A single drop of water has great potential.

Set a glass to capture a drop and come back after a while. Water accumulates slowly when you're looking, but if you forget about it long enough, you'll come back to a full glass.

Move the glass to the side, and every drop falls off the glass. No matter how much time passes, you'll always come back to an empty glass.

Everything adds as long as you take action, and effort accumulates the most when it presents a challenge. Like adding zero to a given amount, exerting no effort leaves you at the same spot.

You can go super fast, in multiple directions, at the same time.

But that's useless if none of those directions are where you need to go.

That said, moving fast may help you figure out where you need to go. And that's why it can be useful, at the very beginning, to diverge and explore, then converge on the right destination.

So, what changed?

In 2023, I left Autodesk to join a startup¹, traveling abroad for work for more than thirty days and spending a decent amount of time planning our wedding and doing a light house renovation.

I still had time to produce content, but I could feel the energy and pace decreasing. I prioritized family and friends, with whom I'd gather to sing, jam, and play boardgames.

In 2024, we had a baby (!).

If you have kids, you know why I'm not producing as much as I used to. If you don't, it's not that I don't have the time, but that I would rather spend it with family, hanging out with friends, or sleeping.

I haven't released any podcast episodes since June 2024. I haven't streamed or uploaded videos for almost two years. I missed twenty Tuesday posts over the past months (that I'm taking the freedom to backfill). And I didn't manage to sketch every single day, or as much as I used to, while traveling. But that's okay.

It took time to accept this is my new normal. Yet this allowed me to recalibrate, adjust to new constraints, and slowly start building new habits, with a different mindset, giving myself leeway.

I didn't go anywhere, really, but you may wonder why I haven't been as active lately as I used to be.

Over the past years, I have produced a lot of content: a monthly podcast episode, a weekly livestream and video uploads, a weekly sketch-and-story newsletter, a daily drawing, and 200 words a day.¹ For a period, I meditated for at least ten minutes and read five Readwise quotes daily. And there are many other habits that require maintenance that I insisted on keeping up with.

I had the time and was willing to invest it in those things, so why not keep going? Well, that was my intention, and it was hard to give up many of those things.

So, what changed? You may ask.

I'll tell you next week.

A piece of writing flourishes when it's published, printed, shared, and read, highlighting the process that took you there.

The raison d'être of a piece of art (an artifact in and of itself) is to inspire and change the viewer, but also to transform the artist who made it.

Not all creative processes will yield an artifact; the artifact may result from numerous sessions over time.

An artifact can be digital or physical: an app, a book, a painting, a story, an object, a document, a sketch.

And, while the artifact is important to celebrate, there's no need to obsess over the outcome. We're not celebrating the outcome but the process that got us here.

It helps to have ways to capture your ideas on the fly—doodling in a sketchbook, jotting down notes in a notebook, or recording a voice memo on your phone, for instance.

Eventually, most ideas tend to come back, though, especially the ones related to your current situation and circumstances. An alternative strategy, in fact, is only to capture ideas that recurrently make it into your head.

I bought two hardbound, 150–gram, white-paper Alpha Series Stillman & Birn sketchbooks, which have become my go-to sketchbooks¹ ever since I tried them out. I'm trying their 10.2 × 15.2 cm (4 × 6 in) size for the first time, which is easy to pack, in addition to the 22.9 × 15.2 cm (9 × 6 in) I've been using for the past four years.

I also ordered a set of Sakura Pigma Micron felt tip pens—003, 005, 01, and 03. The thin tips of 003 and 005 Microns provide line thicknesses of 0.15 mm and 0.20 mm, respectively, which allow for careful detail and line work, whereas the thicker 03 Microns (0.35 mm) work well for infills and outlines. It's important to note that the thinner the tip, the more it wears out, and I go through multiple 003s and 005s before the 03 needs replacement.

I'll bring my Russian White Nights twelve-pan watercolors and Japanese Pentel Aquash Mini water brush, which let me add color to my drawings in any situation.

These are my current tools. Which are yours?

Because drawing skill improves with practice.

Because your ability to see and capture the world around you gets better the more you do it.

Because you won't feel pressured to perform at your best, you'll try again tomorrow.

Because recurrent activities become habits that ground us and reinforce our identity.

I didn't sit at my desk and halted my daily routines and habits, except for the ones I can do on my phone and sketchbook: writing and sketching to comply with my two-hundred-word and one-sketch-a-day minimum.

I always overestimate what I'll accomplish on vacation in terms of my personal creative projects, and I barely get anything done.

I wrote and sketched, but skipped a few weekly posts, which should be up soon. I'll be all caught up.¹

Being away from the keyboard for weeks feels like hitting the reset button.

That's why it's better to draw every day, even if some days you feel you're cheating or almost skipping because you're not giving your one hundred percent.

That's why you won't draw at all if you skip a few days, and will end up skipping weeks, if not months, risking losing the habit.

The opposite is also true.

Doing more leads to more doing.

And that's where we have to drill, on doing more of what we want.

In the long run, it's crucial to prioritize the practice and process over the immediate outcome.

After all, there won't be a better or worse outcome if you stop doing.

Set the bar low and you're high.

Set it high and you're low.

The sweet spot is a slightly raised bar you can reach with reasonable effort.

Push yourself, reach up there, and then raise the bar again.

Always from reality, I draw what's in front of me—portraying three dimensions into two and paying attention to detail.

"You can compare sketching to taking an Instagram photo for [several] minutes,"¹ I said in a 2019 essay.

You capture people, places, and objects in ever-changing contexts.

The key difference between taking pictures and sketching is attention.

Click.

By offloading the capture of reality to a camera, you don't think much about it. The machine does the job, translating light into millions of pixels.

Click.

Using your sight and hands to capture reality requires not only skill but thinking, analysis, and abstraction.

Click.

The camera takes it all—we select the aspects of reality that make it into our sheet.

We decide what we pay attention to.

From the inside, practice is incredibly demanding—a strict and repetitive routine that takes discipline and patience.

From the outside, skill appears to be a natural gift, and it's hard to imagine the time, effort, and sacrifice pros put in to perform at an elite level.

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."¹

All we see is the magic trick.

Ideas are cheap—execution is not.

Frank Harmon’s Native Places blog is one of my greatest inspirations for this project. The formula is simple: pair a sketch with a mini-essay, share it online, and repeat.

I send this newsletter once a week, but I sketch and write every single day.

Every year, I have a different feeling about what I do here.

I’m figuring it out. But I enjoy every bit of it and will continue writing, drawing, and publishing for years. (I encourage you to discover the power of writing: start with one word per day.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, comments, and suggestions, and invite you to write a comment, reply, send me a voice note, or send me a private message.

Thank you, as always, for pushing me to keep going.

Happy newsletterversary.

Here are my favorite recommendations from the article.

• Use medium-sized notebooks with a medium thickness (not too few, not too many pages)
• Single-spaced, lined pages work best; avoid dotted or gridded notebooks
• Numbered pages are great for indexing
• Reserve one or two pages at the beginning for an index—reference pages by number and add relevant formulas
• Parents should keep their own notebooks to avoid writing in the kids' notebooks
• Name each notebook—by naming it, kids can hold power over the notebook itself and the math within, and it's also fun
• Customizing notebooks helps kids like them more—the notebook's name, the kids' name, stickers, drawings, and other personalizations
• It's great for a parent to be able to go back and see how their kid wrote six months in the past, how they've evolved, etc.

Math Machine is the name one of the author's kids gave to his math notebook.

Creative friction is the barrier between you and your practice—forms of resistance that morph depending on your specific practice or craft.

I've found that to reduce friction and create a smooth experience, one must identify the shapes those barriers take and develop strategies to minimize their effect.

One of my practices is daily sketching.

I can't sketch without my tools. Having a sketchbook, pens, and watercolors always at hand reduces friction. I keep medium and large sketchbooks by my desk and in the living room, then bring a small sketching kit when I travel.

Time is often tight, and complex scenes can be daunting. Picking easy subjects to sketch quickly reduces friction. I can rejoice in drawing multiple subjects and more challenging scenes when I have time to spare.

We lean into what's easy and are great at making excuses to skip our practice. The answer is making our lives easier, even if it means duplicating your tool set to increase availability or lowering your standards to ensure daily practice.

Create a minimal-friction system, start doing without overthinking, and focus on doing, even if only for a few minutes daily, rather than making a considerable effort once a week, for example. Long dedicated sessions can come later.

Just as skipping once makes it easier to skip twice, engaging in your craft once makes you more likely to start a habit.

Play and don't get serious until you find yourself spending serious amounts of time on your craft.

Beat the resistance. Minimize creative friction.

Is that the correct order?

Well, there's no correct order.

Sometimes, doing what you enjoy (and never have time for) first is better, as otherwise, you may not get to it.

Then, what you must do follows because, after all, you must do it.

‌Create a web app I can drag an image into and display the image with a glitch filter. Claude Sonnet 4 starts writing code.

The Glitch Image Filter App label appears below my prompt, next to an atom icon that references web technologies. Claude writes CSS, HTML, and vanilla JavaScript for me. After a few minutes, a futuristic web interface shows up. An animated floating folder icon prompts me to Drop an image or click to browse. I drag an image, but it doesn't work. I click and select an image—it works! Four sliders let me adjust the intensity, RGB shift, scan lines, and noise values. As I move the sliders, my image is displayed with the glitch filter.

‌The RGB Shift filter makes the image blue, it doesn't shift RGBs—I tell Claude.

‌You're absolutely right! The RGB shift filter is broken - it's not properly shifting the color channels and is making the image blue instead. Let me fix the RGB shift algorithm to actually separate and offset the red, green, and blue channels.

The app works now as expected. The RGB channels are shifted as I move the slider.

Make the aesthetics minimal and subtle. No superfluous colors. The interface centers attention on the output image, while the rest of UI components are relegated to the background.

I can now see Claude's code edits as it adjusts the styling.

Now we are talking; This looks much better.

I see a dropdown at the top of the web app with v8 · Latest selected. I can go back to previous versions, some of which Claude hasn't even shown me. It took Claude Sonnet 4 six iterations to simplify the style.

Before everything works, I need to request a few fixes.

The reset button should bring the slider values to 0. Fixed. The app doesn't load my image when I drop it. Not working yet. I'm using Google Chrome on macOS, and the drop area doesn't catch image files when I drop them. It doesn't work.

I skim through the code and can see what it's doing at a high level. I understand the code and am familiar with the tech stack—HTML, CSS, JavaScript. But I don't know how the glitch filters work at a low level. And, at this point, I don't have to.

Now, at v19, I hit Publish.

The Glitch Filter app is online.

Passkeys and biometrics are alternatives, but it’s not certain they are the final solution.

How far off that technology is or what it will look like, I can't say.

But I'm sure we'll eventually eliminate the nuisance of secret phrases and security codes.

The downside is that our brains are wired to steer us toward what feels good—not necessarily what's good for us or for building better habits.

For instance, if I'm stuck on a thirty-minute wait, I often check email, Hacker News, or WhatsApp. But I'd read if all I had with me were my Kindle. I'd draw if I only had my sketchbook.

Every action that adds friction and steers behavior in the right way feels like a hack—a tiny trick we always find ways to work around.

I've identified three friction levels I use intentionally on the iPhone.

The first level is hiding apps I want to keep but don't want to use often inside a folder. If that folder is visible in the app group's thumbnail, I will likely tap it. So, I hide apps I don't need daily or don't want to use often deep inside a folder.

The next level is offloading the app. On iOS, this keeps your data and login state but removes the app itself. Tapping the icon re-downloads it before you can use it again. It's also a way to free up storage.

The last resort is to delete the app, which will wipe your session and preferences. So, you'll need to download, sign in, and set up the app from scratch.

I spent years without email on my phone, and it worked great. Eventually, your brain stops seeing it as an available distraction. I built the habit of checking email only on my computer.¹

Today, I use Gmail and Outlook and often check them out of habit.

I'm doing the same with Instagram now—I don't use the app on my phone, so at least it's no longer one of my time-fillers.

The point isn't to use an app less but to make room for quality time doing meaningful things you value and being present with the people you love.²

Sometimes, the easiest thing is leaving your phone behind, even for a few hours.

From that post, I took away a prompt to use large language models (LLMs) for writing with their help. We can use AI as a dialogue partner instead of a ghostwriter in a clever inversion of the prompting role. "As writers we can not allow AI to replace our own thinking. We should use it to simulate the thinking of a missing dialogue partner."

Here's the prompt I've been experimenting with in some of my writing.

Ask me questions about my article on [topic]. One at a time. Begin with the most important one and go on until I tell you to stop.

This text prompt instructs the AI to ask you questions, prompting you to write to answer and clarify key questions about the topic you've told it to write about.

I often feed it my writing draft to give it context about the topic I'm writing about.

Ask me questions about my article on [topic]. One at a time. Begin with the most important one until I tell you to stop. Below is my writing draft.

[Writing draft.]

I've often struggled to sit down and write about a topic, only to find that messaging with a friend over email or WhatsApp triggers a writing spree with practical details and ideas to develop the topic.

While a little sad in principle, chatting with an LLM instead of messaging with a friend is a practical way to get you going articulating your ideas.

This technique reminds me of the rubber duck debugging technique, in which software developers explain their code to a yellow rubber duck in hopes that this will help them clarify their problem and find a solution.

Workflows like this one are a great way to use AI systems to help you write and clarify your thinking instead of writing for you. You're still in control, and authorship is yours. The AI doesn't replace you as a writer—it guides you, prompting you to ask yourself specific questions.

As the iA blog post states, there's a spectrum of AI use, from using it as a discussion partner to having it read and write everything for you.

The sweet spot will likely be using AI for brainstorming and thinking, as a spell, grammar, and fact checker, while staying in control and doing the thinking and writing.

I'm alive.

Though you can choose not to catch up with certain things, ever. After all, there's no time to stay up-to-date with everything.

Reaching inbox zero, cleaning up your phone's camera roll, or clearing your Desktop's files may not be important in your life, yet we're still doomed to behave the way digital systems want us to.

So, deciding which things matter helps you focus your energy there.

Catching up with my blogging schedule was one of those things for me.

I missed the deadline once, and my brain figured I could skip it twice. Now I'm back on schedule, and the posts for the previous weeks are live.

If you put your energy into the wrong things, you risk getting a false sense of productivity by doing things that didn't need to be done in the first place.

In Spain, the legal convention is to hold two last names—mine are Martínez Alonso. Traditionally, these come from the father’s and then the mother’s first surnames. Nowadays, you can choose which one goes first. We chose my wife’s first surname to be our son’s first.

This confusion tempted me multiple times to join my last names with a dash in my online presence and international use. Martínez-Alonso would minimize the confusion.¹

Is that it? Not really. The story doesn’t end there.

I was often greeted as Mr. Alonzo.

Why on earth would people misspell my second last name while holding my identification document in their hands?

A recommendation letter that said Martinez Alonzo.
A work badge labeled Nono Martinez Alonzo.
A hotel welcome letter addressed to Alonso Martinez.

It turns out that Alonzo is nearly as common a last name in the U.S. as Alonso.

Now I’ve got the context for when someone calls me Alonzo.

A few steps ahead? You're in front.

A few behind? You're last, which feels like you're lagging, struggling to keep up. You're running behind.

Start a few moments earlier or sprint to pick up the pace, and suddenly, you're leading the group.

Deadlines work the same way. You'll produce the same amount of work either way, so I remind myself: Start early. Avoid running behind.

Not Groundhog Day—reliving the same day over and over—but a day filled with the same meaningful activities and effort—time with your loved ones, deep work, a disconnecting evening.

There's no perfect day, but you may get quite close.

"Giving yourself time to re-read what you've written lets you view your writing from the lens of a reader," I wrote in My journals. "There are facts you forgot about and stylistic resources you don't remember using."

It's also a great way to capture thoughts and memories, like Stories are the answer, an essay in memory of Patrick Winston.

However, I haven't been printing them lately and have opted to highlight and read them on my laptop. Sometimes, I've sent them to my Kindle to read in the same medium I read books and long-form articles.

Same typeface, screen, and feel. But written by me.

Public service announcement:

Our different ways of writing dates as numbers can lead to online confusion. That's why, in 1988, ISO set a global standard numeric date format (ISO 8601).

This is the correct way to write numeric dates:

2013-02-27

The following formats are therefore discouraged:

02/27/2013, 02/27/13, 27/02/2013, 27/02/13, 20130227, 2013.02.27, 27.02.13, 27-02-13, 27.2.13, 2013.II.27, [and a long etcetera].

It's probably too late to rethink my strategy. But, who knows, I might change it to comply with ISO 8601 at some point.

Machine learning tries to mimic these processes by digitally encoding information as lists of numbers in high-dimensional spaces that only computers understand, and humans can't intuitively grasp unless projected back down to two or three dimensions.

You can prioritize and plan for what matters. You might be able to say no to things that steal your time and that you'd rather not do. You can focus on not wasting time and ensure what you care about happens.

"One of the biggest changes that you could make to get more of what you want is to set higher expectations, even if you don't achieve them," say Margaret A. Neale and Thomas Z. Lys on Getting (More Of) What You Want (2015). "Setting higher expectations will change your behavior, and can lead to better performance."

Aiming for less makes room for quality time with the rest, but we risk doing nothing if we aim too low. On the contrary, aiming higher works.

