I’m an old school junglist raver and first learned how to dance and let loose in a party to jungle music in New York City in the 90s. I was part of the original Konkrete Jungle scene when I was 15 and 16 and have some incredible memories of those times. This was a moment prior to Rudy Giuliani (yes, that same one) becoming mayor of NY and his draconian, ignorant nightlife crackdown. The underground was alive and well and there was an incredible energetic moment for dance music which was mixing with hiphop, dancehall, the popular urban music of NY.

I never connected with house music, techno or more overt ‘dance’ music at that time. It was probably too feminine and gay for my teenage boy self, and the overt mechanical darkness of the harder side of European dance music just didn’t appeal. I was a hiphop fan first and foremost, and jungle had that feeling, it was full of samples and references back to hiphop and reggae and focused intently on beats and bass. It was perfect and just what I needed at the time. Unfortunately the underground dance scene in NYC was crushed by Giuliani and at the same time Jungle was evolving into it’s colder, harder, more streamlined cousin drum and bass. I did like some of that, and got into some of the darker vibes, but it pretty quickly lost me as it deadended into a kind of big-room linear aggression contest. This is pretty similar to what happened to dubstep over time as well, when everyone got into a contest to out-drop each other.

Returning to the present day, we have this wonderful, energetic, lively and colorful set by Sherelle at the boiler room. Somehow over twenty years we’ve made a kind of full circle and the vibes are back. What has lead us to this point? Dubstep got boring and a certain group of those people moved upward in tempo to the Chicago footwork sound lead by DJ Rashad (RIP). Footwork is wildly fast, abstract and rhythmically inventive, much like Jungle but favored a ruthless 150 bpm 4×4 rhythm that for many people is a bit too intense. A few years later the concepts of footwork have miscegenated with jungle and grime in London at the higher tempo of 160 bpm and the results are delirious and full of life and energy. I am super super happy to hear this development because there is such a rich musical thread to pick up here, reinjecting rhythmic complexity and the soulful heritage of black music back into high tempo music. The internet is a wonderful collapser of time and space with the cultural archive of the world living on YouTube so we have a new generation of multi-racial, multi-gender kids here wilding out to a rich mix of tempos, rhythms and cultural references. I love it.

I was going to write something about Jeff Bezos latest scandal which was basically “Wow the National Enquirer succeeded in more or less doing the impossible and making one of the richest most cutthroat and exploitative people on earth sympathetic.” But that’s basically the whole thing, so I’m going to just share some great music by Mall Grab.

This one has the lovely and simple plinky monophonic melodies of grime in it’s DNA but instead is hazy but propulsive house. I love it. Mall Grab is part of the complicated and hyper local stream of UK underground music. Mostly it’s a history of making weird stuff and then retreating and rediscovering house music again and again. Right now the pendulum is on a swing through house territory and there is some really great stuff being made. I guess if we need to give this a genre people are calling it Low-Fi House? Google that if you’re interested.

Making the historical context explicit is another utterly wonderful understated banger from Mall Grab called “I’ve Always Like Grime”. It’s fucking great, particularly for it’s prominent placement of one of Wiley’s trademark eski video game plonk sounds for the lead melody. This is an instant recipe to win my affection. The video is also silly and great.

Welcome back, dear readers. I missed a few days there, my apologies. Still reckoning with doing this daily and keeping up the rest of what I do. I took a few days off because I went on a short vacation with the kids to celebrate my son’s 10th birthday. We went to a very, very strange place for our vacation. It’s called Tropical Island and it’s an indoor beach which is in a retrofitted zeppelin dome sixty kilometers outside Berlin. If you want to get a taste for what life might be like if Elon Musk ever makes good on his plans to terraform Mars, this is a vacation-y version of it.

The dome itself was built as one of the largest self-supporting halls in the world, by a company called Cargolifter AG. They were trying to build a huge airship designed to ship heavy loads. The airship itself was never built, and the company went bankrupt in 2002, after having built the hangar at the former Brand-Briesen airfield outside Berlin. The airfield itself was originally built by the Nazi Luftwaffe, then occupied and used by the Soviet Army during the Cold War. The airfield went back into the hands of the reunified German federal government, and then was sold to Cargolifter, and finally to a Malaysian concern called Tanjong, who built Tropical Island. Like many things in Germany, it’s a site of fascinating and strange layered history. On the bus ride in you drive through a fairly severe landscape, past the decommissioned Hardened Air Shelters and toward this giant dome.

