Creativity & LinkedIn

Quotes on display, and other outlets I don’t understand

Before I get into anything: I was going to post a newsletter today primarily talking about creative outlets, and then [a treasonous coup attempt happened less than 7 hours away from my house]. I won’t use my small platform to talk about this — there’s plenty that’s been said already by people better informed than me — but I do want to acknowledge that it feels incredibly uncomfortable to publish content from my limited, privileged point of view about trying to do better as a human when so many people in America have not only given up on doing so, but seem to now believe that ignorance and brutality are somehow the right values to pursue. Let’s hope that the people ignoring this disheartening reality have finally taken notice and it shows in their actions.

takes a breath

I’ve been working with a leadership coach through my employer. During one of my last sessions, we got into a dialogue about what activities I use to exercise the creative muscle I won’t stop going on about. I mentioned music, as I typically do in these types of conversations, but also the fact that I’ve struggled to see it as a purely fun endeavor. I expressed my need to write something, and over the course of the conversation we landed on the fact that I could start writing freely in the mornings to get thoughts down, and gradually they may evolve into more concrete ideas for newsletters, fiction, whatever they may be. These ideas could come from anywhere and solely exist as manifestations of small ideas I have. I’ve had a horrible habit of not writing things down throughout my life — I blame my excellent memory for details for this — and through this coaching session, I discovered that this may have contributed to my inability to feel creatively accomplished as of late. To quickly report: writing almost every day since that session has helped me center my mood immensely, and I have started writing this newsletter again as a result.

At one point during the conversation, as an example of a possible use of this writing down of things, the coach interjects his own creative outlet: Using [Canva] to create little visuals of quotes he likes, and then posting them on LinkedIn.

I’ll be candid: I reacted viscerally. Almost every word in the sentence made me cringe: Canva, quotes, visuals, LinkedIn. I’ve never been a visual person. I married a designer/photographer because she complements my strengths and weaknesses, and one of those weakness is visual thought. When we think of an improvement to our home, I am usually completely unable to visualize what it will look like; I have to trust her vision (and I am usually impressed with the result). I’ve never used Canva and don’t see a reason to start — it appears to be a tool almost exclusively for designing social media posts, and the simple fact that a business can exist on that value proposition makes me want to die inside.

I’ve never been one to, as they say, capture quotes that inspire me. I’ve never personally felt inspired by something someone else said. In fact, quotes often feel to me like a cop-out for both original thought and careful nuance applied to a given situation. Nuance is arguably the most important element to bring to human society & culture in 2021; quotes and platitudes oversimplify, and as a result, lead to overly simplistic thinking and solutions to deeply complicated problems.

Let’s talk about LinkedIn. I despise it. It’s the worst kind of social network: one centered around the cutthroat, fake-supportive, workaholic white-collar culture mostly bred in America (and bleeding overseas), in which professionals are directly incentivized to shamelessly spew platitudes, share mostly hollow wins that don’t improve our society, and half-heartedly congratulate their peers over all of it. Where Facebook and Twitter are cesspools of vitriol and Instagram is a scrollable billboard, LinkedIn is a virtual circle-jerk for the professional community. I don’t know whether the content shared on LinkedIn is done genuinely, but years of experience in the consumer & enterprise technology industry and other social media platforms have wired my brain to think that is not. I’m unhappy I have to use LinkedIn to get this read by people. I hope you sign up for my newsletter so you don’t need to use LinkedIn to find it.

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Yet, for some reason, I visit it compulsively three or four times a day. My time on LinkedIn is truly a compulsion: I don’t want to go there because the content and underlying premise of LinkedIn makes me want to die but, subconsciously, something makes me do it. I think it roots to a former deep insecurity about my career prospects — I wouldn’t post, but I would seek approval and encouragement from others, or scour the job boards to consider my options. I also am reasonably certain that active contribution to the LinkedIn cesspool does in fact improve my chances of consideration for work posted on LinkedIn — that must be part of the algorithm, because it serves everyone (especially Microsoft, who — friendly reminder — owns LinkedIn).

My coach had me thinking: Do LinkedIn users post things as a creative outlet, or to shamelessly promote themselves, or both, or something else entirely?

On another dimension: Is a creative outlet intrinsically tied to promoting one’s work, business or the desire to generate income, or can one separate those two ideas from each other?

Do either of those questions even need to be answered? Obviously they don’t. Anything that one considers a creative outlet can be considered a creative outlet, even if it’s weirdly tied to a thing that helps one find or promote their work. It took me several days to understand how posting anything at all on LinkedIn — of all social networks — could be considered just a fun creative thing to do.

Additionally, I don’t need to be capturing field recordings for my next piece of ambient music, or brainstorming a work of epic fiction to be “exercising my creative muscles.” I could just write. I could even write something to post on social media — which by the way, as I already mentioned, {I will have done with this newsletter}. It’s not about the distribution method, it’s about the ideas being explored and shared, which can be as simple as thinking about and sharing a quote you like, or as complex as a collection of carefully structured ideas set to music. I don’t need to build creativity up to something more than it is the act of creating.

Fits & starts

Hey, it’s 2020 now! Cue things about resolutions and intentions and bettering selves. This year I intend to drive for more clarity and intentionality with what I put out to the world and how I spend my time doing it.

At work, most of us try to optimize how we spend our working time using a tool called Clockwise. It enables you to set preferences for how & when you like to work, automatically scans everyone’s calendars for meetings, and automatically reschedules those meetings to give each participant as much “focus time” based on their own preferences. On the surface, it’s wonderful for creating meeting block periods without having to think about arranging my day, and some of my colleagues thrive in long periods of deep focus.