That will always happen.

And the only thing you can do is want to do less.

In an era of information overload, it can be challenging to stay up-to-date and decide what to pay attention to.

FOMO invites us to pay attention to the hype, but that's a trap to constantly stay in shallow waters, never diving deep into any areas.

There's always someone, somewhere, willing to put time and effort into exploring the adjacent possible in a specific field or topic.

That could be you.
Pick a topic.
Stick with it.
Don't look elsewhere.

Our mind tries to fool us, but the moment is not a time in the future. It's happening now.

Being in “the moment” means being present right now, paying attention to what you are doing and what's happening to you—your emotions, your experience, your feelings.

Experience this moment as if you could never return to it—because you can't!

It’s hard to be present all the time, but it’s worth trying.

The point of planning is to ensure that, in the future, you can be present.

If you listen to our conversation, you'll understand what it feels like to dive deep underwater, relying solely on your breath, and the most common reasons people lose their lives practicing this sport. However, you won't truly know what it feels like unless you've done it yourself.

The only way to understand how something feels is to experience it. The best way to remember what you felt is to capture your emotions as they happen or shortly after.

That's why non-fiction writers do immersions and dive into the activities and niches they want to write about: Writing about things you have never experienced is hard. (It helps to have jumped from a plane to write about parachuting.)

Still, nobody truly knows what you're going through, and they won't be able to relate to it unless they've been through the same thing. They can't feel your happiness or sadness, your satisfaction or frustration, your pain or pleasure. They aren't you, and you aren't them.

We may never know what certain people are going through.

Immersion makes the difference.

Moving to my new studio took much longer than I initially thought, and I'm past that initial eighty percent. The never-ending task remains of giving a home to rarely used items I should get rid of and finishing small details.

Optimization can lead to frustration when you don't know when to stop.

The same principle applies to other contexts, such as organizing your digital life, processing your inbox, sorting files, or cleaning your Desktop.

The key is to identify when the returns start to diminish and move on to something else—the remaining work could take four times as much time and effort as you've already accomplished.

Here are six things to watch out for to keep creative friction away.

Lack of time. We have so much on our plates that we don't get enough time to work with focus. Reserve time slots to ensure you dedicate time to specific activities.

Lack of energy. We tend to be more rational in the morning and more creative in the evening, but you better allocate time to do the things that need to get done in the morning as you may be exhausted by the end of the day.

Lack of clarity. Define what you want to spend your time on in advance. You'll waste less time and gain in efficiency.

Lack of tools and materials. Investing in the right equipment and supplies can make your work easier, faster, and more enjoyable.

Friction to engage in your craft. The less effort you exert to enter creator mode, the more prone you are to engage in your craft.

Distractions. Likely the worst enemy of any creator, distractions take different shapes and can be hard to recognize but are everywhere.

What pushes you away from making?

Sketching is a meditative practice. Sketching allows us to focus on what is in front of us, clearing away all the busyness of our mind.

Perhaps that temporary escape from reality is what draws us to sketching.

Here are the ones with the most views (in descending order).

1. Three levels of artificial intelligence
2. A conversation with Andy Payne
3. Announcing events on Luma
4. A daily word counter
5. A fuzzy timeframe
6. Before and after
7. Systems not goals
8. Time or priority
9. No such thing as easy steps
10. Types of deadlines
11. The password-management promise
12. Seven months using ChatGPT 4
13. Writing in public
14. Every Monday
15. Scatter-hoarders don't like risk
16. Wait and save
17. Most-visited stories of 2023
18. Bits of advice from Kevin Kelly
19. Commissions may be earned
20. Where's the creative friction?
21. Need or want

No such thing as easy steps, Stick to it, Bits of advice from Kevin Kelly, and More and less are among my favorites.

What stories did you enjoy the most?

Here is my last publication of the year.¹

In 2023, I slowed down my YouTube channel, podcast, and blog due to a job change, a wedding, and a house renovation.

In 2024, I took a break from sharing videos and podcasts to enjoy the arrival and early months of Manuel's life, our first son (!).

I plan to return to podcasting and streaming in 2025.

Here are some highlights from 2024.

• I recorded the first podcast episode with three camera angles with the help of Daniel Natoli.
• I wrote and sketched daily (and published 53 mini-essays)
• I live-streamed 10 times
• I released two long-form video podcasts with Andy Payne

The end of the year is a great temporal landmark to reflect on what we did over the past year and rethink our practice. Yet, it’s best to conduct similar reviews throughout the year instead of waiting for New Year’s resolutions.²

If you're thinking of starting a blog or a personal journal, I invite you to read One Word per Day. I agree with Seth Godin that "everyone should have a blog and write daily, in public." It's a great and free way to establish your tone before anyone cares about your writing.

If there’s anything you’ve learned or enjoyed from my content, I’d love for you to send me a note.

I look forward to sharing more with you in 2024.

Thanks so much for being there!

Goodbye, 2024.

Happy New Year!

Frank Harmon’s Native Places blog is one of my greatest inspirations for this project. The formula is simple: pair a sketch with a mini-essay, share it online, and repeat.

I send this newsletter once a week, but I sketch and write every single day.

I’m figuring it out. But I enjoy every bit of it and will continue writing, drawing, and publishing for years. (I encourage you to discover the power of writing: start with one word per day.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, comments, and suggestions and invite you to write a comment, reply, send me a voice note, or send me a private message.

Thank you, as always, for pushing me to keep going.

Happy newsletterversary.

While it's crucial to stick to the things you feel you should continue doing, it should be okay to give up, take a break, or slow down when it doesn't make sense to continue doing them anymore or when it's impossible to keep up.

The alternative to periodicity—creating at a constant pace—is what I'll call seasonal creativity, which implies focusing on a specific endeavor for a given period, shipping it, and going dark until the following season.

Over the past few years, I have aimed to send a weekly newsletter, stream at least once a week, and release a monthly podcast episode. I continued sending the newsletter but paused the stream and podcast. Adding video to the podcast made editing and releasing episodes slower, and my reduced time availability made it harder to live stream on YouTube. Instead of producing throughout the year, it might make sense to release content in seasons.

Regardless of your creative pace, you should feel entitled to let your craft aside when life demands it and return to it when you are ready.

With enough time, you'll experience what you made through the spectator's lens.

The new normal becomes not doing it.

That’s why you should be careful about letting go of certain good habits you want to cultivate.

Periodicity is everything.

Temporary discounts instill a fear of missing out on deals.

Fast, free shipping and easy returns make online shopping convenient.

Amazon's clever nudge has been to extend the return period for end-of-year purchases until February 6, exactly one month after Three Kings' Day, the Spanish equivalent of December 25th's Santa Claus.

If anything, Black Friday is harvest time for those who wait and save.

I was surprised to see such a big and well-organized event happening here, in Málaga, my hometown, and I hope this serves as a precedent for other events to be hosted here.

Speaker talks followed Linus Ekenstam's opening.

The overall sentiment is that current AI offerings allow creatives to create faster, better, cheaper, and easier, and we should find responsible ways to use AI.

Martin LeBlanc (Freepik) believes creating with AI still requires creativity, but creating is easier than before.

"The industry is [currently] focused on faster and cheaper output, not breakthroughs," says Hugo Barbera (HumAIn). "We are settling for replication more than transformation."

Some startups that presented productize AI to automate specific workflows, such as portfolio creation (Journo) or face anonymization (Piktid).

Nick Coronges, R/GA's CTO, feels that AI isn't disruptive (yet), and we're creating the same stuff as before, just faster and cheaper. Coronges works with well-known brands, and I loved their Google Android rebrand, which surfaces some of AI's yet-to-come transformational uses. R/GA developed a set of polymorphic AI models capable of creating infinite Android design configurations with "fixed structural rules [and] open-ended outputs within those constraints." Nick believes 2025 will be the year of AI rebrands.

George Eid (Area 17 Founder) warns us about perpetuating bias, loneliness, laziness, and technology's limitations and misleading nature—privacy, security, equity, disinformation, and well-being are in danger.

Before the end of the morning session, Justin Hackney (EleveLabs) asks if, when a creation moves you, it matters whether the artifact was created with AI, which brought back Seth Godin's saying that what matters is impact, not effort.

A fundamental transformation is coming.

My writing themes and tone evolve, yet the gist is that I continue to practice.

This writing series, together with my journal, is where I think and develop ideas; what's yours?

Each sketchbook suits a different type of drawing and moment, some for travel, some for home, some for watercolor, etc., which means I have multiple unfinished sketchbooks.

To avoid checking each of my sketchbooks individually to know which is which, I recently sorted and tagged them with rounded color stickers that signal their status: red for completed, green for ongoing, and yellow for empty. 
On top of the color sticker, I name sketchbooks serially, starting with the year I started, followed by the sketchbook number in that year, e.g., 2024.02 for the second sketchbook I started in 2024.

I have sketchbooks of various brands—Moleskine, Stillman & Birn, Hahnemuhle—and sizes—A3, A4, and A5—organized in a tiny shelf on wheels, which also houses my Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300 printer.

Most of my sketchbook pages are scanned and stored on the cloud, and many of their drawings are edited and published, but many still need to be.

The point is to minimize the creative friction by seeing at a glance which sketchbooks I can draw in.

No matter how much you try, it's not something you can predict and accurately plan for.

It's like writing non-fiction; you can do all the research you want, but the best way to learn about it is to perform a real immersion.

I was thinking of relatives and friends to whom I may want to explain specific things—technical, factual, or conceptual—and how an online essay about it, a "one-pager," could be consumed individually by multiple people.

In the end, the point of any write-up is to spread an idea and have others reflect on it.

A web link becomes a shortcut to a brief explanation, as I did last week explaining how I date my sketches.¹

I grew up in Spain and used to see and write down dates as day, month, and year—say, 15/10/24 for the fifteenth of October 2024.

In the US, the month goes first. 10/15/24 also represents October 15, 2024.

Digital systems put the year first, then format dates in human-readable forms adapted to regional patterns. This means you'll see month/day/year in the United States region or day/month/year for Europe.¹

For illustration, you can think of programming languages using the letters d for day (15), m for month, y for year, and other letters for other datetime components. These codes allow programs to display present, past, and future dates to humans.

I caption sketches by hand and prefix the name of digital scans with yymmdd²—the year, month, and day when I draw them, which lets me browse drawings chronologically.

This often confuses people because dates appear flipped.³ 10.01.18 may be interpreted as January 10, 2018, in Spain and October 1, 2018, in the US, whereas it represents January 18, 2010.

Next time you see one of my drawings, remember it's year, month, and day.

If you skip something once, why not skip it twice?

We can use repetition in our favor.

Do more of what you want and less of what you don't.

Avoid the second mistake.

It's better to break them down and be selective about the bits and pieces you can tackle in a given timeframe. Pick one and get started.

With a reduced scope, it's easier to focus on whatever you want to work on during your 168 hours.

My journal frees me up from worrying about what I put in writing. Words flow, even when I know they aren't particularly meaningful. I want the text to flow to clarify my thoughts and generate ideas, to capture facts and memories, and to communicate and inspire—that's what matters.

I prefer it this way. Instead of overthinking what to write, I can review my writing later, analyzing and selecting the best parts.

Writing is a tool that serves many purposes. What will you use it for?

I got my first Apple laptop¹ in early 2011 and bought my second in 2015, this time with a US keyboard to write and code more efficiently.

As I expected, the decision to go for a US keyboard made me a happier coder as, apart from providing a smooth writing experience in English, it is optimized for programming.

For several years, I would swap between English and Spanish with a key shortcut when I needed to write in my mother tongue. The power to type in both languages with the same keyboard quickly became a nightmare: numerous characters change location and aren't physically there, which makes it hard to type in Castellano. No eñe and no tilde.

Let's look at the following text for a second.

¿Tendrías dos euros (2€) en monedas pequeñas?
«Creo que sí». Respondió ella.
¡Gracias!

How would you type this with a US keyboard?

The text uses the euro sign (€), the funny n we call eñe with its tilde, the acute accent over the vowels (áéíóú), opening question and exclamation marks (¿? and ¡!), and citation characters («») used in journalism for quotes—most of which don't show up in the US keyboard.

I recently challenged myself not to rely on the Spanish keyboard altogether.²

Were there key combinations for these Spanish characters in the US keyboard and, if so, why not use them instead of swapping my computer's language to fake I had a different keyboard in front of me?

After a Google search and a few ChatGPT 4o questions, I found out the answer was yes, assembled the following cheatsheet, and started practicing.

ñ — Option + n → n
á — Option + e → a (same for é, í, ó & ú)
¿ — Shift + Option + ?
¡ — Option + 1
€ — Shift + Option + 2
» — Shift + Option + \
« — Option + \

Now I could use the Spanish characters I needed with a US keyboard on macOS without switching languages.

To my surprise, it took me less than a month to get used to these shortcuts and get rid of something that bothered me for several years.

Yet, there come periods when none of that's possible.

What do you do then?

You stick to the plan. You push a tiny bit to get it done.

There will come times, hopefully in the near future, when you'll be able to go back to normal.

These are some of the services that are doing a great job of locking me in.

Apple wants to sync my photos, videos, and backups to iCloud.

Dropbox wants my file library.

Amazon Blink and Eufy want to store my recordings remotely.

Spotify wants to rent my music library.¹

Zapier wants me to continue automating workflows with their zaps.

Descript and Riverside want me to continue recording and editing videos and podcasts.

Grammarly wants to fix my grammar.

Adobe wants me to edit media.

In Kevin Kelly's words, we pay for access, not ownership. Lifetime subscriptions are rare—catch them if you can.

So, as long as I do these things and find no free or cheaper alternative, I'll have to continue subscribing.

And those are the situations you can't plan for and need to adapt to when the time comes.

These situations are the unknown unknowns, for which you can prepare but won't be able to work on a solution til they happen.

Ok, Google. Lights on.

You can control the lights in a smart home through voice interactions, analog controls, or digital interfaces.

Each interface exposes a series of options that inform our behavior. For instance, a smartphone app lets us dim the lights, whereas certain analog switches provide binary control, on or off.

Tools change our behavior. In the long run, we'll default to the frictionless option.

Hey, Siri. Switch off the lights.

It only takes me a few minutes to write a couple hundred words capturing what's on my mind—what I did, thought, felt, or details I might forget tomorrow.

Writing helps me understand my thoughts and make sense of my life, ensuring I don't lose important details.

When I revisit my journal, past worries fade, forgotten stories resurface, and I see how my opinions have evolved.

The benefits of writing daily and revisiting my archives are invaluable.

What the eye identifies as a mandarin orange, mainly because of the color, wouldn't be so obvious without the brush strokes.

Color adds an extra dimension to my drawings.

Yet the key is to get proportion and light right, which I always do with microfiber ink pens.

Only then does watercolor (or shading) add information and help the viewer understand what they are looking at.

That's why we need to reserve time for our craft regularly, even if we don't know what we'll end up using it for.

Easy. Summarized. Highlighted.

Content is digested for us on social media; then, we digest short impulses.

We only get the gist and can't draw unbiased conclusions.

The alternative?

Consume less, long-form content, and deep dive.

It may not be your best writing, but all you have to do is sit and write. Give it enough time, and something good will come.

Routines work the same way the tortoise beat the hare: by steadily working towards the finish line without missing a day, except there's no finish line.

I built a daily word counter and started working on a new folder structure for my Dropbox files. But I haven't put time into developing the others yet.

I'd also like to develop these five half-baked ideas.

• Expensed, a personal expense tracker that turns plain-text notes into charts and infographics and lets me filter and categorize my expenses.
• Sketch Manager, to browse my sketchbooks and see whether each sketch is edited, ready for print, published (and where), and who's bought (or being gifted) a particular piece, with bounding boxes on each scanned page to locate where each sketch is located on the page.
• Sketch Browser, to view sketchbooks with digitized copies of my sketches as they are in the actual sketchbook, with data and references from Sketch Manager.
• Price Tracker, a tool to track the price of online store products, such as CamelCamelCamel.
• Product Recommendations, a site to list my tech gear and things I like to use on a daily basis, with referral links, price history, and descriptions.

Online stores like Amazon, Best Buy, or B&H offer so-called affiliate programs, in which websites and social media channels earn a sales commission on eligible purchases they link from their content.

Here's how it works on Amazon.

You add an affiliate tag¹ to your product links, and Amazon tracks purchases made by customers from your links. This way, you may get ~1–10% commission for eligible purchases within twenty-four hours of the link click.² In affiliate marketing jargon, visitors you send to Amazon are referrals.

And that's why many websites display the following notice.

Commissions may be earned from the links below.

On the opposite corner are marketplaces that come up with suggestions we don't need but may find helpful. Sites that make us spend on what we don't need but want.

Amazon is the perfect example, but many other stores, such as IKEA or Zara, fall into the same category. You browse without a specific need in mind in search of potential things to buy. The best in this category are discount sites, such as Chollómetro, which lists discounts from many other sites to find bargains you often don't need.

Paste the product's Amazon web address at Camelcamelcamel.com¹ to see its price history, choose your fair price, and create a price alert with your email.

It's an easy way to delay purchases and save when you don't mind waiting.

A computer program could teach us how to draw, which requires us to put in the effort and time.

You could say that Ai can become a great teacher when it guides you or the worst teacher when it does everything for you.

