Hello wise turtle 🐢

I am now a member of Club Rona. Santa brought me the dreaded virus on Christmas Eve, and a very quiet festive season ensued. Maybe it was for the best—as was doubling down on activities in the remaining days of the holidays to make up for lost time—because now I've had a taste of very quiet and very busy.

And with that in mind, it's time to decide what the next 12 months should look like.

Since before the pandemic, there's been an increasing shift away from hyper-productivity. The "work hard, hustle harder" message has been red-flagged 🚩 for advocating a culture where overwork, burnout and poor mental health outcomes are not just the norm, but regarded as status symbols of high performance.

Books like Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals challenge us to scrutinise the corner we've painted ourselves into. By and large, we're overloaded, exhausted, restless, and no amount of yoga, meditation and essential oils seems to fix it.

This year, as I stare down a handful of book manuscripts, a loudly ageing cat, and a freshly planted veggie patch, I'm looking for answers in slow productivity.

Tl;dr Slow productivity is an approach to work that's more in line with how the human brain has evolved. It involves doing fewer, more meaningful things at a higher quality, and doing them at a natural pace — with the end goal of getting things done and living a happier and more fulfilled life.

It makes more sense if you watch the 25-minute YouTube video 👈

Happy new year, friend. I hope your 2023 is off to a gentle start.

What are your aspirations for this year? What are you most looking forward to?

Hit reply and tell me.

Sandy.
sanlive.com

🤔

"The Atom text editor is dead. GitHub killed it, because it was acquired by Microsoft, and Microsoft has its own editor, VS Code. VS Code is right now the most popular editor. I don’t know if it will be around in another 20 years. But I do know that Emacs and Vi, both released in 1976, will still be around in another 20 years, and the skills you acquire while using them won’t be obsolete any time soon."
Source: Proprietary Environments are a Trap

Topping my wishlist right now is Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. Anyone who's both a consumer and a creator of media might be very interested in what they have to say. Here's a rundown via The Conversation.

TIL that Universal Paperclips (a silly and fun incremental browser game) is actually based on the Paperclip Maximiser thought experiment that illustrates the risk of poorly designed AI. It puts a dark spin on winning the game, don't you think?

👩🏻‍💻

Finally, here's what I'm up to now.