'The Quarterly' becomes more regular
I'm pretty strongly anti-spam-email, so when I saw someone else with the idea of 'exactly 6 emails a year, no more no less', it resonated immediately. And so the idea of 'The Quarterly' was borrowed: exactly 4 emails a year.
Well it turns out that this is a terrible burden! Rather than having some cool idea and thinking, I'll send that out, they'll enjoy that, you have to bank up these ideas, then the time comes around and I get a notification from my system that I need to 'prepare the newsletter', and now I look back at those ideas and they feel stale, and this quarterly thing better be real special like, or it wasn't worth it. And so we end up in this situation where I never send you anything.
So, RIP The Quarterly. Now I just have 'a mailing list' like a normal person, and I'll actually send you interesting things. Probably every couple of weeks.
Admin note: I found the lovely Listmonk software, which I'm self-hosting on a Pikapod. So I've migrated the list there. Totally private, all data under my control, and you can unsubscribe or delete your own data at any time using the link at the bottom. It's plain text, with no tracking.
Me and Lucy are in the gorgeous city of Morioka, Japan. For people who value order and calm, Japan can feel too good to be true. I'm in a town where Shinkansen (pl. Shinskansen? Shinkansens? It's an amazing property of the English language that plurals can just feel right, in this case in the unaltered form) grace the skyline. Bullet trains! When I was a kid if you told me I'd just be watching bullet trains cruise by … wild.
It's a nice place to create something new, so we're recording something I've been trying to figure out for years: how to 'stay organised' and 'get stuff done' using the Johnny.Decimal system. All through the Workshop we said we'd sort Lucy's to-dos out and then … we just never did. Because I didn't know how. I've got something that's been working really well for me, so it's time to bite the shinkansen and share it.
I'm going for something I call 'comfortable awareness' of the stuff I need to/want to/should get done. Because you can't possibly do it all. In preparing for this course I re-read Oliver Burkeman's lovely 'Four Thousand Weeks', and saved this quote:
You’ll do what you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken.
So instead of trying to do it all, what I'm looking for is an awareness of it all, so that I don't feel stressed. What did I forget? What was that project idea that I really wanted to do? How do I spend today such that I get to the end and am happy about what I did? How do I deal with the inevitable distractions; how do I manage my time?
That's coming to JDU soon.
There's also a new YouTube series, 'Be better at computer'. For ages I've wanted to share how I work. I try – I wouldn't claim to be all the way there yet – to be really, really organised. And with this organisation comes a sense of calm. I want to sit at the computer, as we all do for so many hours of the day, and approach it with clarity and focus. So as I go about my day I'm making notes. How am I using my system, and my computer knowledge more broadly, to just be better at computer?
I'd love your input on this one. I'm trying really hard to make this a practical series, with realistic, actionable advice. It's not a bunch of clever but ultimately useless 'life hacks'. This is how I actually work, every day. So what help do you need? What problems do you have? What frustrates you? Tell me, and I'll show you how I'd go about solving it.
The first episode will be on the YouTube channel in the next few days, then it'll be a weekly thing. JDU members get it a few weeks early, without the ads, and bonus content.
https://youtube.com/@johnny.decimal
Alright that's long enough. I hope you're all well. We love your messages of support, we really do. Remember that our job is to help you to be more organised. That's why we do this. So tell us what you need.