A teacher shouldn't do things for you but show you by example, leading you to tackle the correct problems and get the right solutions.

You don't get to think about the problem when you obtain answers right away; it's a shortcut.

Sit regularly, with wiggle time and no pressure.

Do your magic when you don't need to get anything done.

Then, enjoy the freedom of having it done when you need it and don't feel like doing it.

That's when it may not feel like work.

Artificial intelligence, celebrated for its convenience, poses risks to our privacy and independence. It often functions opaquely, increasing biases and surveillance. Without careful oversight, adopting AI could mean losing human control and ethical standards in favor of machine-driven simplicity. This requires thorough scrutiny.

There are three levels of artificial intelligence, and we default to the third one in our daily lives: using technology developed by others for us.

Thanks to the arms race approach to research and innovations that big tech companies and academic institutions are undergoing, we have access to the key innovations that enable these algorithms to learn from our data and generate such sound output.

But even when the code and datasets are open, it will feel like we are interacting with a black box with unknown biases.

We don't have the time or knowledge to understand those widely available algorithms.

So we'll be left with whatever companies and institutions bring to our hands.

Daily drawing, writing, and weekly publishing are systems—there's no explicit goal. Yet this lets me cherry-pick among dozens of ideas when I want to publish.

I reached for my sketchbook and 005 Micron pen while lying on the couch. Two loose sketches of my right foot in distinct positions count as a daily drawing. I urge myself to comply.¹ Creative friction is everywhere, so the trick is to make your process as frictionless as possible.

Quick is easier than detailed; ink is easier than watercolor.

Of course, optimizing for quick and easy reduces the effectiveness of the habit and can lead to creative cheating. You must exert effort to get better. But some practice, every day, beats the ideal and sporadic training session.

Recently, he published 101 additional advices. Here are a few I loved.

Whenever you hug someone, be the last to let go.

You can become the world's best in something primarily by caring more about it than anyone else.

Once a month take a different route home, enter your house by a different door, and sit in a different chair at dinner. No ruts.

There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at ti. This is your playtime, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it.

The patience you need for big things is developed by your patience with the little things.

When you find yourself procrastinating, don't resist. Instead lean into it. Procrastinate 100%. Try to do absolutely nothing for 5 minutes. Make it your job. You'll fail. After 5 minutes, you'll be ready and eager to work.

The most common mistake we make is to do a great job on an unimportant task.

Tol tell a good story, you must reveal a surprise; otherwise it is just a report.

You can read them all here.

It can be in your mind — the fear of failing.

It can be physical — you don't have the tools or space.

It can be temporal — you can't put the time.

It can be in your process — you want everything to be perfect.

No matter where it is, reducing what adds friction to your creative process will lead you to quantity, which will often lead you to quality.

Here are a few use cases I found extremely useful.

• A custom TypeScript & React GPT for work only allowed to answer with code solutions.
• English-to-Spanish Markdown blog post translation. I only have to apply minor corrections, often because ChatGPT mixes Castilian and American Spanish.
• Write Python and bash scripts, both simple and fairly complex.
• Learning and research. ChatGPT is an avid searcher of related papers and a great explainer of machine learning concepts. (You can even ask it to draft specific neural network architectures!)
• Fix grammar and punctuation.
• Troubleshoot computer errors.

I find it mesmerizing to generate visuals and images with it — I have several parallel side projects on this, which I haven't published yet. But that's a story for another day.

Ethical and safety concerns aside, I find it quite promising that, relatively soon, we'll have models with similar performance to GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 running locally on our devices without a subscription.

I haven't measured how much more efficient as a software developer it's made me. Yet after hundreds of conversations ChatGPT has saved me some "human compute hours" and helped me develop several code solutions faster. In this case, twenty dollars a month is a no-brainer.

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Said John Culkin². Language models are rapidly changing how we interact with machines. The next step could be removing humans from the loop and delegating digital tasks to machines.

Software engineers train and deploy those models and make interfaces for them.

Users interact with the artificial intelligence through machine-learning-powered applications.

I was gathering interest for an incoming podcast release that would take place on YouTube in the form of a scheduled premiere, as YouTube calls uploaded videos scheduled to stream for the first time. During the video premiere, your audience can participate in the chat as the video plays, which, in our case, allowed listeners to ask questions to our latest guest, Andy Payne. After the video "premieres," it will be available on YouTube like any other on-demand video you upload. The gist is that, during the premiere, everyone watches the video simultaneously as if it were a live event.

Luma will remind your attendees when the event occurs in their timezone one day before and one hour before, sending them the link and instructions you set up.

Upon registration to an event, attendees have to enter their name and email, which allows you to invite them to similar events in the future or to reach out to them directly, for instance, when new content related to the episode they signed up for is available, i.e., the audio version of the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

You can change the location link of the event so that attendees will receive it when the event is about to happen. If you change your mind before the event, you can direct users to a different platform (say, Twitch or Riverside). If that were to happen and you've directed users to YouTube, you can do nothing.

I shared the Luma link on a LinkedIn post, a tweet, and this newsletter and got twenty-two sign-ups from people I don't know, which isn't bad.

People can subscribe to you on Luma to get notified about future events you schedule. (Here's my Luma profile.) It's a great alternative to newsletters to capture interest in specific events. People may not be willing to sign up for your newsletter, but they might for the events they want to attend.

I interned at Autodesk’s Boston Seaport office with Jose Luis García del Castillo and Keith Alfaro. Jose Luis and I would bike to Central Square, ride the Red Line T to South Station, and hop onto the Silver Line Bus to Drydock Avenue. By the end of the summer, I open-sourced Voxel2GCode²—a set of workflows to transform geometric objects and voxel-based models into 3D-printable G-code instructions.

Andy is an architect and software developer at McNeel, the company behind Rhino and Grasshopper 3D. We recorded a podcast conversation in New Orleans in September 2022, where I learned about Andy's new adventure.

Enjoy this episode on the origins of Grasshopper, Grasshopper 2, Rhino.Compute, teaching, learning to code, generative AI, open-source code and monetization, and Andy's journey.

We'll premiere the episode on YouTube on Wednesday, March 27, at 2 PM ET, which means you'll be able to chat with Andy and me during the episode.

You can RSVP here.

As of lately, the answer is usually, No, the post is not ready. I then browse my archives or write something completely from scratch.

Why? I decided to do so, and I've experienced how it pays off in the long run.

It's craft, not art.

"A pro views her work as craft, not art." Says Steven Pressfield in The War of Art.

It's professional, not amateur.

"Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way." Says James Clear in Atomic Habits.

Good Mondays, I enjoy the freedom of having completed my "homework" in advance.

In 168 Hours, Laura Vanderkam states that, in our society, "there is plenty of time for raising kids while running a business, for working, teaching, and training for a triathlon, or whatever brings joy and meaning to your life."

Vanderkam says that recognizing this requires changing the narrative: instead of saying we don't have time to do X, Y, or Z we should say we won't do X, Y, or Z because "it's not a priority."

Before and after it's done; before and after you give up; before and after you have energy for it; before and after you have time for it.

I try to do whatever I must get done in the day before I run out of time and energy.

Not everything can be done in one go, even if you set yourself to it, and it's easy to fall into the trap of postponing for later.

Doing things you know you'll end up doing today as early as possible always works best.

In the morning, your mind is sharp, and you're energized.

At night, as happens to me many days with writing, each word requires ten times more effort than when I woke up.

It's a matter of priorities and focus.

I made a Mac menu bar app¹ that displays the word count below the running date—say, 240227, for today—and shows the ✍🏻 emoji until I’ve passed the two-hundred-word mark.

As I mentioned last week, I write daily within a fuzzy timeframe. As the app doesn’t know when I wake up or go to bed, I programmed it for the day to start and end at 6 am.

If you’re curious about why I write daily and how I do it, you can learn more about my writing habits.

For humans, the day begins when you wake up and lasts til you go back to sleep.

Days at home are commonly sixteen hours—from eight in the morning til midnight.

Traveling days are shortened or extended depending on whether you travel east or west, lasting up to thirty hours when you fly from Europe to California.

It is within this fuzzy timeframe that I write and sketch daily.

But also harder to accomplish consistently if you overthink it.

I keep writing and journaling daily.

Yet I've experienced how stopping a habit for a few days can turn into stopping it for a very long time—weeks, months, years.

The gist is to put systems in place that make you do what you should do, to spend time doing impactful things.

You only need to remember one password.
The last password you'd need to remember.

They don't tell you that you're also building a one-stop shop for hackers to steal it all at once.

The solution?

Store hints, not passwords.

Don't reuse passwords. Use algorithmic passwords instead.

Use passkeys and security keys.

Everything under the same roof can be stolen with one key.

Centralization is convenient but unsafe.

Decentralization takes more work but is more secure.

It's all about minimizing risk.

No deadline makes you feel you have all the time in the world, which you don't.

A short deadline induces you to focus and makes you more efficient.

And a super-short deadline adds pressure and freezes you.

The sweet spot is to fake short deadlines to ship often.

That way, you can't hide, procrastinate, and won't freeze because you'll be ready when the time comes.

But give it enough time, and you'll likely forget even the simplest details.

That's why capturing the steps you take, one after the other, makes sense—no matter how easy they seem while you are taking them.

There's no such thing as easy steps when you can't remember them.

Changing your mindset to think this way can be hard, but it ultimately pays off.

This is why I prioritize periodicity—showing up with a constant cadence—over achieving specific goals. A weekly stream, weekly mini-essay, daily sketch, and monthly podcast episode.

Let's use the beginning of 2024 to iterate over our systems.

Here are the ones with the most views (in descending order).

1. Seven principles to simplify email
2. Easier replaced than fixed
3. A great temporal landmark
4. Live 100: Celebrating a hundred live streams
5. An infinite canvas
6. Food and happiness
7. The broken faucet
8. Something else
9. Daily writing vs daily blogging
10. Black and white boxes
11. Looking for answers
12. Transcripts will be commonplace
13. Off the hook
14. Blogging daily in 2022
15. For the sake of doing
16. AI and a text prompt
17. Five quick minutes
18. What's slowing you down?
19. The second mistake
20. Practice and outcome

Something else, Impatience, AI misses the point, and Sunset at Point Reyes are among my favorites.

What stories did you enjoy the most?

Here is my last publication of the year.¹

In 2023, I slowed down my projects—YouTube channel, podcast, and writing—amidst a job change, a wedding, and a house renovation.

I still managed to ship new content and recently started recovering my former pace, but it wasn’t easy to give up on well-established habits.

Here are some of the highlights.

• I released 2 long-form video podcasts with Ian Keough & Alex O’Connor (and enjoyed working with Andrea Villalón, who edited these episodes)
• I live-streamed 15 times, celebrated 100 streams with friends, and started season 4
• I wrote and sketched daily (and published 52 mini-essays)
• I published 101 posts (including the mini-essays above)
• I started monetizing my YouTube channel after reaching 4,000 played hours in 365 days and 1,000 subscribers (we're nearing 3,000)²

The end of the year is a great temporal landmark to reflect on what we did over the past year and rethink our practice. Yet, it’s best to conduct similar reviews throughout the year instead of waiting for New Year’s resolutions.³

If you're thinking of starting a blog or a personal journal, I invite you to read One Word per Day. I agree with Seth Godin that "everyone should have a blog and write daily, in public." It's free and a great way to establish your tone before anyone cares about your writing.

If there’s anything you’ve learned or enjoyed from my content, I’d love for you to send me a note.

I look forward to sharing more with you in 2024.

Thanks so much for being there!

Goodbye, 2023.

Happy New Year!

• A dashboard that tells me whether I wrote more than two hundred words, read my Readwise daily quotes, and sketched on the current day.
• A way to filter my expenses.
• A Rummikub timer phone app.
• An intro video playlist to Apple's MLX framework.
• An app to browse sketchbook scans and identify which drawings have been edited or published.
• A new iteration of my file storage folder structure.
• Vite and React components for my website.
• Dark mode support for my drawings.
• An online price tracker.

I'm phasing out my 13-inch MacBook Pro (M1, 2020)—a first-generation Apple Silicon laptop that greatly exceeded my expectations for day-to-day work—and migrating my apps and settings to an M3 Max machine.

A laptop—because I can travel with it and work in multiple locations.

A Mac—because I enjoy working on Apple's operating system much more than on Windows.

I hope to share my setup to record, stream, and podcast with you soon.

We drove Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to Point Reyes Lighthouse, past Cypress Tree Tunnel, in time to watch the sunset.

Cold. Windy. Of grandiose scale.

Various types of seals and whales inhabit the seashore. We didn't get lucky. Along the way, though, cattle were quietly grazing, and numerous tule elk greeted us.

A few California quail birds surprised us scuttling across the road right in front of us, forcing a sudden brake.

At dusk, as we drove the windy roads back to San Francisco, we spotted skunk. Radiohead played in the background.

I don't remember ever clearing customs faster than today.

Now I sit with my laptop at Terminal 3, writing this tiny blog post as I wait for a few colleagues to land; we'll pick up a mini-van and drive up to Olema by the Point Reyes National Seashore.

I feel privileged to have the chance to visit these amazing places for work.

I'm 9,600 kilometers from home and 10,424 kilometers from Coromandel, New Zealand, the closest city to Málaga's antipodes. I've traveled a quarter of the world today, and I'm halfway from New Zealand.

You have to learn how to talk in multiple programming languages to create applications for different systems, and, believe me, it takes time.

I remember staying up late immersed in digital books and interactive applications to learn how to code more than fifteen years ago.² Knowledge and skill build over time, and concepts take time to click.

This is rapidly changing.

You can ask ChatGPT (OpenAI's artificial intelligence chat-based assistant) and other language models to write working code for you in virtually any programming language. For instance, you can prompt it to Calculate the volume of a pyramid in Python³ or Create a website form. But you can also ask them to reason about finance or List the steps to make pancakes. It seems to know it all.

These programs are great educational and learning tools that help developers carry out their work, and I'm using them to code daily.

The machine learns from the same sources I mentioned before—books, guides, the web—but the user experience of retrieving knowledge and coming up with solutions is radically different.

The system can mix and match different sources and adjust code solutions to your immediate needs as if it were an engineer messaging you at the other end of the line—reasoning and programming after having read the entire internet and public archive. But there's no human. Just a digital assistant that can talk to thousands of people at the same time and knows about much, much more than software engineering.

At this point, it's a matter of time before new workflows that use artificial intelligence are adopted in most fields of knowledge work.

As Cal Newport states in Deep Work⁴, those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines will have a particular advantage in this new economy.

"Artificial intelligence is meant to amplify human creativity, not replace it." Says Lyor Cohen, YouTube & Google's Head of Music.

Maybe these AIs can help us work smarter and, in turn, "let us disconnect and reclaim time to be humans."⁵

Will you join the revolution?

Panagiotis Michalatos told me something along these lines as we walked down Sumner Road in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in late 2016 or early 2017, as I thought about my master's thesis topic. I wanted to streamline the generation of textures for architectural drawings and couldn't imagine what was coming. I ended up playing with the early generative machine-learning algorithms, mainly Pix2Pix, and training bots to color my drawings.

Back in 2017, I wrote that artificial intelligence was transforming the way we interacted with machines. "By curating a dataset, the designer is the programmer. Choosing the right set of images becomes part of the design process."

We've seen huge leaps in generative AI and a transition from GANs to transformers, from Pix2Pix and StyleGAN to diffusion models like DALL·E and Midjourney. It's crazy and exciting. But also scary.

The faster AI turns, the slower we become.

When artificially intelligent systems know it all, we're burdened by the task of coming up with questions, constantly.

Today, we don't need to curate a dataset, because most of the world's publicly available knowledge is compressed and easily retrievable in machine learning models that can give you an answer in less than a second.

Prompt.
Response.
Think about your next prompt.
Prompt.
Response.
Repeat.

Prompting a large language model—an LLM—has become part of the design process, and potentially part of the work of any knowledge worker—programmers, doctors, teachers, students, scientists, etcetera. LLMs are here to stay. And due to the simple fact that they can do many, many different tasks for us, they will.

Then why do we need CAD-monkey work? Because we need time to think and would be exhausted if we gave into the machine, constantly begging us for input, for yet one more prompt.

We've spent years clicking numerous times for computer software to do what we want. Now we can chat with an AI that gets the job done for us. We just need to craft the right instructions for the machine to understand what we want.

I have plenty of topics to cover. This is a great opportunity to reclaim my weekly slot to work on planned themes over several streams.

The new studio works. I need to treat it acoustically, yet my Shure SM7B sounds pretty well even without absorption panels and a mostly empty room.

Topic suggestions are welcome on Discord.

Follow me on YouTube to know when I go live next.

Similarly, my mini-essays evolve and look at concepts from different perspectives.

It's only through the grouping of the drawing and writing artifacts I produce, looking at them as a whole, that they become one.

But there's more planning I could do to make them a cohesive piece of work.

That's why, on top of last week's weekly slots, I want to set long-term goals regarding what to sketch—imagine a collection of drawings of a given topic—and what to write about, so I can break down topics in small snippets and further develop those ideas a cohesive long-form essay afterward.

It may take me months or years to work toward planned themes. But I'll get there.

In my experience, defining your goals helps you move faster—if you know what you want to achieve in a given week, you can reserve time in advance.

