Fernando Gros's Blog, page 11

What Are Summers For?

The last echoes of summer are still ringing. BBQs, cricket and music festivals. But cloudy skies and cool breezes suggest change is coming soon.

It’s been another odd summer, without travel, without that thing we’ve come to call “normality”. But it’s still summer.

Don’t Question Summer Holidays

“You can’t get rid of summer holidays. They’re sacred. They’re the foundation of this country’s social order.”

When I was trying to do a PHD, the research centre I was in invited me to join their board as a student representative. The university wanted all the research centres to submit new strategic plans. And those plans needed to reflect the concerns of students, especially postgraduate and research students.

My fellow students had questions – many of them about summer programs. Master’s students were curious why there was no summer semester. Taking a class over the summer would give them more flexibility in planning their course of study. Research students also liked the idea of more classes because that might create more teaching opportunities. And they disliked how there was no activity on campus for more than a quarter and nearly a third of the calendar year. This was especially acute for international students, who couldn’t afford to travel home and felt isolated in a foreign city over the summer months.

I took those questions, along with a little analysis of summer programs in similar research centres around the world, and wrote a paper for the board. Before the scheduled meeting, one of the faculty rang to suggest I should withdraw the paper. To say he was angry would be an understatement.

He started calmly at first, giving me a history lesson about the role of summer holidays in agrarian societies. Apparently, children couldn’t attend classes in summer because they needed to be in the fields helping their parents harvest the summer crops. But then his voice started to crack and the tirade began, calling into question everything from my ethics to my spirituality.

By suggesting the research centre could think about a summer program I’d clearly crossed a line.

The Point Of Summer

But why did that older academic have a such a visceral reaction to the idea of summer programs?

The obvious answer is because summer holidays are fun. I can certainly relate to the feeling of youthful nostalgia about summer, nostalgia for beaches and bike rides and hanging out with friends under the shade of the willow tree in my backyard as the days blurred into each other.

But why did he feel the need to lecture me about how the university had to protect summers? Why was it an institutional problem?

Clearly, he wasn’t out in the fields picking crops with his kids. I tried to imagine him, tweed jacket flung over a tractor, picking wheat with hands that spent the rest of the year thumbing through books and research journals.

There had to be another reason.

The Myth Of Summer

In Australia, where I grew up, summer schools holidays lasted about five and a half weeks. In the UK, it’s closer to seven. In most of Europe and North America, it’s even longer. But it’s not just the length of holiday that’s different.

Our summer holidays started with Christmas. Shops and offices would close and life would slow down as most people took a break. But that would last for only a few days. People took holidays during the rest of summer if they could. But kids didn’t go away to summer camp. No one relocated “for the summer”. There was no sense that summer was an extended break for society as a whole, or that you spent your summer living a different kind of life to the rest of the year.

After moving to London, I started to discover, a little brutally in the case of the research centre incident, that people around the world had different attitudes to summer holidays. It was clear that in countries where the climate didn’t allow you to live outdoors or at the beach very easily, summer had a different status.

An almost mythical status.

Summer wasn’t just a break from your work. It was a break from your life. Maybe even the chance to indulge in a very different kind of life. This brought with it a whole set of expectations.

The Weight Of Expectations

This approach to summer creates a lot of expectations – from diets to help you achieve the perfect summer body to fashion decisions for the perfect summer look, or lists full of essential summer reading.

Clearly, one needs to optimize for the best summers possible, maybe because after summer the inevitable questions come about how you “spent” your summer. After summer, and the liberation it carries with it, freedom feels like a limited resource.

My angst-ridden professor did allude to this in his rant. He needed summers in order to have the freedom to write. Academics are concerned about having enough output. “Publish or perish” is the cliché. But every time I spoke to him during regular semesters, he was writing something or other.

What he couldn’t articulate was perhaps the most important freedom of all: the freedom to think.

Learning To Celebrate Summers

I didn’t withdraw the paper. The research centre never did develop a summer program. Eventually, I quit the PhD. IL A few years later, the research centre ceased to exist, the victim of a subsequent review and restructure. These days, the university has a vigorous summer program.

But I did learn to value summer a bit more.

Not everyone can go to the beach all year round like I did growing up. The passing seasons are worth enjoying, in their own way, for the different experiences they bring.

Summer, in particular, with long days and warm evenings, can be an excellent time to think. IL Maybe not the kind of introspective thinking we do in the winter months. Perhaps summers are for a watching-the-world-from-a-distance sort of thought. Less concrete and more speculative, perhaps. Or just a good opportunity for the sort of mind-wandering that can fuel our creativity.

It’s probably best to relax into summer’s freedom rather than load it with expectations and hold it anxiously, like a nervous waiter with an expensive bottle of wine. We might just explode when someone asks us why summers matter so much, and we can’t give a better answer than “because they’re fun”.

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Second Brains Are Everywhere

Imagine if you had a second brain, something outside your body that could think for you. Your second brain would quietly work in the background, helping you preserve your precious attention and energy for your most important commitments.

The idea of a second brain has been popularised by Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain course (which I wrote about here). Forte’s approach to productivity fosters innovative problem solving by using a clearly defined system and carefully curated notes. He encourages you to think of this system as your second brain.

While the language might feel new, second brains have been with us for a long time. We use calendars, for example, to remind us of important dates and appointments. The calendar is a second brain. It remembers for us.

In fact, as we start to look around, we’ll see second brains everywhere.

Hoards Of Second Brains

If you want a sense of where someone’s thinking is at, ask them about the books they’ve read recently. Reading isn’t a passive exercise. It’s not the copying of information from one place to another, like a data transfer between computers. As we read, we interpret, we consider, we think.

This kind of “mind-expanding” happens with other media, from news and magazines to podcasts and documentaries. Our mind extends beyond our bodies into the pool of ideas we choose to swim in.

Once we start to look around, we’re apt to see second brains, extensions of our cognitive processes, everywhere.

Brains In The Kitchen

We’ve looked at Winifred Gallagher’s excellent book House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live several times (here, here, and here). Gallagher’s idea is that the rooms in our homes tell stories about us that in turn shape our behaviour. They think on our behalf.

