Weekly Head Voices #126: Fleur-de-lis.

Betty’s Bay’s Crepuscular Rays. An apostrophe in time saves rhyme.

Betty’s Bay’s Crepuscular Rays. An apostrophe in time saves rhyme.

  • Happy new year everyone, and welcome to the first Weekly (truly?! will this be the year?) Head Voices of 2018!
  • I ended 2017 with a longish (by my standards) run in the morning, followed by a laid-back mini-party and finally by struggling really hard to stay awake until midnight.
  • In contrast, returning to the office on January 2 was a pretty good way to ease gradually into work in 2018. Many colleagues were still on vacation, so the week felt a bit like work with training wheels.
  • Pro-tip #1 for the new year: In the last few weeks of 2017 I started (again…) explicitly making quiet time at the start of the day to think about what I want to take care of. These take the form of a small number of Org mode- [ ] Do this thing” checklist items that are usually related to but separate from my main tasks. I find it amazing to which extent these few minutes are able to shape my day. (In my org mode monthly journal, I also usually start by listing out manually the tasks I want to complete during that month, as well as the ideas / thoughts / principles I want to keep in my sights.)
  • Pro-tip #2 for the new year: After years of resisting these types of software tools due to my belief that I should simply apply more grit and will power to squeeze out more focus hours, I finally broke down and purchased the macOS app called Focus. You click its pretty icon, and then your computer goes into focus mode: The Mail application and a bunch of other non-focus-related apps all get killed, and a bunch of websites (reddit, youtube, work chat, etc) are blocked for a user-configurable block of time. I rationalised this purchase with the following reasoning: It usually takes a single moment of weakness for a distraction to terminate a valuable block of focus. It takes a single moment of strength for this tool to start a valuable block of focus.
  • Although I’m having fun, I really don’t think I’m supposed to use bullets like this.
  • Thank you very much for spending time here with me. I wish you a week of value and focus, followed by a visit to the next WHV!
    The Huguenot Monument in Franschhoek, where we found ourselves an hour or two ago. Immediacy FTW.

    The Huguenot Monument in Franschhoek, where we found ourselves an hour or two ago. Immediacy FTW.

P.S. This post was finished during a 30 minute FocusApp block. Background music: Balance 014 by Joris Voorn, one of my favourite music creations ever.