I’ve gone through both phases in my life. Most of my twenties was spent working not nearly hard enough, and about half of my thirties was spent working too hard, so I’ve seen the pros and cons of each. Those pros and cons interact with different times in our lives in different ways, so there are times when it’s appropriate to work “too hard”, and other times when it’s appropriate to barely work at all.

Hard workers are often driven by the metric of “what percentage of my time is being spent working?” and strive for 100%. This often leads to burnout, a very narrow area of expertise and experience, and poor results relative to time invested. I noticed some of this when I was working on Sett. I eventually got burnt out, but the biggest thing I noticed was that my prodigious output of work didn’t always result in better results. Sometimes I spent a month or two working feverishly on a feature that ended up being useless.

If I had really stopped to think about what I was doing and why I was doing it, I may have realized that what I was working on didn’t matter and could have saved weeks of time. I had no time to stop and think, though, as all I thought about were my tasks. Once I finished a task my goal was to start another one as soon as possible.

My biggest sources of inspiration come from three places. The first is my friends. Often a conversation with a friend will spark some idea that I could not have thought of by myself. The second is through random research. Random research is a very high variance activity, because you never know what will be useful and what won’t be. I spent an hour or two researching how heat pumps work because I only recently understood what they were. Will that ever translate into a big gain in my life? Probably not, but I would have also said that when I first started researching cruises, which eventually led to starting a cruise agency. The last source is just idle time when I begin to feel the first inklings of boredom and begin to let my mind wander.

Some people have too much of this sort of time, of course, which is why one must also have a honed work ethic and time to turn ideas into reality. Others have none of this sort of time and they miss out.

As a general rule, if you’re the sort of person who maps out a routine for your life, I think it’s good to have about an hour of space in the day where you have nothing planned. Sometimes you’ll have important tasks that spill over into this space, and that’s ok — a buffer is a good thing. If that happens every day, though, you probably don’t really have space.

During that time you shouldn’t watch TV or play video games, but you shouldn’t otherwise have a very high bar for how to use the time. You can sit around and let your mind wander, take a walk, tinker with something that doesn’t seem very important, or go down wikipedia rabbit-holes to learn about new things. Think about things that mystify you or things that you wish were another way.

Most of the time you’ll think through and idea and realize it’s not worth pursuing, or you’ll learn some trivial amount about something useless and never learn any more about it. These results are valuable by themselves because they let you close that door and not think about it anymore. One rare occasions, though, you’ll find something meaningful that will have a huge impact and justify all of the other time spent.

Make sure that you have some space in your life for exploration and curiosity. It will help you understand life better, get more out of it, and focus your productive efforts on things that matter.

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Photo is a mob of ducks on Lake Mead. The weather is finally good for boating again (I would have never bought a boat if I didn’t have idle time to learn about boats and the lake)

Yesterday, as I was coding, I realized how monotonous the code I was writing was, but how much I was enjoying writing it. It was a strange combination. I don’t always love coding, and the monotony does get to me at times.

I thought about why that was, and I realized it was because I had become fascinated with portfolio optimization. I was really curious about how it worked, how different strategies would affect results, and what would happen to my hypothetical portfolio once I made the changes.

On a smaller scale, I had become fascinated with how to program the algorithm. Do I sell over-proportioned positions first? Do I tax loss harvest first? If I don’t have enough cash left to buy a share of the most under-proportioned stock do I hold the cash or buy the second most?

I can tell that I’m doing a poor job of conveying the intrigue, but it was really captivating. I was fascinated with the problem, and so the actions I needed to take almost didn’t matter.

This happens a lot. Sometimes I worry that I like fixing bugs too much, and that liking it causes me to subconsciously create more. When it seems like something should work but doesn’t, I’m fascinated. What am I missing? What don’t I know? It feels similar to an escape game.

That’s great and all, but how do you become fascinated? Sometimes it just happens naturally, but that’s not necessarily something to rely on.

One thing you can do is think about the interactions between different components. Let’s say you’re trying to make bread and it keeps coming out poorly. You could be frustrated and not want to do it anymore, or you could become fascinated. How does the flour interact with the water? What does the yeast do? How does temperature affect each of the ingredients? There as an unlimited level of available fascination in these questions alone, and it only becomes amplified once you start tinkering to alter those interactions.

You can also try to imagine what you don’t know. I thought I understood tax loss harvesting, but then I realized there was a lot I didn’t know. How small of a loss is worth harvesting? How do you figure out the best securities to swap in? Should you switch back to the original one later if there’s a subsequent gain? It’s hard not to become fascinated when you’re learning.

If you’re working on a project and are finding it hard to stay motivated, take a step back and think about it. What’s interesting about it? What are the factors at play and how do they compete with or complement each other? What don’t you know about it?

You may not have to do this for everything, but I think you could. I was trying to think of an example where it was impossible, like shoveling dirt. But then I started to think about how I barely even know what dirt is, and how it’s probably a lot of different things, and actually if I’m digging dirt, maybe the dirt a few feet down hasn’t even been exposed to the surface in years. Or is it decades? I don’t really know much about dirt, it turns out. Fascinating stuff, dirt.

