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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.

Like you, I struggle to set aside time to learn new things.

Time for learning needs to be extended, uninterrupted, reflective, and allow you to play with things in ways that modern workplaces, life, and task management time doesn’t. What’s my answer? Bowling Nights.

Let’s start with work. Since most people now depend on their jobs to be the source of training and learning. I’d argue, like Cal Newport, that the curse of the modern workplace is finding uninterrupted blocks of time to get things done and focus rather than shuffling information.

I’m a big fan of Padrino . It’s always filled this “more than Sinatra, no Rails bulk” gap for me while still being batteries included. Friendly community. Easy to understand and use. Most importantly, it’s helped me get apps built. Fast. And have them run well and without issue in production.

Case in point: A scientific app for a conservation NGO, chugging away happily without bugs or major issues for almost a decade ago (with a big upgrade 5 years ago) and despite traffic and time.

A lot changed since my 2019 GTD and CRM flow post . After trying lots of new software in 2022, I’ve come back full circle to org-mode. But the experiments with new things were super valuable. I caged and culled new ideas and ways of doing stuff from other software and feel it’s made my GTD setup and system fundamentally stronger and helps me execute better. Here’s how it all works.

I experimented with a lot of new software in 2022. The main reason being a Cambrian explosion in new apps promising gains above my current tools. In the end though, I circled back to roots by 2022’s end and took ideas from those newer apps with me to enhance my existing stack and flows. New software gains didn’t exceed tradeoffs. But, my stack got much more effective without really changing software. If anything, I’ve gone back to using fewer, more open tools, and come up with more creative ways to stopgap shortcomings over the new new things.