Intro
One of the risks of having an injury like I had is that you end up overthinking how you ended up with something like this and get angry at yourself for letting it happen. Which is certainly not an healthy thing and not recommended.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
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Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 2
- Need to complete the final touches on my Newslabturkey online workshop materials.
- Have to prepare for a visit to a high school to talk about digital media and design later this week.
- Also complete a speech and workshop design for next week on sustainable futures.
- I’ll be putting some time aside for a while to complete my work system redesign. I’m planning to blog about the final design when it’s done.
From Last Week (and the one before that)
- I was a guest on a Youtube show to talk about the futures of the sports and media. (Turkish)
- We hit the fifth episode on the Tuhaf Gelecek podcast and decided we need a sub-series on history as well — first episode was all about 2000s. (Turkish)
- On the blog: Burial-London Connection Part 2
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Business of One Problems
Running a business of one is something both really good but also a lot harder than anyone ever lets you know. And you learn how hard it can get when you have to deal with a bad surprise like I do these days.
One of the things that were obvious from the day one is that you need to have a plan for cases like this before it happens. If your system doesn’t have setups for times when you need to rearrange a bunch of stuff or make sure certain things run smoothly when you deal with other problems, you either end up with a much heavier workload or you try to manage the emergency and regular stuff at the same time. As you can see, neither of them are good scenarios to end up with.
(It goes without saying, but the same goes for the financial side as well. You have to make sure that you have a plan because emergencies like these always end up costing something.)
That’s why these days I’ve been thinking about the parts that need an upgrade in my system and how I can make myself more resilient to surprises like this in the future a lot. There isn’t a magic formula or a tool for that. You need to figure out where you are falling short and which parts need support more.
In my case, most of the issues I consider critical are on the admin side of the things. Staying on top of communications, calendar, and tasks; making sure I have things planned in a sensible way, and so on. I’m not terrible at it, but things can get worse even when my ADHD brain decides to have a bad day, so I need to be more than average to make sure things are running smoothly on those bad days.
Of course, I have all the usual stuff in my toolbox, but just having tools is usually not enough. I have to make sure that they’re part of a system that works best for me and communicates well with each other. Otherwise, the tools which should help you work better end up causing more admin work for you because you end up becoming a translator between them.
Like that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been choosing tools to write that work well with Markdown for a long time. I can collect my notes and ideas inside Obsidian and work on them, then I can open the same file on iA Writer to turn into something worth putting out there and WordPress happily takes that format and turns it into the post you’re reading right now. As a bonus, LLMs also love working with them as well.
I’d love to have my all-system work as it is but sadly that’s not the case. I need to make sure that each part works at least half as smoothly as my writing tools to make sure I’m not blindsided by surprise emergencies.
Right now I’m trying to figure things out so I don’t really have a list of advice or “these five tools solved my problems” type of ending for you. I’ll keep you posted about what I’ve tried in the future but if you have any advice or ideas that worked for you or just want to talk about it, I’d love to hear from you.
Song of the Week
Reading Log
- Fake Fans – by eliza mclamb – words from eliza
- The offer is not to create a new paradigm but to be the biggest fish in the pond. If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome. There’s no going back to pre-Napster times. Now that songs are files and files are Godless, record sales mean nothing, and the “analog revolution” won’t change that. Records used to mean fans, which meant money; now that there are no records, it’s just the fans and the money, and fans are a renewable resource. Chaotic Good knows that you can create a fan through imitation.
- Anti-Dystopia – by Johannes Kleske – The Futures Lens
- “The optimist does not look at a situation and weigh the possibilities. The optimist already knows it will work out. The pessimist does not assess the evidence and conclude that things look grim. The pessimist already knows it will go wrong. Neither of them is making a judgment. Their disposition determines the outcome in advance, regardless of what is actually happening. And that is the problem: if the future is already settled, then nothing you do can change it. Both positions are fundamentally deterministic. Both make action irrelevant.”
- A modest contribution to the Chinese Room debate
- “Text is, of itself, not really that dissimilar to any other sensory input. A page of text is lower *bandwidth* than an image, or a minute of sound, but ultimately it’s all information. So the intuition here rests on the idea that there is something defective when it comes to learning about the world in text, as opposed to other kinds of information.”
Outro
And that’s all from me for this week. Take care of yourselves and make sure you don’t stop taking care of yourselves for things that aren’t worth it because you’ll end up like me.
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