But I barely use the focus time as Clockwise probably intends. Being at home, even in a relatively bare spare room / office space, I’m constantly distracted by my personal life: my wife, our things, my new puppy, my Nintendo Switch, my Apple Music library, Wikipedia, trees, cars driving by, a lightning strike of an idea, snacks.

For a while this frustrated me. I had thought working from home was the ultimate path to deep focus and productivity: no commute, no distractions by coworkers, no proverbial watercooler to seek out gossip (though I do enjoy my kitchen), no weird internal IT rules that prevent me from running my work computer the way I want. But I still find myself distracted, often by my own bullshit, which results in a very fits-and-starts style of work through much of the workday. Twenty minutes of deeply focused writing or backlog admin might be suddenly interrupted by my own desire to update my near-perfect playlist to cook to. Alicia might suddenly be having an awful symptom flare-up and I now suddenly need to make lunch and find her medication. Having a puppy isn’t quite like having children, but it’s certainly tested my ability to context switch on a dime to avoid pee stains all over the house.

I’ve very recently learned to accept this reality of working. It’s okay to get distracted by life. It’s okay to feel a little bored trying to improve how teams design products after hammering away at a product requirements document for a bit. It’s okay to stop and cuddle with my wife or a dog because that provides me so much more joy and fulfillment than how much time I can put into staring at a laptop screen.

I can still be quite intentional even if I’m bouncing between the many things in my life in fits & starts. An optimally-placed three hour block of time to write a song or a strategy document won’t solve for me being clear in what I’m looking to do and why; I can be comfortable working ten minutes here, ten minutes there, as long as I know why I’m doing it.

Out of nowhere

Obligatory retrospective write-up for 2020

Sometime around May this year, I fell into a few different forms of writer’s block: I stopped being able to write music, I mostly stopped sharing things on social media, and I stopped writing this newsletter. If you are one of the impressive nineteen people who get this post in your email inbox, firstly, thank you; also, you probably didn’t notice (which is obviously fine).

I felt uncomfortable sharing thoughts, music, opinions, really anything at all when so many people around me were suffering. 2020 was, in many ways, the year of loads of people crying out — to be heard, to be helped, to argue, to defend their beliefs and values. Not only did I not want to add to the noise, but I found myself actively resistant to the idea of participating in my largely progressive, highly privilege-driven echo chamber.

I also stopped writing and talking about music after rushing out [my last album Full Life] in May. I primarily wanted to just get it off my plate. I’m not proud of how it sounds — it’s a lazy production in several regards, and I didn’t care to promote it. So many of my friends needed to figure out new ways to sustain a living and it fell terrible trying to promote my own music as a person with a stable income. I did have things to say; I didn’t feel like asking people to listen.

Thankfully, 2020 is over and we can look forward to a still-painful-but-slightly-more-optimistic 2021 thanks to a number of developments.

I’ve also gotten over myself a bit. I realized only recently that it’s not about adding noise to the echo chamber — instead, it’s about finding something I’m genuinely excited to talk about, and talking about that thing. I think I was depressed for much of the early phase of the pandemic. That kept me in a state devoid of joy and falling into (mostly unhealthy) patterns: complaining, doom-scrolling, doing the basic things that need getting done instead of truly taking care of myself and the few around me.

I’m not sure what specifically caused a turnaround for me — in reality, it was probably a number of things starting or resolving themselves (more on that later). Now I’m pleasantly surprised to be, for the first time in a while, excited and unconcerned about the future. I am aware of the privilege that has led to my own lack of worry about the future — the world around me is still pretty miserable for quite a lot of people — but I’m happy to have my mind in a good place, and from there I hope to maybe lift others a little bit.

I also hope to bring some joy into the world: my wife and I conceived of a baby daughter, and she’s due in March. If I cannot take on the world’s challenges myself, I can at least raise a good human to perpetuate some good in the world after I’m too far gone.

Before moving on, yes: we are having a child during a pandemic. We are also going to be having it in our home, not in a hospital. This was not a decision triggered by the pandemic, but something the pandemic reiterated the value of doing. Home birth is a completely safe and, in my opinion, superior option to hospital-based birth in 2020, and if you don’t agree with me, you should do some light research on the topic and [why plenty of doctors prefer it themselves].

A scattershot retelling of what happened

Time both flew by and stopped, as everyone has already felt and reported. So, in a number of ways, a lot changed, but a lot stayed the same. As the year came to an end, I found myself struggling to succinctly answer: what did I actually do this year?

After thinking about it for a few minutes, I found myself amused, because quite a few really big important things did happen, starting with the aforementioned future daughter. People have written on the fact that the pandemic didn’t create, but instead accelerated, a lot of meaningful changes across the world — the shift to remote work and learning, the funding of vaccine development, the political landscape, just to mention a few — and in many ways, the same occurred. For me, remote work was not new, but I really settled into it thanks to a concerted effort across [my company] to embrace the realities of pandemic/remote life. Almost gone are superfluous, ritualistic meetings; what we now have (mostly) are short intentional calls, bouts of meaningful focus or personal time, and opportunities to simply socialize. Just before the December holidays, my team did a virtual Christmas cookie bake-off.

I learned so much about maintaining and improving a home. I installed some flooring and an entirely new staircase & railing in my house. I also planted a garden, built a garden fence, installed some smart light switches, replaced all the doorknobs in the house with modern-looking ones, learned how to use a zero-turn riding lawnmower, organized the garage a few times, and started installing a drop ceiling in my unfinished basement.

