Figure 1: GOU#1 living her best life at in the Betty’s Bay water at dusk, accompanied by spectaculour colours.
Welcome friends to this, the 233d edition of the Weekly Head Voices, covering the two weeks from Monday September 14 to Sunday September 26, 2021.
(Don’t) Stress for success (aka 4000 weeks at 60%)
It’s really quite busy at work, perhaps even verging on the slightly too busy territory.
I’m consistently putting in stretches of focused, high intensity work to help push us into calmer waters.
However, in spite of all of this, my stress levels seem to have have subsided to quite an extent over the last few weeks.
This could be ascribed to me slowly moving out of new challenge discomfort territory, because I’m either getting better at what I’m supposed to be doing, or, if you want to be cynical, I just care a little less.
Maybe these two are the same.
I like to think that it could also be the growing effect of Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, the book I mentioned in WHV-231 that so eloquently and quite urgently makes the case that because life is so stupidly short, and you’re not even going to get close to Getting your Things Done, and that working hard so that you can relax at some future point in time is a terribly imprudent approach forced upon us by our instrumentalist society, you should instead do your best extracting every bit of enjoyment from every moment that you get, when you get it.
Every morning is an opportunity for a mini coffee and breakfast party, and every evening is an opportunity for a mini dinner party, both of these with the people, big and small, I hold the most dear.
Every day I do need to work, but there is ample opportunity for curiosity, for learning, and for offering a helping hand.
There is generally also time to go out for a wide-open-perception run in the sun.
All of this is available to you if you can just learn how to keep your own set of instrumentalising demons safely locked up in their cages. (these are the gremlins who keep on bugging you to try to finish one more thing.)
As Burkeman writes on page 144:
To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means.
Back in WHV #222, I tried to say something similar, just far less eloquently.
I’ve completed only a pinch over 60% of the book. I might have more to say when it’s done.
Dropbox Paper (aka mobile note-taking evolving)
It’s no secret around these parts that the mobile aspects of my otherwise pretty respectable note-taking game are weak. (In short: Emacs Org mode is amazing and can do anything, except when on my iPhone. Moar shorter: iPhone = Org mode Kryptonite)
Somehow, in spite of being so deep in with Dropbox, and in spite of using Dropbox Paper for other things, I overlooked it when evaluating solutions for mobile note capture all the way back in 2019.
This weekend, because I had to scrounge around for an important bit of information I knew I had stored somewhere (it turned out to be in my Apple Notes doh), I spent some time trying to find a tool that would give me mobile-editable notes that would turn up more readily in Dropbox searches.
Well, it turns out that Dropbox Paper documents turn up in Dropbox searches.
Who would have guessed?!
In addition to that, Paper has:
- markdown support
- syntax highlighting of triple-backtick source code blocks
- LaTeX math!
- embedding of arbitrary media which gets automatically uploaded to dropbox on drag and drop
- easy linking to other Paper docs
- checklists
Cue sound of another personal knowledge management puzzle piece snapping into place…
P.S. I’m not allowed to talk about it here, because the blog post in question happened after this blog post’s legally allowed observed timespan, but shortly in the future, I will also solve the issue of being able to search through and preview all of my Org mode notes on the iPhone.
Post is on vxlabs if you’re from the (near) future.
A truly spectacular long weekend in Betty’s
The second week ended with a weekend in Betty’s Bay that was so spectacular that it deserves its own section in this blog post.
Well this is it. The section dedicated to the weekend. I hope you like it.
The section at the end
Thank you for reading this.
I wish you continuous and consistent atomic party moments.