The newsletter where I share my 5 favorite ideas, lessons, and discoveries of the week.
Let's get right to it!
A quote I loved
I really like people who still know how to waste a little time. They stop and talk to the neighbor. They spend twenty minutes looking at something growing in the garden. They sit at the table after dinner even though the plates are empty. Not because they’ve optimized their lives enough to earn it. They just don’t believe every minute has to be converted into something useful.
Okay, I lied. I actually have a bit of a beef with this quote.
We really need to stop calling things like this “wasted time.”
Just because something doesn't appear productive on the surface doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.
Which is why I’m making it my personal mission to redefine “wasting time,” so we can stop feeling guilty about spending 20 minutes in the garden admiring a particularly nice hydrangea.
After much deliberation, I’ve come up with two questions that I think are a more useful way to judge this:
Did you intend to spend your time that way?
How did you feel afterward?
The first question helps separate chosen time from hijacked time.
If I choose to spend 20 minutes on Instagram looking for content ideas, great. If I go in for one thing and get pulled into 45 minutes of scrolling, that feels much more like wasted time.
But intention can't be the only test.
You might not plan a two-hour chat with a friend. But if you walk away glad you had it, I certainly wouldn't call that wasted time.
So, maybe the better definition is this:
Wasted time is time you neither meant to spend that way nor feel particularly good about having spent.
Last week I shared a quote, which seemed to resonate with a lot of you:
I don’t want a soft life because I’m lazy. I want a soft life because I’ve spent most of my life in survival mode. My nervous system has been in fight or flight since childhood and now I’m choosing peace, softness, and stability.
As fate would have it, a few days later this article popped up in my feed.
It’s basically a deep dive into all the ways we hold onto tension without realizing it, why we do it, what it costs us, and how to start letting some of it go.
A lot of it comes back to the nervous system and how easily “clenching” can become our default state.
To me it feels like an actionable companion piece to the quote above.
Fair warning, it’s a long one (about a 30-minute read).
But it’s well worth it.
A twitter rabbit hole I enjoyed going down
I wouldn’t call myself a poetry hater. Maybe more of a poetry skeptic.
I’ve just never really gotten it.
Which is exactly why this thread pulled me in. The replies are basically a crowdsourced list of poems people think could convert someone like me.
If you’re similarly poetry-curious, it’s a very fun rabbit hole to go down.
Here’s one of my favorites from the thread:
P.S. If you have a poem you’d use to convert a non-poetry person, send it my way!
It pulls from Studs Terkel’s Working, a 1974 oral history built from interviews with more than 100 people about their jobs, careers, and what they wanted from work.
One type of work seemed to give people an especially deep sense of satisfaction: building houses.
Turns out there's something about creating things that last that makes our little monkey brains very happy.
I thought this was a great lesson, not just for work, but life in general.
And got me thinking about this question:
What am I creating now that will still matter years from now?
Things I’m writing that people will still be reading when I’m gone.
Skills I’m building that will keep paying off for decades.
Ideas, lessons, or stories I can pass on to other people.
I encourage you to ask yourself the same question.
A tweet that made me laugh
Maybe people who play the LinkedIn games every day should be branded with a scarlet L. (If this is you, I’m so sorry.)
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. — C.S. Lewis
👀 P.S. If you made it this far, reply and tell me your favorite thing in this issue! It helps me make future editions even better.
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