You will always do better work if you’re more engaged. You can be engaged just because you care so much that the work happens, or because there are some great benefits to you if you finish it, but cultivating fascination is another tool in that toolbox. If you find yourself zoning out or procrastinating on some work, try to find something fascinating within it.

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Photo is San Diego, where I visited Noah Kagan last week. I’ve been to SD twice this year and both times really enjoyed it. I think it’s possibly an underrated city.

Related, Noah pointed out that it was hard to figure out how to subscribe to my blog. Turns out it was actually impossible and had been for years. Now if you’re reading this on the site you should see a box below.

Let’s go through a quick exercise to help solve this problem in real-time.

First, write down the areas of your life that demand your attention or those in which you would like to make progress. A simple version might be

1. Work
2. Fitness
3. Relationship
4. Social Life
5. Learning

You could have more or fewer categories, but those five are a decent start. Now, next to each of them write either “maintain” or “grow”. You may be tempted to write “grow” next to each of them because… who wouldn’t want to get better at everything? Remember that you have limited time, effort, and mental bandwidth, though, so think of each “grow” as diluting the others. It is generally better to make progress serially rather than in parallel as well, because your “date of earliest goal completion” will be earlier and you can start enjoying the benefits associated with it.

Here are how I would rate mine:

1. Work – growth
2. Fitness – maintain
3. Relationship – growth
4. Social life – maintain
5. Learning – growth

There’s really no right or wrong answer here, except that you should probably have a mix of both growth and maintain. If everything is growth you will burn yourself out and not execute well, but if everything is maintain you are not pushing yourself enough (or you are leaving out major life areas from the list).

I chose work as growth because I’m working on a bunch of stuff right now and I have a good environment (stuck at home) in which to make progress here. If I was on a trek across central asia or something, I would have to switch this to maintain.

Fitness is in maintain mode because I’m happy with where I am with it and am not trying to gain muscle or cut fat. My biggest priority here is to keep the gains I already have.

Relationship is growth for the same reason as work. My wife and I have more time together now than usual, so it’s a good opportunity to grow. I’d think of it more as “slow growth” than the other ones. My goal isn’t to revolutionize our relationship, it’s just to make sure that in general every month is better than the previous one.

Social life is on maintain because the same factors that make work and relationship easier make social life harder (being stuck at home). My friends are very important to me, but if I can make progress in other areas now that will free me up to focus more on social later.

Learning is really only growth for me now because I’m really into Japanese tea ceremony. I have a small Japanese tea room in my home and am stuck here (as I may have mentioned…), so I’m using that as an opportunity to 15-30x my learning speed (14 tea ceremonies per week instead of 1, plus the additional benefits of drilling individual aspects and having <24 hours of elapsed time in between ceremonies).

For each of the maintain areas, I figure out what I need to do to maintain them. Maybe counter-intuitively, I think of these as higher priority than growth areas. The reasons for that are that I have put a lot of work in to build them, so I don’t want to lose them, and because they will only take up a small defined part of my day.

For fitness I have a very strict diet (small bowl of nuts at 4pm, Chipotle at 6pm, sometimes fruit later) and I work out every other day for 30-35 minutes. I no longer increase my weights or reps.

For social life I don’t have a very fixed routine, but I chat with friends and try to initiate contact to be proactive.

Your maintenance items shouldn’t compete with your growth items. Clearly I have plenty of time to do those things in a day.

Next I think about my growth items. Specifically I think about the leverage I have and how much improvement there is to be gained. This isn’t a list of “how important are these things to me”, but rather “how aggressively should I be trying to grow in each one”.

Based on those criteria, I would order mine like this:

1. Learning
2. Work
3. Relationship

Learning is the top one because I am a beginner at tea ceremony but think I could go very far in it and have a uniquely ideal situation for improvement. I know that as soon as travel becomes normal again this will drop in priority and ability, so I want to capture the opportunity now.

Next is work for many of the same reasons as learning. I feel I have a lot more to do, and have a good opportunity to do it.

Relationship is last because we already have a great relationship and though now is a good time to work on the relationship, I think the next 12+ months may offer even better opportunities.

Now that we have good priorities, we can think about our actual days. First, we add our maintenance items. I’ve always written about how mine fit into my day above, but now is the time for you to think about what you need to do on a daily or weekly basis to make sure than you maintain those items. You can see why I say they’re more important than growth items, as we schedule the rest of our days around them.

Next we think about how to fit in our growth items. Life is complex so you can’t just allocate hours to each, but you can think about how to fit them in and that fit should reflect your priorities.

In my case, I do my tea ceremony twice per day. It doesn’t really conflict with work or relationship, so this one is easy. I do it once in the early afternoon and once in the evening. In both cases I use it as an escape from work, so it actually helps with work. No need to make things harder than they have to be.

Work and relationship, on the other hand, are somewhat in conflict. When quarantine first started I made the error of not prioritizing my relationship, and things felt off. Since then I carved out two hours every evening as a minimum spend-time-with-my-wife time, and about once a week I take off almost a whole day so that we can spend time together on the lake. We also have dinner together most nights and tea together a couple times a week or so.

