Try This One Hot Tip: Delete Twitter dot com from your phone. It’s not a life-altering yoga retreat where you re-enter metropolitan life with a smokey tan, a bun and a messiah complex but it approaches similar levels of smugness. Let me describe to you what it’s like not spending time either side of sleep suffering didactic triumphalism in the rhetorical form of ‘This. THREAD:’ It’s totally fine. Nothing of value has emerged from that cursed microblog for years. Try and remember the last time you felt that you learnt anything, were in any way spiritually improved or felt better after using it.
Twitter’s tenancy to reward conflict, has turned from the guerrilla skirmishes of the early 2010’s into drawn out wars of ego-attrition that move rhetorical centimetres. I made ‘I won’t spend time fuelling on outrage or hypocrisy’ my mantra of 2016 and it has somehow become evergreen. Stop feeding at the tax-avoiding Irish microblog.
This is the second-to-last week in an academic year of ceaseless change and crisis. I’m in that mode where anything that’s going to take more than a few hours is just pushed to the bottom of the list. The list is getting shorter because I’ve learnt how to magic lots of small things into one big thing and then decide to ignore it for a few weeks. This is another Elite Productivity Hack that you are free to try along with the one about not looking at Twitter.
Anyway, I’m off to the Peak District on Friday to spend time with my parents and the Peak District. There’s some beautiful landscape and climbs but it’s going to be raining the whole time so I’m going to clean up the bike so that I can more clearly understand how wet and muddy it gets while up there. On Monday evening I had what was easily the best ride this year. There wasn’t anything particularly special – 80km around Kent – but I think I’ve got the position spot on. No aches or pains, no sense of exhaustion or drag just full flow. This is my third Elite Productivity Hack: do more fun things.
Some folks ask how I get so much time for cycling, it’s pretty easy, I just don’t waste time. That’s not to say I don’t ever procrastinate or have a broadly curious mind, I’m just very good at compartmentalising tasks and getting them done in the right order quickly and effectively. I can also do different things with each hand both metaphorically and literally. I’ve only come to really experience recently that folks have different ways of approaching work and mine predisposes me to middle management. I struggle to give my full concentration to any one thing for long periods of time which is why I hate reading, have good spatial awareness and get woken up by even the slightest noise but I can easily manage five parallel tasks. My brain is a well formatted Excel spreadsheet.
At some point I’ll remember to talk about design and things on here. I need to write up some clever thoughts I had about transcendental rendered images but I’m besieged by Excel spreadsheet for the next week or so.
Recent
I had a chat with my friend Füsun Türetken for her project Objects For Likes. We talked about Instagram and the industrial image production pipeline. Not much else recently, just submitted an abstract for something, got some bits and bits coming up.
(I used to live with a guy about twelve years ago who said ‘bits and bits’ instead of ‘bits and bobs’ and it has completely stuck with me.)
Small stuff
No small stuff this week really. I started playing Far Cry 5 since it was on sale for £7 and I’ve never played a Far Cry. I very much don’t like it. It’s very explosion-y and loud.
Until next time.