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  • Challenge Day 6 (of 30) – It does give a lovely light

    Challenge Day 6 (of 30) – It does give a lovely light

    It’s been one of those days where I was busy to the point of being frantic throughout, and I can’t really recount what I actually did. Wait, no, that’s only if I use my stupid human brain. I have a bullet journal and I can look at it to tell what I did.

    The closest I have ever come to conventional definitions of “productive” has been when the bullet journal is in regular use. Being ADHD me, it goes in and out of fashion; sometimes I forget it exists, sometimes it rules my day. But when it works, it really works.

    Mine is laid out with the date, the day, and the page divided in half. There’s a day planner on the left, which I almost – but not always -forget to use, and a todo list on the right. (This is… not fascinating, I know, I am nodding off just typing it, but because these emails go out late at night perhaps you can use this bit as a sleep aid.)

    Today mine tells me that I set too many tasks for myself and consequently didn’t get them all done. And that I avoided work on a couple of quite important things to get lost in busy-work. So that’s why it seems I didn’t get anything done. The reason I know this is because I also practice the “reverse todo list” which is when you write down the stuff that you actually did in addition to the things you merely intended to do, so I can see where I went off track.

    Tomorrow I’m going to self-improve by only writing down the one or two most important todos and then, revelation only doing them until such time as they are done and I can get to the other stuff.

    I did manage to get a video done today – I’d dropped off the previous two days because of, well, these emails, which were eating my usual both-end candle-burning hours. I also finished the main body of work on the Secret Painting Project, which I hope to be able to talk about quite soon, ideally next week. And I am getting things ready to email all the Cynic’s Guide and Two Ruru subscribers with all the art products I have made lately, and I am absolutely shitting myself that no-one will buy anything, because… well. Remember I mentioned rejection sensitivity? And being worried about not making a go of this business malarkey and consequently not being able to make ends meet?

    Those two things combined are a hell of a drug. The kind that makes you paranoid, not the good ones like heroin that just make you pleasantly sleepy.

    But those emails are going out tomorrow. And so is a surprise for all the paid Cynic’s Guide subscribers; I feel a bit bad because – in my efforts to keep this newsletter free – I’ve never done anything especially special for the paid subs. And it’s time I changed that.

    Time to sleeeeep

    Wait, no, first:

    What the hell is wrong with PDFs and the tech industry in general

    I had the misfortune of having to fill in a form via PDF today and may I just say, to the originator and perpetuators of this cursed format: what the fuck? How is it, tech industry, that you’re force-feeding AI into every product, and yet it’s still well-nigh impossible to fill in a PDF form in a way that does not instantly induce a migraine? How is it, Adobe, that you offer me the opportunity to pay for an in-PDF AI assistant who can be unhelpful in new and presumably exciting ways, when the software itself is bloated scum garbage and barely fulfils its function?

    See also: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Teams

    Today’s Video

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    Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me, and another person kindly pointed out last week that I have not been including my Cursed Platform links in these newsletters. Let’s fix that now.

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    If you’ve missed one of these 30 Day Challenge emails, you can view the archive at:

    The Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement

    And lastly I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you all the cool ways you can now get a print of what I’m calling Moby Duck:

    Moby Duck: How to Buy

    Thanks, as always, for reading.