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I’ve declared digital bankruptcy

Cheers to new beginnings

November 01, 2022

🗞 A brief State of the Newsletter

🎤Ahem, is this thing still on? It’s been a while since my last newsletter, and a lot of you weren’t expecting me to pop back up in your inbox! I wanted to explain a bit about what’s been going on. Finding a way to cope after my car accident meant shelving Rebooting for a little while.

Unfortunately, that little while became several months. Thanks to my injuries, I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I could change with the newsletter, but not a lot of energy to dedicate to getting it right. I’m glad to be back, though, and I’ll be sticking to the old, regular schedule of a bi-weekly column for now.

Thanks for tuning in.

Like a wrecking ball

There’s no ideal time for unprocessed grief to rear its ugly head. That said, immediately after getting t-boned by a driver running a stop sign ranks chiefly among the worst possible moments.

If the accident hadn’t happened in the car my nana and tata left me, I’d probably still be avoiding the grief I’ve carried in the four years since they’ve died. Lucky for me, my injuries left me mostly unable to walk, sit, or do much on my own for about five months. So, I had plenty of time to stare at the ceiling and think about every mistake I’ve made and what I could’ve done differently. Forced growth is still growth, I guess.

Through that reflection, I realized that nearly all the mistakes I’d made in the past four years, in one way or another, traced back to the fact that the two people who always made life seem easy were never coming back. I didn’t want to face that, or how difficult life felt in light of it, so I ran from it and towards anything that distracted me. That doesn’t usually work forever.

I was already relearning how to walk after not being able to feel my right leg for three months pre-back surgery, so it seemed like a good time to examine how I could start doing and being better for myself and those in my life.

As I went through physical therapy and learned how to listen to what my body’s telling me, I realized that so much of the uneasiness I’ve felt has been rooted in my years-long habit of processing just enough of my trauma or grief to get by, then letting the rest sit for later.

That’s not sustainable or healthy, and I wish I’d learned that sooner. But sometimes you see the warning signs of your poor coping mechanisms imploding in time to do some damage control, and sometimes it hits you like a RAV4 going about 35 miles per hour.

Pull yourself together

It’s rarely beneficial to wait until a crisis strikes to make a change in your life, yet we do it all the time. We let our inboxes pile up until our fingers cramp from typing “So sorry for the delay!!” too many times. Leftovers sit in the fridge until just looking at them makes us sick. We ignore our car’s engine oil light a little too long, even though we know we’ll need to get to it eventually.

Whatever your particular shortcomings in managing the chaos of everyday life may be, it doesn’t have to be that way, and you can get started before things get out of hand. It does, however, require a good deal of self-awareness and honesty about your strengths and weaknesses.

When it comes to my work, that’s probably my ADHD, and in my personal life I’d attribute many of my woes to poorly-managed anxiety. For instance, I can listen to my boss tell me all of my tasks for the week and comprehend that I’ll be able to accomplish them, but if I don’t write them down immediately, they’ll be lost to the ephemera of Zoom until that deadline looms too close for comfort.

In tackling the ways ADHD still prohibits me from getting through my workload, I’ve turned to Judith Kolberg’s ‌ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life, an excellent book on how to assess the ways ADHD (ADD is now considered an outdated term) impacts your life and find solutions that make things more manageable. There’s a lot anyone could learn from this book, but I highly recommend taking a look at what particular challenges you’re facing in your work and finding resources that correlate to those specific struggles, too.

Reboots are good, sometimes

I’ve started referring to the reset I’ve been putting my work system through as “digital bankruptcy,”—acknowledge that something in your work process is broken, and begin to examine potential solutions.

In her book, Kolberg shares a piece of wisdom I think about any time I need to make an adjustment: “Your best organizing strategy is to work with your ADD instead of fighting against it.” This is true of people without ADHD, too. You’ll be in much better shape if you build systems that enhance your strengths and patch up your weaknesses, rather than trying to push them aside and force yourself into an incompatible way of doing things.

