Newsletter #30: Back To Washington, Again

The Grass is Always Greener

I remember before I left last autumn, there was a question that sat in my brain.

Will I ever want to stop traveling? Will I ever be able to go back to a “normal” job and life?

There was a part of me that thought the answer was no. I was done. I needed a change. And in that space, sitting at my desk looking at all the places in the world I could go, I had an idealistic view of the grass on the other side of the fence .

Arguably for the first four months of traveling, I had little change in this perspective. There was still so much to see. I still had no desire to work. I didn’t feel like I’d gotten everything I wanted to out of traveling.

Then months six and seven rolled around and my perspective began to shift. I quickly realized that there’s no way I could travel indefinitely. I craved routine. I craved boredom. I craved comfort. Stability. Community. Things I had understood on a cognitive level I would miss out on by traveling, but could not have understood on an emotional level until I had jumped over the fence. I was envying the same grass I’d been so excited to leave.

Being home, I’m attempting to create as much structure as possible. I want to eat simple, healthy foods. I want to exercise. I want to build in focus time to work on projects, my Spanish, and write. Right now this feels good. Though this time, I know what will come at some point down the line. I’ll get tired of the routine and once again crave novelty, feeling that routine is soul sucking.

To a certain extent, I think there is an inevitability to these feelings. There’s an innate desire to play out what if questions and think about infinite options as a distraction from our current state. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is an easy temptation to view the other side of the fence with rose colored glasses. To think that anything must be better than the now, and that there are no downsides. To think that the grass on the other side of the fence is greener without needing a gardener. This is where we must be cautious.

Every decision has costs. We must try to recognize these costs when making decisions instead of taking an escapist approach to simply get out of our own backyard. Sometimes we end up making the same decision anyway. But we will be more prepared for the consequences of our decisions when they come later down the line.

I can’t imagine not having made the decision to travel. I needed it to reframe my perspective. And now, that perspective has more nuance I’ll be able to apply to future decisions. Sometimes you do need to jump the fence. Other times, you might just need to put a bit more effort into watering your own lawn.

Less Is More

Given my days are no longer spent exploring new corners of the world, I’ve been attempting to get back into some semblance of a routine.

I leverage my calendar heavily for this, and it’s been fun starting with a blank slate every week and filling my calendar as much as possible. My first few weeks, I looked at all this available time and it felt infinite. If I spent one to two hours with any given priority, I could easily fit in 4, 5, maybe even 6 different priorities into a typical 9-5 “work” day.

This past week, I’ve reviewed how much meaningful progress I’ve made on each of those priorities. It’s not where I’d like it to be. I’ve realized that It’s difficult for me to keep switching gears all day. My priority list is too long. I’ve been trying to equally split time between activities that are not equal in priority. This has caused my progress to move slower than I would like it to on higher priority items.

I’ve decided I’m doing too much. I’d rather hone in on fewer priorities and make more substantial progress in those areas. Now, I’ve yet to see the impact of dedicating more focus time to this smaller subset of priorities, but I’ve been reminded of the times I’ve found myself here before. In those times, I’ve found the less I focus on, the more I get done.

This likely isn’t shocking to many of you. It’s not a new idea. You’ll find variations of this talked about in any number of productivity oriented books. But it’s easy to forget in practice. If you find yourself not making the progress you’d like to on certain projects, maybe it’s time to review what’s creeping in and stealing time. It might be time to cut back and clarify what’s important and what’s not. Be ruthless and eliminate. Reduce the amount of context switching you must do in a day.

I have two months until I’m back in Spain, and that’s been my determining factor in prioritization. I want to be spending my time in ways that will prepare me well for my time there. Everything else, though it might be important, is far less urgent. That’s led to ensuring I’m spending many hours on the bike, and practicing my Spanish. Secondarily comes logistical planning for that trip, as well as continuing to tell stories via writing and exploring other modalities of storytelling. Any other side projects come after.

This is how I’m structuring my “work” days. Social activity is my other highest priority, but that naturally finds its way into time outside of work hours. I hope this is a helpful reminder if you’re someone like me. Someone who can want to do so much that it becomes overwhelming and as a result, nothing really gets done. 

It’s okay to do less. Most of the times, it ends up being more.

Controlled Consumption of Content

Nowadays, content is a never ending stream of information flowing at an incredibly high velocity. The algorithms are real, and these business models are centered around feeding you in exactly this way. The more you consume, the more money they make. These also now happen to be the places where the vast majority of people keep up to date with what’s happening around the world.

I was discussing this and other tangential topics with a friend last week. We touched on the impossibility of keeping up with US political news as well as the ever increasing difficulty of separating AI generated content from truth. Neither of us were very satisfied with our current model of news consumption, feeling that we’re actually intaking too much content jumping from video to video on the same topics. Yet, neither of us wanted to lean towards ignorance either when it comes to topics we feel are important. This dilemma lead us to the topic of newsletters.

I made the claim that email newsletters might be one of the most efficient ways of consuming content. They’re scoped. There is no infinite scroll, no “for you” or “discover” page. The content you receive can be self selected and tailored to what is important to you, rather than having to dig through oceans of nonsense. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started making a larger scale comeback.

Following that conversation, I went and signed up for several that cover a variety of my interests. It’s been less than a week so I don’t have much of an experience to share yet, but I’m genuinely excited to try and make email newsletters a larger percentage of my content consumption. If you’re equally as distractible and dissatisfied as I am when it comes to attempting to consume content you truly care about, maybe it’s something to consider. I’ll report back on my opinions after spending some more time digesting content this way.

p.s. If you were curious as to why I myself use email newsletters to communicate travel updates rather than social media posts, this is one of the driving factors. I’ve gone with the “old school” approach because I want you to be able to keep up with me without any ads or any distractions. I don’t want to take any more of your time, I know there is already too much competing for it. I also hope that the information stands out more in this format as it’s an intentional choice for you to open this and read it (whether that’s a quick skim of pictures or a thorough read). It truly means so much to me that you’re here choosing to open these emails. I know I say it every newsletter, but again – thank you for being here.

As always, if you know anyone that you think would be interested in anything I’m writing about, I’d ask that you consider sharing this with them.

Thanks for being here. Talk to you soon.

– Trevor