When she was recovering from her stroke, my mother told me she would often walk into the kitchen and let it “speak” to her. The arrangement of things, a design born of years and decades of cooking, reminded her of details she otherwise struggled to remember.

Contrast this with the experience of trying to cook in an unfamiliar kitchen. We open all the cupboards and drawers, struggling to find a spatula or large pot, something we could locate easily in our kitchen.

The way we design buildings enshrines a lot of ideas about how to live. We see this in the way kitchens and bathrooms have become bigger and more prominent while the formal lounge, once a feature of many homes, has all but disappeared.

Our cities are the same. Poorly designed cities make walking and cycling difficult, which reflects current ideas about transport and encourages car-based trips.

Thinking And Digital Utopianism

Much of today’s talk about second brains implies something digital that “thinks for us”, an electronic thing, an artificial intelligence, working for us. But this betrays a limited understanding of what thinking is.

We might believe thinking happens only when we actively use our cognitive functions. Like Rodin’s famous sculpture, we stop everything, assume a tortured pose, and think!

But our minds don’t work like that. We’re thinking – solving problems, making connections, coming up with ideas – all the time. We’ve looked at this in previous articles on sleep, mind-wandering, and walking.

We might not realise it, but we’re thinking all the time.

This helps us understand how the things around us can think for us. They don’t have to be active in order to be second brains. They just have to be well encoded.

Templates As Second Brains

How can we build a second brain for work? Templates are a popular answer for everyone from designers to music producers. Templates can help us overcome the creative block we might get from staring at a blank page.

In Template Mixing and Mastering: The Ultimate Guide to Achieving a Professional Sound, Billy Decker and Simon Taylor explain how a well-designed music production template has helped Decker mix 16 number one hit songs. Decker’s template isn’t just a starting point for new songs. It’s the distillation of 20 years of experience and a tool for making faster and more reliably good-sounding mixes.

Templates speed up our work and reduce many simple errors. They help make the work more consistent, and because effort isn’t wasted on building things from scratch every time more energy can be focused on the details that matter.

Masters of any craft customize their tools. Woodworkers, for example, personalize their tools to suit their hands, the kinds of wood they work, and their technique. In turn, these modified tools remind the woodworker of their approach to the craft.

Templates are just another form of customized tool, an extension of the mind.

Other People As Second Brains

Second brains of all sorts are explored in depth in Annie Murphy Paul’s rewarding book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Paul suggests that much of what we consider thinking happens outside our physical brains. Our bodies, the physical spaces we inhabit – even our interactions with others – are extensions of our own minds and thinking processes.

Paul recounts the story of the US Navy ship Palau, which lost all power and all systems while returning home from drills. Onboard was a psychologist who was studying “socially distributed cognition”. We tend of think of thinking as the property of individual minds and even distrust “groupthink”. But the crew avoided catastrophe by thinking together, solving problems and collectively navigating their way to safety. The ship became a hive mind.

In our fragmented world of work, where people are quickly hired in the name of growth then equally quickly dismissed to save costs, we tend not to think about the collective knowledge and memory of an organisation. If anything, we’ve been schooled to distrust the idea of the institution as a brain.

We know the people around us influence our attitudes, habits, and thoughts. They are a predictor of who we will become. And while the reflections we have in our solitude are important, it’s also true that some of our best efforts at making sense of the world happen thanks to other people.

Brains Are Not Computers

Thinking is a lot more than just processing information. Thinking of any kind, critical or creative, involves taking disparate pieces of experience, knowledge, and perception, then combining them in new ways to create ideas and ways to act.

Our brains aren’t really like computers. We don’t have a brain to store information. We have a brain to interact with the world. This is where a lot of the talk about second brains starts to fall short.

But the metaphor is still useful if we extend beyond just notes and digital devices to all the things and people around us. In fact, it ought to inspire us to take designing our lives more seriously, in order to think more clearly.

In an important way, your second brain is all around you.

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2031

Finally, I have a new passport. It took a bit of effort, especially since the Australian High Commission here in London isn’t taking appointments. My old passport expired in May 2020. I had been planning to renew it, but then the lockdowns started. When the High Commission closed, the only option was an emergency passport renewal by post. At least I had a passport, but it was good for only one year.

When 2021 started, I still had May in mind as the renewal date. But, of course, it was March. For the first time in my life my passport expired. I had to apply for a new passport from scratch – an added complication in a complicated year.

The main hassle was finding someone to witness my photo ID. They needed to be Australian, have known me for an extended period of time, and have seen me recently. I didn’t know anyone in the UK who fit the requirements and wound up having to ask a friend from Japan who was traveling in Australia.

The whole thing took a while. But the passport arrived last week. And as I checked the details were correct, my eye lingered over the renewal date: May 2031.

Life in 2031

It won’t feel like “the start of a new century” anymore by 2031. We’ll be closer to 2050 than 2010. And the ʼ80s will be as distant a memory as the end of WW2 was in the ʼ80s.

We’ll be facing some of the same challenges. The pandemic might be over, but we will still be dealing with its economic, social, and long-term health consequences. Undoubtedly, we’ll be dealing with climate change as well.

Of course, there might be new challenges. The way we eat, the way we learn, and the way we work are all changing dramatically.

If change is inevitable, then why not be open to adapting to it?

Choosing To Flow Like Water

We’re getting a steady stream of albums from Prince’s famous vault of recordings. With each one, Sony is also pushing out a podcast series interviewing the people involved in making the recording. It seems clear to anyone listening that one of Prince’s favourite bits of advice was to “be like water”. He saw creativity as being enabled by the ability to stay loose, fluid, and in the moment.

We’re often anything but like water when we think of our future. We tense up imagining ourselves older, slower, surrounded by an unfamiliar world.

When you look at Prince’s career, or that of any great artist, what’s fascinating is how much they change and evolve, from decade to decade. And yet they retain a distinctive identity.

Change doesn’t undermine their integrity. Their artistry is like a great flowing river of creativity.

Doing The Work

In a recent piece, Your Ideal Day – How To Plan For A Better Life, we looked at an exercise that gets you thinking about your life ten years from now. That exercise can help you imagine the changes you need to make to live well in the future.