I'm designing a weekly schedule with time blocks for the activities I want to do every week. Think of blocks to write, sketch, record, edit, stream, work, meet, disconnect, exercise, plan, or organize. Everything you want to do—digital and analog—with a dedicated slot in your calendar.

I'll reserve blocks of time for my core activities and iterate by reducing or expanding their time slots.

It's not more than saying I'll write for two hours when I wake up on Mondays and I'll live stream Thursday nights, but it helps a lot.

If you accept a smaller creative scope, design constraints help you innovate within a fixed set of variables by limiting how many pieces can move.

It's on you to set realistic timeframes for each task—not too much time, not too little—and it's on you to minimize your creative degrees of freedom—don't try to be creative in too many areas simultaneously.

I continue to aim at inbox zero but I wanted to point out that I found it extremely hard during the summer when traveling with a half-broken iPhone X and no access to my computer.

It didn't take me long to regain control of my inbox. But I saw the problem framed from a different perspective.

All I can say is that having a laptop—or even better, a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse—makes this work much easier.

That's the problem with relying on a laptop for certain tasks: you won't have it while on the go.¹ Smartphone-first workflows win, as they'll mostly be supported on desktops.

There is no need to learn how to write, draw, edit photos or videos, or perform other complex tasks.

Talk to the machine and let it get the job done. Not completely true (yet). But applies to many areas already.

The obvious next step? The computer doesn't need our input to get going. No humans needed.

This is rendering true, at least, for specific tasks—say, transcription and content moderation—and changes the type of work we're required for, sometimes creating new tasks for us, others leaving us without a job.

This paradigm shift also democratizes creative work formerly reserved for a select few—our capabilities are augmented by the machine, which doesn't necessarily make us more creative.

I drew on my sketchbook, typed on the iPhone and iPad, and postponed things I do daily on my laptop for my return.

Now, I have the iPhone 15 Pro, which works like a charm. I'll likely go back to writing, watching media, and shooting photos and videos on my phone.

It's nice to sit back at my desk. But I didn't miss it much while I was on the road.

It's been a long summer. I look forward to starting the season with new podcasts, YouTube videos, and stories.

But there's nothing left to polish when you complete and deliver a project; it's done. There's a big void to fill and time to reclaim formerly invested in that big project.

That's the time for new projects and milestones.

When other's are expecting you to deliver, it's harder to skip your deadline.

That's why it can help to involve others in your projects and goals.

An audience, people who care, pushes you to keep going.

One thing I still remember is my host student, Steve Johns, making a call on his flip phone from the front seat of his car while it poured outside. I quickly realized he was providing instructions on what to get from the trunk to a friend who was a few meters away, right outside the car.

Back then in Spain, we still payed to establish a call, for every minute we talked, and for every message we send over SMS with our mobile phones. So it seemed crazy that Steve would make a call instead of talking through the window. They already had plans with unlimited calls and messages.

Phones became smart and cellular plans started to include unlimited calls, messages, and internet data, which allowed calls over the internet, a movement pioneered by apps like Skype and now supported by many, such as FaceTime and WhatsApp.

I don't get free roaming in the US with my home carrier, which translates into prohibitive data prices. I use a Vodafone Yu S SIM card when I cross the Atlantic and always bring a tool to swap cards in the air before landing in American land.

The limit today is the amount of data. But that also seems to be going away as plans offer hundreds of gigabytes for ten euros a month. It's weird that's cheaper to connect your smartphone to the internet in the US with a Spanish carrier.

Today, most people with a phone has access to the internet. I use my phone when it's convenient, even if I'm talking to someone just a few meters away.

This means that apps like Tweetbot—a superb iPhone Twitter client—are going away, and services like Zapier—the automation service—will no longer be able to send updates to Twitter accounts.

It's hard for me to know how many people my content reaches through social media, and I recently thought I'd try to minimize my automatic updates in favor of something different: centralized updates on my newsletter at Sketch.Nono.MA or Substack.

While it's convenient to have posts automatically shared on social media every Tuesday, it feels noisy. I may reclaim the attention of my social media accounts for more special updates.

What do you think? How do you often get to read my posts, and what do you think is the best publication strategy?

P.S. Someday, I'll tell you a story about the seagull in today's sketch.

Sometimes others dictate that for you.

But when it's your choice, make sure to choose correctly.

You may end up spending time and effort on the wrong things.

Certain things that get us there require little effort—say, watching viral videos—but others require more—the thrill of acquiring a new skill or physical activity, for instance.

Where was I going with this? Right, distractions.

Complying with what we know we have to do is categorized by our brain as boring and mandatory, the must-do.

We want novelty and unpredictability, at least at certain times.

That urge for something else is an elusive search for something better that distracts us from our goals.

We are often better off with what we know and wanted to do yesterday.

To be off the hook while the closed-for-vacation sign is up, your team must be able to handle your duties without you.

I look out the window and find a beautiful landscape of snow and mountains below us. Like one of those snowy top views from Game of Thrones.

Where are we? I think.

We're flying across Greenland at nine hundred kilometers per hour, eleven thousand meters above sea level, and minus fifty degrees Celsius.

All I get is a high-level view. No detail. No sense of scale.

I realize this is the first time I've seen Greenland.

"One mistake is just an outlier. Two mistakes is the beginning of a pattern." Says James Clear.

After missing my daily practice a few times, not meditating daily became a habit.

"Killing this pattern before it snowballs into something bigger is one reason why learning how to get back on track quickly is an essential skill for building good habits." Follows Clear.

If you follow a practice and miss it once, ensure it doesn't happen twice.

Today, I meditated for ten minutes.

"The practice is agnostic about the outcome." Says Seth Godin.

I write daily regardless of what I publish. The more words I type, the easier it is to dig and find things worth sharing with you at a later time.²

I don't always write for publication. I write to figure out what I'm thinking and capture memories. Discover and remember. I write for the sake of writing, to practice.

This gives me the license to write badly. No pressure. I can distance myself from my writing, return to it from a reader's perspective, then curate and polish what will see the light.

Each of its 124 pages takes up to two minutes to scan at 1200 dpi.¹ But it ends up being more like 5 minutes per page as you position the sketchbook, generate a preview, and select the scanning area. Scanning an entire sketchbook takes four to ten hours (!).

A tedious task that requires patience and I recommend tackling as your sketchbook fills, not once it's full, which makes it more approachable and serves as a digital backup of your drawings if you were to lose your sketchbook.²

Browsing through my drawings anywhere I am—on my phone or laptop—is priceless. It makes it a breeze to select, edit, and publish.

Scanning my sketches equals peace of mind.

Frank is an architect, teacher, writer, and avid sketcher who always has a sketchbook with him.

He writes to find out what he’s thinking, and draws to understand what he’s looking at and ensure he doesn’t forget it.

"It’s too late to stop [the internet], but what we can do as architects and artists and writers is give people a sense of place where they are," Frank said in a podcast conversation we recorded last year.

Frank believes we can make places that have something physical and concrete, grounding us in an otherwise unlimited digital world.

Today, I’m celebrating my publication’s fourth anniversary with 210 weekly sketches and mini-essays published over 1463 days.¹

Frank’s Native Places blog was one of my greatest inspirations to get started with this project. The formula is simple: pair a sketch with a mini-essay, share it online, and repeat.

I’m still figuring it out. But I enjoy every bit of it and will continue writing, drawing, and publishing for years. (I encourage you to discover the power of writing: start with one word per day.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, comments, and suggestions and invite you to write a comment, reply, send me a voice note, or send me a private message.

Thank you, as always, for pushing me to keep going.

Happy newsletterversary.

Something else to work on.
Something else to learn.
Something else to improve.

Something else that wants to distract you, especially when what you're doing gets boring or hard.

Today, let's focus on what we committed to yesterday, on what we already know, and on what's already working.

Ian had just started Hypar¹ out of his garage, "a platform for designing, generating, and sharing building systems." He's the CEO and founder of Hypar and is known as the father of Dynamo.

Last September, we recorded a conversation in a hotel room at St Joseph Street, New Orleans, with two cameras and two microphones. We didn't surf this time but got a beautiful 6.7-mile run in at sunrise along the Mississippi River with Zach Kron.

Enjoy this episode on how Hypar is creating the next-generation platform to design, generate, and share buildings and Ian's thoughts on open-source software, visual programming, authorship, monetization, and generative AI.

We'll premiere the episode on YouTube today, Tuesday, June 20, at 2 PM ET, which means you'll be able to chat with Ian and me during the episode.

We hope you can make it!

Some of us rely on it daily.

We browse our inboxes dozens of times a day, likely because items require time, don't have a clear resolution, or because we need to wait til we can take action.

I aim at inbox zero, which means I try to keep my email inbox empty.

Others adopt inbox infinity, a phrase coined by Taylor Lorenz in early 2019, "accepting the fact that there will be an endless, growing amount of email in your inbox every day, most of which you will never address or even see."²

Here are my principles to minimize the time spent looking at email.

• Batch email. Process messages over a single session.
• Act once. When possible, take action the first time you look at a message to prevent mulling over it for long periods.
• Extract what's actionable. Don't use email as a to-do list. Move actionable messages to an external system. I'm currently using Notion.
• Snooze what isn't actionable yet. Gmail's snooze feature lets me delay emails to a future date when they will become actionable.
• Archive or delete. Once done with an email, I either delete it or archive it with a Keep tag to store it for the long run.
• Remove email from your phone. I've tried this in the past, and it's the best way to detach yourself from email. But it's not something I'm doing at the moment.
• Schedule emails. You don't need to respond to every email or reply right away. I often schedule messages for the following workday when I reply outside of work hours or during the weekend. This way, I don't involve others in work matters during the weekend and delay potential work-related replies while I'm off work.

Defining principles that work for everyone—or even a single person at different moments in life—is hard. This practice seems to be working for me right now. But I'll continue to adjust it over time.

Do you have other tricks to simplify email? I'd love to know.

Cupertino's tech giant has previously redefined product categories and managed to educate the world on why they need them—think of browsing the internet on your iPad or iPhone in bed instead of sitting at your desk.

The device is pricey—north of three thousand dollars. Yet some argue it equals the cost of certain desktop setups if you think about buying a computer, monitor, and other peripherals. Vision Pro is everything you need. "Free your desktop. And your apps will follow." No display. No mouse. No keyboard. "You navigate simply by using your eyes, hands, and voice."

Apple coined the term visionOS to refer to their first spatial operating system, inviting us to an infinite canvas that transforms the way we work.¹

I can't wait to try them out.

Writing down your past states of knowledge and beliefs—keeping memories—is helpful because they will change.

Needless to say, you can apply this logic to activities other than sketching that you enjoy doing. I use it daily for sketching and writing.

Today, there's no need to draw by hand anymore. The camera captures lights and shadows for you. And AI is learning to do knowledge work.

'When you automate as much of your life as possible, you can spend your effort on the tasks machines cannot do yet.' This is what James Clear says in Atomic Habits. 'Each [automated] habit frees up time and energy to pour into the next stage of growth.'

The amount of tasks machines cannot do yet keeps getting smaller and smaller.

James Clear quotes Alfred North Whitehead—mathematician and philosopher—who wrote, 'Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.'

The camera misses the point of sketching, which is to understand what you see.²

The machine does the work for us, and we get to skip the struggle. But it is that struggle that makes us learn and master skills.

Imagine a little kid using an AI to draw or color a flower. How is she meant to learn to draw or color when the machine does it for her?

It keeps getting harder to figure out what tasks machines won't be able to do for us. In the future, the skill to be mastered is controlling the machine, what's currently being called prompt engineering.

Technology misses the point of craft.²

No matter how well machines can draw, I will continue to sketch by hand.

Impatience for the video to load,
and to be done watching.

Impatience for new episodes,
and to binge-watch the entire season.

Impatience, with whatever is in front of you,
and a great discontent with the present.

We're in constant search for the next thing.

Screens rewired us this way,
and wire young generations from the start.

Impatience to read this post in full,
yet an urge to find more content.

In this speedy world,
the turtle wins.

Seth Godin calls it the dip;
Steven Pressfield the resistance;
Cal Newport shallow work.

Just stick around when everyone else gives up.

On the contrary, white box algorithms let you see what's inside. Browse their code, change it, and learn why and how they generate a given output.

Black boxes protect intellectual property, make it harder to hack programs¹, and let companies monetize services by putting their services behind a paywall.

White boxes let the community contribute by collectively maintaining their code and adding new features.

Is it still fun?
What's something you could change?
Did it lose its magic?

You may not need to change anything, but often things turn into something different than what they were when we started.

We'll use Riverside and stream live on YouTube, and we will release an edited version in the Getting Simple podcast.

We'll announce the guests that will join us soon. Stay tuned.

We discussed the recent developments of AI—transformers, prompt engineering, GPT, Stable Diffusion, tokenization, the latent space—but as Alex recently mentioned on LinkedIn, "Little did we know the blizzard of innovation that was coming."

Alex is a senior data science and machine learning manager who works building agile teams and impactful machine learning systems at Autodesk—one of the few people I know who understands what's going on in AI and ML and why it matters.

We'll premiere the episode on YouTube tomorrow, Wednesday, April 12, at 2 PM ET, which means you'll be able to chat with us during the episode.

It's exciting—we've never tried this format.

We hope you can make it!

If you can do anything, what will you do?

Structure incorporates constraints that reduce the number of decisions required.

A clear workflow—a set of structured steps—limits the scope in which you’ll be creative and lets you forget about the process and focus on doing.

We're almost at a point where artificial intelligence can transcribe large audio pieces without making mistakes.

I've used Descript¹ (paid) heavily over the past few years and explored other alternatives. Descript transcribes and lets you edit audio and video by editing text. Transcriptions are highly accurate, but even a small error rate results in serious editing if you want transcripts of hours-long conversations to be correct, especially when using technical keywords and niche words. These tools let you provide sample text and a glossary of words in our audio to improve their accuracy.²

These workflows are still much better (and faster) than transcribing manually. If you don't have time to fix mistakes, you can often get away by adding a disclaimer that "transcripts were automatically generated and may contain errors."

In September 2022, OpenAI trained and open-sourced a neural network called Whisper that, in their own words, "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition." That's a big step. The community can extend Whisper and use it for free.³ (I've been using Whisper and played it with on Live 98.)

These systems can predict word-level timestamps—making it possible to highlight the exact word spoken at a given time—and perform something called speaker diarization, a fancy way to say that the AI knows who's talking when by identifying the active speaker.

Soon enough, transcripts will be commonplace. Transcripts will be free, automatic, and accurate; we'll expect them to be there.

Indeed, Spotify is already transcribing trending podcasts, and YouTube generates captions for every video. I imagine WhatsApp will transcribe voice notes so you can read them when you can't play them.

Transcripts are helpful to listeners to follow content, browse through long pieces, or refer to particular points of a conversation. But they also provide a way for editors to navigate episodes quickly and get an idea of their content, making it easier to edit by removing or moving blocks of audio around to make a conversation more fluid. They also help editors write episode descriptions, notes, and chapters, and machine learning is starting to do these tasks for us automatically—which is exciting.

Soon enough, we'll hit record, delegate all this manual labor to the machine⁴, and focus on our next piece of content when done.

Doing for the sake of doing.

Not pursuing an outcome. Just doing.

It may not be the definition of happiness. But boy is it close.

My thinking applied here, and I ended up replacing the broken faucet.

• The cost of the broken part, the ceramic cartridge, was 30–60% of the entire faucet.
• I can install a new faucet, but I don't know how to replace the cartridge.
• The cost of the part plus the repair service is likely higher than a new faucet.
• Warranty nor home insurance covers damaged cartridges.

I removed and reinstalled the faucet multiple times, so I knew how to install it.

I drove to Obramat¹, paid fifty euros for a new faucet of the same model, and installed it myself.

The leak is gone.

If anything, the artwork is appealing to the eye.

At first sight, the image reminded me of my experiments to produce art in the style of American painter Edward Hopper with DALL-E, OpenAI's text-to-image artificial intelligence.

Indeed, the corner of Lambert's album cover features a color key with yellow, light blue, green, red, and blue squares that reveals OpenAI's algorithm also generated the image.

No brush strokes, photography, or Photoshop, but AI, a text prompt, and, likely, an entertaining process of trial and error.

The internet rewards low prices, free shipping, and fast delivery over everything else.

Today, as Google is valued at $1.35 trillion¹, an arms race takes place between Microsoft and Google to dominate online search.

Unless you are an employee or shareholder of either of these companies, you likely don't care much about who wins. Yet this is one of Google's primary revenue sources.

The business model of Google search and Bing (Microsoft's search engine) is to provide results for our web searches, not for free, but in exchange for the consumption of paid ads.

The war is taking place because Microsoft recently announced Bing AI, a new version of their search engine powered by a next-generation OpenAI large language model that is faster, more accurate, and more capable than ChatGPT and has been customized for search².

In case you’ve been living under a rock, OpenAI released its cutting-edge human language AI model, GPT-3, through an interface intuitive to all of us—text messages—as ChatGPT. This app set a new record for the fastest-growing user base in online applications: 100 million active users in January 2023³⁴.

ChatGPT can hold conversations, answer questions, and solve problems.

In this battle, we are mere spectators waiting to see who wins.

We're not searching the internet anymore. We're looking for answers.

There's no time left to polish or overthink.

And it turns out we often squeeze ourselves to come up with something instead of giving up.

It'll be over soon, you think.

