🚶 It is solved by walking
talks the walk by exploring the many virtues of walking; for well-being, creativity and sanity:Every time I start to feel oppressed by a laptop I realise I’ve not been walking enough. Walking was so integral to moving through burnout that I made myself do it twice a day, every day. After a while, I didn’t need any encouragement.
So many things fall into place at walking pace.
🌱 On tending to your aspirations
I shared my first micro-essay this week:
I’d love any feedback or comments. There are plenty more of these pieces to come. I’ve set up these mini essays as their own section, alongside the Weekly Roundups which will continue to drop every Friday. With the increase in writing, I will be hitting your inbox twice a week. You can always tweak your subscription settings here if you want to opt out of one section or another.
✅ Getting things done with Things
During my sabbatical, I survived for many months without any real to-do list. (In fact, the absence of a to-do list is perhaps why I survived…) But these days things are busy and there are a lot of balls in the air. After a brief detour into task management with Obsidian, I switched to using Things. The standard of the UX and interactions leaves most apps in the dust. It's expensive and Apple-only, but I use it every day. My favourite features are the quick entry, natural date parsing on due dates and just how powerful it is. I’ve added it to my Recommended page.
💊 One book I enjoyed
I devoured Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, in a week. (The recently released Dopesick series is a TV dramatisation of this story.)
It centres around the development, release and widespread abuse of OxyContin. This multi-generational story is addictive, depressing and often infuriating. The impact of what was allowed to happen is hard to appreciate, but I think this book does a comprehensive job of laying it bare. Whilst the Sacklers seem uniquely divorced from the impact of their actions, I do wonder if society is set up to stop this happening all over again. The FDA's incompetency alone deserves its own book.
I also finally joined Goodreads to track my reading and start writing more off-the-cuff book reviews.
—Dan