Hello friend!
Below is week two of material that I hope helps spark your own thinking, learning, curiosity, passion, wonder, laughter, and joy!
How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You
This link was widely shared last year, but I still think following at least some of the steps in it one of the best ways to fight back a little bit against the attention sucking devices we all carry around. The ones that have been designed by very smart people who have been paid a lot of money over long periods of time to grab as much of your attention as possible. We all have human brains and “they” get better at “hacking” them every year. Own your phone as a tool again, not the other way around.
Fair warning: it would take an hour+ to complete all these tasks (I only followed half of them but still saw huge returns in terms of future time saved and mental strain/health). Even if you take bits of the advice or rethink how to better batch your phone use it is well worth the read.
The most powerful performance-enhancer? Sleep.
The most important recovery tool? Sleep.
What do we spend about 1/3 of our life doing? Sleep!
Especially today: Sleep Science: In the Era of Screens, Rest is Crucial
[follow the link and scroll down to see the detail and information of this graphic]
Some quick-hit for improving your sleep hygiene and getting more out of these hours:
No cell phones, laptops, tablets, other devices allowed in the bedroom
Get any normal alarm clock so you don’t have to use your phone for this reason. I use a version of a sunrise alarm clock that gradually brightens the room before going off.
Make the room pitch black.
Dark means DARK. "They've done studies where they shine a laser on the back of someone's knee, and people pick it up. It's light. You cannot have your phone in your room. You cannot have a TV in your room. It needs to be black, black as night."
-Kelly Starett in Tools of Titans.
In new environments, this is where a sleep mask could come in handy- make sure you find one that is comfortable around your hair/skull.
Our bodies associate blue light with daytime, so being exposed to it when you’re trying to go to bed “pushes our internal clock later so that it’s harder to fall asleep and harder to wake up in the morning,” says Cathy Goldstein, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Sleep Disorders Center…In a perfect world, you’d start to avoid blue-enriched light from screens four hours before bedtime. “That is hard for a lot of people to swallow,” admits Goldstein, “so we do sometimes recommend blue-light-blocking glasses at that time.”
These glasses come in various levels of fashion but could be worth considering. So far the research isn’t rock-solid, but they are worth a try if you find yourself having trouble falling asleep after looking at a screen.
A popular app f.lux (That I use and recommend!) aims to decrease eye strain by automatically adjusting the light your computer gives off. Most smartphones also have an option for this.
Sleep in a cool room (optimal is around 18.5 Celsius/65 Fahrenheit).
dark + cool = we’re looking for a cave.
Quiet= If in a noisy environment, consider earplugs or a white-noise machine.
I sleep on my side and the only earplugs I’ve ever been able to use comfortably are Mack’s.
A room-fan or other ambient noise can help here, too.
Invest in a quality pillow, mattress, and bedding. You’re going to be in your bed a LOT.
Avoid eating dinner past 8 pm. See NYT: The Dangers of Eating Late at Night Especially if you find yourself suffering from acid reflux, post-nasal drip, etc.
Make sure you do an occasional clean or dusting of your sleeping area. The air quality of this space is also crucial.
Take 2 minutes tonight to improve your sleep environment and you can see huge benefits!
German language appreciation:
Over the past four years and thanks to the help of many teammates and friends, I have become proficient in German. It’s a great language. I wanted to share some of my favorite words with you all:
Dachshund:
More commonly known as a wiener dog, this word is a direct borrow from German. Dachs means badger. Hund means dog. These dogs were originally bred to hunt badgers. Since learning this I have a new respect for this breed, or for anything that gets face to face with an angry badger in a confined space.
Schildkröte:
Ever the pragmatists, Germans love to smash smaller words together to make new, bigger ones. This can get out of hand. But my favorite is taking Schild (shield) and Kröte (toad) and putting them together to get the shield-toad, otherwise known as a turtle.
Eselbrücke:
The direct translation is donkey-bridge, but in English, it most closely translates to mnemonic device (e.g. PEMDAS for math order of operations or ROY G. BIV for remembering the colors of the rainbow in order). So in German, you build a donkey-bridge in your head as a memory-aide.
But WHY a donkey-bridge specifically?? Turns out, donkeys won’t cross water even if there is only an inch of it. They can’t distinguish how deep it might be. So one must lay down a path of some kind over the water for the donkey to walk over. Similar to the help we give our own minds.
What donkey-bridges have you built in your mind?
Other German words English has borrowed directly:
Schadenfreude, kindergarten, poltergeist, doppelganger…
Worth a listen:
How I Built This with Guy Raz from NPR
I love this podcast because it reminds me over and over again —and in many different ways — that so much of the world around us was built.
“Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is thateverything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you.And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
Recent episode I loved: Outdoor Voices: Tyler Haney
#doingthings and Googling the crap out of anything she needed to understand
Reading: Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
I love getting lost in great science fiction from time to time.
The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience the Hugo Award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.
Worth considering:
Mind the quality of things that come between you and the earth. It’s okay to spend money on a good mattress, good shoes, and good tires.
-Grandma Kessel
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Much love,
Cody