Intro

Well, we had our first skip in this regular posts last week because I both had a heavy dental operation and COVID in that time period — which was enough to knock me out and leave me with a two weeks worth of backlog. That’s why I’m in a “so much to do, so little time” situation once again.

Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.

Mission Control

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Most of the stuff from last week is still on my desk, because of the events I mentioned in the intro.That’s why the main goal this week is to both get better and deal with the backlog so it doesn’t further leak into the coming weeks.

I also have a Now page on my website if you want to check what I’m up to in a more detailed way.

Productivity in Real Life

Having an ADHD brain, a professional life which I must be the one running everything, and a technical curiosity means that I have an unhealthy interest in productivity systems and tools. I love testing and trying things, talking about them, and trying to refine my own personal system.

But this doesn’t mean that I’m one of those “productivity gurus/influencers” that makes you believe that the one true system will solve everything and you’ll become that perfect self because I know it’s bullshit for the same reason I love playing with those tools. Real life doesn’t care about your routines and systems, it’s way too messy to fine-tune it. None of those systems will prepare you for having multiple health issues back to back or having unexpected events. Most of them will just make you feel worse for falling behind.

Most of those systems will look amazing at first and those productivity gurus or “really successful people” will make them look like that’s the ideal way of living. But you never see them talk about mundane, boring part of the life in those systems. I’ve never seen a productivity system that includes housework or really boring bureaucratic stuff. You’ll never see those successful people talk about doing dishes or cleaning their houses. That’s because either they have someone else dealing with the boring and really time consuming part of the life or it doesn’t look good enough on a system that sells hustle mentality.

I wanted to talk about this because when I started to get better and try to figure out how to clean this backlog of tasks, I also fell into that feeling of guilt — when there’s nothing I should feel guilty about. All of those productivity tools and gurus claim they’re helping you but most of them are actually instills that guilt and shame in the background. This is the problem with trying to put something messy and chaotic into a neat system, you’re trying to do something impossible and making yourself feel like a failure in the meantime.

(This line of “trying to put something messy and chaotic into a neat system” can be applied into many different things as well but right now I don’t have much time so keep an eye for a longer blog post on that soon.)

So, whenever I write about work stuff, productivity tools or systems in this blog; keep in mind that I’m only trying to make this chaos more manageable for myself and hoping that you’ll find something useful in my experiments.

Song of the Week

I’m in the mood for some strong metal lately, so I return a lot of my old favorites like this one.

Reading Log

“Although philosophers don’t often talk about this, it would appear that they assume that the interpretation of thought experiments should be subject to a convention of authoritative authorial ethical framing. In other words, the experiments are about what the author intends them to be and nothing else, much like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, who used words to mean whatever he wanted them to mean. To further spell out the implied convention, the author of the thought experiment has, by definition, specified all the ethically relevant elements of the case.”

What is the problem with ethical trolley problems? – James Wilson

“This is the black-metal nature of task management: Every single time you write down a task for yourself, you are deciding how to spend a few crucial moments of the most nonrenewable resource you possess: your life. Every to-do list is, ultimately, about death.”

Of the hundreds of methods out there to help us get things done…why don’t they, you know, work? – Clive Thompson

Outro

I hope you don’t mind that we have a short one for this week. I’m already seeing these regular posts working for me so it’ll definitely continue. I’m also hoping to do more normal blogging as well because there’s so much in my head which I want to work on in a more public way.

Please take care of yourself and do your best to not get COVID.

See you next week!

If you want to work together to make sense of what's ahead, Tuhaf Studio is open for new clients. You can also get in touch with London Speaker Bureau Türkiye if you want to hire me as a speaker or panelist. If you want to become a regular supporter of my public work and help me create more, you can visit my Patreon. Thanks!