I'm Interested [06] - Get Together, Deep Focus, Cash Bail, Big Ol' Trucks, WFH Turmoil
Hey everyone, I’m back with Issue #6 of the newsletter. There’s something for everyone in this one—and hopefully, something to spark a good conversation with one of your friends or family members this week. This one takes approximately 12 minutes to read (because there’s a video!).
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Alright, on to I’m Interested.
I'm interested in a lot of things. I know YOU are too. Not everyone has the energy or attention span to dig through the vast expanses of the internet and then read & prioritize what would be worth a chunk of that idle time we spend on our phone.
I'll be that someone.
Also, ICYMI: the last issue has some commentary on hydroponics, community building, and rank choice voting. Give it a read and let me know what you think.
Get Together: Community Building
For all I’ve written (and ranted) about community building at this point, I don’t know how I missed this book/site/organization: GetTogether.world
I promise I’m not sharing this video because it starts with a pickup hoops game (though I will admit it was one contributing factor).
Although communities feel magical, they don't come together by magic.
Get Together is a practical and heartfelt guide to cultivating a community. The secret to getting people together is this: build your community with people, not for them.
The book untangles the challenge of bridging gaps between passionate people—online and off—into clear steps and shares true stories of everyday people who created thriving communities.
I will spend more time digging into their case studies and success stories in future issues, but their site really got the wheels turning about the idea of getting people together consistently and I needed to share.
What kinds of communities do you wish existed? What’s stopping you from starting one? What communities are you already a part of that could use an extra lean-in?
Products: CAVEDAY Deep Focus Sessions
Last week I discovered Caveday.org.
Caveday is a service that allows you to join facilitated deep-work sessions on zoom with other participants. Their formula builds time blocking, accountability, focused work, and intentional rest into a session meant to empower productivity.
I can’t explain it as well as they can, but I know I love the idea:
Work is not everything.
It’s easy to get caught in the trap of productivity and the myth of hard work– to hustle harder, work 24/7, sleep when you’re dead. But the truth is, if we all worked smarter, and if we had better boundaries with our work, our whole lives would be more fulfilling.
When our relationship to work is healthy (when it’s not asking for all of our time and draining us of our energy), our other relationships can thrive. We help you feel more accomplished every day and in control of your time.
We believe that by improving the quality of our work, we can improve the quality of our lives.
In short: you can sign up to join a zoom session for either <1 hr or 3 hr Caveday sprints to put your head down and focus on important work without distraction. More quality working time should equal less time spent working in the world of knowledge work. So far, they’re getting some rave reviews.
Working in the cave includes the following:
Important Over Urgent
Otherwise, we end up spending our days (and ultimately our careers) just sending emails and Slack and doing defensive, urgent tasks. We’ll feel better about our work if we can make progress on the important stuff.
Start With The Hard Thing First
We often fall into the trap of building momentum with easy tasks, but suddenly, it’s 3:00 pm and you don’t have the mental capacity to do your hard work.
Monotask
Multitasking is the only thing that the more we do it, the worse we get. Splitting our attention across different tasks is not only counter-productive but also reduces our cognitive abilities.
Do Not Disturb Mode
Close tabs, quit programs, mute notifications, hide that phone.
Does anyone want to try one of these with me? Let me know in the comments!
Fighting ‘Publish Hesitation’
The fight continues to overcome self-criticism while writing and sharing. I touched on this in the intro to Issue 04, but it’s not something that goes away overnight. Nicholas Yoder, who is a quantitative researcher on Wall Street who also writes about a bevy of interesting subjects (he also bets on political polls and it’s super interesting), wrote an interesting piece about a 10 point scale he uses to overcome perfectionism in his work. The idea is that he will write as soon as he comes up with an idea, get as far as he can, and then publish with a color/numerical label at the top to score its level of completeness. I don’t think I’ve written nearly enough to have a sense of scaling, but I love the radical transparency and the attempt to hedge the hesitation.
Would this kind of framework help you overcome the barrier of perfectionism for something in your life?