Whenever I’ve done that exercise what stands out most isn’t the things I want to add to my life, so much as the things I don’t want to continue doing. As I wrote in the piece, I never imagine my ideal future self “…eating takeout or doing email”.

I have no idea if I’ll still be on Instagram in 2031. But I’ll still be taking photos. So it might make more sense to invest my time in the craft of photography than the game of getting Instagram likes.

As much as I love paper books, I can’t imagine having more room to keep them. So maybe I should focus on buying more e-books and save paper for the books I want to read again and again.

It helps to ask what kind of long-term commitment you have to the things you do. This can clarify where you should spend your time.

Start Owning 2031 Now

If imagining yourself in ten years’ time feels hard, then try imagining yourself this time next year. Even the near future feels uncertain. We’re all holding our short plans very tentatively right now.

But the future is coming, and that means change as well.

By choosing to be adaptable in the face of change ,we give ourselves more chances to be resilient and better able to face the transitions we’ll need to navigate the way.

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Ted Lasso And The Triumph of Earnestness

Season 2 of Ted Lasso is now on AppleTV+. The show was the surprise hit of 2020. The concept of an out-of-his-depth American football coach working for an English football club has developed from a funny TV ad a few years ago into a marvellously entertaining comedy series.

That Apple had a hit with their first major comedy wasn’t that much of a surprise. AppleTV+ is new in the world of streaming and doesn’t have the brand recognition or breadth of catalogue of Netflix. But Apple’s pockets are deep, and their ability to draw stars to their productions is impressive.

What makes Ted Lasso surprising is its tone. This is a relentlessly earnest show. It wears sincerity and vulnerability like a medal of honour. And this vibe is far away from the cynicism and irony that has dominated TV comedy since the ʼ90s.

Shows like The Office and Seinfeld were deeply sarcastic. Friends and more recent offerings like The Big Bang Theory are drenched in a slightly less stifling flavour of cynical irony. The humour lies in the pathetic attempts of the cast to become adults.

Ted Lasso is different.

The Setup – The Punchline

The premise of Ted Lasso – an underperforming sports star, a coach in the midst of a mid-life crisis who doesn’t understand the game he’s been hired to coach, and a club management set up to fail – all lend themselves to comedy. It feels very much like a ʼ90s sitcom setup, with lots of opportunities to mock each character’s inadequacies.

Except, in Ted Lasso, the characters are trying to grow and become adults. They actively confront their fears and limitations. And we love them for it.

In the Season 2 opener, one of the characters experiences a trauma. The answer isn’t self-indulgence, but therapy. And overcoming the fear of therapy has become a recurring theme – in a TV show about football! The therapist is awesome – a total boundary-setting badass.

As the season progresses, we see characters confronting their fears – fear of showing emotion, fear of failure, fear of not living up to their values. And we see them dismantle the socially accepted ways of avoiding authenticity and vulnerability – like indulgence, machismo, and self-deprecating humour.

Ted Lasso does all this and manages to be funny. It’s a triumph!

When we look back on an earlier generation of comedy, irony operates on two levels. First, it’s cynicism and snarkiness, a vicious kind of humour that relies on a victim. Second, it’s a kind of insider humour, where we as the audience are laughing at the character’s lack of self-awareness. They think they’re cool, but we know they’re dorks, or losers, or in some other way just uncool. Ted Lasso has neither.

Living In David Foster Wallace’s Nightmare

Writing in 1993, David Foster Wallace highlighted the pervasive and corrosive effect of irony on popular culture. Wallace’s thesis was that each generation has a pervasive fear. For pre-war generations, this was madness, best exemplified in the hit song, “They’re coming to take me away”. This fear was partly an aversion to internal chaos but also being found out as unable to conform.

For the post-war boomer generation, the fear was different. They rejected conformity and questioned cultural norms. Their fear was being seen as naïve and sentimental. And the best defence against that was cynicism, scepticism, and irony. If you could see through the false promises of adulthood, through the lies of politicians and all other experts in power, then you were safe.

But what are you left with when you feel superior to everything? Mockery, and little else. That’s the trap Richard Yates explored in the novel Revolutionary Road.

Wallace felt we needed to overcome this addiction to irony. If not, we would continue to create art and literature that increasingly made it hard to be sincere. The fear of seeming naïve feeds a fear of being vulnerable, but without vulnerability, there are no real conversations, no deep human connection, and no one ever feels safe in their uncertainty to change their mind about anything.

From Questioning To Growing

Irony keeps uncertainty at arm’s length. You can’t feel naïve if you never seriously engage with things you don’t understand. It’s easier to say “today’s music sucks” than to admit today’s music is interesting and you feel a little overwhelmed trying to explore and understand it all. It’s safer to sardonically dismiss personal growth than to take seriously the myriad complex decisions we need to make in order to build a meaningful life.

At the extreme, our inability to face uncertainly with an open mind is undermining our ability to listen to expertise. We’ve seen painful examples of this throughout the pandemic. It’s a theme Tom Nichols explores in depth in The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.

How we handle uncertainty – whether we retreat into safety or embrace the opportunity to grow – expresses itself in everyday life and in every conversation. Do we hold space for other people’s experience? Do we hold people at arm’s length with suspicion, or do we draw them in hospitably and sincerely?

Ted Lasso And The New Sincerity

Friends has had a recent resurgence thanks in part to the show’s appeal to younger teenagers. This makes sense. Retro is always fashionable, and the show presents a version of adulthood that would appeal to teenagers.

But would you want to have that cast in your social circle? Or worse, the characters from Seinfeld or The Office? No, of course not.

Perhaps a better marker of the zeitgeist is Abode’s gallery full of “positive energy” inspiration. And, of course, Ted Lasso, a show full of people you’d be happy to share a meal with.

This “new sincerity” has been evolving slowly. Wallace wrote that seminal essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”, nearly 30 years ago. It’s a theme I’ve touched on a few times (here and here for example).

Maybe popular culture was once too naïve and sentimental. Perhaps irony was an appropriate correction. But since the turn of the millennium, it feels like we have had 20 years of overcorrection. We got stuck. We no longer just point at problems and the limitations in our society. We need to fix them. Like the characters in Ted Lasso who find themselves drifting into the therapist’s office, we’ve got work to do.