The rest of time, with very few exceptions, is work. You don’t necessarily have to fill up your entire day with your priorities but I enjoy it.

You can reevaluate any time, usually every few months or if circumstances change. For example, if travel opened up and my wife and I could go on some trips together I would drop learning and possibly even work to maintain mode. If my wife went to visit family for a month I wouldn’t worry too much about pushing our relationship forward.

More than anything this exercise is useful to understand what your priorities are and in which areas you’re actually trying to grow. If you find that your day-to-day actions don’t reflect the results of this exercise, you have to really reevaluate whether you correctly identified your priorities and whether or not you are acting on them appropriately.

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Photo is some friendly ducks.

If you get a lot of value from my work, consider supporting my Patreon. Comments are disabled, but I always anwser questions on Twitter.

If you find that this email goes to spam, would you please move it back to your inbox? I am working through some email deliverability issues, especially on Yahoo and Hotmail.

The most daunting part of it all was that all of the software that Sett relied on was horribly out of date. I was two major versions of PHP behind, and each of its 5-10 dependencies was certainly either obsolete or out of date. Of course, as time went on this disparity became even greater, making me even less likely to want to do it.

At first this cost me about $170 a month, then I finally downgraded our server (but used the same image) to save about $40 a month. Overall, it probably cost me about $10,000 to not move servers! Even greater than this cost is the constant burden of knowing in the back of my head that I should move it and having to make the decision of whether or not to do the work.

Finally, in quarantine, I decided to take a stab at it. I resolved to spend half a day working on it and reassessing from there. If it was going to require too much of a rewrite I would try something else. It was hard to know exactly how long it would take, but it felt like a 5-7 day project to me.

My half a day of effort got it about 95% there. Our search backend, solr, took a few frustrating hours to upgrade, but other than that it was shockingly easy. In fact, it worked so well that I had to check multiple times to make sure it had actually moved to the new server and I wasn’t just loading the old one. I was even a bit surprised when it kept working when I turned off the old server. Over the next day I got it to 100% and made some additional bug fixes and improvements.

Clearly, I should have just done this earlier. Had I done so, it would have taken even less time since I could have done smaller incremental upgrades. What I thought would take a miserable week could have been done in a reasonably easy day.

So what caused me to make this $10,000 mistake?

First, I massively overestimated how hard it was going to be. I’m not exactly sure why I did this, but I think that it was just distance from the Sett code. When I was working on it daily I knew every nook and cranny. Six months after touching it I forgot how it all worked and wasn’t particularly excited to dive back in.

The right remedy for this problem is to do what I did five years too late: allocate some small amount of time to working on the problem and give myself an out if it looked too nasty. Had I dedicated even a couple hours to it in the first year of shutting down Sett (when I knew it would no longer grow), I could have saved all of this money and cognitive load.

I’ve written about this before, but I should have also applied the principle of “I’m going to do this anyway, so I might as well do it now”. When we shut down Sett I agreed to take sole custody of it because my blog was on it so I actually cared. There was no way anyone other than me was ever going to move the server, so I should have just bit the bullet and done it. I’m sure there were weeks or months that I was too busy to add it to my plate, but was there a week somewhere in the past five years where I could have just scheduled this? Of course.

Last, I underestimated how great I’d feel once I completed the project. It’s great to save money, but the biggest benefit is that I just don’t have to think or worry about it anymore. I no longer have to deal with an expensive and out of date server and all of my sites are now in one easy to administer server. I think that we all consistently underappreciate how much nagging todo list items affect us.

Though none are are close in magnitude to moving Sett, many of the projects on my coronavirus list fell into this broad category of “non urgent tasks I probably should have already done”. Even something as small as making a bigger bed has been something I thought about at least weekly. Not having to decide not to do these things all the time frees up my mental space considerably.

I suspect that all of us have tasks like this, and most of us have an unprecedented opportunity to tackle them right now during coronavirus. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m constantly thinking, “how can I make this forced quarantine the best period of my life”, and knocking out all of these sorts of tasks is a major component of that.

What tasks do you consider doing but keep putting off? What overdue tasks weigh on you? Pick one and spend an hour or two making inroads on it today. If you’re like me, that may lead to you realizing it’s not so bad and maybe that will snowball into you clearing your todo list as I have.

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Photo is another drone photo from Lake Mead. I promise there will be pictures of other places as soon as I can travel again!

I started a Patreon. Thanks so much to the people who have supported it so far!

I like to answer questions on Twitter. I have started working on defeating spam on Sett again so I may test opening up comments again, but until then I’m available on Twitter.

1. Rewrote lots of CruiseSheet

I’m not sure how other people do it, but when I create a new project I tend to just jump in and start making it. That means that some of what I start out with wasn’t exactly suited for what the end result was, so I get a little bit of accumulated kludge. I had noticed that it seemed like the number of available cruises would slowly decrease over time, which didn’t seem to reflect reality, so I took a deep dive on the data import section and found the error. While I was under the hood I also fixed a bunch of other minor things that had been bothering me for a while.

