My favorite links, listens, and longreads from the past week:
What to do about your media diet. How the relentlessly negative news cycle is impacting our psyches is an obsession of mine. And on the latest Hurry Slowly podcast, I chat with psychologist Mary McNaughton-Cassill about exactly why the news makes us feel so out of control, and how to navigate it with more finesse — and less stress. A very enlightening episode.
A modest guide to productivity. This simple list of tips from designer Frank Chimero is terrific. “When you’re done, see if your estimation of a tasks’s difficulty was correct. Were you overly optimistic? Pessimistic? If you’ve repeated that work, can you see it getting easier? Are you improving? We so rarely take the time to witness ourselves getting better at our work.”
These things I know for sure. I am constantly returning to this list of 16 rules from artist Andrea Zittel: “Ideas seem to gestate best in a void — when that void is filled, it is more difficult to access them. In our consumption-driven society, almost all voids are filled, blocking moments of greater clarity and creativity. Things that block voids are called ‘avoids.’ ”
A framework for career decisions. There’s so much goodness in this super-duper deep dive from Wait But Why: “When you think of your career as a tunnel, it causes an identity crisis in anyone who doesn’t feel sure of who exactly they are and who they’ll want to be decades from now — which is most sane people. It enhances the delusion that what we do for work is a synonym for who we are, making a question mark on your map seem like an existential disaster.”
Hi, I'm Jocelyn, the human behind this newsletter. I host the Hurry Slowly podcast — a new show about how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient by slowing down — write books that will help you reclaim your time, and give uncommonly useful talks.