The inside of the dome is continually heated year round to 27 degrees celsius, creating the requisite tropical environment. The environment is cleverly designed with winding paths and complex sight lines in order to make the enclosed space feel larger than it is. There’s definitely an interesting level-design lesson there about compact space for video game designers. The park is filled with water slides, pools and restaurants and you can rent a tent or hotel room for the night in order to sleep in the dome. We did this and it was very strange, but fun. Unlike what one would find in America, there is also a very nicely appointed sauna facility with steam, dry heat and ice baths, which I loved. As an American, you may be surprised to find that it’s co-ed and naked. If you find yourself in the north of Germany in winter, and are looking for a taste of the tropics along with a taste of surreal, retrofitted post-modern history, I recommend it.

I’m going to try to lay this out in a direct, but non-accusatory way. This is primarily targeted at men at work, but also applies to non-men as well to a lesser extent. This is not saying that anyone being horny at work is a creep or molester, but that on-balance, the net effect of being horny at work is negative, particularly for people who are not protected by the power structure. This note was inspired by two things which crossed my social feed. One was a stupid article in the NY Times coming out of the world economic forum in which rich powerful men complained that they no longer felt ‘safe’ mentoring or doing one on one work with women since the #MeToo movement. I won’t link it because I don’t want to give them hate clicks. The second was a comment in a separate thread by a woman who said she’d done ten job interviews and got zero job offers but three requests for dates. This was in the context of the video game industry. The video game industry is particularly bad because it’s very intensely male dominated, so everyone who is a decision maker is a man more or less.

Here’s the thing: the world of work is hierarchical and contains complex power structures. Layering dating and sexuality into those power structures creates imbalance. Consciously or unconsciously, this is the dynamic that horny people at work are using to their advantage. At work, you are known and potentially you have respect and status. I’ve been at my job for almost five years, people know who I am, mostly like me (I think) and I get a certain amount of respect. I’m not a random person and I’m not at the bottom of the hierarchy. It is understandable then that I might want to use this position to create openings for romance. It is less uncomfortable than hitting on someone at a bar, or on a dating app, where I have zero status and am a complete unknown. However, this is exactly the problem. By using that privileged position, you are willingly or unwillingly exerting power over other people in your work environment. You are forcing them to say yes or no on an uneven playing field.

My advice is instead, focus your romantic energies on places where you do not have a structural status advantage. Your friends circle, online dating, or basically anywhere where you are not entangled in an overt and important power hierarchy. This is a more honest way to date as well, you know that anyone who is expressing interest in you is doing it on an even playing field. It also avoids a lot of messiness if there is a breakup or some other bad situation, it doesn’t splash over all areas of your life like it will if you are at work. It also protects the less powerful people in your work place not only from being put in an uncomfortable position with you, but also with other people, potentially who are less kind and ethical than you are. If you are being horny at work (or sweetly having a loving and wholesome relationship with a coworker, as you no doubt see it) then you are normalizing this behavior in the workplace and making it OK for other people to attempt to pursue the same. This creates an uncomfortable and potentially unsafe work environment for your less powerful (and usually non-male) colleagues. Do us all a favor and go get on Tinder or something. There are plenty of lovely people outside your workplace to meet and it’s not a bad thing if you have to do a little extra work to impress and win them over because you are starting from a more equal playing field.

PS: I know some very nice people who have office romances who might read this (Hi!) and I mean this with all due love and respect, but yes, I’m talking to you too 🙂

Image: “Three Wishes” by Dominik Mayer

Dystopia and apocalypse play an energetic role in the public imagination, as sites of horror but also as sites of possibility and disruption. Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” imagines the explosion of the credit card companies freeing a generation from debt slavery, and a return to a simpler de-urbanized nomadic life. Many television shows imagine the vistas of a destroyed world, and the possibility for people to become heroic amidst it. Apocalypse in the popular imagination is often tinged as much with opportunity and hopefulness for a clean slate as it is with tragedy and loss. There are a few imaginings of the post-apocalyptic world which attempt to drive home the misery and horror of such an existence, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” notable among them, along with “The Parable Of The Sower” by Octavia Butler and also some of the novels in her Patternist series.