2. Got back on a perfect gym / eating schedule

My general rule is that I keep perfect habits while at home in Vegas, but allow myself considerable culinary leeway when traveling. It just feels wrong, for example, to go to Budapest and not eat the amazing $12 three course lunches. And on cruises I’ve eaten up to 16 lobster tails in a sitting. The problem is that the amount of time I had been spending traveling had increased a lot over the preceding few years. My weight had gotten up to 165 which is the max I let myself get to before cutting down, so it was convenient timing.

I typically eat just one Chipotle meal per day, sometimes some fruit for dessert, and work out every other day like clockwork. Once a week or so I’ll have a different meal with my wife. This is a really easy way to lose weight in a healthy manner, and I’ve lost 12 pounds. I don’t want to get under 150, so soon I’ll increase my food again. This was a fun experiment because I always think it’s not that hard to lose weight, but have never really had a reason to do it all at once. Usually if I get up around 165 I just regulate my food down a little bit.

3. Started coaching 5 new people

Before coronavirus I had stopped taking new coaching clients for around a year because it was hard to schedule with all of my travel. I also really prefer to have the first few calls in Vegas because it’s my favorite work environment and those calls require really intense focus. For months I had been thinking about adding new people, but finally decided to when I got stuck in Vegas. This batch has been a really great group of people, so I’m now very glad that I took them on.

4. Bought a 3D Printer and learned how to do 3D CAD modeling

This is another thing I had been wanting to do for a while that finally made sense when I knew I’d be in the same place for a while. For the first month or so I printed something every single day, usually something I had designed myself. Now I print every week or two, but it’s an amazing superpower to know that I can summon objects into existence within a few hours of conceiving of them.

One day I was burning a stick of incense in my office and found myself annoyed at how I have to fish the unburnt tail of the stick out of the holder after it finishes burning, so I thought about it and designed an incense burner that automatically ejects the stick using gravity. That’s my favorite thing I’ve designed and printed so far. I also made custom tea containers that fit exactly within my Kanpai titanium thermos, so I can now carry about 50% more tea when I travel.

5. Helped my mom move from California to Texas

I’ve never been so grateful to be stuck in a car for 28 hours! This was the first time I got to leave my house in a month and I really enjoyed the trip. My flight home happened to be the slowest travel day of the entire pandemic and I had an entire Southwest 737 to myself. That was a truly surreal experience.

6. Boat upgrades and Lake Mead exploration

I’ve done a bunch of work on the boat while being here. The biggest things have been replacing the alternator (first real mechanical project I’ve ever done), replacing the fridge that I had previously broken, changing the lights to LED, replacing all four batteries and fixing the previous owner’s poor wiring, and finding a good place to mount the barbecue grill. We’ve also spent a lot of time exploring new areas of the lake instead of just going back to our favorite place every time, and have found some incredible new spots that really change our experience out there.

7. Fixed my motorcycle and moved it to my brother’s house

My motorcycle, last ridden in San Francisco years ago, had been sitting in Todd’s garage here in Vegas. He sold the house but the tenant remained the same and he let me keep the motorcycle in the garage for years. My brother is an ex motorcycle mechanic and had space in his garage so we took it out of storage and fixed the sticking clutch so that it could be driven to his house and stored there. This had been bothering me for years, so it felt great to take care of it.

8. Installed a sauna in the house

My condo has a storage room near my front door that I have been filling ever since moving in. Most of the stuff in the back didn’t really need to be there anymore, but there was no way to easily access it. So my wife and I took everything out, found better places to store it, and installed a sauna in the space. I was originally going to build my own Finnish sauna there, but decided to buy a premade one first to see if I even liked going to the sauna before committing that level of effort. So far I like it and am hoping that the purported health benefits are real, but I’m skeptical.

I also custom programmed an arduino and light strip to make a James Turrell style light show during the sauna and plan on modifying the electronics to be controlled by my home automation system.

9. Replaced my dining room with a Chinese-style tea room

When I bought my condo it had two breakfast nooks, which is unusual for a small condo. One I built into a Japanese style two-mat tatami tea room. The other I used as a dining room, but since I eat Chipotle at my desk every day I never actually used that room. I’ve been wanting to do something different with it for ages, so I finally converted it into a Chinese style tearoom with a table. Now I have a relatively authentic Chinese tearoom and Japanese tearoom in my house. I may build a custom table for the Chinese one since it’s very hard to find a shallow table that’s the right height.

10. Moved Sett to a new server

Sett has run on its original AWS server for nearly a decade now. I had become afraid to upgrade any packages on the server for fear that it would break Sett, and I was paying more than $100/mo to run the server despite it being old, slow, and underutilized. I finally bit the bullet and spent about half a week moving the site to my own server and upgrading all of its dependencies. This went relatively smoothly except for a few parts. I also fixed a number of bugs (and still have a few left) and deleted over 100k spam accounts. I’m toying with the idea of removing crufty Sett features and then working on it again to make it even better. Going through the old code and fixing stuff made me warm up to Sett again.