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How to Use Twitter

A lot of people use Twitter, but many of them don’t seem to enjoy it. There are good reasons for this. You can find a lot of hate and misinformation on social media.

But there’s no need to dismiss it entirely. I have Twitter to thank for some of best friendships and professional opportunities. Every day, many people rely on Twitter to stay connected to their communities or informed of things that matter to them.

It’s worth remembering Twitter is a piece of software, a tool you can customise to dramatically change your Twitter experience. And Twitter is innovating to improve the effectiveness of these customisation tools.

It’s worth taking a look at how to use Twitter in 2022.

But before we explore the Twitter of your future, it’s important to take a moment and ask why we bother using Twitter at all.

Why Are You Using Twitter?

So many people open a Twitter account, follow the recommended users and trending news stories, then proceed to have a miserable experience.

So, before going any further, ask yourself what you want from Twitter. What kind of people do you want to hear from? What kind of ideas do you want to be exposed to? How do you want the experience to make you feel?

Then you can customise Twitter to work for you.

For me, Twitter isn’t a tool for news, celebrity gossip, raging political arguments, or anything like that. It’s a tool for meeting interesting people.

When I’m on Twitter, I want to hear from people who make things, like artists, chefs, designers, photographers, musicians, writers, and so on. If there’s a crisis, like the pandemic, then I want to hear from experts. This means academics, scientists, and public health experts. I’m also interested in the daily experiences of people who live in cities I love, like Adelaide, New York, or Tokyo.

Engaging with these kinds of people makes me feel encouraged, inspired, and informed.

Follow People Wisely

To try to tame the experience they have on the platform, some Twitter users follow a very limited number of accounts. It’s an understandable mistake.

Anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar compared the size of different primates’ brains to the size of their social groupings. He wanted to find out how many relationships humans can sustain. He said it was 150. Although there’s a debate around the accuracy of Dunbar’s number, as it came to be known, most of us understand there’s a limit to how many people we can have in our social circles.

Limiting how many people you follow on Twitter to something like Dunbar’s number would make sense if you were trying to recreate your physical social life online. But why would you want to do that?

Think of it this way. Imagine if your world really was just 150 people. Okay, you’d know everyone’s name and their favourite beverage. But you wouldn’t have any art galleries, movies, or sporting events. And you wouldn’t have a smartphone to read this on, since that took a lot more than 150 people to make.

We cope with living in a society because we have strategies to deal with a much bigger number of voices in our life.

My grandparents’ generation didn’t have the internet. Their social life was close to Dunbar’s number in terms of friends, family, work colleagues, local shopkeepers, etc. But count the authors and poets they read, newspaper columnists, singers and radio announcers, movie and sports stars, and you start to get a pretty large number of people they enjoyed following.

Relax your restrictions and open yourself to following more people on Twitter. But do it wisely. Here’s how to make that work.

Mute Aggressively

If you’re seeing too much of a personality or topic that doesn’t interest you, then mute them. Living in the privacy settings (which we discuss below), the mute function is one of Twitter’s most powerful tools. You can mute something forever, or mute it for a day, week, or month, which is handy when you just want a rest from something that might normally interest you.

Mute works fairly well. Sometimes you have to add a few variations of terms to silence a topic, but it can be done.

I tend to mute irritating people rather than block them. There are good reasons to block people on Twitter, especially if you are also reporting them for violating Twitter’s terms of service for hateful or violent speech. But some folks take misguided pride in being blocked – whereas if they are muted, they are effectively shouting into the wind, unaware you can’t hear them.

Pin Your Hopes For All To See

Every year, I write a tweet about how I use Twitter and pin it to the top of my timeline.

How to use Twitter in 2021:

1. Follow people who do inspire you with their authenticity, honesty, and positive way of being in the world.

2. Cheer them on as they earnestly share their stuff (experience, life, work).

3. Share some of your own stuff.

— Fernando Gros (@fernandogros) April 18, 2021

Read people’s pinned tweets. And their bio. While you’re doing that, check out their most recent tweets and the stuff they like. Also take a look at which of your followers follow them.

If you see stuff you like, hit the follow button.

If you’re not sure, then don’t. But the follow button isn’t a marriage proposal. You’re not giving people the keys to your house. You can unfollow (and a lot more) if needed. Following is just giving people permission to bring something positive and useful, something that meets your goals, into your Twitter experience.

Skip The Timeline And Curate Lists

When you open up Twitter, you see a main timeline. This has updates from all the people you follow, more or less, depending on what Twitter’s algorithm feels like showing. Ignore it. The main timeline is chaotic, noisy, and random. Like the falling code in The Matrix, it’s too much.

Instead, use Twitter’s secret weapon: lists.

With lists, you can organise people into groups, based on any interest or topic you like. You could make a list full of chefs, cooks, and food writers. Or if you’re into black-and-white photography, you could create a list specific to that interest.

You don’t have to follow people to add them to a list. So, if you want to track an interest for a brief period, maybe something like an election campaign, or the Olympics, then create a list for that. When the thing is over, just delete the list. You don’t have to manually unfollow a bunch of accounts.

Lists can be public or private. I make most of mine public. But I have a small private list, a nod to Dunbar’s number, with my favourite people on Twitter.

Protect Your Focus By Bookmarking And Turning Off Notifications

Deep work and digital minimalism are recurring topics on this blog. One of the ways Twitter can break our focus is by interrupting us with notifications and soaking up time with interesting distractions.

So, turn off your notifications from Twitter. All of them. You can wait to see that witty reply to yesterday’s tweet later. You don’t need to know someone just followed you.

Good notification hygiene is important. Enjoy your moment on Twitter and then move on to the rest of your life.

When you see something interesting that would take more than a moment to enjoy, bookmark it for later. People are constantly posting interesting links on Twitter. But if you always consume that content on the spot, then you risk a moment turning into something bigger. Two minutes becomes twenty, and Twitter starts to take over your attention.

Bookmark things for later. Then when you have a longer break, you can read those interesting articles and watch the cool videos.

What About Trolls?

Twitter generates conversations. Like-minded people bond over shared interests and exchange ideas. It can be wonderfully inspiring to see genuinely human connections made online. It’s beautiful to watch.

