I actually don’t think bendgate is going to be a problem with the iPhone Air. I think they’ve learned their lesson from long ago, and are keen to not get those headlines again. I’m more interested in seeing how long that back glass can last without a case.
Finished ‘What you are looking for is the in the library’. Longer post to follow, but I’ll be going bed thoroughly heart warmed 📚
Ok, didn’t have ProMotion coming to the regular iPhone on my predictions list this year. That’s a winner.
Only about 30 pages left of ‘What you are looking for is in the library’. Thoroughly enjoying it, although it’s still jarring how much the author needs you to understand how fat the librarian is. It’s not as gratuitous as Graham Norton’s writing in ‘Holding’, but still. Cultural divides 📚
34-32 Steelers. What a barn stormer of a game for week 1. Jets have nothing to feel bad about though, looks like they’re up for a strong season. 🏈
It will also bug me how crisp packets are unnaturally open in adverts. No-one opens them that cleanly.
Reading in progress
So I usually have between one and three books on the go at one time, depending on my emotional and mental bandwidth, and the time of year.
Mostly I can juggle a fiction and non-fiction book either digitally or paper, reading the fiction during the day and the non-fiction in the evening. But over the past few months I’ve been able to start enjoying audiobooks again. I struggle with them over the darker months; SAD really hits my concentration during the day, ruling out listening at work, and with the darker evenings I need my concentration to be on my surroundings when walking the dog, and not whatever story I’m listening too.
At the minute, I’ve got three on the go right now:
- What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama
- How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
- Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
Da Vinci has been a bear on my list for about eight years. I got it after listening to the Steve Jobs biography by the same author, thinking I could get on a biography kick, which turned out to be a lie. It didn’t help that it was another 17 hour read after listening to the 25 hour Jobs biography, nor the fact that while Da Vinci is an interesting topic, Jobs is both more recent and more scandalous.
Yet there it sat in my Audible library, taunting me, goading me.
I’d finally got back into audiobooks while walking the dog this Summer, mostly Warhammer 40k novels, Ciaphas Cain in particular, but thought it might be worth giving another go. I’m a few hours in so far, and it’s okay but I’m hitting a familiar road block of wanting to take notes but being stuck at the pace I’m given. I’ve started using the built-in clips function; we’ll see how that goes.
How To Take Smart Notes has been on my radar for a while now. I’m about 40% through it already on my Kindle, and it’s a real ebb-and-flow kind of book; easy to get through in parts, and then it seems I’m reading pages upon pages of the same point for 20 minutes. Zettelkasten is a system I’ve been interested in for a while, but always struggle to implement, although I’m getting the impression that’s more because of a distinct lack of filter between me and my zettel, and less to do with the system.
What you are looking for is in the library though is probably the one I’m enjoying the most. This one’s from my wife’s Did Not Finish pile; an adventurous one for her, as she’s much more into Kate Morton and books that go back and forth in a time line. It’s definitely not her style of writing; very manner of fact and almost plain, as opposed to descriptive and compelling dialogue.
To me though, it’s a book you don’t have to think about at all while reading. There’s next to no mental load, no call for you to really stretch your imagination. It’s a collection of short stories around the same theme - person is unhappy with an aspect in their life, they go to a community library, and the Librarian recommends a bunch of books including something that’s totally left field but also unlocks their answer for them. It’s sweet, it’s simple, and it’s uplifting. Perfect after a long day, or in today’s case, when I’m full of a summer cold.
If I had to put money on it, I’d say I’d finish Smart Notes and Library this month pretty comfortably, and maybe get Da Vinci done just in time for my next credit to turn up. Then I’m turning right back to 40k. I’ve forgotten how much my brain needs sci-fi, and it feels like it could use a reward.
Easily the second worst pool table I’ve played on (the first worst was also placed next to a pillar…) and the cues provided are for 10 year olds, yet I can play some of my best pool on it.
Others Life Skills, and the Plan
There were other candidates for consideration for the top three topics to focus on.
Music is a topic that’s been a huge crutch to me over the years. I’ve got 329 voice recordings and 70 files in Garageband on my phone, all half written projects from the last five years or so. Actually finishing them has a been a dream of mine for a long, long time now, but it missed the cut because of the financial and time investment I’d need to make that just tips it out of reach.
Another one was sports. It’s a thing I don’t often let myself enjoy, mostly because it means taking up the TV when it’s ‘us’ time, and because I end up spending my weekends doing things I wish I’d had the time to do during the week. This one didn’t make the cut because it felt both too passive and too broad, as opposed to snooker/pool. Again, that doesn’t mean not trying to spend more time on it, just that it’s less of a focus for me.
