📓 Helsinki has nature even close to the heart of the city. As I’m enjoying one such oasis, what is not seen in a photo is noise pollution. You can always hear the monotonous grind of the roads. I wonder if we’ll ever solve this problem in the future.

📓Had to make several difficult decisions during the past week. Needed to lean more on my analitical self than my heart. I just have to trust that the time for pursuing one of my dreams had simply not come. It felt very close. Playing the long game.

📓 Didn’t drink coffee ☕️ during the past week… until today 😵‍💫

📓 Gotta love this era of quality TV based on video games. Fallout is just great. 👍 Had my doubts after the first episode but as I finish the season, I look forward to another one.

📓 Woo, excited for the new comics book from War and Peas creators: Once Upon a Workday! Eagerly waiting for my copy as of today.

📓 There’s correlation between my dogs barking in their sleep and them spotting a rabbit on our evening walk. 🐶🐇

📓💬 A quote often attributed to Niels Bohr or Yogi Berra:

It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

📓 For a while now, the cringy face thumbnails on Youtube ▶️ have the opposite effect on me to what the authors aim for - views. Even when creators that I like and follow do it. It’s so infantilizing… like a mass game of peekaboo. Ugh. 😑

📓 I value The Economist as a publication but their subscription cancellation process uses several dark patterns. 🙅🏻‍♂️ For example, they offer you a discount for renewal (could be nice but still) and just now I had to chat with a person to cancel (who tried to offer me discounts).

🍿 Bullet Train 🚅 is the right kind of silly I needed today.

📓 When I ask for a shopping list from my partner, invariably there is 1 “impossible” ingredient. It’s either not available in every store, it’s sold out, or it requires next level treasure hunting skills to find the right isle. Either way - one does not simply get everything on the list. 👌

📱 I can’t believe it - I can’t close all my Activity rings because of 1 stand hour, multiple days in row 🤦🏻‍♂️ It will break my weekly streak and most likely it’s due to having the watch off charging here and there 😡

📓 It’s been a week that feels like a month. Reviewing my daily journal helped me recollect a lot, even though I felt it in my bones. One theme I’ve paid special attention to is what recharged me 🔋:

• Walks, strictly not in a rush
• Deep work - thinking and “designing”
• Solid mid-day breaks

📓This is quite an unshaped thought. Integrative garbage - the ugly outcome of combining too many, and often conflicting, ideas with the goal of creating an all-encompassing solution. Connected thinking is great. Generalists are great. Too much of a good thing - integrative garbage.

📓 Wikipedia: Petrichor

Petrichor (/ˈpɛtrɪˌkɔːr/) is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil.

TIL 🤓 I thought the smell of rain is the smell of ozone. It’s a bit more complex because - life.

📓📷 Together we are safe (from the vacuum cleaner)!

📓 After a week of temperatures closer to -20C, walking the dogs at -5C feels like spring is coming. 😅 Snapshot from the wintery city landscape in Helsinki from last weekend. 📷 Alt text courtesy of Bing chat 🤷🏻‍♂️

📓 Home-made chai latte, incense stick, headphones on - it’s going to be a particularly zen weekly review. 🧘‍♂️

📓 Iterating over my annual retrospective. Work seems to have a too big effect on how I feel about life. There is a lot to love about 2023, but it’s muted by work at each step. I am proud of how I’ve coped and grown. Still, I could appreciate the good things in life more and in full color. 🙇🏻

📓 One of the nine hells is perpetual flight travel with connecting flights 🛫 And most importantly - filled with people flying for the first time.

📓 Changed back to standard time today. The oven clock is right again and it’s dark by 17.

📓📷 This is the best sourdough loaf 🍞 I’ve baked so far! All this time I think I’ve been adding too much water. I’ve been underestimating the water content in my starter is my guess.

📝 Finally created some evergreen notes à la Zettelkasten. Lesson learned - I should have just started without overthinking it. Here’s something that has helped me through hectic times recently:

Scrying your TODO list

Scrying is a mechanic from Magic the Gathering tabletop card came. It allows for a player to:

• look at their stack of cards
• decide to put cards at the bottom of the stack
• decide to keep cards on the top and re-order them

Scrying your TODO list could be a useful metaphor for prioritizing tasks. The order of tasks, especially the next 2-5 tasks, is more important than completing the whole list.

A useful heuristic for scrying a TODO list is deciding which tasks need doing today and which tasks will make tomorrow easier.

Source: Cortex - #142 Scrying Your List