Reading Notes for 2023-12-08

From: The Imperfectionist: You Can’t Hoard Life – Oliver Burkeman

Spending your days trying to get experiences “under your belt”, in an effort to maximise your collection of experiences, or to feel more confident about the future supply of similar experiences, means placing yourself in a position from which you can never enjoy them fully, because there’s a different agenda at play.

Buddhist psychology is uniquely insightful, I think, when it comes to the specific version of clenching I was experiencing on that hillside path: how we make ourselves miserable, not just by railing against bad experiences, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold onto the good experiences we *are* currently having.

Note: Suffering comes from attachment which is the clenching here. Also the book, Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, that Burkeman references here is available on Kindle Unlimited.


From: How and Why I Use Vision as a Productivity Tool – Charlotte Grysolle

Like I said, this all happens automatically but what’s really cool is that you can take conscious control of the process: • By intentionally narrowing your visual field, you can increase alertness. • By intentionally expanding your visual field, you can increase relaxation.

Note: interesting approach of trying to harness visual focus to pair it with cognitive focus. seems obvious but novel at the same time.

When it’s time for a break, you go into panoramic vision

Be ruthless about removing distractions (especially your…)

When you’re working, put intense visual focus onto what you’re working on


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