🤔 What this is all about
Who the hell am I, and why would you take me seriously?
That's really up to you. If what I'm saying makes sense, I'm glad. I'm writing so I can speak to you. If it doesn't, that's ok too. I wish you, whatever you're seeking, to live your best life.
I have worked as a software developer for startups and a pre-IPO enterprise company with billion-dollar valuations. I've been a researcher and project manager with a university and a hospital. I've been a speaker and workshop facilitator for communities and conferences.
This newsletter is not about that shit.
Along with the stuff I mentioned, I had a crap ton of reasons to be unsatisfied about my relationship with what many people call "being productive". I invest a lot of my time into making this relationship healthier.
This newsletter is about that shit.
What am I writing about?
Getting Shit Done, Calmly is an experimental newsletter. More accurately, it's a newsletter about my experiments at making my life better.
In my years of trial and error, I've experienced increasingly better work-life. As a (surprise) side-effect, my overall quality of life is also trending up :-)
Late last year, I kicked off my new personal blog with a post about Why I Write. The act of writing it out helped me be deliberate about my intent behind creating a new personal blog.
In this post, I'll do something similar. I will introduce you (and clarify for myself) the goal for Getting Shit Done, Calmly.
There are two main themes for this newsletter: productivity and calm.
Productivity
I recognize that I've been very well-indoctrinated with this idea: being productive gives life its meaning.
My current opinion, about that, is: I have no objection to getting satisfaction from "being productive"; so long as doing shit that I enjoy counts as being productive.
I often ask my friends, and my extended network, about their experience using different ideas that improve their quality of life. Or not.
Staying on top of all-the-things is very difficult and I rely on process to do it. Process here is no more than a way of thinking that can be captured and duplicated.
Roughly half the posts will be about doing "productivity" well. That is, making productivity compatible with your choice of lifestyle.
Calm
I also experiment with ways to reduce noise in my life. I prefer to focus on doing what I want rather than what just happens to land on my plate.
So the other half of posts will be about creating calm in the storm that is modern life.
I try ways to choose my path so that my personality (which prefers a slower pace) isn't at odds with my choice of lifestyle (working mostly in the technology industry).
I rely on technology to do this.
Technology is partly responsible for getting us into this mess of a mental overload that is modern life. We're going to use technology to get us out of it ;-)
Case in point: this newsletter
Getting Shit Done, Calmly is a newsletter instead of a social media feed because I find social media mostly noisy and restrictive. That doesn't mean I don't use social media. It just means I think social media is not the best choice here.
I love electronic mail much more than I love social media. Email gives me choice. Email is not scrolling endlessly through a feed. When you subscribe, you get my newsletters in your email inbox. As long as you've turned off your email notifications, you will only see the posts when you choose to go through your email.
My posts will be about using technology and different ways of thinking to get more satisfaction from what we do.
When you no longer get value from reading the posts, unsubscribe (there should be a button for this at the bottom of the email). When this newsletter becomes noise, you should remove it, and move on to something more relevant to your life.
You may be reading this in your email inbox because you subscribed to the newsletter.
Or maybe you came across the very first post in the newsletter archive.
Wherever you're reading this, I hope the future posts in Getting Shit Done, Calmly helps you live your best life 💛