I get various emails with curated links to various stories, and I will click a link to go read that story. First, it often takes me to a browser re-direct that sometimes successfully redirects, sometimes doesn't. Then sometimes the redirect is to an app that I've subscribed to. Which would be great. Except for the times it opens the app but fails to redirect to the specific article. Then if the article is on a web page, it commonly fills the page with more and more ads slowing down my phone and giving me a tiny keyhole opening to read the text through.

Then I often want to go back to the email and pick up where I left off. Which works >50% of the time, but fairly often will skip to a different email.

I truly believe that for reading news and articles the state of software was much better 10 years ago than today.

My wife turned on a meditation feature on our very old Alexa. I guess the app was deleted or something, but every morning Alexa turns on and says "Starting your meditation times ... Sorry, this is no longer available". If I tell Alexa to turn this off, it has no idea what I'm talking about and it shows up nowhere in the iOS app. Instead of meditation, I got a nice dose of minor annoyance every morning.

I think everyone is shifting between maker schedule and manager schedule constantly depending on what is going on, and that's so much more exhausting than just being in maker schedule or manager schedule full time

I've been making a concerted effort of waking up in the morning, sitting out in my garage gym for an hour with coffee and a book. I'll do 1 workout per day, 6 times a week, and read a few pages of "Meditations" (The stoicism book). It really centers me and feels refreshing to break away from everything and just focus on my body and mind ad the real physical world. I'm not religious, so I consider that my "church" or something.

Obviously, carrying that mindset throughout the day is difficult - but having a set "no-screens" time is useful, especially when my previous schedule was this:

- Wake up + look at phone

- Sit on toilet and look at phone

- Drive to work and look at computer for 4 hours

- Have lunch and look at phone

- Look at computer for 4 more hours

- Come home, make dinner, eat food

- Look at computer or tv for 3 hours

- Go to bed and look at phone for another hour

Writing it down like this makes it very clear that this cannot be a healthy lifestyle - so for me, where work is ALL done in front of a screen, I'm increasingly trying to remove screens from the rest of my life. There's no reason for us to be on the internet all day long, there's other cool shit to do that feels way better than burning my eyes and brain receptors all day long.

I hope the ‘free internet all the time’ era that airlines have been threatening us with for a decade now never arrives.