On My Mind
Last week I went to my alma mater, The University of Scranton, for an Alumni Board meeting — a board I've served on for the past few years.
On Friday evening, we usually have a social event, and this time we spent several hours doing a guided reflection at the University's retreat house on a nearby lake. It's one of my favorite places, and the perfect place for that activity.
During the reflection, several of us mentioned the desire to reduce interruptions in our lives, highlighted by the fact that the music we were listening to kept getting interrupted by ads.
As you know, I've been thinking a lot about digital detox, and a concept I came up with that is the opposite of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). I call it MOOWT (pronounced "moot," Missing Out On What's There). And I was excited to share this idea with my fellow alumni.
I told a story about how we managed our strict no-screen policy at Disney World, and contrasted it with families who were all on their screens. One particularly vivid memory is from Beast's Castle — a restaurant and perfect replica of the castle from the animated film. While my family and I are taking in the sights, the family next to us were all on screens: the parents on phones, the kids in iPads.
David Sparks shared a similar story from Disneyland with me when I went on his podcast. It got me thinking that we have such severe FOMO for what's online, that we're rendering our real-life experiences MOOWT.
The concept is still a work in progress, but the sentiment is real: why don't we have a fear of missing out on what's right in front of us?
Recommended Reading
I Deleted My Second Brain by Joan Westenberg: This piece was written about a year ago but seems to be making the rounds now, and I'm here for it.
I'm a BIG proponent of logging ideas so you don't forget them. But my Obsidian research folder is a glut of text snippets I'm never going to read. I wrote about this last year, when I said I was trading highlights for voice notes. That's why this quote in particular resonated with me:
In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection.
I would mindlessly highlight things, assuming I'd go back and revisit them. And I still do highlight. But now, I immediately reflect on what I read. I supplement my highlights with my own thoughts — either via paper and pen, or a voice note.
If you're a digital pack rat like me, I highly recommend this piece. It might give you the permission you need to delete some notes.
Recommended Media
Olivia Rodrigo's performance of drop dead on SNL: Olivia Rodrigo was the combination host/musical guest on SNL last weekend, and her performance of her new single drop dead is fantastic. The set is amazing, the song is a bop, and she absolutely crushes the vocals.
There's a weird nostalgia to both the song and the official music video that I really dig.
On a sadder note, Yankees radio broadcaster John Sterling died earlier this week. It's easy for other fanbases to take shots at him, but he was the voice of the Yankees for 36 years and called over 5,000 consecutive games. He was a baseball fan through and through. To say he's anything less than a legend is to show you know nothing of baseball or broadcasting.
RIP John.
Automation of the Week
Send a Google Chat message when a new file appears in a Google Drive folder: I do some contract work where we use Google Chat for communications. Part of that contract work is uploading recordings of calls so our VA can post the replay.
I routinely forget to ping the VA since I need to copy the recording from Zoom to our shared Google Drive folder then wait for it to upload. This simple 2-step Zap fixes that. When the new file is uploaded, she gets a ping that there's a new file.
The big lesson here is that automations don't need to be these huge, Rube Goldberg machines that do a million things. They just need to be a planned, routine task that you no longer need to remember to do.
Interested in more automations like this?
I'm working on a new program called Automation Foundations, designed to help you identify and automate more of your work with the help of tools like Zapier and Claude Cowork. I'm still in the planning phase, so if you're interested, click the button below and I'll reach out with more info!
That's it for this week. Have a great weekend!
Joe
