The Column

Motto: This Turned Out to be a Monster I'd like to thank my local library and the various apps ( one ,  two ,  three ) that connect with it for increasing my reading throughput by roughly 95%.  Gillespedia  has 9 book reports now... sooner or later I'll figure out a way to make them  look  good. Right now Gillespedia is basically a link to the public-facing portion of my Notion notes. This Column has been dogging me for weeks. I'm sure it will feel good when it's finished. Mindfulness.  Being present. Intentionality.  Buzzwords. What do they actually  mean ? The concept of "mindfulness"  has been getting more and more popular . I've seen tons  books aimed at mindfulness , telling you it's the solution to all of life's biggest problems - depression, anxiety, dissatisfaction. The use of the term in marketing drove a Buddhist teacher to coin the term "McMindfulness", describing the commercialization ...

Motto: Okay Google... what's your goal here? Intro This post is going to be an expansion on something I wrote about in Column #354 . It will (hopefully) complete the series of posts I've written lately about productivity software, Google, Getting Things Done, and all that.  Specifically today I'm writing about Google products, and my growing disillusionment with them. This post will be thorough, longer than most, and generally more well put together. Setting the Googley Stage I'll caveat this up front by saying they are great on the whole, most of my quibbles are just that, quibbles, and that I have them because I'm a power user. I am in deep with Google. Google Products I Still Use Google Search Gmail YouTube Chrome ChromeOS Chromecast Chrome Remote Desktop Google Assistant Google Home Google Photos Google Maps Google Drive Google One Google News Google Sheets Google Docs Google Slides Google Drawings Google Forms Google Keep Google ...

Motto: Keep It Simple, Stupid I suck at what I'm about to write about. An overarching theme for most of my posts lately (and because my writing so closely relates to my thinking, an overarching theme of most of my thinking lately), is how perfection is truly unattainable. Not only personal perfection/perfection of the self, but the perfect tool, the perfect photo, the perfect anything. None if it doesn't really exists... but nearly everything I deal with on a day-to-day basis is good enough . I need to learn to live with good enough (in moderation). Example given: I love containers. It's kind of an embarrassing or stupid thing to even admit; but I love them. I love how they organize the things we need and how they make those things easier to move around.  I love backpacks and messenger bags.  I love waterbottles and lunchboxes.  To stick with one example for the sake of argument, let's look at containers meant for drinking out of - I'll loosel...

Motto: This is essentially just Facebook My little family unit just took our first 3-person vacation... and we liked it so much we decided to go for immediate seconds. We spent 3 days, 4 nights in lovely lovely Las Vegas - in a way super holy cow nice house with a way super holy cow nice family. We saw the Strip, where we ran into a pair of old friends from a cruise. We met up with the Best Man. We hung out by the pool and drank delicious beverages and ate ice cream like we were kids. We were kids, and it was super nice. The kind of nice that makes you realize you’re doing things right in this world. On what was scheduled to be our last full day of the trip, we decided to change our flight home. Rather than leaving from Vegas, we would leave from San Diego. Then we rented a car to get down there. Driving they the Mojave Desert listening to the score from the movie Rango was super fun. Turns out it’s cold in San Diego. If you’re packed for 100 degree Vegas, you may not be perf...

Motto: Cause Nothing Ever Stays "Good Enough" I left the last post off saying I'd write more about Notion. This is going to be that + me revisiting notetaking platform anxieties, which I've written about a few times before. I'm writing here because it helps me think. Notion is a new-ish entrant into the market of notetaking software - but it's more than that. Notion is a notetaking app, with task-management-like capabilities, project-management-like capabilities, and it looks beautiful while it does it. Notion feels like what would happen if someone sat down and made a wishlist for everything a piece of software would have to do in order to manage  anything , then they systematically worked their way down the list building something that checks all the boxes.  Features in an  anything  management app: Support for text, images, links, and other types of content Support for to-do checkboxes Ability to organize notes and tasks and reference materi...