Posts

A forum foray into end-of-year management summaries (with ledger-cli) had a handful of people asking about my blog setup and its speed. I realized it’s changed significantly from posts three years back (and where I was using Jekyll and Gatsby), so time for an update post.

TLDR

The benefits of this setup are:

• very fast - due to static content and CDN (content delivery network)
• cheap - pennies-a-glass: it costs me ~$1 USD a month even for very large traffic amounts
• discovery - unlike other setups on managed providers like Github Pages etc, it’s SEO-friendly
• easy-to-operate - simple, easy commands to setup and execute deploys
• zero-maintenance - other than Amazon SSL cert updates (now automatic), have not touched it in nearly 3 years now

Despite the fact I was not the biggest Go fan at the time, I tried Hugo . Hugo was blazingly fast to build, has a heap of convenience features I really liked, and a nice ecosystem of plugins, along with some decent themes. Also, it compiles/comes as a single static binary to use. While Jekyll and Gatsby are both nice, both were dead slow to generate (additionally, every node update kept breaking Gatsby or its plugins when I was using it.). Hugo also takes care of your asset pipelining for you which can be a major headache with other static site generators.

TLDR

Buy it. Very few quibbles. Great linux laptop with a commitment to 100% repairable and upgradeable is impressive and future facing. I recommend the DIY version if you’re technical. You’ll love putting it together. Works great on Arch Linux 20211101 and above.

Preamble

My daily driver has been an M1 Macbook Air. It’s been a worthy successor to the 12” 2016 Macbook I adored. It’s light, powerful (the M1 chip is a wonder), quiet as it’s fanless, has a stunning display, good keyboard (despite critics), impressive battery life, quality speakers, and a solid webcam for WFH conf calls. It’s been an excellent machine to date. This is, perhaps unfairly, I high bar to meet when comparing Framework’s laptop against. Tough competition.

Going totally remote WFH over 2021 tweaked choices. I really tried to simplify tooling and focus on process though experimented (particularly between org-mode, notion, and logseq for GTD.).

Flirting with Zettelkasten did not work for me. Spent more time curating notes then action, and wanted a system which defaulted to doing (though some ZK practices made me better at absorbing material and acting on it).

For the interested, you can see the toolchain evolution through 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , and 2017 editions of these posts as well if you’re digging for some possibly better ways to do things, especially as we’re in the new year and year two of the pandemic.

Succinctly:

1. Be open.
2. Make lotsa little bets. Collect free non-lottery tickets.
3. Always take care of your downside.

Luck is an attitude, not a thing. Be open to experiences and opportunities.

We don’t pay truck to the role of luck in successful people’s lives. I get irked with business biographies as unbalanced personality cults where luck or psychopathology noticeably outruns talent.

Smart, productive, and ambitious are table stakes these days. Luck, and having help (and being raised white, male, and in the West to be clear about entitlement), often play an outsized role in many success stories we lionize as self-made.

I read 47 books in 2021.

There’s no real trick to reading that number. Make it a daily habit (get an hour in every day) and carry a Kindle everywhere. Block your lunch hour or another time if you need to schedule.

My star ratings out of 5 are below for every book. Good stuff is in the “To Read” list. I’ve also included a “Do Not Read” list for books I wish I had not wasted my time on.

Part III in a series of posts on getting started on financial independence and resiliency. The initial impetus for this came from COVID Career Advice . The first post in the series focusing on making yourself resilient is Getting Started on Financial Independence: Financial Resiliency .

Part II focused on getting started growing your assets and investing once you’ve sorted your basic financial hygiene out.

This post focuses on moving into slightly more advanced investment topics and strategy around building your portfolio.

The individual point of action of the Great Resignation is quitting.

But how do you know when it’s time to go? If your place isn’t completely toxic or you’re not deeply unhappy, it can be hard to tell when giving up an “alright” thing should yield to a better opportunity, and the effort and risk of moving.

For any job you have, even a great one, you should have a proactive system for evaluating at regular intervals whether consider a change every quarter. There’s also a more reactive “gotta go now” checklist where hygiene issues or changed conditions are a consideration to pull the ripcord.

Productivity in about working a limited number of the right things with sustained focus.

This is what actually worked over years of a lot of personal productivity hacking experiments (and avoiding general hustle culture and cult of busyness garbage.).

1. Systems over Goals
2. Protected Time (aka Deep Work time)
3. Calendars: Blocking, Auto-Declines, and Meeting Hygiene
4. Limiting Work in Progress
5. Daily Highlight
6. Weekly Review
7. Have a Toolchain. Simple Tools are Best.
8. Delegate (Effectively)
9. Automate

1. Systems over Goals

If you haven’t read it, go read Atomic Habits by James Clear (or where I first encountered the idea, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adam’s How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big .).

I’m always trying to do too much. You probably are too.

Whether through insecurity, lack of assurance about my choices, or just wanting more, until recently, I spent way too much time trying to do it all. And failing. Todos would get ticked done but big rocks didn’t move.

During covid and lockdowns, forced to do less, it actually got better. Sure, a lot of productivity books say to do less, but there is a difference between reading it and living it.

I don’t want to go back to how things were before the pandemic. I want better. You should too. Don’t accept a return to what was normal as sufficient anymore. We can have more.

Alongside the illness, death, inoculation, and dread the virus caused, the virus may actually have made us better in one way.

It has reset both our expectations about the lives we can lead and about the world we can live in. Especially where we saw what choices the world and policy makers made to keep the world spinning. The pause it forced on everyone allowed us to see more clearly what our pre-lockdown days lacked and trade-offs we had made, often unwittingly, in our lives and by our policymakers and employers.