Sadly, because it’s the internet, or because it’s a part of human nature, some people want to tear this down. We commonly call these people trolls.

The subject of online trolls is vast. Ginger Gorman’s first-hand account, Troll Hunting: Inside the world of online hate and its human fallout, is a good place to start exploring this. Angela Nagle’s Kill all normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, adapted from her PhD research on politically motivated trolling, is also insightful.

Trolling is not an even game. Women are more likely to be trolled than men. Minorities of every type are more likely to face online hate. Trolls usually have multiple accounts, or even automated accounts, to amplify their attacks.

Thankfully, Twitter has been improving its tools for dealing with online hate. We discuss those below. The company is finally taking the problem seriously after years of inaction. The situation isn’t perfect, but it’s better now than it was.

It’s also worth noting that not all disagreement is trolling. People might take issue with what you say. You might not like the way they do it. I don’t like snarky cynical comments, for example. But that’s not the same thing as trolling. It’s not a systematic attack. Just as in the rest of life, just because someone is being difficult, we don’t immediately assume they are full of hate.

Other Features

This article could easily be five times as long if we explored every feature Twitter has, especially as Twitter keeps adding new features. But for now, here are a few things to try.

Advanced Search – In addition to basic search functions, Twitter also lets you filter searches by location and restricting them to people you follow. I use the latter all the time.

Notification Filters – Twitter has a “quality” filter you can turn on which tries to deal with automated replies. You also have various options to mute replies from people you don’t follow, or who don’t follow you. I don’t personally use those, but I do turn the mute notifications from new accounts, accounts with a default profile photo, who haven’t confirmed their email, or haven’t confirmed with phone number, as these restrict a lot of low-quality and troll activity.

Conversation Settings – When you tweet, you can set who can reply – everyone, only people you follow, or only people you mention. You can also change this after you share a tweet. You can mute a conversation if you’re tired of receiving notifications about it. And you can hide replies from people when you find them unhelpful (or worse).

Security Settings – Here you can see and change the accounts you’ve blocked and muted as well as the words and phrases you’ve muted. Also, you can report tweets for a variety of reasons including abuse, or the threat of harm or self-harm. Unfortunately, false and misleading information is not available on this list.

Spaces – This is a new feature many users haven’t explored yet. Twitter has a social audio service called Spaces (I’ve written about social audio here and here).

Turn Off Retweets – Following someone who’s prone to hit the retweet button too often? You can turn off their retweets. The topic of retweets is one Twitter users disagree on. For me, I don’t like retweets without comment and wish there was a setting to turn them off for everyone. But for now, I frequently turn off retweets per user.

A Brief Word About Anonymity

When I think of the accounts that have directed attacks and insults my way over the years, many of them have one thing in common: anonymity. It’s not surprising. These trolls choose to not risk tying their real-world identity to the hateful things they say online.

Of course, not every troll is anonymous, and not every anonymous account is a troll. Some people have valid reasons for anonymity, such as personal or political circumstances.

But many of the benefits of being on Twitter are attenuated by choosing to be anonymous. Connections and conversations flourish because of trust. Online, as in real life, we make things better by having a visible commitment to being civil, kind, and respectful.

This is in sharp contrast to trolls, who have no skin in the game of maintaining good human interactions, and no interest in making room for people to flourish.

Being your authentic self online maximises the chances of meeting like minded people. Authenticity fosters trust.

Most Important Of All

If I can leave you with just one piece of advice, it’s this: use Twitter less often. Enjoy it, then get on with your life. In a recent Atlantic essay, Caitlin Flanagan wrote about feeling addicted to Twitter and feeling like it was corroding her ability to think and read deeply.

“Twitter is a parasite that burrows deep into your brain, training you to respond to the constant social feedback of likes and retweets.”
– Caitlin Flanagan

Don’t live on Twitter. Or have it open all day. Turn off all notifications so you aren’t tempted to open Twitter every time you pick up a device or return to your computer. If you find yourself thinking about Twitter when you’re not on there, then it’s time to take a rest. Take twice as long as you think you need.

Twitter can make your life better. It’s helped me get work, make friends, and understand places I’ve lived. But I’ve also taken long sabbaticals over the years. And although I post regularly on Twitter, the amount of time I spend there each day is tiny compared to how much time goes into reading, listening to podcasts, taking courses, or watching documentaries.

Twitter can play a small positive role in your life – if you use it wisely and customize your experience to suit what you want from the service.

The post How to Use Twitter appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Becoming Obsessed With Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking app. It’s also a lovely shade of dark green that I’ve used to paint my stairs and dining room cupboards. But right now, we’re talking about the app.

Obsidian is awesome, I love it, and now that it’s also available on iOS, it’s become part of my daily reading and writing routine.

But why so much enthusiasm for an app that takes notes? After all, note-taking has been a feature on pretty much every device since the dawn of the digital are.

Well, we’re in the midst of a note-taking renaissance. The internet has given us an infinite library. And the tools for content, from writing apps to publishing tools, have evolved at pace. But there’s a gap between the input and the output. We find ourselves wanting to corral the vast ocean of content into something more coherent.

Obsidian And The Note Taking Craze

This has created a huge demand for new note-taking apps. EverNote dominated this space for a long time. But now there’s Bear, Craft, Notion, and Roam Research, to name a few. Add to that, the ever-improving notes apps bundled with other software from Apple, Microsoft, and so on. And, of course, there’s Obsidian.

All of these let you write a note and do some basic organisation. That’s the easy bit.

But what if you make hundreds – or thousands – of notes? And what if you want to be able to find relationships between those notes, between things you wrote months or years apart? That’s where a new generation of note-taking apps comes in. They all provide different approaches to the problem of finding insights in a sea of ideas.

Notion and Roam Research

Notion, which I’ve written about before, is one powerful solution. You can format and tag your information to create relationships between notes. But Notion isn’t note-centric. Notion is built to make it easy to create customized databases. This makes Notion very flexible for wrangling all sorts of data. But it also makes Notion frustrating if you want to work primarily with notes for research. You can easily skip from one note to another if you’ve set up the right tags and relationships, but you can’t easily pull up a bunch of notes to look at them simultaneously. Notion is great for designing a garden but lousy for whipping up a salad.

