A lot of perceptive writing is happening on blogs these days and we limit ourselves by spending too much time on news and social media. Here are some links to enliven the start of your weekend:

Art of Managing Yourself: Things I’ve Learned

How often have you experienced a situation where you start the day happy and sunny, coffee in hand but it quickly devolves into a day with helmet on, water hose attached, and you, face smeared and hair singed, putting out rapid fires in succession?

That, my friend, is the chaos that must be so actively managed. The takeaway here is the value in managing oneself, to maintain order.

Yina Huang’s observation that everything is always falling apart is totally on point and the way that the universe is built (2nd law of thermodynamics). What we need to do is create a scaffolding that takes that into account and allows us to build up our systems again. Continually.

In Defense of Reading Goals

But if you’re operating in an environment where pattern-matching is useful, it probably helps to expand the set of patterns you have in your head. And reading goals work well for that, because they push you to read when you might otherwise spend time on YouTube, or Twitter, or on the next autoplayed Netflix show.

Cedric Chin’s argument goes like this: the more information that you can take in from books, the more it will allow you to match patterns from what you read onto the nature of unfolding reality, especially in your professional field. This will allow you to answer questions and take advantage of that information in order to succeed.

ten recent thoughts

3. What we have now is what we used to want.

This list of ideas from Rebecca doesn’t initially seem connected. Sit with them for awhile and you might just feel clarity returning.

Structured distraction: how to make the most of your breaks at work

The problem is that today’s environment is actually full of stimuli which may grab our attention during those periods of scanning our immediate surroundings. Next time you blame yourself for letting your mind wander or clicking on a notification while trying to do focused work, remember that it’s just your brain doing what it is supposed to do: be on the lookout for potential danger.

It can be brutal trying to retain focus much of the time. Anne-Laure Le Cunff tells us that this is actually the way we’re wired, and taking these breaks can help our brains to do some much-needed housecleaning.

Further reading: 20 Blogs I Read in 2020: Quarantine Edition

Have a great weekend!