I learned to simply love being home. Home cooking, drinking, relaxing, socializing, all of it. Between food allergies, health & life changes, and the pandemic, Alicia and I gradually grew averse to the limited going-out options we had — and replaced them with suitable alternatives in and around our home, including:

• Bathing Rosie and trimming her nails in our guest bathtub, a la a dog groomer (the nail trimmers and grooming supplies cost the equivalent of, like, 2 groomer appointments);
  
• My wife learning to cut her own and my hair (the professional barber kit we bought cost the equivalent of, like, 3 haircuts);
  
• Me learning to make soups, roast vegetables and grill steaks arguably better than any nearby restaurant (if only we had a pizza oven, I’d probably have no reason to eat out ever again);
  
• Converting one corner of our kitchen into a cute little breakfast nook resembling the coffee shop I stopped being able to visit;
  
• Leaning heavily into the Chemex pour-over coffee lifestyle, and having some of the best coffee I’ve ever had as a result;
  
• Converting our never-used dining room into a fun lounge for sitting, talking, drinking cocktails and listening to records; and
  
• Turning our bedroom into a day spa, complete with relaxing chaise lounge overlooking our yard, ambient music and self-taught massage techniques.

I spent roughly 2 hours of every day walking and/or playing with my adorable little monster pup Rosie. I also started exercising more, but these 2 hours always fill my Apple Watch activity rings on their own.

I almost entirely weened myself off social networks as forms of entertainment and distractions. I now spend this time listening to music, watching great TV, playing with my dog, cuddling with my pregnant wife and (more recently) writing.

I finally experienced the masterpiece that is The Sopranos, which I put off watching for years inexplicably. I don’t love mob movies, and I assumed this was just another one spread over six seasons, but Jesus Christ was I wrong. The commentary on mental health, American crime, toxic masculinity — in many ways it was ahead of its time and very prescient in 2020. (It’s also wonderful seeing the nuances of Italian American culture I’ve experienced through my wife’s family on screen. My grandmother-in-law is basically Livia Soprano minus the sociopathy).

A job I was admittedly on-the-fence about transformed into one of my favorite jobs of my product management career. I can’t say much about why at this moment, but I’ll have more to share later in 2021.

I [started a goddamn podcast]. Sure, we only did 5 episodes, but it’s something I can hang my hat on — and we’ll probably bring it back in some form next year (albeit with less direct involvement from me — thanks, future kid).

I found myself communicating with my family more than I have since I moved out of my house at 18. FaceTime chatter with my parents has become a near-weekly occurrence; I am now closer with my sister and her husband than ever before.

I also ate a ridiculous amount of trail mix, which has secretly become my favorite food of 2020. 365 brand Cherry Chocolate Carnival, here’s lookin’ at you.

Lastly, I came into the year thinking about how I can achieve clarity on my values, and, while I didn’t necessarily accomplish the specific things I wanted to complete, I believe my values and priorities are clearer than ever thanks to the events of this year.

• My family comes first. I don’t think I truly embodied that value until the second half of this year, and with a daughter coming, I won’t compromise this.
  
• True balance between professional and personal, and presence within each. Working remotely has made this truly possible where a commute never could; bringing more of my interests into my home has enabled balance in ways I could never have imagined.
  
• As a corollary to the last point: location flexibility. This extends beyond just “remote work” and is a value I want to publicly talk about more, as a means of enabling balance and stay closer to one’s values. Sure, many of us are working entirely at home right now — but there is no reason why we can’t make that a wonderful place to be both professionals and loving family members. It also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to continue working in the same way from a campsite in the woods of New Hampshire or a coffee shop in Berlin. Expect me to write more on this subject this year.
  
• Minimalism, appropriately applied. I’ve learned so much this year about what my family does and does not need. This first manifested as, admittedly, an explosion of credit card debt, and I first felt deep anxiety about it. As we worked to get this under control, we made difficult calls about our priorities and what we thought was worth spending money on, and have landed on an approach of what we’re calling “minimal of quality” — we don’t need a lot, but what we need must be very good: organic food & clothing, reliable and purpose-built technology, and the like.
  
• Time for and openness to new forms of creativity. Music has always been my go-to-creative outlet, but it need not be the only one. Simply getting thoughts written down — no matter how unformed or crazy — has proven an effective outlet. So is noodling on a potential future product idea.

My favorite music of 2020

A year-end/year-start write-up would not be complete without a shortlist of the music I liked most from the past year.

Haim Women In Music, Part III — What a wonderful collection of songs. This might be my favorite of the year. “Up From A Dream” almost single-handedly got me fascinated with bass guitar tone again, yet also served as a come-to-Jesus that I am not a good mixer/masterer of audio. That song just sounds perfect.

Perfume Genius Set My Heart On Fire Immediately — I admittedly was very late to the party of Perfume Genius, and I’m still not sure whether I like his older stuff, but Jesus this album is warm & inviting. I picked up this album for the first time in mid-December and I’ve had “Describe” stuck in my head pretty much nonstop since then. The density and overwhelming sense of pleasure in that song just gets me every time.

Bad Moves Untenable — I appreciated that there was some good punk rock that came out in 2020, though most of it reflected the anger and depression that most felt in 2020. I found Untenable to a lot of fun in a year otherwise sparse of fun. Best track is the opener “Local Radio” — if you don’t find yourself banging your head and dancing around to it, just give up.

Run The Jewels RTJ4 — I only listened to this a few times but when I did, God, it was a gut punch.

Fiona Apple Fetch The Bolt Cutters — This album is so fun and clever. I’m honestly most disappointed that I can’t blast it in the house because my dog flips out every time she hears Fiona’s dogs audibly barking throughout.

Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts V: Together — I listened to this a lot in 2020. As more and more of my life moved into my home, and a lot of intense realities of the world and our lives came into and out of focus, Together was the calm ambience that helped center me often.

Olafur Arnalds Some Kind of Peace — Second-place for the album that helped center and calm me.

