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We all set goals. Few reading this lack aspiration. But graveyards full of New Year’s Resolutions show there’s a deep disconnect between people setting and accomplishing goals.

So, how do you set goals that are actually going to move you forward and then get them done? Particularly, how do you work on the long arc goals that are the really satisfying ones that are accomplished over years? How do you even scan for a future in which you’ll very likely be a different person than the one you are now? And how do you And also, avoid the productivity-pr0n and hustle-culture that just keeps you busy all the time but effectively running in place?

Working with startups for over a decade may have spoiled me. API Developer experience has come a long way in that time, SaaSifying backends to make building companies efficient, logical, and consistent.

Sadly, after months doing “science stuff” my feeling is this is a major missed opportunity in scientific projects and academia (and to be fair, few scientists building these apis are software developers by trade).

In many cases though it feels like it could be better and is impeding scientific progress. And something large scientific and research-based organizations should be paying attention to since it flies in the face of their core missions.

I’m not really a stuff guy. I try to keep purchases minimal and to high quality stuff that lasts.

Why might my gear be interesting? I’ve been travelling as a digital nomad now for over a year, living without a real residence and often leveraging hotels and visa stays to bounce between various countries here in SE Asia (Singapore, Bali, Thailand, and now Hong Kong).

Riffing off my one-bag travel post from a few years back and it’s post-covid update , a number of things had changed, including my assumptions about how I would be travelling as a nomad, so felt an update was due.

2023 felt like it was about simplifying. Getting down to a non-aspirational, efficient, simple stack for productivity, planning, and collaboration. I focused more on my systems with simpler or fewer tools, rather than trying to find the one tool to do everything — and worrying less about aspirational (and heavily influencer influenced) goals like zettelkasten and knowledge bases and focused on good planning and getting things done. This is what that looked like by the end of 2023.

I read a mere 39 books this year (still not sure why it was so much lower then recent years.)

Felt like I read a lot, even with the new job and academic pre-PhD side-hustle, but felt there were few books which I felt were must reads or that I gleaned a lot from. Other than Sprint and How Big Things Get Done, your professional and personal life will not get any rocket assists from my recos this year (though those two are definitely worth the reads). I’ve written short summaries for the Must and Perhaps Reads. The Don’t Reads I’ve not commented but doubt they’re worth your time.

There was not a lot of truly great stuff in 2023. I’m not sure if this is just spillover from covid when every studio and streaming service were just thumping out any content to keep people engaged, so much bilgewater made it into production, or simply the fact that a lot of material seemed highly derivative of other shows, but 2023 had a lot of things to watch, but very little quality. While there were some gems in amongst the sea glass, they felt few. Let’s hope for more quality in 2024 though, and that the writer’s strike ended up honing rather than increasing pablum.

[This is the first in a multi-part series of posts on setting, executing on, and accomplishing your goals. This first post is on executing and about having a productivity stack to manage the various elements that affect your productivity.]

Systems trump tools.

Obsessing over the One True Tool is counterproductive and driven by insecurity, and is busywork versus real execution. Productivity is about how you manage processes. You need a tool/s to manage the element of your productivity stack, but the choice of tool is somewhat irrelevant as long as you have one that manages your underlying system well.

Books are never owned, only borrowed…

OK, I can’t actually remember who said that, but it’s something I believe. The experience of the book and tale and the knowledge are what you own afterwards. The gift of the author’s soul you extract from the pages.

These days, I read just about everything on my Kindle, and during CCOVID it was rare for me to thumb through an actual paper book. The last months though, more than a few things on my reading list didn’t have sourceable electronic formats (or worse, were audiobook only), so I’ve been using dead tree versions quite a bit.

If you write it down, it’s capital-S Science. At least, that’s what one of my grade-school teachers told me (faced with my “samples” collection sourced from field and river near my house).

Science isn’t a lot more complicated than that, but professional academia definitely seems to be. When I decided I wanted to make a go of serious Astro again, it unceremoniously dunked me into a sudden deluge of journal papers, voluminous and near-inscrutable. It’s, well… intimidating… and a seemingly, strange rarefied, almost impenetrable world.

Almost every trip the last six months, I’ve ended up discussing the same topic in almost every country: just how expensive everything has gotten. People are tightening belts, and seeing real reductions in their quality of life, and noticing price jumps in essentials.

Strangely though, I’m finding people raraly understand inflation or our current experience with it should have been more avoidable. While it’s not necessarily going to remove the helplessness a lot of people are feeling at the moment, I do find understanding a thing better normalizes it and leads to action. So, helping understand why something like rising interest rates are counter-intuitively used to try to induce price stability is worth knowing.