Butler in particular, who’s work focuses on power dynamics, drills into the fact that in a world without laws, power goes to the most ruthless, shameless and predatory, and everything that that means. This leads us to the question, who’s apocalypse is this anyway? To paraphrase William Gibson “The apocalypse is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”

Bad Salish Girl is a sqilxw indigenous anarchist focused on ecology restoration, land base survivalism and indigenous language revitalization. I enjoy her writing on Twitter which is alternately vulnerable, thoughtful and combative and offers a first person view of her experience as a young indigenous woman in the US. The point made in her tweet is I think an important one. For indigenous survivors of the US genocide, the apocalypse has already occurred, and they are living and surviving in the aftermath. This is almost certainly true for other post-colonial populations around the world for whom the arrival of white Europeans has meant devastation, ecological catastrophe, plague and trauma.

I just finished reading Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller and it is very, very good. It fits into the loose post-climate change genre of science fiction that some people are calling SolarPunk (if we must assign names and movements to things). It focuses on a floating city called Qaanaaq anchored atop a geothermal vent in the Arctic circle. The world building and sense of life after the deluge is very strong but perhaps more notable (for an sf novel) are the lively and likeable characters, notably arrayed across a spectrum of sexual orientation. Although there are definitely a number of slightly cliched, or perhaps more charitably archetypal characters including the world-weary boxer and the spunky messenger kid, the detail of their struggles and vividness of their emotions punches through. The narrative hinges around a group of pharmaceutical test subjects called the nanobonded who gain the ability to psychically link with an animal for life. One of the heroes of the story is a woman who shows up in town riding an orca with a polar bear in tow. It’s a novel, fun idea and works in the story.

The plot moves along at a brisk pace, but for me the most affecting and lasting impression of the novel is the feeling it transmits of struggling to live in a city. Miller, the author is based in New York City, my hometown. The city features prominently in the story, even though it has long since drowned. People speak in recognizable New York accents and the history of actions taken in and against the city are part of the plot. The descriptions of people struggling to live in the semi-lawlessness of AI controlled Qaanaaq, struggling to keep warm, struggling to find tiny spaces to rent in which to sleep, struggling to maintain a place in the social fabric of the city feels incredibly New York in it’s concerns. One of the central struggles of the narrative is between tenants and rich landlords. The portrayal of city-as-cliff-face which people cling to daily trying to survive, even as they watch those around them slip and fall, is powerful and affecting. There’s a memorable scene in which one of the characters must choose whether to eat or rent a warm room for the night and goes to sleep bitterly angry in a cold canvas sided box that I found particularly memorable.

What strikes me about Blackfish City above all is it’s multifaceted emotional depth. It’s a story of hardship, and harrowing experiences but does not fall down the hole of nihilism or subject us to an endless sadistic torturing of it’s characters, an exercise some authors seem to mistake for depth or seriousness. Instead we have a group of people struggling under terrible circumstances, but also finding moments of love, connection, familial closeness. These moments are all the more vivid for their humane contrast against the cold harshness of the world in which they live, and make them all the more affecting. Blackfish City is a beautiful book by a strong new voice, one I highly recommend.

Image: Found via Google image search, I thought this was hilariously cryptic and Wallace-ian, in contrast to the million motivational quote memes that also turn up. Perfect.

Last year I read a piece by Tim Wu in the New York Times called In Praise of Mediocrity. In it Wu argues that our pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure. That we cannot just do simple hobbies and activities to relax, purely for their own sake, instead they need to be building towards some socially acceptable and valuable outcome. This is something which I personally struggle with a great deal. In fact it’s something I’m struggling with in thinking about this blog. I spend time writing, because I enjoy it but also because it’s a way to produce a public product. I sort of embrace that it’s pointless, but its still ‘productive’ in some sense. I honestly have no idea what I’m doing here. My hope was that doing this daily some sense of direction would emerge but it hasn’t yet. I’m considering turning on analytics to see what is getting more traffic, but that’s a kind of poisonous activity in and of itself. One thing I’m going to do is move my email newsletter send to Mondays, and start taking Sundays off. Writing on Sundays with the kids in the house is stressful and not fun, and then I feel guilty if I don’t do it. So I think I’m going to start taking a day off a week.

