High Output Management 📊

Clear, concise, concrete advice on managing work. Applicable to persons managing AI agents, if that's what your work looks like these days 😉

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat 🧂🧈🍋🔥

Wonderful book on theory and practice of cooking. Instrumental in my transition from Blue Apron cook to master of my own kitchen. 👨‍🍳

I also recommend Blue Apron type services if shopping for one or more recipes is too much effort. Such services tend to expect these items on hand: pot 🍲, pan 🍳, cutting board, knife 🔪, spatula, large wooden spoon 🥄, salt, pepper and olive oil.

How Buildings Learn 🏛️

A visually rich exploration of how people relate to and adapt buildings from the first day they enter a new building, on through the centuries that follow. ⏳

The Power Broker 🗽

A rich biography of a man who built his life entirely around gaining and exploiting power. Incidentally, captures a ~50 year slice of New York City history. 🏙️

Motivational Interviewing 💬

How to help people change and grow, even when the going gets hard. 🤝

Alchemy 🧪

Meditations on marketing, branding, and what makes a product good. ✨

Software

F.lux

Reduces the blue light* output of your monitor in the evening, synchronized with sunset. This can enhance the normal feeling of drowsiness.

This software is only available on computers. Android and iOS phones offer similar system settings that must be configured / turned on to work.

Hardware

ChiliPad

A water-cooled pad that goes between the sheets and mattress. Really helps me during summer, when I'd be drenched in sweat without it. I love it and use it year-round. When I'm without it on a trip, my sleep is frequently worse.

Consumables

Thorne multi

I use a multivitamin that is formulated in two doses, a morning and evening dose. More stimulating nutrients are included in the morning dose. Relaxing nutrients are included in the evening dose.

Melatonin

When I need to reset my sleep schedule after international travel, or my schedule drifts, one or two nights with 300 micrograms of melatonin, one hour before bed is often all I need to get my sleep schedule back to where I want it.

Melatonin has been completely useless to a blind friend of mine. YMMV.

Practices

Avoiding caffeinated beverages

starting around 2 pm.

Winding down routine

• start early
• shower
• read / listen to book
• switch to incandescent light around when I start reading. Another blue light reduction measure. These are difficult to obtain in the US.

Clean sheets

I wash my sheets once per week.

* Controlling your monitor's brightness can also help reduce blue light exposure and eye strain. Reducing the contrast between your screen and whatever is behind it can also help. Search for "bias lighting".

Consumables

Pedialyte

Chicken soup

DayQuil tablets

Hot tea

Tissues

Practices

Gargling salt water (for sore throat)

Less caffeine (just enough to avoid withdrawal symptoms)

Hot compress on the nose

Breathing steam (optionally from a hot beverage)

Grocery delivery

Timeline

A normal bout of the common cold lasts 7–10 days, peaking in intensity around day 3–5.

Day 1 & 2

1. Gargle salt water, assuming you have a sore throat.
2. Buy or arrange delivery of the supplies you'll need to make it through. You're going to lose a lot of capacity, so prepare as soon as you are able.
3. Taper caffeine intake to a minimum without abstaining completely.

Day 3–5

1. Use steam, hot compress, and hot drinks to keep mucous flowing out of your nose gently, without an excess of pressure.
2. Stay hydrated, using Pedialyte when it's especially difficult. Soup and tea also help.
3. Use DayQuil (or NyQuil) as needed for headache and body ache. Staying sufficiently hydrated can reduce the need for painkillers, and over the counter painkillers in the US aren't particularly safe, so hydrate first, then medicate as needed.

Day 6+

Taper off all of these practices as they become unnecessary.

Closing

I wrote this for myself, because I catch cold so rarely that I re-learn these things every time, sometimes with days of avoidable misery before I remember a solution that works for me.

I hope you're in good health. If you have a cold, I hope something you read here makes your recovery easier.

Initially, there may be excitement at gaining control over one's financial life, but in the long run, a successful budget results in repetition, and boredom for all except the most hardcore budgeting nerds. It does not have to.

In nature, resources and opportunities present themselves in small and large cycles, and also randomly. To make a budget less tedious and more interesting, it should mimic these natural rhythms.

For example, let's make an imaginary food budget. Yes, this example comes from my real life, but my real constraint was much lower, and I had the benefit of living in Shanghai at the time. Today, I'll use the maximum level of food stamps where I live in California as a "creative budgeting" restriction. No, not fraudulent, just fun and varied.

The naive, uniform daily budget is $9.70 ($291 / 30). Using this figure, you can eat well enough, but you'll never truly feast in a day-to-day comparison, and if you buy food in bulk to stretch your money, you'll likely eat the same things every day without a break in the monotony.

If you'd like to feast once in a while, you can try the following budget:

This lowers the spend of the average day to $8.29, saving $1.41 per day. It also increases your maximum budget day by over $5. Once per month, you can splurge the additional approximately $42 on a feast. Steak night, perhaps, or wild caught salmon, or whatever your heart desires. Ten pints of Ben & Jerry's maybe, if you're a degenerate sugar addict (Walmart price).

Every day, you can look forward to Wednesdays and Saturdays, and all month you can look forward to your feast.

The constrained budget on Mondays and Thursdays should breed creativity. When I've used this kind of budget in the past, I consider leftovers, pantry items and condiments fair game on such days (free for the sake of the budget, though they cost money in the past, when I was abiding by the budget). You can enjoy classic poor food like ramen with an egg (and leftover green onion!), or rice and beans. The possibilities exist, and with a constrained budget for a single day, you'll have renewed incentive to find them.

This pattern can apply to some other forms of budgeting too, though the daily nature of eating makes this strategy particularly well suited to a food budget.

