Where am I?
Trying to navigate London using Google maps?
Quote of the Day
”We cannot say that innovation is necessarily good simply because there is a market for it.”
- Simon Johnson, who shared this year’s Nobel prize for economics, writing in 2009 about the complex financial derivatives that caused the 2008 banking crisis.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Keith Jarrett plays Händel | Suite in D minor, HWV 447
Long Read of the Day
My biggest productivity mistake
Lovely blog post by Tim Hartford, which speaks volumes to those of who are multi-takers equipped with buggy algorithms.
And a final challenge to anyone trying to get everything done: that goal is simply beyond us all. As Oliver Burkeman explains in his new book Meditations for Mortals, “the incoming supply of things that feel as though they genuinely need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible.” Delude yourself about this, as most of us do every morning, and stress and disappointment will inevitably follow. No wonder so many of us beat ourselves up at our failure to live up to our own impossible productivity aspirations.
This week, then, let’s change the script. Instead of handing down yet more tablets of stone, let me reflect on my own productivity mistakes. My biggest problem is that I always have too many projects on the go…
Me too (see below).
Trump the Kamikaze
At last, someone (in this case Timothy Burke) gets to the root of the matter.
If there’s any failure of education worth talking about, it’s squarely in the precincts of the political mainstream, not out there in MAGA-land. No matter how many times they see the reality of things staring them in the face, they retreat into their tropes like a child sucking their thumb and clutching a blanket after accidentally watching most of a horror movie because of a parental lapse.
Many of Trump’s voters know exactly what he is. They know he’s going to blow the status quo to smithereens and they want him to. They want him to be incompetent, they want him to be senile, they want him to be cruel. They want him to violate every one of the Ten Commandments in public view. They’re rooting for him to emulate Cody Jarrett and detonate himself up on top of the vast infrastructure of the 21st Century American nation-state, taking as much of it with him as he can.
In other words, Trump is the suicide bomber millenarians have been waiting for.
My commonplace booklet
My email inbox is an ongoing disaster. Why? Because I get too many messages. This is partly a consequence of being a newspaper columnist with a wide readership. (My Observer column goes out on the Guardian website, so it can sometimes reach an awful lot of people across the world.) And, being a fox rather than a hedgehog (to use Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated metaphor), I have a finger in too many pies.
As a result I spend too much time doing email and too little time doing the things I ought to be doing. It’s maddening. What I really need is a machine-learning ‘assistant’ which will drink from the firehose every morning and triage the torrent into: messages that are really important; ones that are potentially interesting but not urgent; and ones that can either be trashed or given an AI-generated reply. In principle I suppose I could build such a system myself using existing ‘AI’ tools, and indeed maybe I should enlist an LLM to write the code for it. Hmmm…
In the meantime, though, I have come up with the same simple but useful idea that Tim Harford mentions in his Long Read above. It is this: Never sit down at a computer without having a handwritten to-do list next to the mouse. It has the effect of making me feel guilty whenever I’m teetering on the brink of yet another email-driven rabbit-hole! It’s free — and the battery never runs out.
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