11. Fixed my email spam system

I host my own email on my own server and at some point I realized that the spam system wasn’t actually learning when I reclassified messages as spam or not-spam. It still worked reasonably well without that so I’d only dedicate a few minutes at a time to try to track down the problem, and inevitably I would think, “Well… it’s not so bad…” and give up. I finally committed to fixing it no matter what and it took a few hours. The problem was a small typo, but it was hard to track it down.

12. Built the mega bed

I’ve always had either a full or queen sized bed, and always thought that it was big enough. However, over the past year or two I noticed that if I slept in the same bed as my wife for too many nights in a row I would begin to feel tired. One night apart and I would be back to my normal self. We had begun alternating sleeping together and sleeping in the guest room so that I could be well rested.

I toyed with the idea of getting a king-sized bed, but we have a really excellent queen sized mattress that I didn’t want to give up or spend the money to replace it. I finally came up with the idea to rotate the queen mattress 90 degrees and use it at the head of the bed. I could then cut a cheaper Amazon mattress to make a section for our feet. I also rotated the mattress frame to sit at the feet and built an extension for the head. I’m not sure how clear that description is, but the end result is that we have an 80×80 bed (4″ wider than king!). I even found an oversized king down comforter and duvet, and standard king sheets stretch to fit the mattress (and to hold the two pieces together). The end result is amazing and I doubt anyone would realize it’s not just one huge mattress. I’ve never slept better.

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I’m really glad to have gotten all of these things done in the past 4 months. It’s fun to look back at them since the beginning of quarantine feels like ages ago. I’m definitely running out of projects I’ve been wanting to do for a while, so we’ll see what comes next!

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I think there’s a relatively good chance this post will be a little bit messed up, since I’m just now fixing Sett. Apologies in advance if you get multiple notifications for it, no notifications, broken links, etc. I expect to have Sett running better than ever within a week.

I have a Patreon now! If you get a lot of value from my work, consider supporting it.

While I think that it’s important to be able to work with as little motivation as possible, there’s no point in making things harder than they have to be. Working is easier and more enjoyable when we are properly motivated, so learning to motivate ourselves is a valuable skill.

It is possible, and maybe even preferable, to be motivated by work itself. I wrote a whole post called Love Work about this many years ago. If you are not able to love your work and be motivated by it, you are definitely in the wrong field. However, all of us go through periods of time when our immediate tasks are not overly motivating. I spent the last two weeks totally rewriting code I had already written, which is really hard to get very excited about.

Think of external motivation as the starter to your productivity engine. Work is usually most motivating when you’re in the zone and in the middle of an interesting problem, but sometimes we need a push to get there.

Over the past month I have probably watched at least 50 reviews of yachts. Some of them border on being affordable, but the majority are one or two orders of magnitude more than I could afford. I share a small boat with a friend and some of my most enjoyable times in the past year have been taking friends and family on the boat for one or two day trips. As I watch the yacht reviews I imagine being able to take my friends and family on trips that spanned a week or maybe even a month, cruising around the coast of Europe or hopping islands in the Caribbean.

Is it a waste of time for me to be spending hours per month watching reviews of yachts I couldn’t possibly buy? I don’t think so.

Watching yacht videos makes me motivated. I know that the only way I could ever get one is if I work really hard and create a lot of value for a lot of people. I will never be able to afford one on my current trajectory, so I must level up.

It’s important to want something that you don’t already have. It doesn’t have to be a big fancy yacht. It could be new knowledge, prestige, respect, the ability to donate a huge amount of money to a cause you care about, or anything else.

Most people start out with wanting things like financial stability, a good living situation, and maybe a nest egg for security. Those are perfect goals, but once you achieve them you have to find something new. Like so many things, what got you from point A to point B may not be the same thing that will get you to point C.

There’s the idea that wanting things is not good and that you should be satisfied with what you have. I think that this is half true. You shouldn’t be merely satisfied with what you have, you should be ecstatic! Humans came into this world living in the wild fighting for our lives, so anything above that (and even that, really), we should be grateful for. If you never get anything else in life, you should be more than satisfied.

However… that doesn’t preclude us from wanting things. We humans have created so many cool things (I mean seriously… just watch a yacht video), so why not be excited about those things? The best state to be in is to need nothing, be extremely happy with what you have, and still want a lot more.

Isn’t a yacht very materialistic? Sure. What I’ve found best motivates me is sharing experiences with people close to me. I love showing people my favorite cities (and, even better, hosting them there), teaching people cool things I’ve learned, or buying fixed assets that I can enjoy but also share with others. The best part of the island isn’t going there by myself, but being able to share the experience of staying on a private island with others.

It would be nice if my primary motivator was ending global poverty or something, and maybe those who are motivated most by that are better people than I am on balance. However, I’d rather figure out what actually motivates me so that I can use it to produce good work than try to convince myself I’m motivated by something more altruistic. It’s just more effective and honest.

