Tracking every hour of every day has made me happy with how I spend my time.
What inspired the idea?
My friend, also called Alex, showed how he was doing more of the things he wanted to — piano, friends, and a course — and avoiding things he didn’t want to.
To do this he was using a spreadsheet.
Based from Hannah C book called The Science of Fate, and her summary of the Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science.
1. Say how you feel
Literally say, “I feel angry/sad/confused” when you are. It will allow others to help and show compassion to calm you and it will allow you to think at a higher cognitive level — helping you to process it at a high level.
2. Regularly reflect
Regularly thinking about what happened recently (day, week, month, year) will help you package what is happening. You should also focus on why you like yourself. This is self-compassion. The aim is to learn to frame and package tricky experiences, and then with this ability be more assured to disturbances in your daily life.
The author says to…
It is clearly a difficult challenge so I am exploring the areas of challenge
Scenario of the pain:
A group holiday can be many different demographics; a group of friends, a group of people with similar interests, an extended family. In each group there is typically the organiser.
The organiser is the person spearheading the group. Sharing and confirming the details, pushing people to commit, the first one for reminders, typically also the one commiting money first, and getting paid back last.
In addition to them, there are usually those who are less comfortable with the process, perhaps feeling overruled, thinking there are better options (forgotten or missed), and hence have low confidence or desire to commit.
Then…
Not-normal nomad is best nomad.
“When does our tenancy renew?” I called out from bed.
“No idea”, she shouted as she squeezed past the bikes and over the shoes.
It turned out we had only 2 weeks to decide if we commit to:
- another 8 months of £2,000 per month,
- find another place to live in London in the middle of the pandemic.
Or maybe a third option.
£2,000/pm anywhere else in the UK is luxury — hot tubs, views, countryside. “Shall we just do that for a bit?”
We picked the third option.
A leap of faith? No. It was logical.
Covid minimised the consequences of going nomadic. We no longer needed to quit our job or find new sources of income to change our way of life.
We had planned to travel and work before…
Actions from The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky
Rewards are fun but dangerous
We are social animals, we want rewards from our society, but that is not the source of confidence or sustained happiness.
Worse still, it could lead to a dependency that you need external validation and plaudits. And that is dangerous for your self esteem.
If you only do what others you know will celebrate, you a picking a path that may not align with things you want to enjoy. There is courage in doing things you want to do, without a need to be rewarded, but there is also fulfilment and achievement there.
Own them
Reliance on external validation or financial reward…
PWA’s are getting closer and closer to full functionality — but the documentation of them is, in my experience, poor. Let’s help.
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Reminder: What is a PWA?
If you don’t know what a PWA is, read this or more simply, they are apps that are not delivered via app stores. They are tiny in file size, much faster, quicker to develop, have offline capabilities and even payment capabilities!
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Overview:
Chrome, Edge and Firefox (and a few others) all support notifications. This is the flow that we need to go through:
- User needs to tell their browser that they want/allow…
The book, Hooked, by Nir Eyal.
If you’re shocked how quickly time disappears when you’re doing nothing on your phone and how slow it is when you’re not on the web, don’t be surprised. It has been designed that way. But if you know the model they use, you can do something about it.
Nir Eyal is a prominent force in tech, largely due to his hugely successful book Hooked, in which he clearly illustrates how tech companies have formed a model to induce obsessive behaviour, using everyone’s normal human stimulus. This is his model.
Before this sounds a little bit ‘tin-foil-hat’, it is worth saying…
How to read Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and others…
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the longest place name in the world
Commonly known as Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, often shortened to Llanfairpwll or Llanfair PG, this town on Anglesey rose to fame for many after Liam Dutton nailed its pronunciation.
Also, I found out that Taron Egerton, the actor of Kingsman fame, is apparently from there!
All place names are descriptions…
Humans are generally bad at naming things, and names generally only stick around if other people agree with the name…
How I will decide what to work on for Product Hunt’s Maker Festival
Inspired by Product Hunt’s community engagement piece focusing on building a Greener Earth, I thought I would revisit an old idea.
I can track my calories, my emotions, how I spend my time, and every second that I spend on my laptop… but I have no idea of the environmental impact of my decisions.
Why can I not record what I have eaten and find out if I am going over my weekly carbon target?
Throughout the day, I want to be able to record what I am up to — food and travel mainly, as I assume they are the largest factors which I have full control over.
My notes for future me.
TL;DR:
- There is a lot of prep (images, gifs, videos, descriptions, first comments, potentially videos, and so on).
- You will fall into the sea of products if you don’t prepare yourself
- You will fall into the sea if you don’t prep your friends and followers
- People who signup on the day will not count to your upvotes
- Lower upvoted products can rank higher (if they were released later)
- Don’t bother launching at 12am — just launch when your the people who will upvote will be up (see point 5)
- You don’t need to be hunted. It doesn’t affect the algorithm.
ACGoff
Focused on saving our time: everyhour.xyz for your life balance; tree-meals-a-day.earth for our food emissions and compairbnb.info/hello for booking airbnbs.
