake, one that I must live with, am more than willing to do so.
Because I still want all of this to mean something.
– From Colin Walker
Isn't that what we all want in the end? For all of this to mean something? So true.
I am not saying I necessarily want to take one photo a day, but I do want to start documenting my days a bit more. Besides just writing, I want to take some pictures, too. MY day(s) may not be super exciting, but I think they are worth documenting for me, anyway.
– From A Photo A Day by tmo
Interesting that I am contemplating the same thing; taking a photo of my day and posting it on here. In my case, this idea came to mind after reading this bit from Warren Ellis:
I have a particular set of wants for the isles of blogging. I want to know what you are seeing, doing, thinking. The /now page movement started by Derek Sivers is smart, but requires people to update their /now page on the regular, and, generally, they just don’t. I use a Status category on this site, which is actually linked in the footer of my emails, so, if people feel the need, they can click through to see how fucked I am on any given day. I like this to be primarily located here, even though it does pass through to social media...
The idea of sharing a photo as a status update is interesting to me, especially with the free photo hosting benefit you get as part of a Write.as Pro account. It kinda sounds like a Photo 365 or 365 Project kind of a thing, but it doesn't have to be. It could simply be a photo of your day documented and shared online.
Just wanted to point out that me and my wife have been enjoying reading the On Parenting series that Daniel Rose has been sharing on the Read.Write.As feed. As a young parent, I find a lot of the info shared in those posts to be useful and refreshing. Refreshing in the sense that it makes me reconsider what I think I know about parenting. And it also challenges my preconceptions of how I think parenting should be done.
When you choose experience over stuff you are also choosing relationship. Just giving children stuff communicates that you would prefer them to be seen not heard. Experiences are almost always linked to engagement. Leaving town or heading out on a local adventure usually means that there are significant times where the phones are put away and we are doing something together.
– From On Parenting: Experience Over Stuff
My wife texted me that quote after I sent her a number of links for reading. She said she loved it, so do I.
My previous experiment was about weekly planning using pen and paper, mainly using a Bullet Journal. This experiment is about weekly planning using digital tools.
Why not continue weekly planning with pen and paper?
One of my issues with using my Bullet Journal for weekly planning was that I felt like I was wasting paper with the Weekly Log pages. The reason I felt like it was a waste of paper was because a weekly plan is just that, a plan. It is not a record of what really happened during that week. For the true record of events that happened during a week, I can look at my Daily Log pages. The Daily Log pages I want to save. The Weekly Log pages? Not so much.
For today's music log, I have two songs with really great intros. I'm talking about the kind of intros that will get you pumped up and ready to rock. I'm deviating from my usual sharing of songs from Spotify, to instead sharing music videos from Youtube. This is so you can actually listen to the intros of these two great rock songs.
First up is the song “Hell Yeah” by Rev Theory. I've only heard of Rev Theory a few years ago, but this song is apparently from way back in 2008. I know musical taste is subjective, but I believe this song has one of the best intros as far as rock and roll songs goes.
And so I’ve been very interested in a new book by Jenny Odell called How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. She describes a world where “every last minute” ends up “captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.” But in the midst of push notifications and likes and friend requests, a “certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers.”
Sounds like a book I should read. Adding it to my “books-to-read” list.
I didn’t solve everything in my strolling, but I started to notice some patterns. I was finally able to hear God’s voice because the noise was turned down. I couldn’t block it out with the distractions–parties and drinking and social media and to-do lists and podcasts and music and movies and shows and idle fretting about work—that were my preferred methods. Instead, I just had to be present to exactly what I was feeling at each moment. If I was sad, I just had to be sad for a bit. If I was excited, I just got to experience it rather than try to share it on an online profile. If I was worried, I lived through the worry instead of numbing it.
I experienced something similar when I started practicing digital minimalism. I even wrote it down in my journal. Without distractions, it was like all of a sudden I had all this time to think, to be present, to live in the moment, to hear God.
Yesterday I talked about why I created a new Facebook account. Today I'm listing down some guidelines for myself, concerning the use of my new Facebook account. My main goal here is to be able to manage a Facebook account while still minimizing distractions and keeping my attention intact. I didn't go through my #DigitalMinimalism journey just to throw everything away with a new Facebook account. I'm incorporating lessons I've learned from my year away from Facebook. So here goes.
Let’s look more closely at the anatomy of boredom. Why is it so damned boring to be stuck in a departure lounge while our flight is increasingly delayed? We are in a state of high arousal, anticipating our imminent arrival in a novel and stimulating environment. True, there are plenty of shops, screens and magazines around, but we’re not really interested in them and, by dividing our attention, they serve only to exacerbate our boredom. To make matters worse, the situation is out of our control, unpredictable (the flight could be further delayed, or even cancelled) and inescapable. As we check and re-check the monitor, we become painfully aware of all these factors and more. And so here we are, caught in transit, in a high state of arousal that we can neither engage nor escape.
Ever wondered why you get bored while waiting for your flight in the departure lounge? Well there you go.
There were two major events recently that made me reconsider creating a new Facebook account. First is watching the PBS Frontline documentary, The Facebook Dilemma. While it didn't change my views on the dangers of Facebook and social media, at the end of Part Two of that documentary, there is this striking quote from Zeynep Tufekci:
They're not going to do this as long as they're doing so well financially and there's no regulatory oversight. And consumer backlash doesn't really work because I can't leave Facebook, all my friends and family around the world are there. You might not like the company. You might not like its privacy policies. You might not like the way its algorithm works. You might not like its business model. But what are you going to do?
I feel trapped in the same way. All my family and friends are on Facebook. None of them maintain personal websites or blogs like I do. It's not that FOMO got to me, but more of the fact that they can't seem to reach me after I've deactivated my Facebook account. It doesn't help that all my really close friends, my “barkada” as we call it in my native tongue, they all live in a different continent than me. So, I don't have the luxury of hanging out with them on weekends to maintain our friendship. Had I had that option, I'm positive I could have gone on without a Facebook account.
A game of Tiny Epic Galaxies with the wife, which she won, on her first try... She always seems to do that on every new game we play.