ponderings, digital decluttering
Become an expert in mistake-making?
Yes. Make mistakes. This was one of the possible lifestyle paths of “How To Live” by Derek Sivers.
I printed out this section of the e-book that I had bought, thinking over these words.
“How To Live” is one of my favorite books, in my top twenty.
Sivers, in the book, was directing me to keep a log of all the mistakes. To quickly finish a bad first draft. A bad first paragraph for that matter.
But not just log the mistakes. Log the lessons as well.
Last summer, I wanted to do a blog post detailing mine.
Similar to what James Altucher does where he bleeds vulnerability into his blogs, sharing embarrassing stories where he has failed in more ways than one.
So in order to actually get a log of all of those mistakes, I had to go back to the documents where I logged the tasks and projects that I did, in addition to the experiences I had, grouped by year.
I call them my “I did” documents.
I’ve been writing these since 2013.
These personal history documents were all disorganized, so I used Claude to put it all in similar sections.
I am not anti-AI, but I believe in it being heavily regulated and it being used for specific purposes.
This was one of those purposes.
I wrote the content, I just wanted it to organize it.
I also prompted Claude to create a personal timeline.
All of these were then turned into more readable documents.
I printed these out so I wouldn’t have to look at a screen for hours when I refer to them, because it’s such a joy to write offline. (I could also just download all of the documents, but that would mean looking at a screen for hours.)
I’m pondering whether to use these stories for creating future blog posts, to write about what I’ve learned from the mistakes I’ve made.
In addition to getting ideas for possible future blog posts from these documents, I’ve also gotten ideas from my own notes I’ve taken from podcasts I listened to before.
This is something I’m also pondering doing.
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I finished the 90 day audiobook listening plan I wrote about before. It ran from June 2026 to August 2026.
Learned so much! About walking as a practice, how infrastructure inhibits walking, how to envision and structure a Feminist City, what a life after cars can really look like, how as a society we can transition to a walkable city model, how the automobile wreaked havoc on community building and social capital, the history of car culture and how we got here.
I have a backlog of books from that list I still need to get through for note-taking.
So far, I’ve completed “Flâneuse” and “A Walking Life.”
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I’ve been in the medical cannabis industry since March.
I listened to “The Cannabis Hangout” podcast, re-read “A Woman’s Guide to Cannabis” by Nikki Furrer and “Cannabis and CBD” by Aliza Sherman and Dr. Junella Chin, took notes on each book, and read articles from “Salt Baked City” magazine.
My resume needed revising though.
I researched the specific industry keywords that I could plug into my resume, linking how my past job experience lines up with where I want to advance in the cannabis industry.
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I deleted my Discord, Meetup, Go Frendly, and Pinterest accounts, unsubbed from Apple Music and moved all of my playlists over to Spotify, culled old Spotify music and podcast episodes, deleted the possible future projects documents I had in iCloud Drive, and erased extra Safari browser bookmarks. I’ve also been limiting my TV and film viewing post-work.
I tend to get overwhelmed by digital information.
I also felt like this extra effort expended in the digital realm was inhibiting me from interacting in non screen-based environments.
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I’ve been slowly buying music from the Apple iTunes Store.
I listen to hours of content on Spotify but always download it and then leave my phone on Airplane Mode.
Streaming content hurts the planet so I try to be mindful of my usage.
Eventually I would like to leave Spotify and stream even less.
I’ve become increasingly overwhelmed by new music discoveries when I haven’t finished listening to an artist’s discography.
I love getting deep into a song, analyzing the lyrics, and understanding the meaning behind the music.
And it’s much easier to “monolisten” (one of the twelve monotasks talked about in the book “The Twelve Monotasks” by Thatcher Wine, which I also wrote book notes on) when you can’t skip a song frictionlessly with a tap.
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I wrote a previous blog post on the ‘pod education’ I unknowingly received after listening to hundreds and hundreds of hours of podcast episodes while simultaneously doing manual labor jobs.
All of these episodes were already in ‘My Episodes’ in my Spotify library.
I saved them there.
I grouped them by year.
I let those episodes sit there for a while.
Coming back to the episodes, I wanted to save them into a Notion database instead since I didn’t want to house my whole listening archive all on Spotify (which I have no control over if it gets erased).
I also know that, again, I will eventually leave Spotify when I no longer “need” it to get through work.
I took screenshots of the episodes, asking Claude to tell me the themes and through line of what I was listening to each year.
Since I couldn’t copy and paste from Spotify, I also prompted Claude to write out the episode titles for me so I could put those in the Notion database.
I then categorized them by topics such as burnout, productivity, dating, sexuality, behavior change, self-education, social skills.
I printed out all of these documents, now possessing an entire hard-copy library of episodes that I’ve learned so much from, starting in 2017.
I learned so much about what it means to be a modern woman, the dysfunctional dating market, how technology is affecting gender relations, how gender ratios have an impact on dating, society’s collective exhaustion and where it came from, what cannabis topicals can do for the body, the difference between cannabis concentrates and cannabis flower, how to make buses appealing to ride, how and why people are going analog, how to market your online business, how to write persuasive copy, how to budget based on your values, what sexual liberation actually is and whether it’s empowering or disempowering, etc.
I’m considering writing a series of blog posts under the tag “pod education.” Each post would cover the major takeaways from a specific topic, what I learned about it, and how I want to put that information to use in a concrete way.
book notes on “The Twelve Monotasks”
book notes on “Cannabis & CBD”
blog post on my “pod education”