Even my playing of video games, in this case Dota 2, has some element of ‘seriousness’ to it. I have been thinking that maybe I should start a YouTube channel to document what I’m learning as I play and to help teach others. There is a whole community of people doing this on YouTube, many with a lot of traffic, since the game is so hard and complicated. But this is evidence of the same infiltration of work and product-making into what should be a relaxing activity. So I’m resisting that impulse as well. What this reveals is the difficulty which I have in doing something purely for pleasure which I don’t see as ‘virtuous’ in some way. This connects in my mind to the article I posted a few weeks ago about millenial burnout. I think that there’s a process at work which tempts us to draw everything into the sphere of work or other virtuous activity like exercise or ‘being a good parent’ (another cognitive minefield). I’m feeling starved for time and space to think and work deeply on things I want to. But again, there it is, I want time, but not to relax and enjoy life, but instead to work. But for me working deeply on something I care about is in fact relaxing. It’s a confusing situation.

This also connects to a book I read not too long ago, and wrote briefly about, Mastery by George Leonard. The pursuit of mastery is the work of a lifetime, and can take place outside of what we think of as ‘work’. Leonard is an Aikido teacher and practitioner, something which few will be able to do professionally, but many will dedicate significant time to becoming excellent at. This idea of practice, of pursuing excellence, perhaps for it’s own sake, is a kind of virtue and is seen as such. What Wu argues for in his article is for us not to scorn the more dilletante pursuits of someone who just wants to dabble in a wide variety of things, purely for pleasure. In a way it’s a defense of frivolousness, of lightness, perhaps something we might think of as childish. As someone who finds that the older I become the more heavy and serious I become in my thinking and way of life, I feel the need for this. Luckily having children is a way for me to be continuously pulled in this direction, to participate in all kinds of silliness and pointless activities. But I think for all of us, Wu’s appeal is worth considering.

I’m white. Growing up in New York City and going to public school, I was aware of this fact because I grew up with people who were not white. Among us kids, it was a fact that was acknowledged and if not discussed, not ignored. No one pretended “not to see color”. We knew that this was a part of our identity and was probably connected to a bunch of other factors like class, money, and privilege, even if we couldn’t quite articulate that. As I get older, I realize that this is an experience not many white people have had. I’m speaking from an American perspective, but it’s also true here in Europe, which is intensely racially homogeneous compared to the way I grew up. For many of my fellow whites, being white is just “normal” and everyone else needs to add a special classification to specify their race.

Whiteness, or race in general is of course a fabrication, a construct. This does not mean it isn’t real today, and something that we have to live with. It was constructed as part of the ideology of white supremacy, a moral justification for the crimes of slavery and colonialism. It was important for our white ancestors to believe that what they were doing was for the sake of civilization, or Christendom or “the greater good”. White supremacy and the dehumanization of people of color was a critically useful justification for why all the rape, theft and murder was in fact not evil, but civilized and good in their eyes. It was also a tactical maneuver to divide the working class against itself, which was successful.

pic.twitter.com/d0JAzRxQnT— CIA (@CIA) January 21, 2019

The hilariously hypocritical lionization of Dr. Martin Luther King in the US by organizations like the FBI, CIA and NRA is an example of the hasty shoving of this history into the oubliette of memory. The CIA posting a graphic with an MLK quote on it’s Twitter page is an example of the desire to say by whites: “We’ve moved on. Everything is fine now. Let’s not discuss it any further.” It exhibits a breathtaking, brazen hypocrisy that only the powerfully shameless are truly capable of. But of course, as we can see in a myriad of ways, from the killing of black children by police, the incarceration of Mexican children at the border or indeed the entire Trump administration, things are not in fact fine, and we have not in fact moved on.

Today, the FBI honors the Rev. Martin L. King Jr. and his incredible career fighting for civil rights. #MLKDAY pic.twitter.com/9UEulHmL8a— FBI (@FBI) January 16, 2017

The FBI of course attempted to blackmail Dr. King to commit suicide, a matter of historical record. Malcolm X spoke eloquently about white guilt, about the knowledge that whites had behaved in depraved and savage ways towards their black fellow citizens, and the anxiety that that has engendered. The knowledge that whites have done terrible things which have not been paid for is a source of terrible anxiety. In fact I would argue that it is probably fairly central to the current epidemic of militarized police violence against black people in the US. Whites know that white supremacy is wrong, and has been wrong and that we are trapped living in a country with people who we have wronged for years. There is a debt of terrible, terrible violence outstanding. This leads to powerful white guilt and white fear, which lead in turn to further perpetuation of violence against people of color, particularly black people.

