Digital detox edition
This soft lockdown/work from home/social distancing experience is a bit strange. I’ve been sleeping a lot more than usual (2-3 hours more per night) which is probably a good thing but at the same time I find myself staying up late and sleeping in. Not ideal.
A lot of that is due to mindless internet use, which is using up too much of my time when I could be doing something more useful.
So I have tried to start some new habits. One that I am really liking is to put my phone in another room when I get home and not touch it again until I leave the house the next day.
Doesn’t seem to make much difference to my email and browsing amount: I do the same things in less time. Instead, I find myself reading more books and watching some of the many jiu-jitsu instructional videos I have bought (and not watched) over the last couple of years. Much more productive.
I’m also helping out more with housework and feel better. Going to try and keep this habit.
This week’s links
- There are definitely some trade-offs: Treat the patient, not the virus
- This also works for spending: Via Negativa: Adding to Your Life By Subtracting
- This is getting worse for me. I read this in 2008 and it made sense. Still makes sense now: Is Google making us stupid?
- What is Japan’s power source? Geothermal? Can We All Be Like Texas?
- A more traditional way of doing things: My Retirement Plan Is You
- Incredible story: The Eruption Of Instagram Island
- I found this really helpful: One-Touch to Inbox Zero: How I Spend 17 Minutes Per Day on Email
- Food for thought: Warren Buffett’s Optimistic? Pessimistic? No, Realistic
- This is only just getting started: Coronavirus-linked bankruptcies rise sharply in Japan
- Can you imagine hundreds of millions of climate refugees? One billion people will live in insufferable heat within 50 years – study
- Second and third order effects: What It Will Take for Restaurants to Survive
- Great write-up: This version of Warren Buffett
- Interesting stuff: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
- This is going to get ugly: Pandemic sets Japan on course for deep recession as spending, services plunge
What do you think? Not much in there that is uplifting, eh? I think the standouts for me this week were #7 and #12.
This week’s books
Thanks to trying to control my time online, I have managed to read more books this week 🙂
- Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel, by Martha Wells. This is the fifth Murderbot book, and they are all wonderful. Fantastic, very human science-fiction with a non-human protagonist and excellent world-building. I got this the day it came out and devoured it in less than a day 🙂
- No More Champagne: Churchill and his Money, by David Lough. I’m only a few pages in, but this is already fascinating. I had no idea Churchill was bailed out by wealthy sponsors multiple times, to cover his gambling and terrible money management.
- Violence, Blunders, and Fractured Jaws, by Marc Macyoung. This is a bit long-winded, pretentious, and hard going. I think I prefer Geoff Thompson’s books.