Moreover, Notion is a cloud-based app. You have to be online to use it. And it’s often slow to boot up and even slow to use. Being cloud based with minimal security means your data isn’t fully secure.

An alternative is Roam Research. As the name implies, Roam was built as a research tool. It’s key feature is the ability to organise notes quickly into outlines – which is great for writing certain kinds of essays. The type you might need to get through college, for example.

But it’s a formulaic and prescriptive approach for more creative or complex writing tasks. And, like Notion, Roam will work offline. But Roam uses a proprietary markdown format, so if Roam were to go out of business, it might be hard to salvage your notes and the work you did to organize them. And since all your data is in Roam’s cloud, you have to rely on their security, which, like Notion, doesn’t include two-factor authentication or end-to-end encryption.

Why Obsidian Is Better

Obsidian works with notes in a standard text file format. You can create links directly between notes or tag them to create relationships. Obsidian also lets you see your notes in a cloud map. It’s fast, and the interface doesn’t get in your way or force you to work a certain way.

In fact, it’s very customizable. You can change the way it looks or apply different themes. And you can easily re-arrange the windows you see to make it as cluttered or as minimal as you want. And, importantly, Obsidian works offline and you control where your files live for maximum security.

As I started using Obsidian, I wondered why it felt so comfortable and familiar to use. Partly it was because of the speed, stability, and ease of use already considered. But there was something deeper. Obsidian seemed to work with a similar design philosophy to my favourite writing app, Scrivener.

Obsidian’s vault, full of standard text files, is like a Scrivener project. Where Scrivener has cards, Obsidian has panes. And Scrivener’s side-by-side mode even looks a little like Obsidian with multiple notes open.

Tools And Meta-Cognition

Finding a tool that does the job isn’t the question. It’s finding the right tool for you. And it’s finding the tool that suits the way you think.

Think about the way you think when you’re using an app. The meta-cognitive demands of the tool. How hard are you working just to figure out how to use important features? How much is the app getting in your way, either because its design or its suggestions for how you should work don’t suit your process?

This was part of the frustration with EverNote. You were constantly trying to find workaround for the EverNote way of doing things. Maybe it’s a confusing camera-setting menu, or a printer that just does weird printer things.

We put a mental burden on ourselves when we use something that doesn’t work in a way that makes sense to us.

With Notion, I could create an elaborate database full of notes. But I couldn’t get into any sort of flow while looking at notes as part of the writing process.

With Roam Research, I felt like I was in an undergraduate essay writing class impatiently staring out the window while a teaching associate droned on about creating a three-part structure with a clear introduction, summarizing conclusion, and lots of connecting sentences.

The Logic Of Writing And Research

Throughout this conversation, I’ve intentionally kept two categories of tools separate. There are tools for research (Obsidian) and tools for writing (Scrivener). You could expand it a little, since you’re able to read this thanks to WordPress, which plays a role in turning the words written in Scrivener into something you can read online. And there are also apps like Readwise for capturing highlights from books, articles, and essays, which creates some of the raw material for notes in Obsidian. But there’s still a distinction between research and writing.

Writing is a pragmatic, goal-oriented thing. When I sit down to write, it’s with a purpose, for an audience, and with a final product in mind. But research is asynchronous and open-ended. When I’m in that mode, I’m considering questions I don’t always know the answer to, reflecting on ideas that might come up again before they go anywhere. Or maybe they never go anywhere.

There are things you read here on my blog that I’ve been thinking about for years.

If you made a note of the interesting things you hear, maybe a few notes per book you read, together with highlights from articles and web pages you read, then it’s not hard to imagine your note collection growing to the tens of thousands in a few years.

That’s a vast trove of information that’s yours, already pre-selected for interest, before you ever have to resort to a search engine. Far more than a tool for creating content, a well-crafted library of notes is a sanctuary within which you can find the room to acquire wisdom and craft your unique perspective on life.

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Panache – Seasonal Theme For Summer 2021

Opening my wardrobe fills me with dread. I’m tired of the way I look, the food I cook and every book that sits waiting on my shelf.

Sure, blame it on the pandemic. But, we know these ruts and routine frustrations from other seasons of our lives. Somehow, we’ve got to a point where things lack flavour, style, or dare I say it, panache.

I love that word. It feels gauche and retro. Like something from a 70s fashion editorial. I can imagine Ewan MacGregor saying the word over and over again in an elegantly campy drawl, while looking in the mirror preparing for his Netflix role as designer Halston. Say it with me – “Halston has panache.”

My yearly theme for 2021 is imagination. But, I’ve been struggling to imagine a better way of being in the world. The last 16 months haven’t made me less stylish. But, they’ve made me less sure of my style.

On Having Panache

So, for this seasonal theme, I’m imagining my life with a little more panache added. Sure, panache is an odd word. But it appeals to me because it’s a fun and unexpected way to talk about style. Panache suggests an enticing mix of extravagance and risk taking. Not just finding your own style but being brave enough to push it to the edge in pursuit of expressing yourself.

“Panache” has its root in a plume of hair or feathers. Think of the helmets Roman solders wore. The lower ranks had no plume. But as you went up the ranks, the plumes became more elaborate. The decorations marked rank and status.

There’s a common misconception that style doesn’t matter anymore. Of course, this is untrue. We’re always decorated and showing our taste in some way. That’s why this recent meme worked so well.

Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook pic.twitter.com/XdoG9QERwn

— Valerie (@GamineCuisine) July 15, 2021

We all have a style, not just in the way we dress, but also in our approach to work, how we behave and how we treat people. Not explicitly having a style is still a style. So, why not cultivate a style?

Customise Your Life

Recently, I wrote about life feeling small because of the pandemic. One thing I’ve struggled to hold onto is the feeling that my work comes from an atelier, or workshop, where everything is customised. I’m getting through each day. But, increasingly it feels like things are less crafted and unique. Like everything is just on the default setting.

When you look at people who’ve mastered a craft, you might see they have a lot of tools. But, what’s more interesting is how they’ve customised those tools. Whether by years of use and maintenance. Or by design. They’ve made those tools their own.

Their tools have panache.

