Top of mind, my reason for creating this new blog. I’ve been thinking about improving the way I approach tasks. Namely, I want to get better at taking small steps on a regular basis that build up to meeting a bigger goal. I don’t know if I realistically would publish some long work of writing, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. It wouldn’t hurt, if I find the interest and motivation in the future, to have had some routine practice writing and expressing my thoughts.
Further, I want to test a new way to keep track of my daily thoughts. I primarily want to give myself the ability to review what past-me had on his mind, facilitating future-me’s decisions. I won’t be publishing my deepest darkest secrets here, just broader topics I have on my mind. I don’t expect people to follow along with anticipation, but if anyone finds reading my posts here interesting, I wouldn’t be unhappy about it.
I intend to publish here more frequently than on Chronicles. The scope of that blog is different: a place for me to share useful resources and learning experiences I find pursuing projects. I expect this new blog to be more raw and not quite as useful to people besides me.
I’m thinking about ways to improve my personal efficiency. My time is fixed and limited, so the important choice for me is in how I spend my time. Listening to an episode of the Tim Ferriss show earlier, I heard an interesting distinction I’ll paraphrase here: the goal is not to do more of some task in the same amount of time (say, responding to more emails), but rather to decide on the most impactful parts of that task to spend time on (responding only to valuable emails and not wasting time on low/no-value emails).
Tim and Joel also discussed focusing on the 20% of things that lead to 80% of your unhappiness to identify ways to improve the quality of your life. I hadn’t thought about applying the 80-20 rule to that perspective, but it’s definitely got my mental gears turning.
For quite a while, I’ve been running my personal life almost exclusively on iOS devices. I loved using my iPad Pro for anything and everything I could. I had an aging mid-2012 MacBook Pro that was excruciatingly slow for even the simplest tasks, bolstering my preference for tackling personal tasks on my iPad.
Recently, I got a gorgeous new mid-2017 space grey MacBook Pro. This Mac has pulled me away from doing a lot of things on my iPad. Speed in the following three areas is the primary factor: performance, charging and task efficiency.
On the performance front, this Mac has an SSD, which plays a huge role in making things lightning fast (and solving the problem that made me deign to use my old Mac). I haven’t had this device stutter or drop frames even when I’ve had multiple resource hogging apps running at once (think Chrome, Excel, Word, Firefox and more).
I wasn’t anticipating my experience charging this device, but it benefits tremendously from USB-C fast charging. Several times, I’ve done a double-take after having plugged in my Mac for a short while because the battery percentage will have massively jumped up. It charges much faster than any other device I have, including the aforementioned iPad Pro with a USB-C to Lightning cable plugged in. Given the tremendous capabilities of this device, it feels great to know that battery life is effectively a non-issue because I can charge it in a snap.
Finally, task efficiency. It pains me to say this as someone who invested so much effort in and very much enjoyed working through an iOS-based task workflow, but I’ll be damned if I don’t say that I’m still much more efficient at completing all sorts of large and small tasks on my Mac.
All of this is not to say my iPad is sitting unloved somewhere in a dusty corner. I actually have it right by me and am figuring out its place in my life. The strongest urges pulling me back to it are the ability to use an Apple Pencil to physically flesh out thoughts in handwriting, and a more comfortable reading experience.