Forcing yourself into no-time-left mode—by establishing a rigid work schedule, for instance—is a great strategy to combat the trough¹ and be efficient.

Many of my publications were shallow updates and technical posts.

But the experiment made me write more.

Yet, as Derek Sivers points out, sometimes you "spend more time being shallow to get something posted," which often happens to me when writing my Tuesday posts.

Ideally, I'd spend many hours writing every week, so I can at least get one essay or mini-essay on the blog. But it's not always easy.

My plan for 2023 is to continue publishing this newsletter weekly, use it to develop ideas for more extensive essays which get broken down into individual concepts, then publish longer writings when they are worth sharing on Substack.

The gist of writing is to entertain the reader.

Publishing daily is harder.

These turn out to be two significantly different tasks.

The former consists of pouring words in private every day.

The latter requires getting to a finished piece every single day. You can build a strategy to plan and schedule what will show up in your blog each day in advance, or you can spend minutes to hours every day to get something out the door.

As Derek Sivers says, "writing daily but posting when ready" is better.

Distractions.
A lack of focus.
Bad work habits.
Little planning.
Fragmented work sessions.
Too many goals.
Too few goals.
Unclear goals.
Weak systems.
Constant context switching.
Lack of a proper workspace.
Working solo.

In my case, I'll stop overdoing things and work to ship better content faster, reduce creative friction by streamlining and automating workflows where possible, and delegate work to other creatives.

It's great to improve and ideate new ways of doing things, but we shouldn't forget to enjoy established workflows once you've reached a good-enough point.

What are your goals for 2023?

Here are the ones with the most views (in descending order).

1. Algorithmic passwords: A simple method to secure your accounts
2. Goodbye, 2022
3. The tiny, green chameleon
4. The myth of a better life
5. When the machine does the work for you
6. Twenty rupees
7. The Basic Attention Token
8. Most-visited stories of 2021
9. How much time did that take?
10. Idea generation versus execution
11. The reason to finish
12. Cooking ideas
13. One more task
14. Meta
15. On to the next one
16. Summer content post-mortem
17. How many of these can you write?
18. When to-do lists get too long
19. Which one would you like to read?
20. Summer vacation

What stories did you enjoy the most?

Here's my last publication of the year.¹

I wanted to thank you (!) for being there and share a few highlights from 2022.

• I live streamed 37 times from my home recording studio
• I recorded all podcasts on video (and released 13 episodes)
• I wrote and sketched daily (and published 52 mini-essays)
• I published 330 posts (including the mini-essays above)
• I wrote more than 120,000 words

At the turn of 2019, I published Twelve Grapes—a short reflection on temporal landmarks and New Year's resolutions. Over the past years, my goal has been to stop overdoing things and ship better content faster, to reduce creative friction by streamlining and automating workflows where possible, and to delegate work to other creatives. I will always continue to improve and ideate new ways of doing things, but it's good to enjoy established workflows once you reach a good-enough point. (As Zach Kron and I discussed in a recent podcast conversation, it's good to stick to a set of tools when you reach control of the creative medium.) I'm pretty happy with where I got regarding live streaming, recording video tutorials, and podcasting (both remotely and in person).

A great acquisition was Elgato's Stream Deck XL. I've set up plenty of actions that significantly improve my streaming workflows, such as setting up my studio lights for recording, creating chapter markers, switching camera scenes, or configuring my computer and opening software required to record.

One of the goals to remove friction from my creative writing process during 2022 was to publish on Substack, in English without a required illustration. I did this on my blog instead², posting almost daily. And even though I didn't get to establish a clear newsletter strategy or publish every day, I published a lot more content than in 2021.

If you're thinking of starting a blog or a personal journal, I invite you to read One Word per Day. I agree with Seth Godin that "everyone should have a blog and write daily, in public." It's free and a great way to establish your tone before anyone cares about your writing.

I mentioned I wrote 120,000 words in 2022. As I said in Idea Generation Versus Execution, "I write daily in my diary without a specific goal in mind other than capturing memories, facts, and thoughts. Then, I conduct review sessions to highlight passages worth developing further and deep writing sessions where I focus on turning drafts into publishable essays." Much of what I write is for myself. But you'd be surprised at how many ideas that initially seem to go nowhere I end up using in my publications.

I want to highlight two things from the podcast. In 2022, I read three books and had a podcast conversation with their authors—Formulations by Andrew Witt, Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See by Frank Harmon, and Systems Upgrade by Leire Asensio Villoria and David Mah—and that I recorded five in-person conversations on camera, one of them already out with Zach Kron, and others with Ian Keough, Andy Payne, John Pierson, and Alex O'Connor coming out soon.

There are lots more that I'd like to share with you.

But I'll leave that for future posts.

If there's anything you've learned or enjoyed from my sketches and stories of 2022, I'd love for you to send me a note. Feel free to reply to this email if you're getting the newsletter, tweet @nonoesp, add a comment to this publication, or message me on Instagram or via this contact form.

Thanks so much for being there!

Goodbye, 2022.

Happy New Year!

In film-making, shooting is often perceived as the most important part of the process. However, what happens before and after recording is equally important. Planning ensures you’ll shoot the essential takes and post-processing filters out unnecessary takes and shapes the final movie. There's creativity in recording but also in planning and editing.

What's key, not only in film-making but in any creative activity, is to identify which parts simply add friction and which ones are fundamental parts of your creative process.

But there's today and tomorrow.

ChatGPT¹ defines "guesswork" as "the act of trying to figure out or estimate something without having all of the necessary information."

Online content creation requires both taste and guesswork. Because no matter how much you think about what to create, the stats may surprise you.

A video you’ve spent hours creating may accrue no views while a post or a video clip that took no effort to produce can go viral without apparent explanation.

Good taste helps. But the relationship between taste and views isn't linear.

Don't worry too much about "what" to make; experiment and see what works best.

There are two ways to show up first on Google: with "organic" non-paid content and with paid ads.

Google "organically" indexes publicly available websites and displays search results by relevance, which can get you to Google's top results without paying for an ad.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the field of optimizing websites to perform well on search engines.

Positioning strategies may involve the creation of content related to your brand and services to answer questions frequently Googled with common keywords used in search queries. A page's title, its web address, its code, and its uniqueness matter—it's not only about the content.

For instance, I gave an answer to the question "What is SEO?" above, which could generate organic views from Google to this page, but it's unlikely, as there are probably hundreds of better-positioned sites that answer that question in more depth.

Google's AI often goes as far as identifying which portion of your writing exactly answers a user's prompt, displaying that portion of text on its search engine, and saving the user a visit to your website as they already got what they wanted.

The shortcut to Google's top hits is keyword bidding, where you compete with others interested in displaying an ad for a similar search query.

It wouldn't make sense, though, to bid for "location of voice memos on Mac" as I'm simply offering information and not marketing products or services for monetization.

Google's algorithm—as well as YouTube's, Instagram's, and TikTok's—is a world on its own, which can bring your content to thousands or millions if used properly.

You can watch a two-hour movie in two hours and listen to a twenty-minute podcast in twenty minutes.

But how long will it take you to write a two-hundred-word essay?

Somewhere from a few minutes to several hours.

It's hard to say because creative work doesn't fit into discrete units of time.

Writing, for instance, requires the right head space and time.

It may take several hours to write a piece in ten minutes.

Pigma Micron fiber pens have been my go-to for quite a long time, together with the hardbound, 150–gram, white-paper Alpha Series (22.9 x 15.2 cm, 9 x 6 in) sketchbook from Stillman & Birn, slightly bigger than A5 sheets, and the White Nights watercolors.

The thin tip of 005 Microns provides a 0.20 mm line thickness that allows for careful detail and line work, and thicker 03 Microns (0.35 mm) work great for infills and outlines.

This weekend I used 05 pens with an even thicker 0.45-mm line to portray faces, which resulted in faster sketches with fewer strokes that felt more expressive. Plus they run better on coarse paper.

It pays off to gain control of your creative medium, settle on a fixed set of tools, and focus on the act of doing.

It's only then that slight tool changes like this one can lead to significantly different results.

This episode may be helpful if you're thinking of starting a podcast or YouTube channel or if you want to learn about my podcasting workflow.

Here are the key ideas.

• Long-form conversations allow getting to know more about guests
• Building two-way relationships with your audience makes them more likely to stick around
• Outlines help deliver a clear message
• Lean recording and publishing workflows make it easier to start
• Experimentation can keep you motivated
• Monetization is hard
• Define your goal and let it evolve with you
• Evergreen content will always stay current

You can watch this episode and read the notes.

Early in the morning, I can write many mini-essays. Thoughts flow. I'm fluid, eager, and energetic. I can keep going for hours.

I write drafts that inspire my publications.

I don't write so much in the evening when I'm often exhausted and need a recharge. Yet the evening is the most creative part of some people's day—we're less rational than in the early morning. So I try to capture ideas before bed if I'm rested and relaxed; there's no pressure to ship or get anywhere, and I can simply enjoy the act of writing.

You're trading minutes for an experience that may be worth your time.

Sometimes as a result of mindless decisions.

We jump from task to task without too much thinking.

What will you trade today's minutes for?

It pays off to strategize your time.

It’s also okay to let yourself go.

Now and then, ask yourself, Am I available for this?

You may be better off doing something else.

The second and last are your strongest paragraphs.

You should have started with the second paragraph. It's the one that hooks the reader in.

Talking to Frank was transformative.

A reminder that others can provide valuable feedback about what I do.

After our meeting, I went ahead and made a few edits to my post¹.

Frank's suggestions made it read much better.

Yet it takes me several hours to write particular two-hundred-word essays.

I write daily in my diary without a specific goal in mind other than capturing memories, facts, and thoughts. Then, I conduct review sessions in which I highlight passages worth developing further and deep writing sessions where I focus on turning drafts into publishable essays.

Generating ideas is cheap and fast.

It's curating, developing, and shipping those ideas that require the most time and effort.

But meaning—how people understand language—isn't universal.

Without the right words, you can inspire someone to do something you did not intend to or land the wrong message. Each individual brings language to their context and worldview.

Individual words and short phrases are open for interpretation, which is helpful in some instances. Nike's Just Do It and Apple's Think Different slogans inspire people to do sports and be creative. Short and abstract is not a bug in this case but a feature; everyone can adapt these messages to their lives.

When you want to ensure everyone gets the same picture—a set of instructions, a mission statement, a notice, a story—we need to remember that what's evident for the writer won't always be for the reader. Here's where redundancy comes into play: stating the obvious and the not-so-obvious helps a significant part of the readership to extract a similar meaning from a given message, leaving less room for interpretation.

Make room for play, or you'll get bored.

I ended up publishing five sketches and mini-essays, twenty-three blog posts, and two videos and recorded a podcast episode which is still to be edited and released¹.

In August, I disconnected from the digital world and started returning to work yesterday. I deliberately stuck with two daily routines during vacation: sketching and writing. I look forward to sharing my drawings and stories with you soon².

We've been warned not to drink tap water or eat street food. Unlike locals, we could get sick because of bacteria our body has never been exposed to or due to the inability to digest spicy food.

An interesting practice we've had to follow for the past week is brushing our teeth with bottled water. Every hotel provided us with water bottles and we knew we shouldn't use the tap. Yet the habit of brushing our teeth with water from the tap is extremely engrained on us, which led me to use water from the tap by mistake a few times.

Having drinkable water from the tap is one of the many things we give for granted, and it's crazy we use drinkable water for showering and flushing the toilet.

Yet machines leave us empty handed when there's an outage—electricity cuts off, there's no reception, the WiFi doesn't work, your device runs out of battery.

As a result, you can't do your work as you normally do it.

The more you rely digital mediums and the cloud for work, the worse your impairment will be when they stop working.

Take typing words on your laptop or smartphone. You can fallback to pen and paper. But there's no easy way out when your data is locked on the cloud, you need to meet with others online, or systems simply don't work offline.

It's worth ideating alternative ways to do your core tasks without the internet and digital devices; at some point, they will fail.

Digital is convenient. But it doesn't always work.

In vacation mode, though, it's hard to jump into work mode and get anything productive done.

With your tools at eyesight, it's easier to engage in your craft than watching Netflix.

Taking your toolset out and putting it back when done may be enough to turn you into a couch potato when you felt like doing something more fulfilling.

If the amount I'd pay is low and I don't enjoy the process, I shouldn't be doing it; I better rent someone else's time.

If both the amount and the time I save are high, I shouldn't do the work either; I better buy time and let a professional do the job.

But when the work is rewarding, its price is high, and I can do it, then I should.

This assumes we have a choice. But most of our 'work' is externally imposed.

And, on top of that, finding reliable professionals is no easy feat, nor is rejecting work that pays well but we don't enjoy.

If you shouldn't be doing the work, who should?

The task becomes effortless.

Your productivity multiplies.

There’s no need for you to learn the skill.

You are replaceable.

But summer still goes from June 21 till September 23.

It's just that I only¹ go on vacation for one out of those three months.

As I approach my summer vacation, I face a challenge: preparing content to keep publications going out while I'm away.

An obvious alternative is to close for vacation in August. But I enjoy the idea of letting the machine work while I'm on vacation and self-imposing a deadline to finish existing drafts.

Here's what I want to ship in August.

• A podcast episode
• Five sketches and mini-essays
• Twenty-six blog posts
• Five videos

Frank is an architect, teacher, writer, and avid sketcher who always has a sketchbook with him.

He writes to find out what he’s thinking, and draws to understand what he’s looking at and ensure he doesn’t forget it.

We talked about writing, drawing, life, and how digital technologies make the world completely placeless. "It’s too late to stop [the internet], but what we can do as architects and artists and writers is give people a sense of place where they are."

Frank believes we can make places that have something physical and concrete grounding us in an otherwise unlimited digital world.

Today, I’m celebrating my publication’s third anniversary with 157 weekly sketches and stories published over 1099 days.²

Frank’s Native Places blog was one of my greatest inspirations to get started with this project. The formula is simple: pair a sketch with a mini-essay, share it online, and repeat.

I’m still figuring it out. But I enjoy every bit of it and will continue writing, drawing, and publishing for years to come. (I encourage you to discover the power of writing: start with one word per day.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, comments, and suggestions and invite you to write a comment, reply, send me a voice note, or send me a private message.

Thank you, as always, for pushing me to keep going.

Happy newsletterversary.

For whenever I write a good story. I think when I spot sketches I particularly like.

Sometimes I write a story, then draw or search among existing drawings; others, stories are inspired by existing sketches.¹

Drawing daily and publishing weekly lets me keep six drawings per week for future publications. Scanning sketchbooks in advance makes editing and uploading my drawings a breeze.

It's all about reducing friction.

I hear Frank in my mind. If it's not fun, you shouldn't do it.

I ponder.

Yet here I am, squeezing myself and enjoying a late writing session.

Some days I'm prolific, others I drown in a glass of water¹.

But I always capture ideas and doodles—memories, facts, and details that grab my attention—that I want to remember and may write about in the future.

The process is a joy.

Flipping through the pages of my sketchbooks and journals is priceless.

Work. Leisure. Stress. Joy.

Weeks go by and you feel at the very same place you started, which may be true if you didn't get any work done. But you may feel the same way even if you worked—you simply need a way to check on your progress.

Since then, we’ve seen how the massive adoption of online communication tools—instant messages, email, social media, phone calls, video meetings—has homogenized how we interact with each other, a phenomenon accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic that also made Skype lose a great part of its market share to Zoom¹².

For the past two years, in-person wasn’t an option, so the talks, podcast interviews, and meetings that would have otherwise been in person happened in front of a screen.

Even the moments meant to relax and disconnect became yet another call.

As a side note, today's sketch features a RODE Wireless GO II microphone, which we used for the first time to transmit audio from a lavalier mic to a laptop capturing video and audio into OBS Studio². This way the 4K video from my Sony α6500 would be encoded with the audio feed of different speakers perfectly in sync, reducing the post-processing required to edit the recordings after the event.

It was great to meet friends and colleagues I've been working with through a screen for the past two years, especially people from the Spacemaker team who work out of Boston and Oslo. I loved presenting in person to share my team's most recent project and learning about the work of other Autodesk teams.

Even though the gist of the conference are these talks, the most important moments were the breaks—breakfast, lunch, and evening events—not for the food quality but because we got to mingle and gossip. In those moments we restored a bit of our social capital¹.

At the end of January 2020, right before the COVID outbreak started, I walked around the same Charles de Gaulle airport terminal I boarded today's plane, spotting the first surgical face masks I had ever seen worn in public due to coronavirus²; two or three people, amongst the early adopters that would be dubbed paranoid by some, were already taking measures to protect themselves and others from what was to come. Nobody knew what was going on. Sanjay sat next to me on our way to Toronto, wearing a surgical mask out of precaution. But, as far as I recall, nobody else on the plane wore face masks. Cases worldwide started to arise—two at that time in Toronto—and pharmacies went out of masks.

Today's image of Charles de Gaulle's airport was radically different. While wearing face masks in closed public spaces has been mandatory, the requirement was recently lifted in some European countries. Yet the airport featured dozens of mask types, the most common being light blue surgical masks. Some travelers and airport workers opted for no mask, others for wearing it, and the third category of people wore it without covering their noses. I'm sitting on aisle 42D wearing a surgical mask³, and while it's still mandatory to wear masks on the plane, it's a soft measure.