Since a lot of us rely on our computers, tablets, and phones—plus their accompanying apps and services—to get our work done and stay organized, it’s important to ensure they’re set up to make life as seamless as possible, rather than just another thing to manage. Remember that they’re all a means to an end, they can’t be what we rely on to solve our problems. For instance, I love Obsidian, but it could crash tomorrow and stop working. The systems and structures I’ve used to take and build my notes, though, can follow me anywhere should that ever happen.

So, let’s say your to-do list app isn’t cutting it. Before hitting Google and searching for someone else’s recommendations, start by doing a hard reset of your app: delete any projects, pending tasks, tags, or any other structural cruft that you might’ve built up throughout your last attempt at workplace zen. Then, just start adding tasks as they come up, and see how the features of whatever app you’re using can help you better organize those tasks and delegate them properly. The more you do this, the easier it’ll be to see how you tend to delegate tasks, and balance that with what your work or life requires of you. You can also apply this to other workplace tools, like note taking apps or your calendar; a hard reset in a time of unmanageable chaos may be just what you need.

If you’re like me, you may find you work better if you take a busser’s approach to handling a workload: take a look at the various fires around you and quickly figure out which one needs immediate attention, then delegate from there, managing each fire as the flames oscillate between luminance and dwindling. This is how I learned to tag all of my tasks with an estimated duration to complete (always add 15–20 minutes), that way I can weigh which tasks are the most pressing, and how long each one will take, then find spots to squeeze each task into my day accordingly.

This is only the start, because disorganized workflows run deeper than using the wrong apps (or maybe using the right apps in the wrong way). Between distractions chewing into all our time, pricey subscriptions making the use of the tools we rely on increasingly difficult, and an abundance of choices, it’s difficult to know where or how to get started. In the coming issues, I’ll be looking more at how to rebuild after you declare digital bankruptcy, and how to better use the tools at your disposal to manage your life in a way that keeps your life outside of work stress-free and, you know, outside of work.

📚 Good Reads:

Mark this off your to-do list (Maybe, Baby): I’ve long viewed doing the dishes as a meditative act that also serves as a great time to catch up on podcasts or audiobooks. There’s something therapeutic about looking at a dish rack full of clean slates, untainted by failed attempts at NYT recipes or remnants of leftovers you only ate because the paycheck hasn’t cleared yet. Haley Nahman puts it more eloquently than I’ve ever thought about it, though:

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.

In defense of the voice message (The Verge): When voice messages first debuted on iMessage, they kind of bummed me out. Sure, that was mostly because I’d received an accidental recording of someone I’d recently gone out with venting about our date to a friend, and it wasn’t fun to hear. I’ve long since gotten over the bruised ego of someone just telling their friend about a night they wish had gone better, and found a lot of beauty in being able to “talk” to my friends even when they’re busy. That can be to gush about a date that went so well you can’t help yourself (or one that went so badly you have to dish on your walk home), or just to tell a friend what you’ve been up to since the last time you checked-in. As Jon Porter puts it, there’s also an intimacy to voice messages that text simply can’t replicate:

Yes, the messages are rambly. Yes, they’re full of half-formed thoughts and tangents. And yes, we’re definitely using them because we can’t be bothered to type out everything we want to share. But that’s the point. Each recording contains an unfiltered first impression of an hour of TV, where you can hear someone working out how they feel about an episode in real time. They offer much of the immediacy and intimacy of a phone call without having to be available at the same time.