Prince Sign O’ The Times Super Deluxe Edition — Okay, not a new album, but the newly released tracks (plus the original, weirder version of “Strange Relationship”) make this completely interesting as a new collection of its own.

2021

I’m very excited about 2021, but I’m keeping expectations about the world around me pretty low. We’ll still be in a pandemic, it won’t go away, and I’m comfortable with that. On the other hand, I’ll have a daughter to raise, and a set of values I’m more firm on than ever.

I made a podcast about product

So I’ve been busy making a podcast.

I’ve also been a little depressed, infuriated, overwhelmed, grateful, loopy. A real who’s who of feelings. Typical for these days, I imagine, but it had gotten in the way of writing.

A significant coping mechanism I’ve embraced during the pandemic is to accept the reality of things, and then avoid thinking about them by doing literally anything else productive with which I can fill time. I started (finally) recording music again. I bought and tinkered with a Raspberry Pi to run more smart home nonsense, a media server, retro games emulator and security camera all in one. My wife and I started a garden. I built a fence around said garden.

I’ve always had a serious itch for the podcasting game, though, due to my love of hearing people I respect ramble on, unfiltered about really interesting stuff, and the sheer exercise of recording audio. Fortunately my friend and former colleague Ben seemed to as well, and we both had some things to talk about.

So we started one called Product Therapy, which is pretty much what it sounds like: two product guys talking out some things that excite us, frustrate us, and others we can’t really make sense of about the kind of work we’re doing. We noticed that while there are a ton of business, tech & even product-themed podcasts out there, there’s virtually none which get into the really messy stuff about it — the reality of doing the job every day. Everyone seems intent on interviewing leaders of the tech giants, sharing killer insights, and the like.

We’ll ramble a lot, and we hope you find it entertaining and perhaps helpful (even if you’re not a product manager). It’s available everywhere you find podcasts:

• Apple Podcasts
  
• Overcast
  
• Spotify
  
• Stitcher
  
• Pocket Casts

You can also subscribe directly to our Substack page, which is a cool way to directly show your support, plus a way to get members-only episodes if we ever decide to do that.

Clarity is out the disinfected window

I don’t know about you, but I am very overwhelmed at the moment and pretty much all the time. Leave it to a global pandemic to cause people to fundamentally reconsider how people work and communicate and live their lives.

I’m not personally leading a vastly different life compared to how it was two weeks ago: working remote in a farm town with no close friends less than a 45-minute drive away doesn’t really lend itself to lifestyle changes in the face of a highly contagious virus. I’m not even terribly stir-crazy, since our puppy Rosie is getting me outside four to five times a day to urinate, defecate and/or run around the yard.

But I’m feeling a different stir-craziness, one that is much more psychological. My mind is racing constantly despite multiple attempts to calm it down. I am exhausted at the end of every day, passing out in my bed but somehow waking up feeling poorly rested. It took something like seven attempts to even get this short and not-particularly-groundbreaking post together.

I referred back to my “clarity” note which drove my goals for 2020, and pretty much everything is out the window at this point: it’s a struggle to be intentional, I’m not reading, I’m not actively creating, breathing only helps for a few minutes before this weird reality sets back in. The only thing that is progressing is my ability to let anxiety about homeownership go, simply because it’s the last thing on my mind right now.

I am having visceral urges to create something but I can’t form a single complete thought around what I could do. It almost feels like the entire world is up for disruption, so there’s a need (or opportunity?) to create things in these trying times, but I can’t achieve the level of mental fortitude required to actually do it. It’s a struggle to come up with an original thought when everyone is seemingly feeling the same: either “I am terrified and confused” or “I refuse to acknowledge this reality.”

I don’t really have anything to share for insights, advice, or reflection that hasn’t been already shared. If this experience has taught me anything, it’s that the Internet is wonderful for not feeling alone, but it kind of sucks if you’re feeling the urge to do something original.

But mostly I thought the title of this post was cheeky, and wanted to post it for that.

Earworms

I don’t want to talk about work or technology or bettering oneself. I want to talk about the thing that was stuck in my head for the majority of the past week, which was the following phrase: “We can’t find the books; they must be in La Jolla.”

This is from a sample used in the song “If Not Now, Whenever” by The Books, a wonderful experimental folk duo that was moderately popular in hipster circles in the early-mid 2000s. The song itself is fine: pretty repetitive, hypnotic melody, a little boring but also fun for a deep cut. There’s a seemingly random string of voices throughout the song — they don’t tell a story from what I can tell, but the end of one phrase seems to lead into the next. This sample comes up randomly in the middle in the song, after a few old women asking about “the books.” It’s unclear whether this is a meta-reference to the band or a commentary on how people consume media.

I don’t know what else it could be, but the phrase just sounds good to me. It sits in the rhythm really nicely, and it’s spoken sardonically and cool. It’s not some deeply catchy, intricately-produced melody manufactured to optimize profits; it’s a passing sample likely meant as a joke.

I have a horrible habit of getting small parts of songs stuck in my head for long periods of time, and then having those songs incessantly distract me.

I just discovered Poppy, whose whole vibe and backstory is insane, and essentially put out a melodic death metal record. There are parts of her new album I Disagree which are certainly catchy, but metal rarely captures my attention these days. I’ve had various parts of the lead track “Concrete” stuck in my head for weeks (something about that “sugar on my teeth” line), and recently became obsessed with the refrain from “Fill The Crown.”

Back-to-back with Poppy has been “You Make My Dreams” by Hall & Oates. Talk about a topic jump: from being ironically buried alive in concrete, I move to a simple love confession. I’ve had this track on-and-off stuck in my head since 2016, when it was on seemingly infinite repeat during my best man’s own bachelor party. There’s no need to explain what makes this song an ear worm: it’s probably stuck in your head too from time to time. One scientist calls it a “cognitive itch,” which seems appropriate for this particular track.

