The 8 things I learned in 2017
Getting things done is best done on pen and paper. I've tried several digital tools and none work for me. The analog feel of paper and the cognitive and physical investment of effort in committing tasks to paper make it easier to invest the extra effort to get it done.
Learning a new skill requires time and zero distractions. Smartphones are time parasites feeding on our attention. This year I turned off all notifications on my phone & also kept it on airplane mode when I was learning something (apologies to those not able to reach me).
I process & retain information better when I'm reading on paper than on devices. So I do most of my serious reading on dead trees, mild non-fiction on Kindle and pop-non-fiction (Gladwell/Harari types) on audiobooks at 3x playback speed. I don't read anything on LED/LCD displays
Creativity requires an open and exploratory mind untethered by rules and regulations, but strangely enough, an open mind also requires time, which then requires personal routines and habits that care of the mundane but mandatory stuff of daily life in an efficient way.
Social Media is a vacuously empty and gaping time sink. Its algorithms bubble up the trivial and sink the important. What goes viral is not the genuinely complex, but the misleadingly simple. It also magnifies only the Narcissus in all of us
All TV News and most printed news is a waste of time. It is the organized collection, dissemination and fact-free discussion of rare and fringe events with no nuance, depth or any appreciation for the actual complexity of the world.
Politics everywhere is now officially in the full-time business of distracting us with trivia. Political types regularly say outrageous things to feed our infinite addiction to virtue signal our outrage over soundbites. The important bad stuff happens on the unreported sidelines.
And finally, kindergarten teachers and nurses do what I believe to be the toughest and most critical jobs in the world and yet are among the least paid and recognized. We pay people who crunch numbers less efficiently than an algorithm several times more. It's a travesty
That's it for 2017. I will hopefully spend more time meeting people in real life, writing on krishashok.me and putting out music on soundcloud.com/krishashok than here.