It also doesn’t really matter if you ever get the things you use to motivate yourself. They’re just tools and you’ll change anyway. For years I was so motivated to work because I wanted to buy an airplane (Mooney M20J or M20K), but then when I got to the point where I could reasonably consider it, I lost all interest. The point isn’t to actually get the things, it’s to gain the ability to get them.

I think people feel bad about dreaming big these days. Wealth inequality is certainly too high, but rather than aspire to make it to the top and raise the floor for everyone else, we sometimes demonize those at the top (which isn’t to say that some don’t deserve it…).

Love work for its own sake, appreciate what you already have, and don’t become such a workaholic that you miss out on the joy of life. But also: think big. What would be worth working really hard for? What would get you out of bed in the morning eager to work? You don’t have to share your motivation publicly or even be proud of it. First find it, then channel it into great work, and then on the side think about what it is you want and examine the underpinnings of the desire.

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Photo is our not-quite-a-yacht at Lake Mead.

I started a Patreon Account. I’ll write a post about it in the next couple weeks, but I figured I’d force myself to link it today because I’m sort of uncomfortable with the idea. Please feel no obligation at all to donate… I’ll be fine either way. If you want to donate to show your appreciation for the work I do, I really appreciate it. I made a somewhat arbitrary cutoff at $20 to create a group of people for whom I’ll try to do some special stuff (though what that is will depend on the size of the group, who they are, etc.), but you can choose any amount.

I think I’ve finally figured out the Sett performance issues that keep taking the site down. If not, I’ll probably either commit to fixing it or switch to another platform(!)

If you’d asked me a year ago what the chances were that I would fly only two domestic trips in three months, I would have said about zero. And yet… here we are.

It’s rare to get such a big change in behavior, so I thought I’d write about a little bit, as much for future me as for you.

The biggest surprise is that I really like it. The first week or two was novel. The next two weeks had me searching the map to see if there was anywhere I could justify going, knowing that the answer was no. And since then I’ve been loving it. Paradoxically I can’t wait to travel again and know that I will as soon as I can, but I also sort of hope the lock down keeps going for a while.

I talk a lot about routines, but my main reference points with them were in the past. I sometimes felt a little bit weird prescribing routine to solve peoples’ problems, while knowing that I wasn’t in much of one myself. Now I have an incredible routine where all I do is drink tea, work, work out, eat Chipotle, use the sauna, read, and go to sleep. I feel amazing all the time and love tweaking my routine in ways you can only really do when you live with it for months.

I’m more productive than I’ve been in years, in the best shape I’ve been in years, am reading more than I have in years, etc. I got off of my strict routines for travel, then brought them back partly by cruising a lot (best routines ever there!) and buying a bunch of home bases with my friends, but it’s sort of obvious that that only gets me to about 60-70% of how good routines can be.

Also in the same way that I like eating the same thing every day and wearing the same clothes every day to avoid thinking about things that don’t matter, I like that for the most part I have no choice in what to do with my day.

Last, my wife and I have been able to spend a ton of time together. It’s definitely the most contiguous time we’ve ever spent together, and it’s been really good for us. We’ve always had an excellent relationship, but I think the constant interaction forced us to iron out a few details that will be good for us going forward.

My plans before quarantine all seemed so important and immobile. It was pretty amazing how easily they were wiped away and how few consequences there were.

So that’s the good stuff. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll integrate it into my life going forward, but I think I may force myself to spend at least one month in Vegas with no trips per year. Even having not traveled for three months that feels crazy, but I think it’s probably the right thing to do.

The biggest downside is that my world feels so much smaller. I’ve been traveling virtually non-stop since 2008 or so, and I forgot what it was like to not travel. Especially with our home bases in different places, I feel isolated from communities I care about. I missed the entire spring in Budapest and didn’t get to see any of my friends there. I was lucky enough to go to Hawaii and Japan right before this all started, but I miss going to Hawaii every month or two for my tea classes. We’re into island season already and I’m not sure I’ll even get to go once this year. I’m dying to see how the forest is and see all of the people we know there.

I’m generally pretty introverted and am totally content by myself, but most of my social time is traveling with friends and it’s weird to basically not have that for a quarter of a year. More productivity, but just about zero shared experience.

CruiseSheet is in a coma. It was doing really well and then… we spent about a month refunding everyone’s cruises. People are starting to book a few future cruises now, but it’s a just a trickle of business. I’m not too worried about its long term prospects and I don’t mind the lost income too much, but it’s not very exciting to work on a business where I know nothing I do is going to move the needle for a very long time. Recently I’ve been using the time to read more about coding and become a better coder.

I think I’ll probably start traveling again whenever borders open. I’ve got a cruise booked for the fall which I hope will sail. I really hope I can visit the island at least once this year and I’m dying to get back to Budapest, mainly because I walk so much when I’m there and Vegas in the summer isn’t much of a walker’s paradise. I don’t usually crave going to China but for some reason I’ve been thinking a lot about going there.