Life in Málaga, Spain, is slowly transitioning back to normality, a new normal with social engagements that let us momentarily forget about the pandemic. Some still opt for wearing masks outside, even when walking entirely on their own. I can't avoid feeling a sense of risk when around my loved ones, especially the elderly.

Now we're immersed in a new global crisis—Ukraine's invasion—and news of coronavirus outbreaks in China and other counties make it to the local news every now and then. Will those strains spread?

The plane jiggles, and the crew announces an area of strong turbulence. I realize this trip will be my first in-person public speaking engagement in years⁴ and a chance to meet people I work with for the first time without staring at a webcam to emulate eye contact. The virtual-only approach we've had for the past two years has been challenging and presented new opportunities. At a company level, travel was restricted, and everyone had to transition to working from home. I got into live streaming and figured out how to produce high-quality remote recordings and tutorials, both for the podcast and my machine intelligence video series, in a home recording studio. The virtual ways are here to stay, but I look forward to interviewing podcast guests in person to regain the connection that Zoom conversations lack. When you close Zoom, you're back to your life or your next call, but in-person gatherings often lead to a meal or walk together and unstructured chit-chat—something that can feel like unnecessary busyness via Zoom.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, suggests that effective remote collaboration relies in part on social capital, which, as reads a New Yorker piece titled How the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever?, "[accumulates] by working in the presence of others, and [depletes] during virtual interactions⁵." We need to work and collaborate in-person to build social capital, but this isn't a possibility in specific remote roles. How does remote-only affect our wellbeing, our ability to socialize, and our work?

As we near our destination, the crew gives us a little red bag that reads Bon appétit with items that look like breakfast and include, among other things, two warm pieces of cheese bread, a muffin a la myrtille, a pain viennois, and a bag of cherry tomatoes. I've been typing this essay on my phone for the past two hours, and I don't remember the last time I spent nine hours in a row off-the-grid, on airplane mode. Ouch! A cabin crew member hits my leg with a rolling metal container.

I hope you enjoyed this longer story format; let me know what you think.

I'm grateful for having the opportunity to work remotely, travel for work, dedicate time to my passion projects, and be with the people I love.

I'm ready for mindful, sporadic work travel and excited to meet you in person soon.

Waiting in line to check-in at the hotel, I overhear employees greet each other: It's nice to see you, in person.

On another note, a new podcast on my Habits & Passion Projects¹ is out and a few short posts are up on the blog. Let me know what you think!

• What I'm reading in April 2022
• Favorite quotes from Andrew Witt's interview
• Anything you share with us
• To learn something better
• Mindless tracking

You can see all posts in the archive.

Our attention drives the global economy. (Not your attention, individually, but the group's attention.)

The most-watched, bought, liked, shared, and consumed—what the world pays attention to—thrives.

Attention makes the price of Bitcoin go up and down, companies succeed or go bankrupt, and people buy the latest gadget.

Always connected, marketing and dogmatism drive us. You may want something else tomorrow if you continue to listen to the marketing copy—a potential life change or acquisition; a shortcut to happiness; a mirage; the illusion of a better life.

Within the attention economy, it's more complicated than ever to opt-out of these attention-calling alerts and ads that steer us to consume, one nudge at a time.

I know from experience that having multiple ideas cooking at the same time yields good results—your projects feed on what you do in and outside work—but it also adds stress to your plate as your creative debt grows.

A great strategy is to separate the work of refining and finishing existing ideas from idea-generating sessions. This way, we make sure to continue paying our debt.

Last week, I asked you which essay you'd like to read—The Missing Black Coasters sparked certain curiosity. (Big thanks to those of you who replied back. You can still vote.)

The following are the titles of a few of my writing drafts.

You have to tell me which one I should work on next.

• Should you give in to your brain's ideas or focus on deep work?
• Effortless creation, complicated sharing
• Unitaskers: Digital versus handwriting
• The benefits of tracking your progress
• In search of a publication strategy
• The missing black coasters
• What's a digital garden?
• Nulla die sine linea
• You stopped working
• Unitaskers: iPhone
• On drinking water
• What's StyleGAN?
• The IKEA effect
• The black box
• The Superhost

Which one calls your attention?

Which one would you like to read?

If you're getting the newsletter, you can reply to this email.

Otherwise, you can message me.

As consumers, we pay little attention to how things are made, their inner workings, or the effort behind them—all we care about is how what we consume impacts us.

As creators, we obsess about how things are made and forget about their impact on the reader, the listener—and we should care about how what we make changes the way consumers understand the world.

Nobody cares how much time you put into writing an essay. All they care about is how its words transform them.

In January 2016, Eich raised $2.5 million from angel investors as CEO of Brave Software,³ the company behind a revolutionary web browser named Brave built around the concept of privacy and attention which has its own cryptocurrency—the BAT or Basic Attention Token.⁴

According to their white paper,⁵ "[Brave Software proposed] the BAT as a token of exchange in a secure, anonymous, opt-in advertising system based in the browser and the mobile app webview."

You make BAT by browsing the internet with Brave, which shields you from ad tracking but exposes you to selected ads in exchange for tokens, which you can trade for digital or fiat currencies.

The BAT follows the ERC-20 token standard and is implemented in the Ethereum blockchain. As of October 4, 2021, each Basic Attention Token (1 BAT) was worth seventy cents of a dollar ($0.7032) and is now down to sixty-three.

In the BAT ad ecosystem, "users earn for their attention, creators get paid for making great content, and advertisers get a better return," and Brave has more than fifty million monthly active users.³

In short, part of the advertising money goes to you in exchange for your attention as you browse the internet and get exposed to curated ads—all of that without compromising your privacy and being tracked, one of the key pillars on which ad-selling companies such as Google and Meta rely on to make a profit.

Even though I continue browsing the internet with Google Chrome and AdBlock, rewarding ad consumers for their attention is an attractive model that could be implemented in other mediums.

Thanks to Jose Mathias for his suggestions for this essay.

Months after my visit to Tanja, I read Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It wasn't until then that I fully understood what Tanja meant when talking about the myth of a better life. "One thing that you understand from the book is that we were the smartest, the happiest, and the healthiest when we were hunter-gatherers." Tanja pointed out. "We have never been busier. We have never been more stressed. We have never had less time to do the things that interest us in life aside from work. And that is kind of sad."

You could argue that hunter-gatherers were also stressed out, but probably for more fundamental reasons, such as hiding behind the bushes until the lions were done eating to break leftover bones with a stone to extract the marrow inside.¹ In our developed world, we often worry about meaningless concerns.

As Harari points out, it seems we lost more than we gained when we became sedentary. The agricultural revolution was an illusion. We traded health for comfort. We stopped moving from place to place and settled to cultivate crops—wheat, corn, potatoes—and gave up a diet of varied foods. In Harari's words, "We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word 'domesticate' comes from the Latin Domus, which means 'house.' Who's the one living in the house? Not the wheat. It's the Sapiens." Yet whether settling was a decision we made in search of comfort or a by-product of tribes needing to settle for long periods to build mythological totems or other artifacts is unclear.

The sedentary lifestyle didn't fulfill its promise to provide food slack and eradicate our food search. It led to the never-ending expansion of crop fields and the appearance of infectious diseases in larger—but unhealthier and malnourished—populations. "This is the essence of the agricultural revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions," says Harari.

What we thought was the end of our search for nutrients led to disparate population growth. Women could give birth once a year, and tribes that could barely feed one hundred individuals were now breeding and feeding thousands.

Contrary to the platonic idea of living on a farm, working in the field is a tough endeavor requiring full-time commitment and painful physical effort. "The new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life." ²

Wheat was, once more, the myth of a better life. And things have barely changed.

If there's something I'd like you to interiorize from this piece is that there's always some version of this myth of a better life—a new house, a job change, a relocation—but it's simply that, a myth. Certain life changes do improve our wellbeing substantially. Still, we should focus on doing the things we want to do now, under our current situation, and focus on finding meaning in everything we do. That, in turn, is a path to happiness.

Part 1: There is never a later

This gift is meant to protect the cable's end that plugs into my iPhone from tearing apart, and I guess it's helped the cable last longer. But I know from experience the cable will end up breaking one way or another.

Even when it's meant to protect the cable's end, the chameleon moves around freely as I detach it from the tip to let the phone lay flat on the table while charging.

My tiny friend acts more as a cable identifier rather than as a protector—it's easy to spot my cable from afar.

I enjoy sketching this little buddy, often lying around my desk.

You can order it—and many other animals, including hedgehogs, sharks, whales, pigs, and ducks, among many others—at online stores such as Amazon or AliExpress. The keywords are animal bite cable, and the range of varieties of bite cable protectors tells us something about these cables: they seem to be engineered to break.

Once you embrace such a frequent habit, there will be times in which you don't enjoy it as much as you thought. Saying to yourself, Let's ship it and move on to the next one is a way to keep going.

Unless you can invest quality time every single day in your habit—writing, in the case of daily blogging—you'll have to get by with shorter pieces than you'd like and low(er) quality posts than you'd get if you had all the time in the world. If you're human, it's likely to find days in which you won't have the right mindset, energies, or time. Shipping anything is the goal in those cases. But it doesn't need to be.

To avoid the feeling of cheating when you're not at one hundred percent, you can maintain a queue of ideas and finished drafts ready to be published when you're away on vacation, sick in bed, or with too much on your plate. (If your habit is writing daily, not publishing, there's nowhere to hide. You either write or not. But you can still cheat by writing some nonsense.)

The gist is to embrace the identity of a craftsman who shows up daily. In the case of writing, that craft is discovering what you think, pondering your thoughts, and entertaining and inspiring others to learn, reflect, and change in positive ways.

Remember that it doesn't need to be writing and that each commitment adds up to the potential stress you will accrue when you're unable to fulfill your promise. But it's worth it.

What's your commitment?

From a productivity standpoint, getting lost on the tools adds friction to your process.

It's an entertaining part of the journey that needs to be enjoyed.

As long as it doesn't distract you from the actual goal—shipping—the dedication to ever-improve how you do what you do can make a difference.

In Seth Godin's words, "effort isn't the point, impact is."

You can tweak them, little by little, every now and then.

I have a queue—a series of writing drafts and ideas—that I revisit every now and then in search of writing inspiration. These are the essays I need to get out the door first. But ideas often stagnate and it’s easier to start new ones from scratch.

Pair them with a sketch, translate, and on to the next one.

After more than two years of weekly Tuesday posts—translated and illustrated—publishing in English only felt frictionless.

I don't want to commit to this habit just yet, but I'm giving it a try.

I wrote about the first live of 2022 and my new analog timer, acting soon, NFTs and speculation, Solana, producing tutorials live, the YouTube algorithm, my podcast conversations with Jordan Gray, a recording on Web3, the blockchain, and anonymity, and deploying apps on DigitalOcean.

It's crazy how much more I can publish by sticking to English and no image.

I've been experimenting with algorithmic passwords and pass-phrases over the past years. In short, they are passwords that you can easily compute in your mind before you log into a site to avoid the lazy impulse of reusing the very same password on different websites and apps.

A dummy example could be grabbing the number of vowels in the app name (say, Google), which has three vowels, raising it to the power of two (3^2 = 9), adding the number of letters in the word (6 for Google), adding a text prefix (say, Vowels), then appending the third letter of the app name, uppercased, at the end (for Google, it'd be the letter O). The resulting password would be Vowels15O for google.com.

Here's how other computed passwords would look like.

Instagram  Vowels18S
Facebook   Vowels24C
Meta       Vowels8T
Twitter    Vowels11I

This would make your passwords safer by the simple fact that a malicious program stealing your key-phrase won't be able to re-use your email or username and log in anywhere. A human would have to reverse engineer the logic behind how these keys were computed, which wouldn't take too long in this case, as the rules we've used are extremely simple. So please don't use this rule! Make your own, and think that someone shouldn't be able to reverse-engineer your password-making rules by simply looking at it. What we can all agree is that any algorithmic rule yields more secure passwords than a single, reusable password. Also, note that the longer your passwords are, the safer they are against systems that can spend hours or days trying different combinations out.

You fool yourself into thinking you can do more than you're capable of doing.

Work; Fix this and that; Share a post; Sketch; Catch up with (too many) people; Edit another episode; Write.

There's just not enough time for it all.

What's worse is that the list was meant to off-load your mind, and it's now stressing you out, defying its own purpose.

Sooner or later, you’ll have to stop fooling yourself.

You can’t do everything.

Here are the ten with the most views (in descending order).

1. A frugal practice: Use cash
2. The new sketchbook
3. Each sketch is different
4. A tiny notepad as checklist
5. What do architecture and software engineering have in common?
6. A world without email
7. The urban sketching habit
8. White Nights watercolors
9. Freediving: Otovent
10. Freediving: How to prevent your diving mask from fogging up

There is never a later, Batteries not included, and The diving reflex are among my favorites.

What stories did you enjoy the most?

At the end of 2020, I said goodbye to the pandemic and recorded my impressions of what I thought would be the end of that phase—I wasn’t expecting COVID to be around us one year later.

We've had to comply with full lockdowns, limited gatherings, and ever-changing curfews. We've reduced our travels and kept our trips as local as they can be. Christmas hasn't been our traditional holiday—a sense of fear and anxiety accompanies our gatherings with friends and family—and local restrictions forced many to spend salient dates apart from each other.

Ever since some of us got vaccinated and obtained a COVID certificate and fought multiple coronavirus variants. Today, omicron is on the news, spreading faster but killing less, especially amongst those who got their shots.

This is my last publication of the year, and I wanted to, once again, shift my focus from the bad to the positive and highlight some of the good things I take from 2021.

• I live streamed (and showed up for more than 40 weeks)
• I recorded podcasts (and published 16 episodes)
• I wrote and sketched daily (and published 52 stories)
• I started freediving¹
• I built a recording studio for podcasting and streaming²
• We recorded the first full video interview of Getting Simple³
• We started the Bytes podcast series

At the turn of 2019, I published Twelve Grapes—a short reflection on temporal landmarks and New Year's resolutions. For me, 2021 was a year to stop overdoing things and ship faster; to reduce creative friction by automating workflows where possible and delegating work to other creatives.

If you’re thinking of starting a blog or a personal journal, read One Word per Day. I agree with Seth Godin—Everyone should have a blog and should write daily, in public. It’s free, and it’s a great way to establish your tone before anyone cares about your writing.

As a matter of fact, one of my goals to remove friction from my creative writing process is to begin publishing on Substack, in English only and without a required illustration. The simple fact of having to translate a piece of text and couple it with a drawing or photo makes my process more complex than it needs to be.

There are lots more that I’d like to share with you. But I’ll leave that for future posts. If there’s anything you’ve learned or enjoyed from my sketches and stories of 2021, I’d love for you to send me a note. Feel free to reply to this email if you’re getting the newsletter, tweet at me @nonoesp, message me on Instagram, add a comment to this publication, or through this contact form.

Thanks!

Thanks so much for being there.

Goodbye, 2021.

Happy New Year!

These drafts not only develop into essays and text publications but podcast episodes. The Black Box and NFTs & Digital Art, essays I'm currently working on, turned into Bytes episodes (13 and 30 minutes, respectively); Stories Are the Answer developed into a 10-minute experiment; Should you give in to your brain's ideas or focus on deep work? is in the making, as are Unitaskers: Digital versus Hand Writing, In Search of a Publication Strategy, You Stopped Working, The Myth of a Better Life, and many, many other stories.

You're reading sketch number 129, which means this project has been going for 903 days. (Since July 2, 2019.)

The goal is to develop my writing and my ideas, to find out what I think, capture what I learn, and share it with you, in an archive we can navigate anytime in the future.

The process is messy. But it's exactly that journey I'm here to enjoy.

Here are a few tips I try to live by to run away from the beginner feeling.

Make periodicity your friend.

Engage in your craft daily.

(If you can't, try to show up on a weekly or biweekly basis.)

But again, make periodicity your friend.

Otherwise, you'll repeatedly feel like a beginner.

You'll find yourself getting back at your practice, over and over again.

Show up daily instead to minimize that friction.

Anthony Pompliano says denominating your assets in bitcoin is better than doing it in US dollars, as the inflation rate of the cryptocurrency is much lower than the majority of currencies commonly used to denominate assets. I haven't yet dived deeply into the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and smart contracts.

I enjoyed watching Craig Mod's bookmaking video in Japan, which shows the craftspeople involved in the production process of his third edition of Kissa by Kissa.

I'm working on a new interview with an old friend—Jordan Gray—on friction and creativity.

I'm building a sound studio to record my podcasts and live streams, and I'll hopefully be commenting on the results soon; it involves a green chroma, acoustic panels, and recording gear.

Last but not least, I'm going to start publishing on Substack soon. You can subscribe here.

See you next week!

We went away with friends to the countryside of Córdoba to disconnect over the weekend; walks, barbecue, and fireplace. I often wonder how we'd disconnect from work if there were no weekends, and constantly remind myself of a passage from Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism, which says the key to thriving in our high-tech world is to spend much less time using technology. Even though I try, I haven't found the right way to do it.

I learned about this idea from James Clear's 2018 book Atomic Habits. "The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don't even have the option to act."

Instead of working against friction, we engineer ways to produce more of it.

In his book, Clear provides a practical example. "The brilliance of the cash register was that it automated ethical behavior by making stealing practically impossible. Rather than trying to change the employees, it made the preferred behavior automatic."

