I'm curious how big of a factor a consistent core team is to having long-term sustainable and stable software. When companies have people rotating on projects constantly and the original vision and design principles of the product are lost or changed, I can only imagine that contributes to the problem.
I've tried to retrain myself to open Obsidian (and have Obsidian configured to always jump straight to my daily note upon opening) if I compulsively pick up my phone. From there, I'm either going to write about what I'm actually trying to accomplish in the moment, or realize I had no real goal and just compulsively picked up my phone as happens more often than I'd like. It's then much easier to just put my phone back down instead of getting locked into browsing random internet streams, or I just do whatever thing I actually got my phone out to do.
I've injected some intentional friction into an otherwise compulsive habit, which opens up the opportunity to redirect that behavior. It's been very a helpful switch so far.
Not to mention it prevents people trying to legitimately access these services from doing so by putting extra barriers in place, defeating the purpose of the assistance program in the first place.
Perhaps there is something to be gained by being forced to slow down anyways. Speed for the sake of speed isn't always the highest priority. Certainly there are contexts where "keeping up" is a priority, but not always.
I'm with you here -- constraints like that can definitely be useful! The constraint of slowing down to write by hand is also useful for me in this context.
You're touching on a reason I like paper too -- in a digital format, I end up thinking too much about how I'm going to organize the information as opposed to just getting my thoughts down.
Organizing the information is important too, but worrying about it before your thoughts are clarified is a quick way for me to get pulled away from my focus on the problem.
Definitely agree -- paper is something that should compliment your overall system, it's pretty hard to get by with paper alone these days.
If my goal is to focus in on what I'm thinking about, pulling myself away from the computer and putting pen to paper does a better job than anything digital has been able to provide me.
This! There's also plenty of research backing up the idea that writing with a pen commits the information to memory more effectively than typing. It makes sense if you consider the extra time and effort being dedicated to what you're writing.
I've ditched pen and paper in the past because it was too slow for me. Over time I've realized that desire to "go fast" can be good in some contexts, and bad in others. Slowing down with pen and paper does a much better job of clarifying and directing my thoughts.
> It is very easy to have a "apps and services"-free experience: just kill notifications. Why would the paper make a difference? It's not like your "attention-clawing" misconfigured device is not still at your reach.
Absolutely true, this article is generally a reminder for people (like myself) who can struggle with attention and are a little too easily pulled into things once I'm engaged with a screen.
I try to keep my notifications groomed appropriately, but I also have many allowed through thanks to work. I can groom all I want, but a computer is always going to offer more distractions than paper.
Accountability! It can be scary, but it's also important and a driver for positive change.
I deal with all of these things as well, but have pretty much decided to not go the anonymous route, because I would rather try to build that confidence in myself and embrace the accountability that comes along with it.
That said, I still don't comment or publish much online out of this same anxiety. /shrug. It's a work in progress :)
> I am constantly worried by the history of how many things we historically applied historical-purposeful reasoning to, totally confident at the time that our explanations made sense – which we now know are not historical-purposeful at all.
I worry about this a lot too. We tend to make sense of the world through the stories we apply to our experience, but with unreliable memories and a desire to find a story that fits what we want to think, confirmation bias even about our own identities leads us to false conclusions.
It seems like the idea of a universal basic income would achieve much of the same long term goals, while not getting things tied up in the complications of treating the US like a business.
The problem that's trying to be solved by this is legitimate, but I don't see much value here beyond it sounding a bit clever. There are ideas out there already that aren't making headway for the same reasons this idea wouldn't.
I've seen a couple comments on emotional well-being and kindness, and I couldn't agree more. Life is about people, and when we optimize for our relationships, life is better for everyone, and everything else falls into place.
As for professional goals, I'm often too aware of the fact that new information over time causes me to change my goals, but that's a natural part of the process and I try not to resist that. Instead I just try to make sure I'm learning and growing in some way or another.
One struggle I've had along the way is balancing what I choose to learn about between what I think will make me more employable or better at my day-to-day work and what I am genuinely interested in. Trying to lean more towards the latter, it's much more rewarding and generally still pays off career-wise.