Overall the quarantine is a mixed bag, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make the best of it. I suspect that I’ll look back fondly on it and wouldn’t be surprised if I considered it to be one of the best eras of my life. Of course, it’s a lot easier to think of it that way when you’re eating lobsters on a cruise ship…

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Photo is a terrible photo of the moon from a night cruise on Lake Mead. Sorry! I don’t leave the house much so there’s not much for me to take photos of. Expect a lot of Lake Mead photos…

Sorry that my blog has not been consistent. I’ve been putting off writing and have been battling with Sett (that’s why you either got a zillion notification emails for the last couple or none…). I think one of my next quarantine projects might be to either rework parts of Sett or write a new blogging platform just for me. I’m 50/50.

Over time, both in myself and others, however, I noticed that high output didn’t always lead to achieving goals. It was certainly better than not producing output, but I had a persisting feeling that my results weren’t as good as they should be. I now have a more balanced approach and I my results towards goals now seem disproportionately good compared to my output.

If you don’t feel like your results reflect your output or you are trying to figure out how to get started at being more productive, I have some suggestions based on my own experience.

It’s important to realize that what you create when you are at your best will be many times more valuable than what you create at average or worse. Sometimes work created can even be a net negative. For example, if I force myself to write a blog post when I’m not at my best, maybe it will be unclear and actually turn people off from reading future posts. If I write some crappy code, maybe I’ll have to spend hours in the future chasing down a bug that could have been avoided in the first place.

Therefore it’s sometimes best not to work, and it’s always beneficial to do things to be at your best. Also, effort spent getting yourself to a better state can be more valuable than work itself.

It’s for this reason that I always try to get people I coach to take care of the fundamentals. Sleep is one of the biggest factors. I sleep an average of eight hours a night and frequently (like last night) sleep over nine hours to catch up if I’m not at my best. I drink tea and eat healthy food every day. I work out every other day. Recently I’ve started going into the sauna every day (no verdict yet on whether it has any effect).

At the very least, you should be sleeping as much as your body needs (no alarm clock), drinking a lot of water, eating healthy food, and doing some sort of exercise.

It’s also important to optimize your workspace as much as possible. Get a huge monitor, a comfy chair, and a nice desk. Get some plants. Spend the time customizing your computer to make it easy and efficient to use. These are basic things but they really matter a lot.

An undistracted mind is one which can work most efficiently, so automate and delegate everything you can. You should focus on your work not through force of will, but because you’ve eliminated everything that can distract from it.

It’s a random estimate and varies from person to person, but I’d guess that with changes like that you can get from being in “the zone” 10% of the time to 50%+. In other words, it really matters.

When you sit down to work, your task must be connected to a goal that matters to you and it must be an effective lever. With a tinge of shame I can think of so many weeks and months I spent on various features of Sett that no one, including myself, ever really used. I was sometimes working with the goal of producing a big piece of work, rather than thinking about why I wanted Sett to exist, how I needed to reach those goals, and which steps would be required to get there. I don’t know whether or not Sett would have succeeded if I had thought more about these things, but it would have had a better chance.

Once you start a task, you are precluding yourself from working on other tasks during that time and are also possibly adding future responsibilities. If I start writing a book, I am obligating myself to designing a cover, laying the book out, and entering it into Amazon. If I create a new software feature I am obligating myself to fix any resulting bugs and to support that feature going forward.

For that reason, it is important to do tasks that matter and will get you closer to your goals, not just to do tasks. Sometimes it’s better to do nothing but ponder why you’re doing what you’re doing and what the best next thing to do is. People are so afraid of being idle and bored that they don’t give themselves time to plan and build the confidence that the output they’re creating actually matters.

When you are at your best and are working on something that matters, that’s when it’s time to step on the gas and work hard. The amount of valuable output you can create in even 4-6 hours of peak performance can be better than days or even weeks of mediocre output. If you’re not sure if you’re at your best, act like you are and work hard anyway. Understand the state you’re in and do a task that will best use your present capabilities. If you’re not at your best, don’t use that as an excuse to watch TV, instead clean your house or organize files or something else productive.

Start with your end goal in mind, figure out what output will be needed to get there, and then optimize your life around being able to produce that output. Don’t burn yourself out, as short term gains are never worth the sacrifice of long term gains. Work for to achieve an outcome, not to feel busy.

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Photo is an aerial view of Lake Mead. I miss being on airplanes!

For over a year, way on the backburner, I’ve had a project of building the world’s most realistic LED candle. Over the past few years I’ve bought just about every possible contender on Amazon and found them to be pretty bad. Some have good color tone but flicker to much, others flicker appropriately but are orange, some have little movable wicks but cast weird shadows. I have one I programmed and built myself, but it’s just a circuit board with wires dangling off of it. Maybe, in quarantine, it was time to build the exterior shell of it.

I’ve been interested in 3D printing for a while but was worried that if I bought a printer I would use it for a few days to print some of the standard stuff others had already made, and then it would just sit on my desk forever. The only friend who had one did exactly that and had only recently thrown the thing away. But I figured with at least one concrete project to do and a luxurious amount of free time, it was a good time for me to give it a try.

At the same time I saw a deal for a Monoprice Ultimate Maker (which is a rebranded Wanhao Duplicator 6), so I bought it. At the time I figured that any 3D printer would be good enough to make such a basic little project, so I didn’t do much research.

