Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, a guilt-free meaningful break before getting back to work.

• 💡 3 ideas worth procrastilearning over

• 🗣️ 2 quotes to help you refocus

• 🪄 1 tip to keep you on track

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. The Arctic Council is a thing

Literally much cooler than the European Council, the Arctic Council is an association of all the countries in the Arctic Circle. There are only 8 members: Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia as well as the US and Denmark (thanks to Alaska and Greenland, respectively). Together, they try to do interesting and useful things up in the cold north that might come in handy for the world.

Seeing as at least a third of the land in the Arctic is in Russia, you won't be surprised to learn that things have been a bit awkward at the council since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago - all the other council members are now in NATO. But somehow, despite the boycotts and ruptured links in warmer climes, the Arctic Council are still managing to get on.

2. Only a few companies get good Google results

You might assume that Googling something means finding what you're looking for. But things are getting worse, and in all likelihood, you'll be pushed towards a page owned by one of 16 big companies.

They manage to do this because they each own many popular websites and get them all to link to each other endlessly, making each other look good.

This has become more pronounced over the last half a year, with Google results pages getting filled up with more ad space, leaving smaller independent companies struggling to appear in the results you see. The big companies were also given advanced warnings about recent algorithm changes - they were able to improve, unlike the countless smaller websites that have had their searchability neutered. Although the Internet was once seen as an open playing field, it's become just as colonised and oligarchised (if that's a word) as any other resource.

Will this monopolising push people towards using different search engines? Will they even notice, is that a better question?

3. The more complex your job, the more likely you are to stave off dementia

If you're a janitor and now worried you'll start losing it early, don’t worry. Other activities recommended by research include regular exercise, studying for a degree, learning another language and eating a Mediterranean diet.

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 simple tip to stay focused online

Limit your browser to 2 or 3 tabs

While browsing the web, do you find tabs start racking up after a while? Suddenly 10 tabs become 20. And you don’t even know what you were supposed to be looking at. You start jumping from one thing to another, distracted like a fly that landed on a beer bottle.

Closing your tabs keeps you focused. Ideally, you should set up your browser so that it doesn’t keep a record of all the tabs you had open and starts you off with none whenever you open it up.

Not everybody has this problem though - usually those people who also have tidy desks. Lucky people.

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading. Here’s a photo of hot air balloons flying over Cappadocia.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff
Currently reading: The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom

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