Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where you’re free to procrastinate on something healthy before you get back to work. The current format:

• 3 links worth investigating when you want to procrastinate

• 2 eye-opening quotes to get you thinking

• 1 practical tip to keep you on track

If you have an interesting link worth including in a future issue, just reply to this email.

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. Ronald Reagan consulted an astrologer for most of his presidency

This was a small scandal when it was revealed in the late 1980s, but I had no idea until recently - Ronald Reagan and his wife regularly consulted with an astrologer. The astrologer even helped make his schedule.

Whatever you think of Reagan, he is the US President who made an ally of Mikhail Gorbachev and helped usher in the end of the Cold War.

To think he was also checking if Cancer was in Uranus is a handy reminder that nobody really knows what the hell they're doing.

2. Books on Amazon are allowed to be 1-page long

Hassan Osman calls himself "a writer on the side", meaning he writes and publishes short books while keeping a full-time job. Many of his books are between 50 and 100 pages, so pretty short by any stretch. But it seems he recently challenged himself to see if Amazon would let him self-publish a book that was just a single page. And surprisingly, it wasn't a problem.

You don't have to buy the 99-cent book though - you can just listen to him read the whole thing out on his podcast.

It's especially worth a listen as he also explains the incentives for writing such a short book and the benefits. It also seems to me that Amazon has thrown down a gauntlet: “Hey, you can publish a book even if it's only a page, so what's stopping you from publishing one?”

3. It's hard to remember how lucky you are if you can see and hear

Like most British millennials, I first heard about Helen Keller from this old episode of South Park. In case you don't know who she is, Keller (1880-1968) was a US woman who went blind and deaf as a toddler but went on to become a world-famous political activist and author of 11 books.

In 1933, she wrote a superb piece for The Atlantic that is now freely available on the Internet and well worth your time. In it, she tries to imagine what it would be like to see and hear again. I especially like these lines:

"Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed. 'Nothing in particular,' she replied... How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note?"

If, after reading her uplifting words, you want to feel cynical and sad again, you can read about the TikTok conspiracy claiming she was a faker…

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 tip to stop you wasting time

Do you find that you don’t struggle with things to do, but rather you keep doing things you shouldn’t that stop you from getting on with them?

Make a Not-To-Do List.

Sometimes called a To-Don't List, this is a list of things you are not going to do. It's the opposite of the Mind Sweep which I wrote about a while ago here.

You don't need to sit there and think about your responsibilities. It's more sitting and stewing on all the things you do that annoy you, particularly those that stop you from doing the things you truly want to do.

The Atlantic writes about the method here, but if you'd like an example, here is one belonging to August Bradley, the guy I first heard about the concept from:

• NO distractions, tangents or rabbit-holes. Do the work as planned.

• No erratic starts or transitions. Dive-in directly.

• No junk food. No late evening eating.

• Do not obsess over perfection in early drafts.

• No meetings/calls without clear agenda.

• No projects outside of Priority-Zone.

• Do not be late to meetings/calls.

• Do not constantly check notifications/likes

As you can probably tell, Bradley is a hyper-focused and exacting person. Your list will probably look different.

The best thing about making a Not-To-Do list is that you only really need to do it once. Just get a few things down and stick in on the wall. You don’t need to keep recreating it every couple of days like you do with a to-do.

How about making one for the new year? 🤔

That's it for this week. Many thanks for reading. See you in 2024!

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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