Then there’s the whole raft of things that I’m bundling into Life Skills; non-hobby activities that I need to spend more time on in order to pay for and fuel the hobbies I’m focusing on. Professional skills and qualifications, DIY, cooking, physical fitness, socialising. All still important, all worth taking time on, but they’re already baked into my day-to-day; I don’t need to be spending more time focusing on them, just maybe tweak how and why I do.
So all that said, what’s the plan again?
For each of the key three activities, I’m setting monthly goals in Beeminder. Beeminder gets you to set a goal, whether that’s daily, weekly, or monthly, and starts charging $5 per goal missed, then increases that amount for each additional failure on the goal. I can set an upper limit when that becomes a bit too much for the budget though, so we’ll see how that goes.
Initially, Beeminder allows you to set 3 goals on their free plan, which fits nicely with my 3 activities, so to start with, these will be:
- Finish one book per month
- Write four posts here per month covering one of the activities (500 word minimum)
- Practice pool/snooker 5 times a month
I’m going to stick to this for the first three months, then check quarterly to see if the limits need adjusting in either direction. Maybe I’m through books quicker and can move to two a month, for example, or our budget gets tighter and I need to re-think snooker. Maybe I get with the writing bug more and want to incorporate morning pages as a habit, or want to try the old NaNoWriMo challenge. But I’m going to be honest about my failures, and post a copy of the graph from Beeminder showing where I’ve passed or failed, and how much they charge me.
And I’m going to do this for a minimum of a year. If I still benefit from it, it’ll go on. If not? At least I’ve tried, and can try, try, try again with something else.
So that’s it. Regular posts will start this weekend, and then it’s full steam ahead.
Pool/Snooker
Out of the three, however, this is probably the one that hits closer to home. It’s the one that connects me most with my wife.
We don’t have a lot of shared interests; or rather we do, but we have different tastes. We both read, but fairly different books at different speeds. We both love music, only hers makes me think of bratty teenagers on the bus, and mine makes her think of weirdos or headbangers.
But then along came snooker.
She’d been vaguely interested in it around about the time of the snooker World Championships, having friends at work who were really into it. Myself, I watched it a lot as a kid, but couldn’t really afford to get into playing it too much (especially as I wasn’t great at it), so when she suggested watching the finals I was only too happy to oblige.
And she was hooked, but actually playing it was intimidating to her. The size of the table, the precision needed to play red-colour-red, no handy referee to keep score, it all got a bit too much. Pool though? Much smaller table, still have to be precise but it’s by and large more forgiving, and much less to think about as a beginner.
It turned out the local pub did free pool on Tuesdays, so we started going on our lunch break, and once she started getting the hang of it we started going to our local pool hall. That was when I noticed the snooker tables tucked away upstairs in a more private room and started paying for that separately.
Neither of us are great, but it’s an activity we can add to the short list of Things We Enjoy Together. Plus, independently, playing snooker has become a bit of a sanctuary of its own for me. A place where I can chill for a few hours and focus on what’s in front of me, rather than everything else around me.
It would just be nice to be better at it; to not spend two or three hours inconsistently making good and terrible shots. We’re getting there, but inconsistently, and that’s why it takes up slot number 3.
We use ClassicFM to help calm the dog down if we need to leave him alone for a couple of hours. Works great, only now we have to reassure him that we’re definitely not going anywhere when we listen to it casually…
Reading
‘A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone, if it’s to keep its edge. That is why I read so much.’ - George R R Martin, Game of Thrones
Reading is one of the earliest hobbies I can remember. Our local library had a mobile van that would park at our local park every Thursday, and I would get through whatever I could.
I started with the usual kid’s books, following on to my early forays into comic books - Tintin, and Asterix and Obelix. At some point, the nice lady behind the desk suggested to my mum that I might want to give this new book series a go that had been getting quite popular, which is how I started reading Harry Potter.
I was hooked. Reading became a salvation, even back then when the most I had to worry about was school. Goosebumps, Animorphs, Darren Shan, wider and wider my net grew. It took a few years, though, before I found something else that captured my mind quite as much as Potter. That was at a random books fair at school when I was about 13 or 14, where I found The Fifth Elephant by Sir Terry Pratchett, opening up a whole new world of possibilities.
Nowadays, my tastes range from sci-fi to romance, hard non-fiction to high fantasy. My bookshelf hosts everything from Bill Bryson, Oliver Burkeman, Tolkien, and Stephen King, to John Green (both fiction and non-fiction), and Graham Norton. There’s also One Hundred Years of Solitude, but that has a rare spot on my Did Not Finish list.