Another example is to avoid distractions by logging out from email, social media, and services that steal your time. Having to log back in each time you visit them makes the experience less enjoyable and serves as a wall to potential distractions.

By making what you want to avoid harder, friction helps break bad habits.

The first step to avoid friction is to say no to the unnecessary.

Once we've filtered out work what isn't required, we categorize the remaining tasks into core or delegable.

Core work is crucial for you to do. Delegable work can be automated or delegated and carried out, without your intervention, by a machine or human, potentially faster and better than yourself.

The second step to avoid friction is to delegate as much as you can without sacrificing the quality of your work, running away from perfection, and focusing on what's essential for you to work on.

Friction is on what doesn't need to be done and what could be done by someone else.

A dummy notification drags you out of the meeting.

Dismiss.

You look back at your computer screen.

But a tiny distraction was enough to lose track of the conversation.

Could you repeat the question?

On the podcast.

I released a new episode with Aziz Barbar on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and digital art. You can listen here.

I know very little about the fast-moving world of digital currencies and the new age of digital art, and these byte-sized episodes are an attempt for us to catch up with the latest developments. I intend to publish essays on the topic to share my findings.

While everyone's wondering whether the representation of ownership of digital creations with tokens is a bubble, events such as the 69-million dollar sale of Mike Winkelmann's body of work—@beeple_crap—in an auction by Christie's significantly contribute to the validation of this piece of technology.

A future episode with Aziz will discuss the role of black-box algorithms in our culture.

On the live stream.

Last week, I hosted two live events on YouTube to record a two-part podcast celebrating One Year of Live Streams, to be released soon. The first part features audience questions regarding the evolution of the live stream after a year of weekly streams. The second is a follow-up conversation with Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo on our experience coding live.

Elsewhere.

Lastly, Jose Luis invited Andrew Heumann to his Introduction to Computational Design class (GSD-6638) at the Harvard GSD to give a guest lecture on Architectural Automation & Augmentation. You can watch here.

I produce a lot of material. Yet, I feel the need to create with more structure, plan, define a clear agenda, establish publishing protocols, develop editing and post-processing workflows, collaborate with other professionals, and put more time into editorial content creation.

I need to filter, select, write, research, and have a clear idea about what I want to talk about, teach, discuss, and the questions I want to cover—to fight the resistance, stop complaining and hiding behind the process, and focus on the content.

That—and not new gadgets—is what will make my content more valuable, more listened to, watched, read, and, most importantly, beneficial to my audience. In turn, people may come back for more and get something meaningful.

I want to share what's on my mind, learn, and teach my learnings through a consistent message and a constant publication flow. After all, that's the type of content I like to consume.

With so many items, Kanban boards¹ are hard to navigate² and I forget to check to-do apps, and things end up slipping by my workday.

My latest attempt is a simple running list in a tiny notebook on the table.

I write down the tasks I want to complete today (maybe tomorrow) and strike through individual action items as I do them. When I finish the majority of to-dos in the list, I scrap the page and transfer the remaining to-dos to the next page.

At the moment, I'm using a 10-by-9-centimeter notepad in the shape of a chocolate bar, and want to try MUJI's tick box tape, which turns any sheet into a checklist.

How do you track your to-dos?

My commitment is to publish a sketch and story every Tuesday, both in English and Spanish. And it isn't easy. I find joy when I schedule my weekly publications in advance, and I often fantasize that I'll put the hours needed to prepare posts weeks, maybe months, ahead of time. But that rarely happens. I was close to doing that for August, looking to unplug from the screen during my vacation. Yet, I ended having to do some writing, translating, and Photoshoping amongst the hot days of Summer.

Here's a personal note I wrote on the morning of July 7, 2021.

Writing a good newsletter post with 466 words […] makes me feel good. It's Monday morning, and my post (in English and Spanish) is scheduled for tomorrow. It's 9:40 AM, and I need to keep going, making progress in other areas not to be caught empty-handed later on my day.

I realize how great it feels to finish to-dos early in the day, going on with your day without pressure. It's then when I think, I wish I did this more often! But, no matter how much structure I try to introduce into my daily routine, every day is different.

As you can see, I lied—I had the first line of this essay as a backup post in case I had to miss a publication, but it ended up sparking a reflection that I decided to share with you today.

I adhere to a set of informal rules to determine why, how, and when I write or sketch. I do it daily to think, learn, teach, remember, and portray and share what I experience. And even though I experiment with different formats and gadgets now and then, I try to stick to the same typing and drawing medium to pay attention to the content I'm making, not the tools.

Defining what we do and our processes let us clarify why and how we do them. Sharing that reasoning with others allows them to understand your craft and practice.

It's fun to read what was on your mind before, say, meeting a person for the first time, your first day at work, or recording your first podcast.

The only moment to accurately capture how we thought is now, as the event itself will distort your thinking.

Revisiting these kinds of writing, I often ask myself, How on earth could I think this way?

Diving suit, fins, and belt on, I jumped from the dingy to dive in search of the flat rocks, a kilometer-long area of stones nearby my family's Summer house. The water was foggy, and I could barely see anything. At the sea bottom: sand. The flat rocks were nowhere to be found. As I came back up to breathe, Bea shouted, A dolphin! Get on the boat! I went up after what would be my first (and last) dive of the day. Dad drove the boat slowly, following a pair of dolphins that swam away parallel to the coast. For an hour, we swam with around eight dolphins traveling in couples that, to the eye, appeared to be about two to three meters long. They'd frequently go up for air, as we do when freediving—only that they hold their breath for up to ten minutes¹ and navigate at around ten to twenty kilometers per hour².

It was the first time we've seen dolphins in the area in thirty years.

What's excellent news is that, a week later, we found and geo-located the flat rocks with crystal clear water—a bank of hundreds of sardines, a few giant jellyfish, and lots of anemones attached to the flat rocks.

When one bitcoin was worth $1,000 (around March 2017), you could divide a dollar into 100,000 units—a satoshi was worth 0.00001 dollars. Each cent was divisible into 1,000 units. But what about today?

As I wrote these lines, on May 13, 2021, the price of Bitcoin displayed on Google was $48,617.50² (BTC to USD)—a satoshi was worth 0.000486175 dollars. That's 48.61x what it was worth back in 2017, making each cent divisible into 20 units (instead of 1,000). The higher Bitcoin's price, the less divisible its dollar equivalent is. If Bitcoin rose to $1,000,000, a satoshi would be worth a cent. Does it make sense to have a coin valued so high compared to fiat currencies such as the euro or the dollar?

In the digital world, divisibility makes it possible to offer services for a fraction of a cent—a mechanism present in online games that let you convert money into digital tokens. Having this feature in a currency by default would be advantageous for services not to have to implement this feature independently. But this divisibility depends on Bitcoin's price compared to fiat currencies.

Maybe Satoshi Nakamoto³ expected satoshis' price to parity with the cent, or perhaps he never imagined the price could get so high, which would allow for the exchange of satoshis as small fractions of Bitcoin and other currencies.

Nobody knows whether Bitcoin will stand the test of time or what its future value will be. What we know is that cryptocurrencies are here to stay.

I long for the days in which we could fly. Catch a plane and meet a friend in a remote world location in a matter of hours. One such event for me was a two-week trip to San Francisco back in October 2019. I traveled for work and managed to connect with friends over the weekend.

Even though we had been talking online for more than a year, this was the first time I met Tatjana Dzambazova, Tanja, in person. After going for ramen with two of her friends on Friday night, we drove to her wonderful place in Mill Valley, California, to spend the weekend. (I keep good memories of the long wooden stairs and the unsolicited raccoon visits.)

At her neighbors' house, we recorded an insightful interview on The Art of Asking The Right Questions—the same weekend I recorded with Adam Menges. I remember boarding the ferry that connects San Francisco and Sausalito, carrying my podcast gear in a carry-on suitcase.

Tanja had started taking notes a few days before my arrival in preparation for our conversation. She had a message to tell, and this usually makes for the best interviews. She's a curious and creative person that puts love in everything she does, a trait shared by most of my interviewees. Her main message was to avoid wasting talent working to solve the wrong problems and take care of our planet.

On Saturday, she came into the house as I sketched a panther sculpture sitting at her desk. "I'm so jealous. I keep postponing life. I keep leaving things for later and never get around doing them," Tanja said. But I don't think that's necessarily true (as you can confirm browsing through her Instagram feed). Tanja doesn't let go of a chance to go outdoors hiking, kayaking, paddle surfing, or mushrooming. I think what she meant was that she wants to do more things she can find time for.

When I first asked her to record an interview, she thought she was the wrong person because she hadn't found a way of doing less. "I'm intellectually aware of the trip, but I haven't found a way to do it better. I do take time for things that I like. I study my languages, read a lot, my boyfriend, and always try to solve new problems, learn structures, physics, or something together. But I'm just adding to my stuff and not disconnecting."

I asked Tanja for ways in which she deliberately tried to fight stress and slow down. "In America, we live for working [whereas] Europeans still manage to work for a living." I guess there's a bit of everything in both places. Your lifestyle heavily depends on the culture at your workplace and your individual mindset. "I feel like I'm postponing life because I would like to do so many other things."

"I will say, 'Later, later. After this. After this is over. After this project is over.' And there's never a later," Tanja followed. "If you don't do it now, you might never do it. So I have the discipline of asking myself this question every day. But I don't have an answer."

Part 2: The myth of a better life

Shapeshifting throughout your day makes it hard to define yourself with a one-liner.

While I often envy the full-time writer, educator, or coder, I choose to engage in different areas of expertise to escape monotony.

Yet when pros specialize, their discipline also unfolds into subcategories that bring nuances into their craft. (Artists experiment with painting techniques; scientists with research methods; machine-learnists with algorithms.) If you like what you do, it's easy to run away from boredom and make your daily work feel anew.

As a generalist, not a specialist, I don't dive as deep as others in the subjects I work on, but I ensure I enjoy most of what I do every day, slowly specializing in multiple areas.

There's something special about opening a new product, putting its batteries in place, and using it for the first time. I guess that's one of the keys to capitalism and consumerism—to get customers hooked into the habit of buying and using something for the first time. Like a kid with her red car, using a shiny new iPhone is a thrill. And, to be honest, I felt this thrill while unboxing my new M1 MacBook Pro. Meanwhile, I still carry my first smartphone ever, a six-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 6 that works but doesn't support the latest operating system and many of the latest apps—that's the side of me that believes in the power of scarcity.

More specifically, one of the thrills for us—creatives, software engineers, tinkerers—when setting up a new computer is to install our favorite tools and configurations; to customize the machine. Yet this initial setup can become a dread if you do it often enough; instead of play, it becomes an unwanted obligation.

By default, Unix-like operating systems¹ hide files whose name starts with a dot from ordinary users (say, when listing the contents of a directory or viewing a folder). These files, commonly called 'dot files' or 'dotfiles,' tend to contain plain-text configurations for different aspects of the system or contain folders with a set of configuration files inside. This behavior of hidden files (as many other abstractions) is embedded in the operating system to accommodate different levels of expertise of its users. If you're a pro-user, a software engineer, or a systems administrator, you can opt-in to view these hidden files to view and edit these configurations 'by hand.' But if you're a beginner, you probably don't want to be overwhelmed by a set of files you can barely make sense of.

The operating system of Mac computers—macOS—lets you toggle between displaying hidden files or not with the CMD+SHIFT+. shortcut. (That is, 'command-shift-dot.') When I do this on my machine, I see several dotfiles in my user directory, mostly related to programming tools I have installed and 'dot folders' that hold the configuration of desktop apps, such as Dropbox.

Programmers are lazy. In essence, we minimize the human effort involved in everyday tasks and the friction of manual and tedious repetitive processes. In search of avoiding long hours of configuration to replicate their system setup on a new machine, power users and software developers devise programs to automate this process. In turn, the source of satisfaction—the thrill—becomes the act of putting a workflow in place to automate the system configuration precisely as you like it by running a few commands.

Back to dotfiles.

If this is the first time you hear about dotfiles and system configuration automation, the size of the community behind these efforts would surprise you. I adapted a set of configuration scripts open-sourced by Zach Holman on GitHub. Still, with a lot of work to do, I can now wipe a computer or buy a new one and have many of my systems configured automagically.

Let me share with you a few of those automations.

A Brewfile lists dozens of macOS command-line and desktop apps—such as Dropbox, Spotify, Google Chrome, Discord, or Zoom—that get installed by running a single command; the zsh folder configures my Terminal with shortcuts to commands and autocompletion helpers. A bash script inside of the macOS folder configures a set of System Preferences—say, the mouse tracking speed and whether the Dock and status bar hide automatically—and the Preferences of other apps (such as iA Writer or Calendar).

Automation is an endless game that can become a trap in itself—you may end up spending more time automating a task than the time it would take you to complete it manually, and you won't ever run out of things to automate. Yet, you may automate processes for the thrill of having the machine take care of tedious processes for you thanks to custom-made workflows. You can sit back, relax, adjust a few parameters, and go on with your day.

Today, I celebrate the second year of this publication with 104 weekly sketches and stories published over 730 days.¹

I'm still trying to figure out how to become a good newsletterer. Your replies keep providing me with valuable hints on what 'touches' readers the most. If you've been following long enough, you may have realized I write about ever-changing topics, yet I come back to some often every once in a while. I do my best to allow myself to experiment with different styles and formats.

My main goal with this newsletter is for us to learn about things we didn't know and interiorize well-known concepts that slip our day-to-day but should be more present.

Sharing our worldviews and stories makes us more human and understand what goes on in our minds. I'd encourage you to discover the power of writing: start with one word per day.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, comments, and suggestions and invite you to write a comment, reply, send me a voice note, or send me a private message.

THANK YOU for pushing me to keep going.

Happy newsletterversary.

An exciting part of diving is that, as humans, we benefit from the so-called mammalian diving reflex, "a set of physiological responses to immersion […] that optimizes respiration by preferably distributing oxygen stores to the heart and brain, enabling submersion for an extended time."¹ "The diving reflex is triggered specifically by chilling and wetting the nostrils and face while breath-holding."¹

The simple act of putting your face in a bucket full of water activates the diving reflex—optimizing the inner workings of your body—causing bradycardia, apnea, and increased peripheral vascular resistance.² Bradycardia (the opposite of tachycardia) brings the heart rate down, decreasing the work of the heart and limiting unnecessary oxygen usage, allowing us to stay underwater longer.² "Increased peripheral resistance is thought to redistribute blood to the vital organs while limiting oxygen consumption by non-essential muscle groups."¹

The diving reflex exhibits strongly in aquatic mammals (think of seals, otters, dolphins, and muskrats), and as a lesser response in us, adult humans, babies up to six months old, and diving birds (such as ducks and penguins).¹

While looking for whether this reflex manifested while showering, I came across Your body's amazing reaction to water, a 2014 publication by James Nestor on TED Ideas. "Peripheral vasoconstriction explains how [a human] could dive to below thirty meters without suffering the lung-crushing effects that Boyle's law had predicted."³ As it turns out, equivalent pressures on land would harm our body, but not in water. And our amphibious reflexes become stronger the deeper we dive.³

We experience this phenomenon in the shower. The human body goes into a meditative state, with lower heart rates and blood pressure than the rest of your day. With more resources allocated to our brain and external inputs limited, we stay with our thoughts in an elevated mental state. Maybe, the diving reflex is one of the keys to why ideas often spark in the shower.

I brought a minimal recording setup inside my backpack to Tenerife—two Shure SM58 microphones and a Zoom H6 recorder—just in case I found a chance to record material for the podcast.

Before parting ways at the boarding gate, Jose Luis and I captured our first impressions after a week of freediving classes; what we learned, what we loved, and things we thought we knew but didn't.

We talked about the mindfulness of breath-hold diving and being deep underwater, best practices, equipment and techniques, equalizing your middle ear pressure, scuba versus freediving, and how recommendation systems brought us there.

You can Listen to our Getting Simple episode on Freediving.

Make it a hundred words and you'll get 36,500 words in a year. (That's around half the words in the average non-fiction book.)

What about 1,000 words every day? That's 365,000 words.

Will your writing be worth reading? This is a harder question, but you'll surely be able to communicate your thoughts better.

Your readers are out there waiting for you—they just don't know it yet.

In 600 days of practice, I share how and why I write and sketch daily, and discuss the concepts of deliberate practice and atomic habits.

In Why should you write?, I talk about the benefits of writing "in public" every week.

In Are you writing enough?, I comment how generating more ideas makes you more original.

In my Writing habits podcast episode, I share the routines that help me write consistently and the software tools and gadgets that I use on a daily basis to journal, write essays, posts, and episodes, and review and edit my writing.

Here are my favorite quotes from Cris.

• "You don't care about the mathematical function that goes behind blurring [an image in Photoshop]. You just want the output of it—the creative output of moving a slider and having an effect applied to your video, your pixels, or content."
• "When you think about using algorithms to help you and assist you in the editing process, you need [to find] a metaphor or tool that would allow you to collaborate with those algorithms."
• "We need those new interfaces, metaphors, and systems. And that's all we're building, those next-generation systems to help people create video and content."
• "When you take that picture, no one is saying, 'Oh, the AI is biased' or 'The AI worked or didn't work' or 'It showed me new creative possibilities.' It just works."
• "[Artificial intelligence] is a tool as any other tool. And so, in general, I think all the art tools that we're making will eventually reach that point where you're not too concerned about the systems you're using. You are just using it as a tool. And if it provides you with good results to explore the creative direction, you're going to use it again."

