The Deliberate #61: What I’ve been practicing without realizing it

Plus, my quest to become a morning workout guy and being okay with more silence

I’ve been practicing a few things over the past few months. I never wrote them down or made them particularly explicit, which is probably why they’ve felt fairly amorphous and I’ve mostly felt pretty bad about them. One of the key insights I had years ago when I first started to develop this Deliberate Patterns idea, is that there’s a huge advantage to actually making explicit the implicit expectations you’re holding yourself to. Expectations that stay implicit have a way of making you feel vaguely bad when you aren’t meeting them and making them real means you can bring real attention to them.

Anyway, I didn’t really do that (I’m still learning, too!) but I can look back and see that I was practicing some things, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. In no particular order, here are a few of the Deliberate Patterns I’ve been playing with since February.

Relaxing all practices related to capturing, tracking, and analyzing “personal metrics”

I’ve always been interested in tracking my personal data. Never to the extent as some of the more extreme “biohackers” or “quantified self” folks, but probably much more than the average person. For the last couple years, my practice had turned into mostly just collecting passive data (mostly via my Apple Watch and some time tracking tools on my computer) and then manually putting the values into a weekly and monthly spreadsheet that brought them all into a single view. Over the past couple months, though, I’ve stopped doing all that. While it was never really that time consuming to do it, I also wasn’t ever really using the data in any meaningful way. At worst, it was just stressing me out to keep the habit going so I didn’t have any “holes” in my data. That didn’t seem particularly wholesome, so I decided to just try getting rid of the practice all together. So far, I really don’t miss it. There’s a larger idea at play here, too: namely, what does it look like to take a more intuitive / less structured approach to basically everything?

Experimenting with non-experimentation (which, of course, is a type of experimentation in itself)

Part of the reason I haven’t published this newsletter in so long is because I had been feeling like a bit of a fraud. I’m supposed to be the “deliberate experimentation guy” and it felt like I was trying to go through a period of time with as little experimentation as possible. I was striving for consistency in almost everything. My work responsibilities were getting more intense and I didn’t feel like I had the margin to try doing anything differently because even subtle experimentation requires extra time, attention, and mental space to make happen. Of course, in retrospect, going through a period of time where I try to keep everything constant, to not experiment, is a type of experiment in and of itself. Over the past few weeks I feel like I’ve gotten a few things, like my morning / evening routines, my sleep hygiene, my work schedule, to name a few, really dialed in.

Buying physical books again

I’ve been a pretty intense minimalist for most of my adult life. Part of that inclination was the simple reality that up until a few years ago, I moved a lot. Between 2005-2018 I moved approximately 14 times (and a couple of those moves were fully across the country). When you’re moving all your stuff that frequently you have a pretty strong incentive to keep possessions to a minimum. However, since 2018 I’ve been living in the same apartment and although it’s likely we will move in the next couple years, it will most likely to be into a house. Which means I don’t need to keep being a minimalist just because I move a lot and it sucks to lug things around.

My brothers and I grew up in a house with tons of books and we are all pretty voracious readers. I readily buy into the idea that it’s important for children to grow up in an environment surrounded by books. Emily and I don’t have any kids right now, but we hope to at some point, and I want them to grow up how I did — in an environment that obviously values reading. So, I’ve been deliberately building up my library of physical books and finding it to be a lot of fun.

I’ve been ebook only for like a decade, if you can’t tell.

What I’m Doing Now

No more vague intentions that just float around and make me feel bad. If I’m going to let myself feel bad about something I’m not doing, I’m at least going to write it down. This week’s Deliberate Pattern stack looks like this:

Morning Training: Complete each day’s training by 10am

Since January and the start of this new client project, my training routine has felt a little shaky and in the past few weeks, it has gotten even more precarious. I used to be able to fit it into my late morning or early afternoon without any problems. But as the complexity in my work life has gone up it has been more and more difficult to find any time to do the proper amount of training, never mind doing it at the same time every day. I’m pretty sure I need it to be one of the very first things I do each day if I don’t want to let it get crowded out by other things. Can I learn to become a “workout first thing in the morning” person?

The face of a man who cannot afford to be missing swim workouts if he doesn’t want to drown in his next race.

Cultivate More Silence: Don’t fill interstitial space in my day with podcasts

Every time I have done a “cultivate more silence” experiment I’ve always been kind of gobsmacked how many good ideas seem to bubble up to the surface. I distinctly remember a several week period in grad school when I stopped listening to anything on my walks to and from campus (~40 minutes each way) and it was one of the most creatively and intellectually productive times of my life. Since then, though, I’ve developed the habit of always having something playing in the background when I’m showering, brushing my teeth, going for a walk, working out, etc. Usually it’s just re-listening to a podcast I’ve listened to many, many times (👋 You Look Nice Today). Can I learn to be okay with more silence in my life? What impact might it have on my thinking and writing?

What Else Has Had My Attention

Since the last time I sent an issue of this newsletter, I appeared on a couple podcasts. I joined

Paul Millerd

on his Pathless Path podcast to talk about organization design and indie work. Paul is a much better than average interviewer so I got the opportunity to talk about some stuff that I’m not sure I’ve ever talked about on a podcast before. (Watch “Stop Performing Office Work on a Laptop” on the Pathless Path Podcast on YouTube here.)

Joining Paul Millerd on The Pathless Path podcast.

I also joined Kevin Owocki on his Green Pill podcast to talk about the intersection of organization design and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). This one is particularly wonky, but if you’re curious about DAOs it might be worth your while. (Watch “DAO Alignment with Sam Spurlin” on the Green Pill podcast on YouTube here.)

Chatting DAOs and org design with Kevin Owocki on Green Pill.

Finally, Max and I brought Fields of Work, our podcast about looking at work through two very different lenses, back from its winter sabbatical. We’ve recorded and published one episode so far and will be getting back onto a normal rhythm soon. (Listen to Ep. 64: “No Hay All Strawberries” here.)

---