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You Have to Check Your Systems

A task management system only works if you check it, which is absolutely a problem I suffer from in both digital and physical forms of task management. My main job involves Github Issues so I check that daily, but the rest of my Todoist list often languishes for months.

In previous years I’d get down on myself about this because I wasn’t hitting the synthetic ideal you often see preached online, but now I don’t sweat it. The important stuff gets done and the things that sound nice don’t.

The same principle applies to your notes. As we talked about last week, you have to check your notes if you want to make progress with them. Whether you take notes physically or digitally, everyone I’ve coached struggles with putting time aside to go through their notes and think about them and draw deeper connections between them.

Your notes are useless to your knowledge growth if you don’t go back through them to continue to integrate new notes/knowledge with older notes/knowledge.

The Life a Billionaire Plans for You

With billionaires buying land to build their own cities one has to wonder how things would actually go under their rule. One recent example I read was Liberty’s Daughter which follows Beck Garrison as she lives on a libertarian seastead that her father helps run. Sure if you have enough money it is a decent life, but if you don’t maybe your chained to a bench to grow skin and exposed to terrible chemicals everyday.

But that may even be a nice example of how an ego-maniacal billionaire would run a city. It’s entirely possible that the Wayward Pines trilogy by Blake Crouch is a better example. I first read this years ago at the recommendation of my friend Carrie and enjoyed the story, but a coming back to it this month I see a much more sinister example in real life.

Spoilers ahead

Our main villain is David Pilcher who predicted that the human genome would collapse and thus funded/invented stasis pods so that his selected humans could be saved for 2000 years and see what happened. The big problem is that Pilcher only asked about 200 people and kidnapped the other 600 people that end up making up his city. In fact if you live in the seemingly idyllic city, you didn’t have any idea what was coming.

There is a long list of things you can’t talk about, like your life before Wayward Pines. The children are educated to believe that Pilcher is their god/father because he alone can protect them. If you step far enough out of line Pilcher calls a party where you’re the guest of honour, which means everyone hunts you down and kills you.

Even as things collapse around Pilcher all he can see is that no one appreciates his vision for the future. He’s baffled that people don’t appreciate him more, and that not even his hand selected “true believers” understand why he tortured and killed his daughter. He expected them to just go along with him because of his money and because he’s smart.

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There are many parallels between Pilcher and the tech-bros we have today. Many won’t allow any argument, they assume they know everything and because they have money can make the best decisions for everyone. They figure we should let them do what they want and not let ethical questions get in the way of progress.

But I fear if we let them have their way and run the world we’d get a Wayward Pines. They live pretty, while everyone else is monitored. A select few get special privileges, but most people have to follow the rules or they’ll be dead.

Personal Blogging Evolution

What is your blogging evolution? Mine has been in phases of interest. For years I wrote about freelancing and running a business as I tried to figure that out. Then I waffled around for awhile writing about the random things I found interesting. Then I spent lots of time talking about Obsidian and note-taking, which has slowed down a bit as I have more of that figured out.

While many people say that you need to stick with a niche to grow your audience, I wonder if that killed blogging. I’m in fact working on a longer piece on that topic specifically. When everyone was trying to be the next big blog so that they could just become a blogger going niche may have been the best advice for a business. I’m not sure it was ever the best advice for the writer though.

Years ago as I first started getting backlash about writing less freelance content I decided that my site would be about whatever I wanted to write about. There are months or years that have a focus, but that focus may change which mean my audience may change and my site may no longer be for you.

I hope you have a blog and I hope that you write about the things that interest you because that’s what keeps it fresh.