Dear readers,

2023 has been a big year for me. I got married and brought home an adorable puppy named Rosie.

Perhaps appropriately, my first post this year was Rewriting My Mindset: My Experience With CBT For Perfectionism, in which I shared the particular exercises I found helpful for relaxing some of my more counterproductive mindsets. With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that I felt more comfortable and less anxious publishing posts and trying things this year.

My first theme this year was stimulants. My interest stemmed from finding stimulants helpful for the brain fog I’d always attributed to my chronic health issues. I started with Inside The Minds Of ADHD, where I explored what ADHD looked like from the candid stories of people diagnosed with ADHD. Then How to Get Diagnosed with ADHD where I looked at the practical side of the medical process, and finally with What is ADHD? I pushed back against the framing of “Do you have the medical condition ADHD?” instead of the more (in my opinion) useful framing of “Will stimulants help you?”. I’m planning one more post, about how my thoughts have changed over a year of using stimulants.  

In Do Deadlines Make Us Less Creative?, I explored the psychology of creativity and the tradeoffs we make for productivity.

Detouring to a fun, lighthearted post – Why do Tattoos last? explores why tattoos don’t slough off with dead skin cells. (Hint, the cells holding the ink do die, but the body has a way around throwing out the ink with the dead cells.)

My second major theme this year was studying learning, particularly deliberate practice. I started exploring some of the theoretical claims made by deliberate practice supporters in Leveling Up Or Leveling Off?, then did a deep dive into applying deliberate practice* to unstructured contexts in DIY Deliberate Practice. (*Technically, more accurately I was applying “purposeful practice”, but I’m going to ignore the pedantry to use the more commonly understood phrase.) I finished up with Of Practice And Paintings on the benefits of practicing within the scope of your normal work, rather than purely in isolated exercises.

More broadly, I spent a good amount of time this year studying learning. How quickly and reliably we can learn new skills, bodies of knowledge, or from our own experiments seems incredibly important for what we can accomplish. So I’m studying a variety of approaches to learning, including career exploration, lean methods, naturalism, and hypothesis driven experiments.

 What’s coming next year?

I expect you’ll see more posts about optimizing learning next year! In particular, I’m hoping to refine a few tools I use so you can try them for yourself.

Additionally, I’m trying out letting people commission posts. My goal for this blog is to produce valuable, actionable insights you can apply yourself, by sharing my journey, concrete examples, and underlying theories. One way to test value is seeing what people will pay for.

To that end, if there’s a particular topic you wanted to hear more from me about, this is your chance! Ideas for posts you could commission include:

• Guides for particular productivity tools or strategies.

• Reviews of different strategies for addressing a particular problem.

• Exploring how robust a particular productivity tool is to scientific literature and practical application.

• Trying to quantify what effect you might experience from trying a specific tool or strategy.

• An experiment that I run and write up the results.

While I’m figuring out exactly how this will work, I’m offering a $50/hour rate (this will go up later to closer to what I value an hour at). I’d start with an ~5-hour project to test we’re a good fit, which can continue if we’re both excited about where the project is going. 

If you’d like to discuss a potential post, schedule a call with me here. 

Thanks for coming along on this journey. I hope you found these posts as interesting and useful to read as I did to research and write them.

Cheers to 2024,

Lynette