I unboxed the printer and printed a little test print of a batman logo that was already loaded on the printer. I was fascinated by the process and surprised at the high quality of the plastic. For some reason I had a preconception that it was crappy plastic.

Test print out of the way, I had to learn how to actually build something. I had never used CAD before, so I did a little bit of research. It seemed like the best option for Linux users is FreeCAD, so I downloaded that and watched some tutorial videos.

I think my jaw was dropped for most of the tutorial watching. I had never concieved of the idea of parametric modeling, that you could specify the dimensions and relations of various parts of the model and have them remain constant while the rest changed. For example, I could specify that the hole that the wick would come out of would always be 2.5mm wide, and that the outer shell and inner shell would always be 1mm apart from each other. It was a totally new way to look at creating something.

Over the next few days I must have printed 50-100 candle shells, each time making small tweaks and modifications. I experimented with fiber optic channels to carry light, different charging options, creating wax molds to coat the candle in wax, and any number of other ideas. It’s very empowering to be able to have an idea, make a few changes, and then hold those changes in the physical world.

Once I’d gone through this process it took hold in my brain and everything seemed like an opportunity to design something new. When I fill up my Teforia tea machine in the morning some of the tea falls on the counter sometimes, so I made a simple funnel to more easily fill it.

When I first got my Snow Peak Kanpai water thermos I had bought every possible plastic case from Amazon to find the one which would best fill the space. I found a good one, but it wasn’t perfect. So I spent a few days learning how to design screw threads and made some that fill the space exactly. Now I can carry almost twice as much tea with me, which will really impact my life once I’m able to travel again.

One day I wished I had another incense holder, so I printed out a design that someone else had made. It was a standard design with a hole that you put the stick in. At the end I was annoyed that I had to pull the little unburnt stub out of the hole and thought that there must be a better way to make an incense burner which would automatically discard the stub. A couple hours later I was holding one in my hand that I had invented, and about a day later it actually worked well.

Having a 3D printer, and the skills to be able to design 3D items now feels like a totally essential part of life. I routinely print out little things that I would have otherwise had to buy or go without. As a natural born maximizer, I’m able to make things exactly how I want them, which I find incredibly satisfying. If you’re the tinkering type, you might want to buy one too. If you aren’t going to design stuff yourself, it’s probably not worth it.

I’m very happy with the printer I got, especially because I have upgraded most of it (firmware, dampers for motors, hot end, extruder, Z-coupling, nozzle, etc). To save you some research, it seems like Prusa printers are the gold standard, but Creality Ender printers are the best bang for your buck.

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Photo is one of my latest candle designs, though I have some big changes planned. I just thought it was a good example of the sort of complexity that is pretty easy to do in 3D printing.

Last year when I did this I didn’t have any posts I was burning to write. When I revealed what I had been doing, a couple people gave me the feedback that the posts felt a little bit forced and not written out of excitement. I could see their perspective and I think that it was the result of having to come up with so many ideas in such a short time.

This year was the opposite. I had so many posts that I was dying to write all year, so I put them in a text file. When time came to write them I was bursting at the seams to go. I hope that the enthusiasm has come through this year.

I really liked that I could go over my entire year and see what topics I hadn’t covered enough and which ones I’d written too much about. I haven’t looked through previous years to verify, but it feels like these years, especially this one, have been pretty well balanced.

As I’m always saying, working on cruises is my favorite because it doesn’t feel like work. Every day after having a leisurely tea with my friends I’d crack open my laptop, write the five posts that I was most inspired to write, and then get back to the cruise. Knowing how easy it was to produce this volume from last year made me feel even more relaxed this year, and as a result I was able to go into more depth with no time pressure.

Now that I’ve written all of the posts it feels as though my tank is empty and that I won’t possibly come up with another 52 topics for next year, but somehow I don’t think that will be true. I suppose that by the time you’re reading this I will have already finished writing the next year’s posts.

If I can come up with enough good ideas, I’d like to start writing 52 posts twice per year so that every year I grow another year of runway. That would allow me the luxury of continuing my blog after I’m dead or lose interest in blogging, whichever comes first.

I hope that you’ve liked this years posts. Looking over the huge list of things I’ve writen in the past couple weeks I’m really excited for a lot of these posts to go live. I’m planning on posting the most timely ones first and leave the evergreen ones for the end.

Thanks a lot for reading and for being open minded to my new way of posting. If you have any ideas for new blog posts, there is an excellent chance that I will write about them, and if you have any feedback on how I can make my batch-writing process better for readers, I’d love to hear that as well.

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My plans were foiled a little bit this year because coronavirus canceled my two spring cruises, so I still haven’t written next year yet. I have a few left besides this but they are posts I am delaying because they don’t make much sense during coronavirus.

I guess now I’ll just do an imaginary home-cruise and write five posts a day until I have the next year down. I have 30-35 topics chosen, so I’ll also brainstorm some more (or maybe you’ll email me to suggest one?)

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Two weeks ago I flew to help a family member move across the country. I was the only one on the plane, as seen in the photo up top.