Sprinting a Marathon

Hey friends,

A shorter issue today since I'm focusing on work more than usual this week.

I noticed a long time ago that no matter what I'm doing my productivity generally comes in bursts and I'm most efficient when I plan my projects in sprints. I can be incredibly productive for a few hours a day, then completely unproductive for a few more, then it comes back – and I can sustain this cadence working on a single initiative for a few months until I have to switch to something completely different.

This generally works since my productivity bursts are intense enough to make up many times over for the idle time and my projects (personal and professional) rarely take longer than a quarter or two.

However, occasionally I get periods in life where I stay extremely productive for days and weeks in a row and end up accomplishing months of work in a short span of time. This sustained intense productivity never lasts longer than that and I keep wondering where I'd be in life if only I could keep it up for, say, a year. But alas I haven't yet found a way to sprint a marathon.

Is your life more like a set of sprints or a marathon?

Have a focused week,

Martin

A few thoughts

Empty stomach productivity. I try not to have breakfast before noon since I feel most productive on an empty (or at least not full) stomach. For this same reason I've settled on a two meal a day eating schedule – breakfast around noon, lunch around 6-7pm. Not sure about drawbacks but seems to be going well so far.

Living closer to the sky. Last time I was in Philadelphia I lived in a suite on the second floor with a lovely view of the Independence National Historical Park. Lovely view, but the apartment was very dark (my own apartment is on the 5th floor). This time I'm living on the 7th floor with my windows facing my neighbors', but I still love this place. There's something captivating about higher floors.

Enjoyed this

The Morality of Having Kids in a Magical, Maybe Simulated World "In ENERGY, humanity is roughly as ethical as it can afford to be. When food was scarce, it was acceptable to kill neighboring tribes to take their food. When machine labor was scarce, it was acceptable to enslave other human beings and force them to labor. Today, we allow billions of people to live in energy poverty because fossil fuels are a scarce resource."

My techno-optimism "Thanks to the internet, most people around the world have access to information at their fingertips that would have been unobtainable twenty years ago. The global economy is becoming more accessible thanks to improvements in international payments and finance. Global poverty is rapidly dropping. Thanks to online maps, we no longer have to worry about getting lost in the city, and if you need to get back home quickly, we now have far easier ways to call a car to do so."

The fun part

Went to a college basketball game on Saturday and it was a lot of flags and eagles!