Cognitive itching seems overall appropriate for the whole sensation inspiring this post. Instead of scratching a technical itch or a career itch, I find myself regularly and incessantly scratching sonic itches in my brain. Sometimes this comes to the detriment of one of those other itches; I think my inability to parse Swift documentation and make sense of inexplicable bugs partly relates to my brain being distracted by those melodies and samples that won’t leave.

Some of these songs are incredibly catchy and have fair right to be called earworms, but others get stuck in my head for seemingly no reason whatsoever. I said the word “cocoon” this morning, and now I have “Cocoon” by Björk stuck in my head. It’s not even that catchy of a song; her vocal melodies are usually more meandering than crisp. (This was not written for effect — this specifically happened at 8am this morning, Monday, March 2nd.) I’ve been following the pianist/MC Jason Charles Beck (aka Chilly Gonzales) for a while, and I’ve had his track “I Am Europe” stuck in my head recently. It’s got a somewhat catchy piano riff, but vocally there’s nothing to hang onto whatsoever: there’s a weird string of spoken-word metaphors in the middle of the song that ring quite hollow (“I’m a dog shit ashtray”; “I’m a toilet with no seat, flushing tradition down”), but the piano line, undercut with pitched moans, just works for me. I haven’t listened to this song or album in years, and there’s no reason for me to either –– it’s not that great. But it’s in my head.

Sometimes the nature of these earworms are subtle and specific. Another song I frequently get stuck in my head is “You With Air” by Young Magic, which is fun and catchy as hell. It shares a vocal line almost identically with Purity Ring’s “Grandloves”, but I rarely if ever think about that song. I have no idea why, despite having the Young Magic version of the line in my head frequently. The context of the backing rhythm and overall vibe seem to matter.

It feels narcissistic to get one of my own songs stuck in my head, but I have a little guitar and bass line loop stuck in my head. I guess one could call that part of the songwriting process, but this particular loop has been in and out of my head since 2009. I guess you could call it catchy once the vocal melody is attached, but the guitar loop is kind of nothing on its own. I can’t explain it, which I guess is the whole thesis of this post. (I guess it’s also weird to link to said song in my own newsletter. Shameless.)

I wonder what some earworms tell me about my inner demons. I have a strong distaste for horror movies –– inexplicable gore and chaos make me very uncomfortable –– but sometimes I’ll scratch an aural itch that would be terrifying to most people. Mr. Bungle, a bizarre, fun and sometimes confusing band from the 90s recently announced a small set of reunion shows in California which prompted me to revisit some of their music. I recently got stuck in my head a song of theirs called “Carry Stress In The Jaw”, a song about grinding one’s teeth during sleep, specifically the jittery saxophone line that begins the song and a bit of the following verse. Any rational person would likely find this song terrifying, between the jarring tonal & genre shifts, the chainsaw-sounding guitars, and Mike Patton’s meandering recitation of an Edgar Allan Poe excerpt which builds to a high-pitched wail. But I find it a fascinating and ultimately entertaining listen, and I apparently get fixated on parts of it from time to time. What does this say about me? The aforementioned Poppy tracks are unconventional and dark but ultimately (as her moniker states –– hey!) poppy and interesting social commentary; “Carry Stress In The Jaw” is chaotic, strange, and sometimes gross without a clear point. Is this a reflection that my mind is in a proverbial gutter? Is this a manifestation of the actual teeth-grinding I do while I sleep? Am I a glutton for aural punishment?

More likely I just am fascinated by sound, but I can’t help but worry about my sanity with a track like this.

I made a playlist of these songs that I keep pretty up-to-date, for those interested; there’s a lot rattling around in my brain. Check it out here.

This was fun to write. I didn’t really learn anything for have any nuggets of value to share, but it was nice to shove stressful or effortful things aside and just ramble about songs I like. We should be doing more stuff like this.

Found my stuff

I’m incredibly lucky to have a little bit of time to pursue hobbies or interests outside of my work and family life. One of the interests I’d been exploring was app development: I am deeply in love with the iOS/iPadOS ecosystem and have always wanted to tinker within it and contribute to it. Plus, I’d played a little with development before by running a few Wordpress sites in the past, doing low-complexity coding and bug fixes in previous gigs, and spending most of my workweek talking with other developers for a job. And I had an idea for an app that would actually be useful to me.

So I tried picking up Swift and SwiftUI to develop said app. After about 10 days I’ve given up. I either don’t have the brain, or the patience, for software development. I get the model-view-controller framework completely — I need to at least understand this concept to do my day job, but while I can sort of read code, it’s a whole order of magnitude of complexity for me to write it and not run into a dozen build failures or inexplicable crashed. The place where I got stuck, specifically, was around supporting Siri Intents: the idea involved needing to talk to Siri, or build Shortcuts, around locating a specific piece of data, and I got incredibly frustrated trying to figure this out. Tech pundits are right when they say Apple’s documentation is not useful, and I don’t have the skillset to adapt examples from other people to my own use cases.

The idea stuck, though. It came out of an episode of the wonderful Reconcilable Differences podcast. In this one, John Siracusa talks about his use of Apple Notes to keep a running list of where random things are in his house. Turns out I could have used one of those: My wife and I move random items around the house regularly and then forget where we put them. Some of these are easy to track down, such as AirPods or our phones, because we can yell out to Siri and then a loud bell will be emitted from said device. I wanted to be able to yell out to Siri, “Where’s my goddamn box cutters?” when I have a dozen cardboard boxes to break down and can’t find them. The only options I could think of were to buy a Tile or wait for Apple’s competing product, but I also don’t want to spend hundreds (possibly thousands) of dollars putting a Bluetooth tracker on all my tools, random cables, passport, etc. Not to mention all the problems with Bluetooth security and electromagnetic radiation in the house.

