After a long fallow period, I've been voraciously consuming my backlog of email newsletters over the past few days. They've always been a really useful and important part of my 'process', if it can really be called that, in terms of getting breadth and exposure to a bunch of different ideas, people's work, and cool stuff to fill my brain with. Both directly in what people write but also as a connecting ground to other articles, sites, ideas, etc. I find the curation work that other people do here incredibly valuable.
For reasons that are fairly tedious but that I'm nonetheless going to recount here, I haven't really been reading them of late (despite signing up to a glut more of them a month or so back!). The reasons:
- They go, perhaps obviously, to my email
- I've always treated them as part of my email-handling process, trying to read a few each time I do that
- (This was flawed anyway, I think, but we'll come back to that)
- I've been progressively narrowing my non-day-job email handling, so now I only actually check it a couple of times a week
- Making that process leaner has been vary good!
- But the leaner that process became, the less I got out of the newsletters -- I'd go to read them less often, and because that was also time-boxed, I didn't feel like I had the space to read gainfully -- my brain was in 'solve problems, tick off tasks' mode, not 'receptive to ideas' mode
- But: dilemma! I try to stay out of my inbox when not checking emails
- And I can't be arsed to do the work to port a tangled mess of email rules elsewhere
I did say it was tedious. Anyway, it turns out the solution was to stick a shortcut on my phone that just launches directly into the newsletter folder. Another benefit to this is that it puts those newsletters in my reach as a replacement habit for social media. When I'm in low noise state, I find myself reaching for my phone a lot for that nebulous something -- the little dopamine bump to move me onto the next thing that's hard to get without letting in social media. Bite-sized interesting things are a perfect replacement for that.
Here are some of my favourite newsletters right now:
Sentiers via which I get SO MANY interesting things to read
The Whippet which is pretty new to me, but I really, really like
Things That Caught My Attention Dan Hon writes a startling volume of really interesting, smart stuff on technology x society (for want of a better word) and digital change
Orbital Operations which often has thoughts on writing process, tools, and tools/systems more generally
Cartoon Gravity which I enjoy particularly for insight into a different creative process