All the small things

Why I started microdosing my accomplishments

May 18, 2023

Quick housekeeping: It’s been a while! Again! Turns out, between moving to another state amid the holiday season and all that entails for work and my personal life, the last few months flew by. I’m hoping to get back to a regular schedule, but please bear with me if it takes a minute to get there. Also! Rebooting has a new mission statement.

Historically, I am not good at setting realistic expectations for myself, but I’m trying to change that with an aspirational to-do list. 

In the middle of last year, as I sent off my physical therapy documents to my lawyer—pro tip: if someone causes you to be in an accident, talk to a lawyer before you talk to your insurance agent—I saw a note that crumbled every bit of progress I'd made since my surgery: "Help Jordan sit or stand for up to a minute without pain."

I'd been far past that stage for a while. I felt good about how far I could walk every day and that I got to hear my niece giggle and look at her smile when I finally had the strength to hold her over my head and do the airplane. Those things should've made reading that note easier; that's a celebratory amount of progress. I just couldn't get past the loss of the life I had before the accident and the charismatic me I used to be. In less than a minute, I'd lost bike rides along my favorite beach path, trips to the park to watch my dogs chase a tennis ball for hours, and nights out trying tasty food and drinks with the people I love. Pair that with a concussed brain endlessly battling to retain any sort of information that used to register, and the light at the end of the tunnel felt like a waning candle. 

A few weeks after my surgery, while my doctor’s orders were still "don't bend forward, don't go down the stairs, and don't lift anything more than 10 pounds by yourself," our building's benevolent new landlord told us we'd have to move out of our home of over two years so they could renovate and double the rent. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because without my new neighbor Modesta, my cycle of grief and anger probably would’ve lasted longer. 

Since Modesta knew I'd been confined to my apartment for months, and recently ended a three-year relationship, she made it a point to come over and give me company in a lonely time. We'd sit outside and talk at my table about the decades-long feud she had with our mutual neighbor as that neighbor peeked through her window to eavesdrop. We'd talk about her passion for learning new languages in her spare time, and her life in Honduras before coming to the states. She became the friend I needed when I felt loneliest.

On the days where she could sense the anxiety I tried to mask, we'd talk about how defeated I felt. I'd lost a sense of the things I loved about myself, and I didn't know how to get them back. Modesta managed to put into words what I didn't know I needed to hear—and what countless friends, former partners, and family members had been trying to tell me for years: "Try not to suffer too much."

I didn't know how to do that at first, and I found myself frustrated that in the accident, I lost the ability to do nearly all the things I loved for half a year. That changed one day. As I sat in my kitchen laughing at my favorite podcast, I realized I'd finally made it through washing an entire sink's worth of dishes without my still-recovering spine giving out. I started tracking my walks along the beach and every day I'd reach a new milestone, even if only by a couple extra steps. I didn't have to carefully roll out of bed every morning for fear of undoing my surgeon's work. 

As more tiny acts of care and maintenance became feasible, even enjoyable, that flickering candle slowly turned into a small light bulb, which became a campfire in the middle of a beautiful forest. It's still growing, but I'm finally feeling like it's the sun waiting for me on the other side. 

Much ado about nothing

Those tiny victories rarely feel like wins, but with a little change in perspective, it's possible to grow the light that might feel dim when work becomes too much and you lose the time you need to yourself.

In trying to find joy in those little things, I've been thinking about this piece from Haley Nahman's newsletter, and Avery Carpenter Forrey's article on the pleasure of to-do lists. Both talk about the ways in which maintenance in our personal lives is just as crucial, if not moreso, than consistently trying to strive for maximum productivity. 

In her newsletter, Nahman says: 

These days I really do believe that chores give my life meaning. Not just because they present texture and struggle and a necessary counterpart to rest (all true), but because maintenance is in itself profound. Caring for ourselves, for other people, for our homes, for plants and other animals—these are the unfinishable projects of our lives. We do them over and over not to conquer them, or for personal gain, but to maintain and nourish them, with no greater expectation.

Carpenter Forrey's piece supports that sentiment, and helped lead me to what I'm calling my aspirational to-do list:

Happiness, that elusive peak, is frequently overshadowed by its overachiever cousin and the main impetus for to-do lists: productivity. They’ve become so linked in our minds that we believe we need to be productive in order to achieve happiness.

I started a practice I termed “the D-list,” in which I broke tasks into three buckets: “Doing” (must do today), “Dealing With” (tedious activities such as taxes and laundry), and “Dreaming.” The Dreaming section became a catchall for everything that didn’t fit into the Tetris grid of my calendar. It was meant for fun wants that existed in the cracks: go on more hikes, read that National Geographic article on spider monkeys, figure out what a Brazilian butt lift entails and whether I should get one. Dreaming grew into my favorite section.

The idea of a "dreaming" section, where things you cared about, rather than things you felt like you owed to your job, stuck with me. Later in the article, she cites a woman who frames her to-do list around the question "what would make today great."

That framework was a start for me, but I didn't want my to-do list to become another form of a habit tracker. Every time I've tried habit trackers, they felt closer to an obligatory list of tasks like drinking a ginger shot every morning than a place to celebrate the milestones I'd reached in my own recovery and personal growth.