So instead of frustrating myself endlessly trying to build a swanky app to solve this problem and then monetizing it for no good reason, I built a group of shortcuts to help me with keeping track of shit around the house.

Found It, the shortcut suite

Collectively they’re called Found It, and they enable you to securely tell Siri where your stuff is around the house. When you can’t find one of those things, just ask Siri and she’ll tell you. If you put that thing somewhere else, just tell Siri and she’ll remember next time you can’t find it.

If you like, you can tap on the links below to download Found It and all its components:

• Found It (the master Shortcut, which does everything)
  
• Keep Track of Something (just asks Siri to track something new)
  
• Help Me Find Something (just asks Siri to look up where something is)
  
• I Moved Something (just tells Siri the new location of something)

From there, you can start tracking your own stuff. These shortcuts also support custom inputs, so you can make your own mini-Shortcuts that ask Siri for a specific item (so you don’t have to re-specify every single time). For example, I made a shortcut to ask Siri “Where’s the hammer?” since I keep leaving my hammer in random places around the house, and she’ll just tell me that. You can get that example here; you’ll just need to tell Siri where your hammer is first.

The master shortcut is available on RoutineHub, which is a community and directory of crazy-powerful Shortcuts.

If this is interesting to you, let’s talk

I’ve realized over the past week that Shortcuts creation is basically a lightweight form of programming, and it’s proven very helpful in the solving of everyday problems around the house. I’m going to be writing more about my explorations here (like some people are already doing — see Federico Viticci or Matthew Cassinelli for just two great examples). If you have a problem you need solving and I might be able to help you solve it with a Shortcut, or if you just find this interesting, let me know or subscribe to this newsletter. Thanks for listening!

So, layoffs are weird

This past week my previous employer laid off roughly 3% of its staff. A lot of people lost jobs, and I personally worked with about two dozen of them and knew those folks pretty well.

😞

I’m not going to pretend that this was a massively unexpected surprise; this is absolutely something that happens with over-hiring and mismanagement of performance for large groups of skilled employees. I’m surprised it hadn’t happened already, to be completely honest. But I can’t ignore the fact that layoffs are a really weird thing and I’ve been thinking about it more than I care to in the past few days.

Layoffs are especially weird in 21st-century society, in that we’re able to easily rally for each other on a social network and get out of laid-off status in a matter of hours. I posted twice on LinkedIn offering to help or talk to anyone affected by the layoffs, and these were by far the most popular posts I’ve ever made on a social network, ever. Not only did laid-off folks appreciate it (I spend much of yesterday afternoon responding to folks looking for tips on remote work), but dozens of former colleagues, current colleagues and people I’ve never met liked and commented on what I had to say. Most of those people also had their thing to say, and most of the thoughts were exactly the same: offers to help or talk, the processing of “many feelings” with ultimate optimism and gratitude.

It almost feels compulsory, that you must post about one of these things because everyone else in your circle is already doing it: if you’re not grateful to the employer that laid you off, you’re an ass. That compulsory feeling leads it the emotions feeling fake. I genuinely do want to help because I think a lot of highly-skilled and intelligent people aren’t aware of the possibilities out there beyond open office environments at well-intentioned-but-sometimes-overzealous e-commerce companies. I also want to make sure folks are okay with expressing frustration or constructive criticism at their previous employers, because without that it’s hard to imagine companies getting smarter about how they hire and evaluate the need for teams & individuals if everyone’s grateful for the company that took away their lifeline on a moment’s notice.

At least people come together to help each other in the face of a bad situation.

I saw some recruiter posting about a job fair for the folks affected, and his post mentioned layoffs at another company. I then started digging and realized just how many companies — large, highly-reputed, tech companies — are growing too quickly or cannot meet the demand of the market in which they compete. Tripadvisor had layoffs last month, AthenaHealth did last year, so did State Street, and there are rumors flying around that LogMeIn also did recently. Turns out dozens of Boston-based companies have had pretty major layoffs in the past decade.

Another friendly reminder that the primary goal of these businesses is to grow and profit, and the care of its employees is predominantly secondary. If you can find a place where you’re felt taken care of well enough, then good on you.

It’s hard to be helpful in a way that doesn’t feel alienating to someone. Here’s an attempt.

Some advice to anyone who was surprised by it: pay more attention to your employer’s hiring goals, earnings calls, performance review process and the perceived performance of those around you. You’ll quickly realize that there’s plenty of places from which to trim fat in a pinch.

Or here’s some other advice that I’m working on myself: make it so that a layoff doesn’t affect you. This can be done in multiple ways, but here are two I’ve really focused on:

• Pay very close attention to how your current or next employer runs things: how it spends money, its hiring goals, how it runs performance evaluations, where its profits come from. Ask questions if you don’t understand things or don’t find the information you’re looking for. If you can’t get answers, think about why you’re not getting answers. Ideally, you’ll find a company that is clear with how it runs things and that aligns with your values.
  
• Don’t be confined by where you live. Yes, relocation can be hard, but also, remote work is very much a thing that you should not ignore. A quick search with the right keywords (think “remote position jobs”) will net you some interesting stuff to consider. If you like being in an office, coworking spaces do exist, and some companies will even cover this expense if you play your cards right.
  
• Build up safety nets in other work, and, if you can, find a job that will enable you the time to do this. This is the classic side hustle argument. Most people I know who work in tech are so consumed by their work that it feels impossible to make time to do things on the side. My advice? Unless you truly love your work, don’t work for companies that consume you. My previous employer was one of those, and while I loved the work for a long time, once I stopped loving it I needed to get out.