That’s what I’m trying to do this season, even with my digital tools. I imagine a way to make them work better for me, even the small things, like these banners I made for Twitter Lists.

It’s an excuse to open up the preferences and get away from the default settings, in work, as in life.

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The Next City

Sometime in early 2022 I’ll be moving to Melbourne. Were it not for the pandemic, the move would happen sooner. I’ll get to that. But first, I need to say a few things about leaving London.

Normally, the family discussion about changing location takes weeks or maybe even months. This one took minutes.

None of us felt like spending any more time in the UK. The clock was always ticking on our time here. Thanks to the events of 2020 and 2021, the ticking just got louder.

This was true for so many parts of our lives during this pandemic. Every frustration got louder. Every inevitable fork in life’s path came sooner. Amplification and acceleration were 2020’s combined blessing and curse.

Looking back on my early months here, I had a whimsical sense of amusement about this place. Sure, London felt grimy and inconvenient, but also kind of magical. I loved going to galleries and football games. Okay, the traffic and public transport were terrible. But exploring food markets and walking in the city’s many parks were a delight. Yes, my Tokyo wardrobe made me feel overdressed everywhere I went, like a time traveller from the 1950s. But it was nice to forego the foreign language anxiety for a little while. I’d even started to pick up a new creative passion, book-binding, taking courses at the excellent nearby London Centre for Book Arts.

Still, at the start of 2020, after only a few months, the sheen was wearing thin. British customer service was always going to be a shock after living in Japan. But I found the vibe of London slow, unfriendly, expensive, and – drenched in an oddly repressive form of nostalgia –tiresome. I was praying for some kind of magical solution to make life better, or at least different.

The pandemic certainly made it different.

As I write this, I’ve been in isolation for 70 weeks. The UK has come in and out of lockdown several times. The lockdowns worked. But they always came too late and ended too quickly. For me, when considering my age and prior health concerns, the situation never felt safe enough to change my stay-at-home routine. Especially given the widespread reluctance to wear masks.

And, just when greater freedom felt within reach, the government abdicated responsibility and left us with rising case numbers and nowhere near enough of the population vaccinated (as I write less than 55% of London’s adult population are fully vaccinated).

My life here in London became small, too small, painfully small. I’ve always said your second year in a city defines that place for you and, well, I’ve spent my second year in London in isolation and lockdown. I’m thankful for being safe, healthy, and feeling relatively creative, despite all the restrictions. But this house is smaller than the homes I had in Tokyo or Singapore, and all my studio and workshop gear is still in storage, a result of the never realized plan to find a studio space here.

My soul is crying out to expand, physically, emotionally, artistically.

So in 2022 I’ll be moving to Melbourne. My wife was offered a great job. It’s based Down Under – at least for now. Ordinarily, we would be moving right away, but for personal and professional reasons, we’re waiting until Australia opens its borders again.

I’ve already been asked what it feels like to “return home”. I honestly don’t know. To me, it feels more like another expat relocation. Melbourne is a place I’ve visited only twice and only for a few days each time. And as much as I love visiting Adelaide and miss the regular cadence of trips I made there, Australia stopped feeling like home a long time ago.

Still, I miss my parents. I feel like a bad son every day, so far away, as they get older. This move puts me closer to them at a precious time.

And I miss being in Asia. I miss the optimism, the joy of living in the present, and looking towards the future with hope. Melbourne isn’t in the heart of Asia, but it’s a better base for the kind of travel I want to be doing.

That said, I read the news from Australia with a mix of exasperation and revulsion. Australia initially coped so well with the pandemic. But the slow rollout of vaccines has put the country at risk, and a poorly managed quarantine system has made it hard for so many Australian expats like me. It’s concerning to read about the persistent problems with racism, safety for women, and climate policy, coupled with the corrosive effect of “culture wars” on the country’s public discourse.

It’s hard not to wonder, with some degree of concern, what it will feel like to live there.

To quell the anxiety, I try to imagine myself driving through the bush in a nice new electric vehicle. I haven’t owned a car since 1998, but I’ll need to get one now. I hope to live somewhere that makes it easy to escape the city. Maybe where I’m more likely to see kangaroos than coffee shops on my morning walk. Somewhere big. Because I miss the wilderness as much as miss my personal space. Somewhere deep down I yearn to see a landscape that feels old and untamed.

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Your Ideal Day – How To Plan For A Better Life

What do you want from your life? It’s such a vast question that most of us shrink away from it. The self-help books and hustle culture make setting goals look easy. But it isn’t.

Maybe it’s easy to come up with superficial answers. The things your society, or your parents, or your co-workers expect you to say. Or the glossy aspirational version of life we get sold on Instagram and reality TV.

But figuring out what you want, deep down – what will satisfy your soul and help you flourish – takes a bit of work. Especially if you’re thinking about a future you can build for yourself without relying on winning the lottery or making a sudden fortune via crypto-currencies.

The imagine-your-ideal-day exercise is the best thing I’ve tried for thinking about this problem. I’m eternally thankful to Debbie Millman for introducing me to it. So much so, I’ve written about it before here, here, and here. It goes like this.

Doing The Ideal Day Exercise

Find a distraction-free moment. Get your favourite writing tool ready. Imagine yourself in the future, 10 years from now.

Then focus on a single working day, your ideal day. Write about it, filling out the details of what that day would look and feel like.

Go deep with the details. Where do you live? What time do you wake up? What is your morning routine like? Do you commute to work, or do you work from home? How do you dress? What do you eat? How do the rooms you’re in smell like? What do your plates and cutlery look like? Who do you work with? What’s your workplace like? How does it make you feel? What kind of chair do you sit in? How do you relax and unwind? Who is in your social life? Are you planning a holiday soon and where to? What kind of media do you consume? Finally, how does your day end and how do you go to sleep?

Give yourself time and freedom to dream. The more detail the better. Don’t self-edit. Don’t worry what other people might think.

Every time I’ve done this, it runs to several pages. So take your time and enjoy the process.

Now Ask Yourself Some Questions

The next step is to use what you’ve written to ask yourself questions about your current situation. As the first stage is so taxing, you might want to wait a few days before tackling this.