The scissors have a lot of advantages: they’re smaller, lighter, cheaper, less fragile and more versatile. They will probably last beyond their owner's lifetime, unlike motorized nose hair trimmers. They also tend to be more pleasant to use–they don’t tug on hairs the same way and don’t tickle as much. You can trim your beard, eyebrows, and exterior ear hair using scissors.

They’re quieter. They don’t require electricity, so you can take them camping or traveling anywhere in the world, without worrying about charging or plugs.

What are the advantages of motorized nose hair trimmers, then? They are easier to use and faster for their single specialized task. The ease of use can be the difference between trimming nose hairs and not if a person lacks the dexterity to operate scissors. But that’s about it.

This example is illustrative, but the concept that simpler technology is usually better for an individual user extends to building software, choosing kitchen appliances, and writing.

If you’re building a static website, HTML and CSS are almost certainly the right tools. There’s a temptation to add something like Svelte or Vue, but usually vanilla JavaScript will do.

If you’re just getting into cooking, a single, high quality, pan, spatula, cutting board, and knife, will do. The same logic applies to deciding how to stock your kitchen if instead you’re planning to cook mainly using a pot, baking, or even using a microwave as your primary heat source.

For writing, pen and paper are best. They have similar advantages to the facial hair scissors. They also allow you to focus, undistracted, on writing. You can probably type faster than you can with pen and paper, but quality writing doesn’t depend on speed. If you want bulk word salad fast, ask AI, the ultimate in unpredictable complexity.

This concept has wide-reaching implications, and can save you a lot of time and frustration if you routinely apply it when making decisions.

It is often simpler to not own something than to own it. Partly because ownership includes management of the item. Partly because it includes thinking about the thing.

Simplicity is usually best.

After work, usually past midnight, I’d buy a pint of creamy euphoric goodness with my tips, ending the day by eating it before a video gaming session that would often keep me up past sunrise. Ice cream gave me great comfort and was, perhaps sadly, the main thing I looked forward to on most of those days.

To be fair, addiction-wise, I was much better off than my pizza coworkers that were using heroin.

My life changed a lot over the 15 years that followed: the largest milestone was becoming a software engineer. But the daily ritual of eating a pint of ice cream at the end of the day remained relatively stable. I quit for a year once, during a year-long nutrition and exercise program, and abstained for days or weeks at a time on other occasions. Nevertheless, I identified as an ice cream addict, and I was daily haunted by the feeling that this was out of my control.

Previously, I overcame a cigarette addiction in my mid-twenties. I lost count of failed attempts to quit, and was more demoralized during those years than I ever was by my broken relationship with ice cream. Unlike cigarettes, ice cream brings me joy and euphoria, so my feelings on ice cream were more mixed–I felt ambivalent about quitting.

The path to quitting cigarettes came in two aha! moments for me. The first was reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. The insight this book provided me was that change is possible. I never applied their advice outside trying to quit smoking, but I was so convinced of my own powerlessness that what I needed was simply a sense of agency. I redoubled my efforts to quit after reading it, but continued to fail.

The second eureka! moment that led to quitting smoking was reading The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Alan Carr. This book is brilliant: it asks you not to quit until you’re ready, and then systematically refutes that there’s anything remotely beneficial about smoking on an emotional level. Most people rationally understand why smoking is a losing game and a waste of resources, but identify as a smoker and are socially supported by fellow smokers. In the second to last chapter, the book asks you to set it aside–don’t read further–until you’re ready to quit. The final step is simply to identify as a non-smoker.

That may sound flimsy, because it’s a one-paragraph recap, but it was what allowed me to quit smoking. Identity is a powerful force.

So: I’ve successfully ended an addiction before, in spite of smoking being a notoriously difficult addiction to kick among legal substances.

In my attempts to stop eating a pint of ice cream every night, I’ve abstained, I’ve tried substitutes like light ice cream, yogurt, custard, and smaller portions of other desserts. Despite these efforts to stop, I kept eating a pint per day, very consistently.

Along the way, I learned about a little known effect that health researchers avoid talking about publicly because it violates all the culturally popular shame and moralizing about sweets, including ice cream: ice cream consumption is positively correlated with good health outcomes.

How can this be? Common speculations include: it’s nutrient dense, it’s comforting, and well-adjusted, healthy people tend to do what feels good. I’m under the impression nobody has empirically proven why ice cream has this effect, but it gave me some comfort knowing that that regular ice cream consumption can be part of a healthy life.

I’ve received advice on quitting from friends, the best of which was, “Why don’t you just have one bite?”. What’s sad about this is that it was a great suggestion, but because I didn’t want to hear it at the time, and I was busy identifying as an addict, it fell on deaf ears.

As with quitting smoking, it was something I read that ended my pint-a-night ice cream habit. This time, it was serendipitous: I wasn’t looking for inspiration or a solution to help me quit. I was browsing Hacker News, when I came across an article discussing that a large portion of addictions end spontaneously. 15 years prior, I’d read about this phenomenon in a book titled Motivational Interviewing, and the reminder shocked me into realization.

I don’t have to eat a pint of ice cream every day. I’m free to eat as little or as much as I like.

Since then, I’ve been eating three to five bites of ice cream most nights. I’m happier, I feel better, and I have no plans to stop eating ice cream. But the biggest, most freeing change is that I no longer identify as an addict.

My problem was identifying as an addict.

Postscript: Favorite Flavors

I’m pretty picky about flavors with three go-to options that have served me well over the years: Oat of this Swirled, Sweet Cream Caramel Brownie, and as a ubiquitously-available standby, Half Baked. I’ll eat other flavors, but I’d really rather not, most of the time.