I’ll stop talking now.

Everyone’s a workaholic

There were multiple nights in January during which I wanted to work on one of those things I resolved to start doing this year, but sometimes one just wants to watch a wonderful television show or spin a record. But there persists a nagging feeling. An itch not being scratched.

I have a lot of itches. One involves forming chords on a piano keyboard, another involves what you’re reading right now, another involves automating my house, another involves just building something cool. I’m not a skilled coder, but I’ve wanted to become good at it so I could eventually make an app on my own. And then I realized that nocode is a thing: No-code development, the idea (or now a movement, I guess) that there are dozens of cheap, scalable services out there on the Internet now which can be strung together to form a meaningfully viable business operation.

I could spin up an idea of my own in a weekend.

I assumed correctly that I’m incredibly late to the party: Personalities on Twitter spinning out consulting services to help fellow no-coders, whole premium communities where indie hackers bounce ideas and team up. But virtually everyone I see on the internet talking about something they love is talking about their paid vocation.

This is not just isolated to weird, specialty forums, but has also taken over my Instagram. I have reached the point where Facebook’s own app — yes, the app that my mother and her friends use more than people my own age — is more useful to me than Instagram, because Instagram for me has devolved into nothing more than puppy pics and individuals & corporations trying to convince me to buy things. Facebook is at least where I can talk to extended family or learn about delays in trash pickups & snow emergencies in town. On Instagram, every fourth story is a sponsored ad, and my feed is roughly 75% people promoting their new albums/projects/products/hustles/whatever. My wife’s feed is even worse.

It’s worse now that it’s extending into the real world. My wife and I need to make a conscious effort not to talk shop while eating meals. The most troubling example: We received a Christmas card from some friends (intentionally keeping theme anonymous), and they were promoting a product in. The. Christmas. Card.

Everyone selling all the time can’t be good for us as humans. Talking only about your work all the time inherently adds massive stakes to virtually every conversation you have; your life is centered on your income, your lifeblood. Sure, eventually some of those side hustles could become sustainable, passive income, and that’s the dream. But think about the psychological damage this is probably giving us.

No wonderful mindfulness apps are so popular: it’s not that they’re fashionable, it’s that all of us are regularly on the verge of a psychotic break.

I truly hope my fellow millenials have hobbies they can pour this anxiety into. The beauty of a hobby is that, if I lose interest, or if my interest changes shape, there are no stakes. I can morph that hobby as I please and as my passion for it changes. When I decided to stop exploring music as a profession, it didn’t stop me from playing; when I decided I no longer enjoy live music, I kept recording music and listening to recorded music. I listen to new and old music constantly; I strive to engage in deep conversations around why great music is great. But I gave up on trying to make money on it, and .

But then again, maybe I should be trying to: I could have done this. There’s the fucking itch again, and here comes the psychotic break.

Instead,

I might start buying Lego sets again and writing about that. Would that get attention?

Clarity check-in

And here’s month two. There’s a beautiful partly sunny sky outside but I’m instead staring at an iPad screen. Just kidding, I’m oscillating between the two because the outside is nice.

My theme of the new year was about striving for clarity, and reflecting on the first month of the new decade, forced weekly writing seems to be helping achieve this. I have a bit more clarity around how and why I think about things, what things I want to spend time thinking about, and how I want to convey them.

One thing I’m not thinking about is the Super Bowl, which is a waste of my time.

I have a few larger topics I’m noodling on for future posts, but for now I have some updates on how the year is going so far, and some things I’ve enjoyed along the way.

insert subscribe button

Not doing things is doing things

I did write down some resolutions-of-sorts back on New Year’s Day, in the spirit of that theme. A few are progressing fairly well: writing regularly, being more present for my wife, stopping & breathing more.

Others… well, I have enough clarity to know I don’t care to move those forward at the moment. They’re simply not as important to me as the ones in focus right now. These are things I’m not doing:

• Participating in a band/musician/songwriting group. I’ll probably write more about this later, but I’ve been rethinking what kind of music I want to make after becoming inspired more by ambient & solo piano music than recent popular music. This is an area for which I am working toward clarity but haven’t gotten there yet. Once I figure this out, I’ll explore this or whether it’s even going to add value to my music composition.
  
• Finding something with which to spoil myself. I wrote this down at the behest of my wife who suggested I should do more for myself, and I agreed, but this has been difficult to give priority. I honestly feel like getting a puppy was a splurge.
  
• Cultivating an online base/community/whatever. I see this newsletter as something to contribute here, but also I simply don’t care too much to self-promote — I’d rather just write what I feel and see if it sticks.
  
• Reading regularly. I started a fiction book and it’s at my bedside, and every time I go to read it I’m asleep in five minutes. Damn you, comfortable mattress.

One area I’m still working through is more strategically defining my relationship with capital-w Work. Working remotely is wonderful and I’ve even grown comfortable with being a bit scattered about it, but I realized early this year that I was so excited about remote work that I neglected to think about what else I might want out of my job. To me, this is not about leaving my job for something better (because no job is perfect but working for Abstract is quite great), but ensuring that I’m being clear, proactive and assertive about what I expect out of the job and how I want to shape it. I’m circling around this idea now, and not sure how it will work out.

Quick aside: “Stay tuned” is an obsolete phrase and let’s stop saying it

I was about to end that last paragraph with “Stay tuned.” It felt immensely weird to say that, for two reasons:

1. I loathe the idea of demanding my tiny reader base to be attentive to my bullshit
   
2. When I publish my next update, an email will appear in your inbox. You don’t need to stay tuned at all; it will just appear.