I believe that the next step for us as a white community, is to try to bring some of this into the open among ourselves, and to acknowledge it. Are we ourselves individually responsible for the sins of our ancestors? I don’t know, and I don’t know if it’s even worth trying to answer. But we can agree that we have inherited a scorched and poisoned landscape in which we must try to live, grow and be human. In order to regenerate this landscape, we need to try to heal both ourselves and those who have been wronged. The work of healing the wounds of white supremacy should not lie in the hands of it’s perpetual victims, people of color. It may not even be helpful or fair to ask them to participate at this stage. Instead I believe that it is possible for us to make more progress among ourselves, from one white person to another, raising and discussing these issues, ideally in a compassionate and open way.

The term ‘racist’ has become an epithet, a label to be hurled at people, a conversation-ender. I think it’s important for us as whites to think not in terms of racism as a state of being, but as a label which can be applied to beliefs and actions. It is imminently possible for a well-meaning white person to say or do something which stems from unconscious racial bias or has harmful racial consequences, without them being a died in the wool intentionally evil racist. Being able to have the discussion of: “hey, saying that sounds a bit racist or biased” among whites is important. Importantly, the more often we do it, the more it will become normalized and the more it can be seen as a healthy corrective piece of feedback, rather than a condemnation of who we fundamentally are. Labeling one another as racist or playing gotcha or ‘cancelled’ is not going to lead us down a path of healing and reconciliation. Instead we need to develop a dialog which allows us to take ownership and responsibility for our share of this problem, and find ways to identify beliefs and actions which can be changed.

I think it’s almost more likely that these conversations can happen more productively among groups of white people in a process of self-examination than they can in discussion with people of color where the stakes may feel higher because the consequences of being wrong may be more harmful. I think of this as us taking responsibility for our own personal whiteness and our inherited place in history, and how it affects our beliefs and actions. I don’t think any individual can take on the guilt of the massive history of white crime and genocide, and I don’t think it’s necessarily helpful. Instead I think we need to take responsibility among our friends and in our families and communities to try to start the local process of dismantling this poisonous system of white supremacy that has done the world so much harm.

I am fascinated by the sub-culture of people who believe that the earth is not in fact a sphere, but a disk. Instead of having ice caps at the poles of a sphere, they allege that there is a huge wall of ice around the edge of the disk, which holds the waters of the oceans in. The thing that is interesting about this is that it is such a weird, seemingly insignificant hill to die on. In this world-view NASA, of all people, are the shadowy enemy pulling the strings and convincing the world of a big lie. How precisely they stand to benefit, aside from having funding (and honestly not that much funding) to do their jobs, is a mystery to me. When we consider the idea that a crime has been committed, what is the motive?

My basic position on all conspiracy theories is that if we look at the history of conspiracies enacted by the US government, they have mostly failed to be covered up or carried out. People are mostly pretty disorganized, sloppy and chatty, so the idea that we could keep some massive, shocking secret like this under wraps just seems very unlikely. Watergate with it’s bumbling burglars, self-incriminating president and general air of shambling ineptitude is what I usually point to. I know that some conspiracy theorists would probably try to claim that this is in fact a double triple false flag wrapped in a cover up, or something, and that someone is playing 12 dimensional chess against us, but I prefer more occams razor type explanations.

That is not to say that there are not in fact conspiracy type operations carried out with impunity by the US government. The Iran Contra and the massive domestic spying by the NSA come to mind. The fact is that none of these were fully successfully concealed, instead they were more or less revealed, but then brazenly allowed to happen by the politicians in power. In my opinion the US government is much more likely to piss on your head and tell you it’s raining then successfully cover anything up. They rely on the cooperation of the media, judiciary and a compliant public to commit their crimes in more or less broad daylight, and then simply tell us that in fact they are not crimes and you are crazy if you believe otherwise.