Instead, I set up a project in my to-do list of choice titled "Hell Yeah." Sure, it's dorky, but it's the sort of feeling I want to get when I've done something good for myself or someone I love. In "Hell Yeah," I put things like getting through another chapter of a book without my mind blanking on it, making it through a six-mile walk in a day, or carrying a bag of groceries through downtown without my granny cart. 

These aren't things I have to do everyday, they're just the things I can do to foster the parts of my personal life I care about the most. Since I don’t log them until they’re already done, there’s no timeline or expiration date, just a quick celebration. These are the milestones that make a life feel doable, because every small achievement begins to feel like a win, even on day's where it feels like life won't let up.

Make me better

I hadn't thought to put this into my to-do list until reading those pieces, but as I explored the power of "Hell Yeah," I started exploring how I could use other gizmos to expand the management of my aspirational growth. We all use different tools, so it's hard to say what will work best for you in an aspirational tool but these tools can be really good at managing and prioritizing the things we need to do. Why limit that to the expectations and necessities of labor that your job drops on your plate?

For me, that expansion has turned into a few new ways to use the tools I already keep handy for my work. I have a note in Obsidian that's just a list of things I've noticed my friends want so I can remember to get them a thoughtful gift when the time comes, a stack of things I want to talk about my long-distance friends about next time we catch up (I'm trying not to take up so much time diving into the minutiae of my admittedly messy life over lunch), and a section in my journaling app that's just a compilation of things I've done that bring me joy. That's not a way to brag to myself about the good I've done lately, it's just a way to remind myself of what makes me smile when happiness feels miles away. 

The best part? You can do all these things in Apple Notes, Google Docs, or any number of the funky and effective note-taking apps you can get your hands on. This isn't about finding a new tool to manage your life (we're already flooded with too many apps and services); the goal is to take advantage of the tools already at your disposal in a way that benefits you and your personal life, rather than just the work that never seems to stop piling up.

Having a better way to manage the things you care about isn't the only benefit of this practice. It can make the tools you use for work less anxiety-inducing to check if you're occasionally using it to feel better about yourself rather than how productive you're being. That might not seem practical at first, but practicality doesn't always need to be the goal: sometimes we just need a space to feel good about ourselves without turning it into a project of deadlines in the name of self-improvement. 

📚 Good Reads

Six months later, the iPhone 14 Pro is everything I love and hate about phones (The Verge): I love my comically large iPhone 14 Pro Max, and it’s been surprisingly useful in getting me to read more on-the-go. But as Alison Johnson points out, features like the Dynamic Island and always-on display aren’t reaching their full potential. I don’t follow sports and rarely use ridesharing apps, so aside from the occasional weather alert, activities on the lockscreen don’t do much for me, and the Dynamic Island is little more than a place to show tiny artwork for my currently playing song or podcast. My most-used app, Drafts, lets you show a pinned note, like an in-progress text message you’re dreading sending or an impromptu grocery list, on the lock screen, but the feature itself still feels like an afterthought without more developers getting onboard with equally clever implementations. 

Into thin AirPods (Defector): This is a great tech blog from Casey Johnston that points at the frustration of actually using Apple’s Find My feature to track down missing gear. Even in the event that you do decide to pursue the thief (truly, though, don’t), there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to track them down. Laggy real-time location updates, plus spotty connections to do things like play sound from your missing device, can impede the goal of getting you back in touch with your pricey gadgets, and ultimately it doesn’t seem worth the effort. 

🌐 Just Browsing

📚 How Bookshop.org took on Amazon 🎬 In honor of Barry’s excellent final season, have a profile of Bill Hader 📦 Free returns are dead, and everything is worse now 🎤 It’s time for directory’s commentaries to make their way to streaming 🌐 The internet wasn’t meant to be so small ⛩ Land ownership is a silly, terrible concept 🎟️ The latest in “everything’s a subscription now” 😵‍💫 Don’t buy into the mythos of dopamine fasting 👂🏼 Are you a good listener? 📰 How Google’s AMP ruined its trust with publishers 💬 A look back at Blackberry Messenger  🤖 Is AI the new McKinsey? ✅ Do bosses understand what productivity means? 🐦 A slow descent into birdwatching 🚰 Take a dive into #WaterTok 📽️ On TikTok as a chaotic streaming service 🔎 Bing is a trap 🍿 This granola recipe is so good, try not to eat it all in one sitting

🔧 Toolkit

👥 From the team

💕 And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like

The Body Keeps the Score is the de facto book for understanding trauma, and Britt Frank’s The Science of Stuck feels like an actionable companion to that book. I hadn’t heard of the book, or Britt Frank, but after listening to her on an episode of You Are Not So Smart, I immediately ordered her book and put it at the top of my ever growing reading pile. Naturally, the podcast can’t go as in-depth as the book itself, but Frank offers a lot of insight in the episode that might help you get your next project rolling. 

✉️ You’ve got mail:

I’ve added a paid subscription for anyone who wants to support the newsletter (a lot of work goes into this), but it’s not required and I won’t pester you too often. The newsletter as it exists now will continue to be free, but I plan on adding some benefits for paid subscribers, and I want to hear what you’d like to get from a paid version of Rebooting. If you have any thoughts, feel free to reply to this email, or drop a line in the comments.

My thanks to Medea Giordano for editing this issue.