Is listening to audiobooks really reading? (Wired): One part of my healing journey has been taking longer walks to get my strength back, and listening to podcasts can only keep me entertained for so long. Audiobooks (courtesy of Libro.fm and my favorite audiobook player, Bound) have helped fill that gap by giving me something to listen to as I try to get another 100 steps in day after day. Sure, I may not remember everything I hear, but when listening to novels as I usually do, that’s hardly a problem, and fixating on that distinction between reading and listening misses the entire point of reading, as Meghan O'Gieblyn argues:

The larger problem, however, is in viewing books as a means to some other end. Many people who aspire to read more are motivated by the promise that doing so will prevent cognitive decline, improve brain connectivity, or increase emotional intelligence. Even the obsession with retention assumes that the purpose of reading is to absorb knowledge or nuggets of trivia that one can use to demonstrate cultural literacy or being “well read.” What all of this obscures is the possibility that books might be a source of intrinsic pleasure, an end in themselves. I’d be willing to bet, Easy Listening, that your earliest experiences with the joy of literature were aural. Most of us were read to by adults before we learned to read ourselves, and listening to audiobooks recalls the distinctive delight of being told a story: the rhythms of the prose made incarnate in a human voice; the dialog animated through the performance of a skillful reader; the ease with which our eyes, liberated from the page, are free to roam around the bedroom (or the aerobics room, or the landscape beyond the car windshield) so as to better imagine the actions of the narrative playing out.

🌐 Just Browsing:

🤓 For the Wall Street Journal, I wrote about my favorite read-it-later app 👾 Oh! Also! I started a new job at the Strategist, and I wrote about how the Backbone One made me love mobile gaming again 🏒 On the spectacle of the Arizona Coyotes and the Mullett Arena 👹 Welcome to Hell, Elon ☁️ It’s time for a more modern browser. Here’s one company’s take on it. 👷🏼‍♂️AI has a lot of benefits, but there’s a dark side to the exploitative labor that allows companies to build their AI systems 🐘 Tech is helping us talk to animals. That could be a good thing, it could also be pretty bad! 🛠️ Maintenance is a disappearing art 📚Why are ebooks getting so dang expensive? 💬 How anyone can become Twitter's main character of the day ⌨ Meet the ghost writers behind those viral LinkedIn posts you can’t escape on your feed 🚸You don’t have to be a parent to make a difference in a kid’s life 🧡 What we get wrong about being in love ​​​​🌜This tarot deck is a must-have for cat lovers

🔧 Toolkit:

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

Now that I can actually do things on my own again, I’ve been taking up one of my old hobbies: experimenting with new cocktails and trying funky new combinations. For anyone out there who enjoys making a tasty cocktail, here’s one I recently whipped up that’s been a hit so far:

  • 2 oz of gin (I really like The Botanist and Future gin, but a bottle of Hendrick’s will do the trick, too)

  • 1 oz Limoncello (this one’s my favorite)

  • 1 oz Blackcurrant liqueur (try this one if you can find it)

  • 1 oz fresh-squeezed lemon juice

  • ½ oz strawberry mint simple syrup

  • 1 egg white or 1 tbsp aquafaba

Pour all the ingredients, except the egg white/aquafaba, in a cocktail shaker, then do a reverse dry shake. Pour into any fancy coup glass you’ve got, garnish with a lemon peel or a couple berries if you have a cocktail spear, then enjoy!

If you don’t partake, though, I’ll also highly recommend an unfortunately cancelled, but still brilliant show: Amazon’s Patriot. It’s hard to pitch this show when it just sounds like another spy thriller, but it’s far from that. John Tavner is an intelligence officer who’s manipulated into working off-the-books for his father doing pretty heinous things to interfere in foreign elections. To cope with everything he has to do and the wreckage it leaves in his life and the lives of others, he smokes copious amounts of weed and writes folk songs that are basically confessions (and security risks, if you ask his father), which makes it one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen. Its cancellation may make you hesitant to start, but without spoiling anything, the finale ends on a perfect note that gives enough closer to make it worth the journey. To get you started, here’s one of the songs from the show: Guns and Groceries

✉️ You’ve got mail:

As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hello, feel free to drop a comment below.

My thanks to Medea Giordano for editing this issue.