The flat earthers, with their conventions, YouTube channels, theories and counter theories, represent a strange tribe of reality builders who have all agreed to go off and live in a weird bubble together of their own making. I think this phenomenon represents a few things. One is the desire to escape mundane reality. Reality can be depressing and if we can instead believe that we are the rebel forces bravely resisting a shadowy conspiracy, this can give a sense of meaning and agency in an existence which can lack those things. Additionally it provides community and significance for the participants. If you can find a group who agree with you that they are a persecuted minority of truth tellers and that you are all in this together, that feels good. You are not alone, you are part of a community of people who believe as you do. It’s almost fulfilling a function of a religion in this sense, providing a sense of meaning in the face of meaninglessness, and a community of people to reinforce that system. The fact these type of very strange, frankly stupid and unconvincing theories can get traction and attract adherents tells us something about our age. If I were to hazard a guess it’s that people feel so alienated, lonely and lacking meaning in their lives that they will latch onto almost any absurd idea if it offers the chance to alleviate those feelings.

Today I’m thinking again about self-optimization, specifically, how to improve my work output during my work day. If you have read some of my recent posts, I’m also critical of the obsessive desire to self-optimize, but that doesn’t mean I don’t do it or think about it. Holding two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time is very human, and worthwhile I find. Or maybe it’s just schizophrenic and self-contradictory. I prefer to think of it as sophisticated, nuanced and a mark of complex thinking. Go figure, end disclaimer.

I work from home and have a great deal of time freedom and no one looking over my shoulder as to what I’m doing at any given time during the day. I value this a lot as I hate the feeling of being managed and checked up on. I find that most of my most effective work actually happens in relatively small windows of time during the day surrounded by much more flaky administrative and communication work which is sometimes valuable and sometimes not.

I’ve spent the past few months optimizing my pre-work morning routine to focus on doing things which are good for me personally. This routine is as follows. I wake up and usually rush off to take the kids to school, then drink coffee and eat a light breakfast. Afterwards when my time becomes my own, I go immediately to my chair and meditate for 15 minutes using the Insight Timer app, which I’ve written about and like very much. I listen to a guided meditation by Tara Brach, who is wonderful. Immediately after that, I write for maybe 20 minutes in my journal. I write three longhand pages. This is taken from a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which is a little breathless and starry eyed in it’s writing style but actually has a lot of good advice on nurturing your personal creativity. Weirdly I worked for her literary agent as an intern for a few months when I was 15, in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. I recommend the book if you’re not too turned off by the style, and don’t turn your nose up at ‘self-help’ as a concept.

After meditating and writing the journal, I’m feeling calm and sort of mentally loosened up, and so I sit and write one of these blog posts. Usually I write these very fast, read them over once for obvious typing mistakes, find a picture to go with them and publish. I’d say the whole thing takes about half an hour on a good day, sometimes a bit longer. The idea of writing a blog post every day is one I got from Seth Godin, the marketing guru and generally brilliant thinker about education, creativity and a lot more. Again, he may not be for everyone, but if any of that sounds interesting, he’s the best at what he does. I love his books The Icarus Deception and Stop Stealing Dreams the most.

I find that doing this routine in a mechanical way every day works well. Some days I’m traveling or something blows up in my daily life and I don’t do it, and I don’t beat myself up about it over much. I am a human after all, not a robotic assembly line. Doing multiple things in order at the same time of day is super effective for me for some reason. Once I’ve decided to get in the chair and meditate, the next two things just sort of happen automatically. And I like meditating, so there’s the least resistance to start with that. I probably have the most resistance to writing these blogs, so they come last when I’ve already built momentum.

What I want to do next is extend this routine into my daily ‘office’ routine (which is done in the same chair here in my home office in my bedroom in Berlin). Something that I’ve done sporadically in the past is used the Pomodoro method, and that works great for getting specific sprints of work done in short bursts, allowing for designated break time in between. My current idea to extend my daily routine is to extend the first hour of work time to include the following:

• First, pick three things that are actually important and high value to get done in the work day, with one at the top being the single must-do thing that really is actually important and useful
• Second, do one or two Pomodoro timer periods of 25 minutes on that task to try to get it done or majorly started to reduce friction on continuing
• Third, stop checking random work communications like slack and email until these tasks that I’ve assigned myself are done. It’s really easy to get pulled onto someone else’s to-do list and miss your own important stuff.

I am going to try making this the next set of sequenced actions in my work day and report back. If you have any good tips for this kind of work, feel free to drop a comment or hit me on Twitter via @mattmirrorfish