You can Listen wherever you get your podcasts or Watch on YouTube.

Enjoy!

Printing my own 'zines' and reading them is a crucial part of my writing process—these are my journals. I start a new volume every seven thousand words and print them out for later review, and I'm up to sixty-three of these volumes.

Giving yourself time to re-read what you've written lets you view your writing from the lens of a reader; there are facts you forgot about and stylistic resources you don't remember using. Part of the writing is for me to keep, but many publications resurface snippets I wrote in the past.

Within this practice, I believe quantity, more than quality makes it easy for me to publish consistently. First, I dump my thoughts on writing; then, I act as a curator.

I wrote this post using a 95-word draft titled My Journaling Zines—which I wrote on May 10, 2021—from my Daily 62 volume.

This piece links to related posts. My journal and publications mull over the same topics throughout the years, slowly settling up my take on each of them and helping me clarify the why behind each of the things I do and showing where my opinions changed. I believe this to be the incredible power of writing.

In the afternoon, I cleaned up my surfboard, waxed it, installed a new leash, and went surfing for a bit.

I was ready for bed at 10:30 pm, so I sat to write and sketch to finish two of my "daily must four," set up an alarm clock on my iPhone 6 at 7:15 am, and went to bed at 11:20 pm.

The following morning, I jumped out of bed as the alarm clock rang; Blue sky, sunrise, and a refreshing breeze as I opened the window.

After a day of disconnection, I woke up with the energy and time to write before work.

I'm now back from Tenerife—back at the screen—and, as promised, I'd love to share with you the technique we've learned during our freediving course to stop your diving mask from fogging up.

It's common for diving masks to fog up, especially when they're brand new, and the three-step process below can help you prevent this from happening.

Snorkel or diving masks fog up when water vapor condenses due to a temperature difference between the inside and outside surfaces of the lens.¹ "The moisture that collects in the mask has to attach to something, which is typically the residue leftover from the manufacturing process that coats the lens, dir, and oils on the lens from normal use and simple microscopic imperfections on the lens."¹ This problem seems to have worsened as manufacturers build new masks with synthetic liquid silicone instead of natural rubber.²

As recommended by our instructor, we ordered the C4 Chanteclair "Cleaner" (green) and "Antifog" (blue) products.

The first step is to treat your mask with the "Absolute Cleaner," a greaseproof liquid, to remove the residue from the manufacturing process.³

• Spray the internal silicone of your mask and the internal and external sides of its lens (7/8 ml recommended)
• Rub the inner and outer surfaces with cloth or a toothbrush for four minutes
• Wait for ten minutes
• Rinse with cool water
• Repeat the entire process once again

This first step only needs to be done once you first buy your mask, and maybe when you haven't used your mask for several months.

The second step involves applying the "Extreme Antifog" to the inner side of the lens right before using the mask.³ (This Cressi Anti-Fog solution works as well.)

• Spray the interior of the lens (3/4 ml recommended)
• Wait for two minutes
• Rinse with cool water

The third step is two spit on the interior of the lens and spread your saliva with your fingers.

You're now ready to dive!

My mask lens didn't fog up once for the entire week.

We've been freediving for the past three days (yesterday morning at Tabaiba's "El Puerto"). I believe much of what we're learning will stick with me for the rest of my life.

Freediving is a highly technical sport. You can do it to explore the seabed, spearfish, or—as professional freedivers do—to go as deep as you can. (The depth world record is over 300 meters and the time world record over 24 minutes.)

Here are a few facts I've learned so far.

• You always need a buddy to look at you whenever you go down, and neither of you can go deeper than the other can (otherwise, you wouldn't be able to help each other).
• You wear a belt with lead weights (and long fins) to go down quickly. (I carry 4 kilos.)
• You have to equalize the pressure in your middle ear every meter you go down. Not when your ears hurt, but before. Every meter.
• Every muscle uses oxygen, so you have to relax your entire body and only use your legs to move (with your legs straight, not "cycling").
• There's an effective technique to prevent your goggles from fogging (which I'll share in a separate post).

For the first two days, I went 6.5-meters deep. Yesterday, I went around 18-meters deep.

I wonder what would happen if we were to learn as many technical details about other sports—think of running—as we're learning about freediving. I probably do many things wrong when running—say, how I move my legs, how I breathe, or how I stretch when I finish.

It's been an incredible experience so far, and we still have four more days to go. I like the breathing, concentration, and relaxation techniques required by this sport and its meditative aspects.

I hope to share more with you in the coming weeks.

Even though I don't quite understand the physiological mechanisms behind equalization¹, I bought the device recommended by Paco, our instructor.

Otovent was initially launched in 1993 to help people suffering from glue ear² and later repurposed to treat Barotitis (a painful condition some suffer while flying) and as a visual aid to equalizing for freedivers³.

How does the method work? As the instructions read, "the Otovent method provides the pressure required to open the Eustachian tube to help equalize the middle ear pressure." This process ventilates the middle ear, clears effusions, and relieves symptoms.⁴

The package contains five latex balloons—specially pressurized for this device—, a nosepiece, and a carry case. (Toy balloons can't be used for this method!)

Here are the basic usage steps, verbatim from the manual.

1. Connect the balloon to the flat end of the nose piece.
2. Hold the ball-shaped part of the nose piece firmly against your left nostril with your left hand. Compress your right nostril, using your right index finger.
3. Inhale deeply through your mouth, then close your mouth and inflate the balloon by blowing through your left nostril until the balloon is the size of a grapefruit.
4. Still with the inflated balloon tight to the left nostril, perform some swallowing manoeuvers.
5. Repeat the procedure through your right nostril. Some patients may experience discomfort in the ear or dizziness during inflation. This initial sensation will decrease during the next inflation and is an indication that the procedure is working correctly.

I did this exercise around eight times through each nostril for the first time—which is recommended daily for 2–3 weeks—and, as expected, I felt slightly dizzy. I guess this feeling may disappear after a few weeks of practice.

Thanks for reading—I hope to share more curiosities with you as I dive into the freediving world.

The slowness of my six-year-old iPhone 6 makes me more prone to typos.

If the message is clear and the conversation informal, there's no need to fix typos. Let alone when I'm writing notes to my future self. Better spend the time writing more.

When you are crafting a message for publication, you may want it to be concise and crystal clear. Your draft may need editing, re-work, and typo-fixing. But, as long as the message stays the same, typos don't need to be fixed by you.

Again, better use your time to write your next piece instead of obsessing about making your past writing pixel-perfect.

Text is more articulate, organized, and structured than speech. But the writing process isn't as clean. You shuffle words, sentences, and entire paragraphs around, deleting the chunks that don't add much and rewriting unclear parts. "Where do I stop? What should I add? Will they understand?" There's no correct answer.

The sketching process is similar. Strokes, shades, and color let you give more or less prominence to each part of a drawing. But the process is non-linear. You don't "plot" lines as a printer does but add details and darkness; it looks more like additive manufacturing processes, in which an extruder drops chunks of material from one side to the other.

We write (and sketch) to create memories and share our worldview and stories with others—with you.

I didn't plan to sketch a napkin thrice to make a point. It just happened because I wasn't happy with the first result. (They all look like popcorn!)

The finished artifact looks meticulously planned.

The process is messy.

We've recorded our next episode on StyleGAN—an algorithm developed by NVIDIA which can learn from images and synthesize fakes ones in the same style—and intend to release future conversations on NFTs and digital art, cryptocurrencies, machine intelligence, design and authorship, GPT-3, automation, creativity, and much more.

In his own words, co-host Aziz Barbar is an architect by training specialized in computational design, interested in the digital environment, automated construction techniques, building performance, and all things digital.

As with most of what I do, these pod series are an effort to learn and find the tactics, techniques, and digital tools that can help us live a more meaningful, creative, and simple life.

I hope you will join us on this journey.

Listen to the introductory episode of the Bytes series.

"For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation—[the third drive is] the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing—is essential for high levels of creativity," Pink says. When someone sets your goals, your challenge is to stay motivated. When you lead others, the challenge is to ensure they enjoy and feel part of the process without the stress of performing in a specific way to be rewarded.

Another curiosity I learned from Pink's research is Edward Deci's discovery of the Sawyer Effect—that depending on how rewards are used, they can turn play into work or work into play. Paradoxically, "When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity. […] [Artists] who pursued their painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognized as superior. […] It is those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eventually receive them."

Nono

Do you have any specific frugal practices that help you save money?

J.R.

Yeah. Oh my God. Gazillions. They're all stupid. But that's the thing—as with anything, it's gamification.

If you use cash, which less and less people do, and especially in post-COVID, we might be a cashless society, but again, that's a totally different conversation.

Research suggests that, if you use a credit card, you are more inclined to make impulsive purchases.¹ If you have actual dollars in your hand, it's harder to part with them. It's also harder to part with them if they are larger denominations. So one thing that you can do is... Just carry some cash and really think about it and have them in larger denominations. And that alone will maybe make you a little bit more hesitant, maybe make you a little bit more mindful of those purchases that you're making.

And that could lead hand in hand with another stupid little thing, which is not stupid, but you have a change jar or a little thing, whatever, every time that you go and spend that cash—say it's a $20 bill—and just like some of the banks and FinTech companies, they'll do this electronically automatically with your credit card or debit card, you take that cash and whatever change you have, you put it in your jar and you forget about it.

Then you come back to it like a year later, all of a sudden, now you got some money. Do something with that. Put it somewhere. Buy something that you've been thinking about for a while. You didn't buy it impulsively because you've had this little bucket over here building for the last 12 months. So you could buy it in a responsible way.

Listen to the full conversation with JR from Insisting Simplicity.

Writing is about creating a daily practice where you repeatedly show up and do your thing waiting for the magic to appear. Without this practice (time-based labor to some extent), you won't be able to get to the good parts—even if you've been practicing for decades—as it's hard to write anything meaningful in thirty minutes. I reserve time to sit and write every day without the pressure of having to get anywhere specific. A thirty-minute daily practice can take you far. (That's 182 hours of writing a year.)

My current goal is to write a minimum of two hundred words per day, but it's easy to go over once you get going. I practice deliberately to better articulate my thoughts, communicate and share my ideas, and express myself more clearly; I believe writing and storytelling benefit my podcast conversations, talks, and live streams.

Right now, the only pressure comes from writing publicly once a week, posting a story with a hand-sketched illustration on Tuesdays (which you're reading). Publishing frees me up from the fear of sharing what's on my mind, telling the world who I am, and being judged, and forces me to refine my writing and direct it to my readers. One essay at a time, I share my worldview and accept that my perspective will inevitably change. But that's okay—that means I'm evolving—and you should feel the same way.

Two hundred words won't get you far, but showing up day after day can translate into writing more than seventy thousand words per year, which will surely make a difference.

Even when you can't find the right words for us to understand what you're trying to say, the exercise is worth the effort; you can clarify your message by explaining it to others.

We have more mediums to deliver our message than we could have ever wished for—think blogs, newsletters, podcasts, live videos, or social media—and no shortage of people who want to talk.

What continues to be scarce (and we should work on) are trust, authenticity, and messages worth our attention.

Will you care enough to try?

Nowadays, we have unlimited audio available in our pockets, and we don't even need to think how much we ship or even its length. YouTube makes millions of hours of video and audio available, and streaming services like Spotify provide us with an immense catalog of music and podcasts available to us without worrying about where the music is stored. With enough time and internet bandwidth, we can stream anything.

In the 2000s, I got a portable CD player, the Sony Walkman E-220, which I didn't get to use that much with the advent of the internet. It still works, and it looks as new. Apart from the standard playing function—which plays all the tracks on the CD ones—this device could play songs on repeat mode, looping over the entire disc in order; on shuffle mode, looping through songs in random order; or on single track mode, playing a single track repeatedly. The number of songs we could carry with us was limited, and we paid for each new album. Streaming services and the internet let us bring with us millions of songs today.

There is a little arrow symbol that seems to have stick until today—it shows up on Spotify and other digital music players. The arrow goes left, down, and right, and it means you're going to be looping through a specific block of audio; a playlist, an album, or a song.

Can you imagine situations in which you may want to play a song over and over and over? I want to share with you a habit I've been practicing for many years. Listen to this Getting Simple episode on looping playlists.

A question submitted to the podcast by Marc Exposito¹ made me reflect on 'mini-retirements'—what they are and potential techniques, challenges, and reasons to live as if you were retired—and, in retrospect, understand my 2015 break like one. I deliberately reserved time to wander around Japan's streets at my own pace (like that of a turtle) and enjoy Málaga's sunny weather. What would happen if, instead of working for forty years and retiring for twenty, you distributed those twenty years throughout your career? Marc asked.

Listen to a Getting Simple podcast on mini-retirements.

Breathe in.
One, two, three, four.
Hold.
Four, three, two, one.
Breathe in.
One, two, three, four.
Hold.
Four, three, two, one.

Newport started writing and publishing books while he was a student—his first titles include How to Win at College, How to Become a Straight-A Student, and How to Be a High School Superstar—and started building a community of readers who enjoyed his Study Hacks blog.

So Good They Can't Ignore You was Newport's first book outside of the college or high school arena, which walks you through how to "build a career you truly love [where] you're not only paid well, but you're doing work that matters." Newport teaches the Top Performer course online—based on this book—together with Scott Young.

I've lost count of how many times I've recommended his latest books on the podcast and my writing, mainly Digital Minimalism and Deep Work.

Deep Work was a response to readers' questions on how to structure their workday. As reads the summary of his Wall Street Journal bestseller, "deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time." Newport firmly believes we can only do deep work with full concentration without distractions. His approach consists of working in a series of 1 h 30 min blocks separated by one-hour breaks that he uses for productive meditation (recharge walks or breaks in which your mind can continue pondering about the problems you're trying to solve at work). To keep track of your time, Newport created The Time-Block Planner, a notebook that lets you plan your day using this technique.

For the past years, I've been using this method using this 7:00–19:00 time-blocking sheet that you can download here. It contains four planning cards to print in an A4- or Letter-sized sheet to fold in four. Works best with two-sided printing to create eight cards to cover an entire week. I try to block time for deep tasks one day in advance at the end of my workday.

Digital Minimalism was a response to readers who asked how to manage their non-work time. My takeaway from this book is that a social media sabbath—going cold turkey for thirty days in a row—can help you get rid of the habit of mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds and reclaim your leisure time, only getting back to using social media after you've identified what value you're getting out of them if any, and making sure to schedule your leisure time as well as your workday to ensure the activities you want to do are happening. It's interesting how much Newport—a person who's never been on social media—can contribute with his digital minimalism philosophy. In my case, I spent three months in a row without social media. I decided I would be present by sharing the content I created but wouldn't routinely interact in other ways and would remove the social media apps that remained on my phone.

A World Without Email will be released next week. As Newport mentions on his podcast—Deep Questions—online communication as we know it today isn't the result of careful thinking in search of the best way for knowledge workers to communicate but something that happened because the technology was there. We embraced email and instant messaging as the solution, but Newport explains how this constant influx of messages depletes our ability to perform deep work. He sees applications like Slack or Teams as transient applications that will go away sometime soon, as we devise new methods that will let us—as knowledge workers—work without distractions. I already pre-ordered a copy.

I doubt Cal Newport is superhuman, but I applaud his work and life approach and his consistency to ship work that matters.

Yesterday, the blue sky pushed me to leave the keyboard and adventure myself out with my sketchbook, pens, and watercolors.

I enjoyed drawing a concrete mixer truck as I caught up on the phone with Grandma, who will get her first COVID vaccine shot tomorrow.

The truck comes and goes to a huge building site at Hoyo de Esparteros, Málaga, for the ongoing construction of an H10 'high-rise'¹ hotel by Pritzker Prize architect Rafael Moneo.

It'd be great to capture the hotel's evolution on my sketchbook, as days get longer and sunnier. That, surely, will help to get back the urban sketching habit.

Other artifacts and scenes, however, only appear once—the drawing of a place I traveled to, a gathering with family or friends, a building, a distinct palm tree—and become tied to a memory.

Here, in Málaga, Spain, all non-essential business is about to close for fifteen days. The weather doesn't invite us to stay inside; the high was 25 Celsius degrees last week. Mask ok, I walked more than twenty kilometers over the weekend, wearing my sunglasses and enjoying the sunny weather. We'll get colder days before the summer, but nothing compared to the snowy winters of Cambridge.

I get nostalgic of my days in Cambridge when friends send pictures; I used to walk to class under the snow, boots on, enjoying this buffer time to be alone with my thoughts, call, or listen to podcasts. That nostalgia might be why I don't click the 'unsubscribe' button at the end of the City of Boston.

There's barely anything we can do. But we can still walk outside.

Be safe, stay sane, and stay healthy.

P.S. You can now listen to a new Getting Simple podcast episode with Mike Gabour on Falling in Love With the Ocean, Dark Showers, Attention, The Sensorium, and The Contents of his Backpack.

Hi, I'm Nono Martínez Alonso, and you've signed up for Sketch.Nono.MA, a weekly newsletter where I share my worldview through hand sketches and stories. Today, a little rant on watercolor sketchbooks.