The rest of this particular piece discusses his tactics for writing bite-sized technical pieces and building them up to be a full ‘wiki’ on a subject over time. I often think about the pros and cons between writing small, cumulative sections on a topic vs. consolidating them into one single, long-form piece.
Another Good Idea to Improve Government
Amira Valliani decided to write a small essay about ways to build a better government every day for 30 days. In the last issue, I shared her brief essay on rank choice voting. Here’s what she had to say about cash bail:
The part that really hits home for me is the vicious cycle once someone can’t afford bail.
I can imagine someone spending time in jail, losing their job, marring their record/resume, getting evicted, losing custody. In the end, the effort to have an ‘insurance policy’ ends up making an individual far more costly to society than they may have been had they remained free, continued to work, and showed up to their trial.
To me, this practice works against the 6th amendment and the idea that someone is innocent until proven guilty. I need to do more research, but Amira has me thinking of a better way here.
The Gradual Supersizing of Pickup Trucks
I’ve been riding in pickup trucks my entire life. In the last 10-15 yrs it has felt like the step up to get in has gotten a little higher with each new design. The doors have swung out wider, the cabs have become plusher, the bed walls have become so high they had to build in a foothold by the wheel well to step up and reach in (start looking and you’ll notice that change), and most of all — the grills have become more aggressive and towering from the front to a point that blind spots are created.
It turns out, this wasn’t just me noticing the changes — this is real.
Chonky front ends and plenty of blind spots from Chevrolet, Dodge, and Ford [3]
Since 1990, U.S. pickup trucks have added almost 1,300 pounds on average. Some of the biggest vehicles on the market now weigh almost 7,000 pounds…
As trucks have increased in size and height, they’ve become safer for those in the vehicle, and more dangerous for those who are outside of it (read: pedestrians and people in small cars).
Giant, furious trucks are more than just a polarizing consumer choice: Large pickups and SUVs are notably more lethal to other road users, and their conquest of U.S. roads has been accompanied by a spike in fatalities among pedestrians and bicyclists…the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Detroit Free Press have pointed to the rise in SUVs and large pickups as the main culprit in the pedestrian mortality surge.2
Have you noticed the gradual transition to massive front grills and overwhelming proportions on the latest pickup truck designs? Have we gone too far? I’m not discouraging the ownership of pickup trucks—more so questioning the automotive design trend. Is there a real functional purpose for this scale-up, or should we start considering the safety of those inside and outside our larger vehicles?
…I bet we could improve gas mileage as well.
WFH Life: Turmoil Awaits
In the midst of the pandemic, a massive percentage of the white-collar American workforce transitioned to working from home this year. The forced transition drastically accelerated what had been a gradual increase in work from home flexibility over the years.
Now, some folks can’t wait to get back in the office, some people want to work from home forever, some people want to have a hybrid schedule, some people aren’t sure—but also moved across the country during 2020 and can’t exactly show up to their office anymore. Some companies don’t care where their employees are, some of them definitely do. There is uncertainty and inconsistency ahead.
Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and a revered expert on the effects of work from home arrangements on employees and employers, spent some time with Business Insider weighing in on the future of work.
Unless employers established a clear and level playing field, he said, the years ahead could remain filled with uncertainty and upheaval, for companies as well as employees.
"Revolutions are chaotic, and as we know from many revolutions in history, they're often followed by further turmoil," Bloom told me. "This has been a massive revolution — and we're only halfway through."
Will we face promotion inequity between those working face-to-face with management and those who are remote? Will we need to fight the natural human instinct of favoring folks based on presenteeism? (Don’t get me going on outcomes over outputs.)
We are approaching the time where companies will need to make decisions about their workforce and take steps to establish the clear and level playing field mentioned above. This won’t be the last time I write about this.
Closing with the Vibes
We’ve made it. It’s the time of year where the sun is out for a couple of hours after work, weekend days are warm, the summertime feels so close. This song just makes me want to go out and grill (I know, such a primal instinct). Queue this one up and take a walk in the sun this week.
Thanks for reading and thank you for your support. Enjoy the rest of your week and stay curious!
If you’re not feeling it, please reply or reach out and provide some feedback. I don’t know what I’m doing and I can only improve through iteration — stick with me.
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