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 ideas worth procrastilearning over

• 🗣️ 2 quotes to help you refocus

• 🪄 1 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. British cities make no sense

What the hell is a city?

I used to think it was whether or not a town had a cathedral, but this video from Map Men shows that's not the case. At least not in the UK. It's not population size either. Watch to find out the true and rather silly answer.

2. Caravaggio was a murderer

One of the most famous and influential 16th-century Italian painters was, by all accounts, a bit of a twat. Today, he's seen as a pioneer of chiaroscuro (using light in darkness) and the creator of the Italian baroque painting style.

But during his lifetime, Caravaggio got into fights all the time, and even ended up murdering somebody. He went on the run, and when he was eventually pardoned thanks mostly to his contribution to art, he died before it was official, thanks either to sepsis or a hit-man offing him.

It's funny how with enough time, people's faults are forgotten and their works live on. I wonder if eventually the celebrities that fell into disgrace during the #MeToo period will end up being forgiven?

If you want to watch something about Caravaggio, here's an old mini-doc by Waldemar Januszczak.

3. Fun can be motivating

In this classic short blog, Buddhism teacher Susan Piver gives some heartfelt advice about our struggles to get things done. Often we just need to remind ourselves of the pleasure that we get out of doing them, that we can look at much of it as play rather than work.

A lot of these ideas are coming back in vogue as popular productivity YouTuber Ali Abdaal has just launched a new book called Feel Good Productivity in which he argues we should use fun to keep ourselves motivated.

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 tip to stop you feeling frazzled

If you write Christmas cards every year, don't you find it easier to do them all in as few sessions as possible?

Writing a card a day over 40 days would just be annoying - it's much better to write them all over a couple sessions of 2 hours then take them all at once to the post office.

That's batching.

And you should do the same with as much of your work and tasks as possible.

It helps reduce context-switching which can often make people feel overwhelmed and burnt out. It's simply easier for our brains to do the same thing for a couple of hours at a time instead of doing 10 minutes of this, then 10 minutes of that, 10 minutes of the other.

If you want to read something more comprehensive about batching, this guide on the Freedom app’s blog will help.

That's it for this week. Many thanks for reading. I hope 2024 has treated you well so far.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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