This is my sixth weeknote in a row that I’ve published without publishing a regular post. I’m OK with it. I’m writing a lot, personally and for work, so I’m keeping the habits, just not on here. I’m fortunate to be working with companies right now that put a high value on writing and ask me to spend a big part of my time doing it for them.
Consuming too much
I read a tweet recently that got me thinking about the amount of content I consume in a week. I realized that it’s a lot—too much to be honest. When I look back at my weeknotes, I see I’m reading close to a book per week, listening to an audiobook every week or two, and continually listening to four podcasts. I’m also watching documentaries, movies and TV shows.
None of this is counting the time I’m sitting around reading Twitter or tech sites. If I have a few spare minutes, I’m looking at my phone or my Kindle. When I’m winding down after the day, I’m watching a TV show or movie.
In the past I’ve wondered if reading Twitter too much creates a bunch of mental problems for me. But I think Twitter is only partially to blame. The issue is I live a life filled with consumption.
So this week, I tried to stop consuming. I stopped reading on the internet, reading books, listening to podcasts and audiobooks. When I was driving, I kept it quiet. I know it’s only been a week, but my mind is so much calmer.
Just before writing this, I opened Twitter and looked at what was trending. It was garbage. I then looked through my timeline. It was mostly filled with reactionary tweets to what’s going on in the world today with some tech tweets sprinkled in. While it’s important to hear about the hardships people are facing in the world, I don’t need to hear the opinion of hundreds of random people about it.
Mini vacation
We took an impromptu vacation by driving an hour away and staying in a hotel with a pool. It was less than 24 hours, but the kids loved it. We’ve been super careful during this pandemic, and we’ve done almost no traveling. We decided we could stay safe and do a trip like this.
Notes
- We finished Luigi’s Mansion. It was a fun family game.
- I started writing an ebook for an upcoming presentation I’m doing on schema entropy. More on that to come.
- I watched Screwball on Netflix which is about the MLB doping scandal. It’s a hard story to believe.
- We finished Fantastic Fungi which was fantastic.
- I’m back to using my reMarkable 2 a lot. They recently put out updates that makes it easy to jump around in a notebook and jump to other notebooks. The updates were a huge improvement.