“Stay tuned” is no longer a thing we need to do because, other than cable TV, our technology no longer warrants it. From Quora:

Back in the day of radio broadcasting, before the era of automatic frequency control (in the radio tuner) a station would ‘drift’ and the listener would have to move the tuner dial ever so slightly to hear the station loud and clear (remember the strength and clarity call out 5 by 5, in which each was evaluated on a 1 to 5 scale, with 5 being the best). Atmospheric propagation would also cause the station to surge and fade at times.
…Now enter the role of the sponsors of the radio program. Each sponsor would be billed a certain amount based on the number of “ears” that the program would “deliver”. If the number of listeners dropped, the sponsor would pay less and the radio stations income would also drop. It was certainly in the radio stations best interest for listeners to stay tuned to the program - and it would sometimes take a dedicated effort on the part of the listener to ‘stay tuned’.

Internet people: Let’s stop saying this, k? It’s not relevant for our medium. Honestly, it makes us sound desperate for someone’s attention. Might as well say “don’t forget about me.”

Ambient Essentials is the best music for not being distracted

The best thing — no surprise — has been shutting off the TV and instead listening to music. Turns out when something isn’t visually distracting you, you’re less distracted.

I truly madly deeply love music, but sometimes it’s also distracting. The one exception that has one-hundred-percent delivered on not distracting is Apple Music’s Ambient Essentials playlist. This is a wonderful mix of highly repetitive, calming pieces that both engross me and allow time to pass without me even noticing. Case & point: William Basinski’s forty-minute-long “dlp 6” and Ekkehard Ehlers’ heartbreaking “Plays John Cassavetes II.”

Oh, also, sorry — not a Spotify user. There’s a comparable playlist there, though, for all you folks.

BoJack Horseman is over and I’m sad, plus other recent great TV

I’ve started to more deliberately watch TV less and at specific times, which has admittedly been a challenge because there’s so much damn good TV. Just in the past 1-2 weeks, here’s what I’ve enjoyed a lot:

• BoJack Horseman, season 6 part 2. This has been arguably my favorite show of the 2010s, and I’m sad to see it go.
  
• The New Pope. The pace is slow, but the cinematography is beautiful and the premise is incredibly interesting to watch.
  
• Servant. I haven’t enjoyed psychological thrillers much lately, but this one has just enough to keep intrigued, between the creepy nanny and the amazing food/cooking shots.
  
• Broad City. This isn’t new and I loved this show when it was current, but Alicia and I began rewatching it as the show we could use to laugh out loud when no other show would… including The Good Place which ended strong but not hilarious.

I’ve noticed a recurring theme in these shows as being powerful and immersive, but still escapist. Little America on Apple TV+ seemed good, but it’s too real-world (and somehow feels problematic despite the intent) for me to enjoy right now.

The fewer tools, the better

Like Viticci has been touting recently, and Merlin Mann so eloquently put in a recent episode of Back to Work, I’ve felt a higher degree of clarity by resorting to basics instead of elaborate tools when it comes to my devices & apps. I first tackled this for my online presence, which is no longer beholden to unreliable web hosting providers, and simpler too as a result. I already tweeted about this, so in the spirit of not repeating myself:

Late to this, but being an individual online is so cheap in 2020 thanks to #nocode. I can have a cohesive personal brand that hooks into all the networks for basically $20/year if I wanted. (1/3)

— brandon lucas green (@sphmrs) January 19, 2020

The biggest burden w/r/t tools has been how I plan & keep track of what I need to do every day. For a while I used Things to meticulously organize & track those things. It’s a beautiful and quite capable app, but it overwhelmed me constantly. So I pulled everything out of it and moved it all into stock Reminders and Notes. I was already using these to share basic lists with my wife (groceries, shopping, some house project stuff), and when I realized I don’t need to hold myself to arbitrary deadlines for most things in my personal life, I realized the incredibly simple ecosystem I had for myself.

Things that must take place on a day or at a time are in my calendar. I religiously use calendar notifications, even for personal deadlines like posting this newsletter.

Things I need reminders about end up in Reminders (woah). I don’t need a special methodology to organize and categorize those things to do. Notes acts as a reference, a system of record, things I occasionally need to look up: like house utility information, useful shortcuts tips, gift ideas. Sure, I could categorize and tag these things incessantly, but I can also just search for them.

Everything that isn’t obviously a task needing a reminder or a reference note starts in Drafts, which is the one exception to this first-party rule. I like Drafts for a few reasons:

• Capturing an idea reliably from my Apple Watch is the best thing, and it’s the most reliable way to do this.
  
• This thing can format, merge move and prepare text for use literally anywhere, including Substack (on which this newsletter is hosted), which has neither an app or an API.
  
• Virtually everything in this app can be organized as I like and done in one click or keyboard shortcut.

Drafts plays the role of my daily agenda, not unlike the pen-and-paper planners folks used to (and still?) use. I wrote a Shortcut that pulls reminders and events taking place today and organizes it all into a Draft — I run this every morning as part of a larger routine that shuts off the alarm system and turns on a few lights downstairs, so it’s ready for me as I’m starting the day. This prepared draft aggregates everything I need to do, everything that’s going on, into a single sheet. With the Taskpaper format, I can easily cross things off the list or add notes to go through later. For reminders that come up throughout the day, I can also check those off when the notification hits, or I can sync a matching thing on my Agenda back over and kill the reminder if I no longer need it.

This is still evolving — in some ways Reminders feels redundant with Drafts for things that are not time-sensitive, so I might move some of my generic lists over to Drafts, which seems like a common use case for this app. That said, simplifying how I go through my day has helped me take better notes while also feeling less overwhelmed or distracted by apps. It’s also been a fun tinkering exercise.

Here’s a link to the Shortcut, in case it’s helpful to you: Prep Daily Agenda

That’s all I’ve got. Bye!