Re-read your notes and start to notice every difference between your ideal day and how you currently live. Make a list of those things. Don’t worry about how big or small they seem. It could be how far you commute or what kind of coffee you drink. It might be what you wear or how kind your co-workers are. It could be the job you do or the friends you have.

Compare, notice, and list.

Now it’s time to look at that list and ask yourself, How do I get there? These will be the changes you need to make in your life. Some of these change might feel daunting. That’s okay. You’ve given yourself 10 years to get there.

The important thing is asking yourself what changes you can start to make now, today, this week, this month, to get you moving towards this ideal day.

And, as you make choices in all aspects of your life, ask yourself, Is this moving me closer to my ideal day?

Your Ideal Day Helps You Set Boundaries

Whenever I do this exercise, what stands out is the number of things I do now that never appear in my ideal day. I’m never imagining myself eating takeout or doing email.

This process of imagining your ideal day shines a light on any uncomfortable compromises or limitations in your current life. There’s nothing wrong with takeout pizza once in a while. Actually, it’s awesome. But when I’m eating a lot of takeout, it’s a sign something is wrong in my life or the way I’m managing my schedule. And if I’m constantly mired in email, then that also points to poorly thought-out ways of working, unhealthy collaborations, or projects that are taking up more time and energy than they should.

What imagining your ideal day also does, of course, is focus your mind on your aspirations. Too often, we’re timid when asking the universe for what we really want from life. For many of us, institutional processes like racism, sexism, or ableism have made us fearful of having our desires and dreams labelled as unreasonable.

The process of imagining your ideal day gives you a safe environment to embrace your desires.

This does helps you set boundaries. You can use your ideal day as a check whenever deciding to say yes or no to something (or someone). Does this thing fit in my ideal day? Is this the kind of person I imagined in my ideal day? Is this something I would do in my ideal day?

How Does This Work?

In an interview, Debbie Millman explained some of the reasons why this exercise works for so many people. It gives you the freedom to imagine the future you want. Also, it helps you feel hopeful and optimistic about designing and creating a better kind of life for yourself.

Part of the reason is because the exercise focusses on your working life. While it’s okay to dream of skiing the back country or relaxing on a beach in Tahiti, that’s probably not going to be what you do for 200 days a year.

The purpose of life is work and love. The ideal day exercise encourages you to think deeply about the flow, shape, and texture of your work and the place of love and human connections in your life.

Also, the exercise helps you make the changes you need to make it tangible. Any big project needs to be broken down into many steps and gets finished by working through many decisions. And there’s no bigger project than shaping your life. So, having some framework for the many yeses and no’s you’ll face is liberating.

The Answer Is Design, Not Addition

It’s easy to believe the answer to making our lives better is more – more money, more time, more things. That isn’t always true. Sometimes greater freedom comes from removing things from your life as well.

What this exercise does is focus our attention on designing our life, rather than buying more stuff. Once you get a clear picture of the life you’d like to live, you can start every day to make the choices that will get you closer to where you dream of being.

The freedom comes from really understanding your desires.

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The Slow Evolution Of A Morning Writing Habit

I write every morning. Or at least six times a week. It’s my most important creative habit. And central to everything I do.

While I’ve described my writing habit several times, and shown you the mechanics of how it’s organized, I’ve never explained how it evolved.

Before I Had A Morning Writing Habit

In high school, I was good at writing – when I did it. But I was a terrible student, with chaotic habits. I did homework when – if – I remembered. I made it to university but struggled. Studying in order to get a job felt like a terrible deal and playing in bands was a lot more fulfilling.

Returning to full-time study in my mid-twenties, I was a lot more focussed. But my first essays were crap. And their grades reflected that.

Then I started looking at the top students’ writing. Not to copy their work, but to understand how they wrote, structured and formatted their essays. Then I did the same with journal articles.

Academia was just another game. If I could learn to play sports, or guitar, then I could learn to write essays. There’s no magic involved. Literature and poetry are art forms. But the kind of writing required to get High Distinctions or A+ grades doesn’t involve any sorcery.

So, I became a better writer, but my writing habits were still chaotic.

I’d learnt to use a calendar, so I remembered when things were due. Mostly. But I was still writing at all hours of the day and night, often printing essays minutes before they were due to be submitted.

I’d love to say that by the time I was doing my PhD I was much better. But I was late once to an important conference presentation because my computer crashed as I was packing up to go, meaning I lost the paper I’d stayed up all night working on.

It Started With This Blog

I started this blog in 2004 after quitting academia. IL I was looking for a different way to write and a different way to be in the world. It was then that the writing habit started to evolve.

In the early days, I wrote straight into the tiny editing window in WordPress. Sometimes I’d publish, then the connection would drop out, thanks to the dodgy ISDN connection in the farmhouse, and I’d lose a whole unsaved blogpost. My writing habit, if you could call it that, was still sporadic and stressful.

Once my daughter started pre-school, I noticed there was a peaceful moment every morning. We were living in Delhi at the time, and the mornings were often the coolest and calmest time of the day. With my child safely out of the house for a few hours and my wife at work, I had some time I could use any way I wanted. At first it was just a couple of days a week. But taking a hour to write before tackling the rest of the day’s responsibilities quickly became a habit.

For the first time in my life, I started to enjoy writing.

The regular cadence of those morning writing sessions helped me think more clearly about what I wanted to write and how I wanted to write. I wrote with a distraction-free writing app called WriteRoom. Then I migrated to Scrivener and learned the drafting process I use today.

The Writing Habit Takes Shape

By the time we’d swapped the Delhi farmhouse for a Hong Kong high-rise, I was writing most mornings. The blog was starting to attract an audience by then. My daughter’s school bus left at 6.55 am, and we’d take turns walking her to the bus stop. But no shops or cafes were open at that time, and no one I knew (apart from my wife) started work that early. So I would go back to the apartment, open up a document, and start writing. It was an hour until my favorite espresso bar opened, so I’d earn that cup of coffee by putting down some words.

These days, there’s no favourite coffee shop nearby. But I still write every morning. Or at least I try to – as a goal, 100% is easier than 98%. It ends up being six days a week. Enough for 59,041 words so far this year. Almost of them straight after breakfast, before email or social media, and with a fresh cup of coffee as the reward.

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