But as my days grew harder and longer, it became far quicker to get sucked into Reddit than it did actual books or even blogs. Where once I was able to devour Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in three days after its release, now I’m lucky to manage 20 pages an hour, and even then that’s assuming I can read for an hour without interruption from work, sleep, or Priorities.
The way out? Read wider, read better, and sharpen that mind. Replace that instinct to fire up social media and pick up a book, find a new and engaging blog, read an essay in the Atlantic. Actually stretch my mind rather than let it rot. Go back to that salvation, and sharpen my sword.
Writing
On the list of things I both love and fear doing at the same time, writing easily sits above all others. Nothing could signify that more than this post.
I’m a guy with a dozen and one thoughts running through his head every waking minute, from dawn to dusk. I go to bed thinking, I wake up thinking, it simply doesn’t stop. Communicating them, however, often takes a huge amount of effort.
This stems from the fear of being Misunderstood, or to be more precise, the fear of Having To Try To Find The Right Words Over And Over Again. It’s why my therapy sessions often have five minute pauses whilst I search for the most efficient words, or why I’ll pause arguments because I know what I’m saying, but I’m clearly not getting my point across. I get flustered, frustrated, and soon enough give up.
But when I do find that near perfect combination of words? Pure, divine satisfaction. I’ve grinned ear to ear talking about some of my darkest moments for no other reason than finding the cleanest way to explain the exact situation and feelings it evokes. It’s an absolute joy when I’m able to clearly express myself, but that joy comes as a result of a journey that is often too daunting to take.
There’s also the familiar and oft repeated fear of sharing, the vulnerability that comes with expressing yourself to others. As with a lot of complicated feelings, it’s inconsistent; I’ve written and performed at several open mic poetry nights with no issue, for example, and published several blogs in the past, but have re-written this post five times over because I’m just not quite satisfied that it’s good enough for Others, despite the complete lack of consequence if that’s the case (especially compared to the risk of bombing on stage).
So then why persist? Because again, it brings me joy, and joy is often in short supply in life.
I also have an over abundance of ideas; brief bursts of poetry, stories half mapped out, blog post ideas, essay topics. Getting them out there seems the better path, rather than sitting under the weight of them.
And if nothing else, it’ll help lift the monotony in a far healthier way than endless YouTube shorts.
Actually Finishing
I have an all too familiar problem in this age: far too many things I want to do, but through a lack of effort and focus, doing none of them.
I’ve tried time tracking to try and encourage myself to really monitor time spent on what I’m doing, until that became too much mental effort. I’ve tried time blocking, but couldn’t then follow through on my commitments. Various productivity systems to try and handle and push through my actions in each direction, encouragement through friends, habit forming strategies (thank you, The Power of Habit), on and on the list goes.
Then something comes along, and I fall back on the less than healthy hyper focus on the critical areas in my life, overcompensating for my feeling a lack of agency by enforcing it through ‘productivity’ as opposed to the ‘unnecessary’ distractions of hobbies and interests.
It all came to a head recently where, through therapy, I’ve been reconsidering and analysing how and why I act, and questioned why I put myself through this process two or three times a year. What is it that pushes me to keep trying? Why do I think anything will change? Are these even things that are important to me any more? How important could they be if I don’t spend any time on them?
The importance question was the easiest to answer: they’re important to me because they bring me joy. The fact that I don’t participate in them consistently says more about my negative mental health habits than it does about the direction they take me.
As for why I keep trying, that became clearer after my last session. I have an abundance of ideas and a barely used canvas; I want to see how it’ll look when I start throwing some stuff on there, and learn what feels good in practice vs in theory.
So I try, try, try again. But what makes this time different? External accountability.
First off, I’ll be writing about how I’m doing and progressing each area here for all the world to see and comment on. I’m starting with my three key activities I want to build on:
- Writing - not just blogging, but fiction and poetry too, to recapture that lost feeling of creating.
- Reading - both fiction and non-fiction, in particular philosophy and long form articles; the antithesis of Reddit
- Snooker/pool - to stretch my mind in another way whilst relaxing it in others, and also to build yet another new connection with my wife (more on that this week)
I’ll also be doing micro posts on the more core life areas - DIY, cooking, professional skills - as well as monthly progress and commitment checks.
Secondly, and the bit I’m most nervous about, is I’m going to be using Beeminder to put my money where my mouth is. Beeminder is a site where you set specific activities to achieve on a regular basis and for each time you fail to hit that goal, they charge you money. Plus the more you fail, the higher the charge goes (within limits - you can cap the maximum amount so it doesn’t go crazy). It gives you graphs that show which side of the pass/fail line you currently are and have been, which I’ll be posting here on a monthly basis, stacking external accountability.
The next few posts I’m going to go into each area in detail, then the hard part: getting started.
Let’s get moving.