On Positive Defaults
Hi friends,
At the start of this year, I committed to writing and sending this newsletter every week for 1 year to capture and share my thoughts on design, creativity, and life. I set myself the time box to make it seem manageable (that’s only 52 emails!) and keep myself accountable, but my hope is that the habit that sticks indefinitely.
Hard to believe it, but this is the 14th email, which makes it just over a quarter of the way. If you’re following along on the blog or via email, thank you!
Some weeks are easier than others. I heard on a podcast this week, “You fancy yourself a writer. You just hate writing”. I think a lot of writers feel this way. When you sit down to write, suddenly your plants need watering or your laundry needs doing. It’s so satisfying when it’s done, but sometimes the process is painful. Especially on a beautiful weekend like this one.
It’s been said that friction is the most powerful force in the universe. When you’re tired and your decision-making ability is depleted, any amount of friction can prevent you from following through on the habits you committed to in a higher energy state.
This is where defaults are powerful. When you don’t have the energy to make the right decision, you’ll fall back to a low-friction default. You often default to doing nothing because it’s easiest. Worse, you default to something that’s counter-productive to your goals, like grabbing a fast food meal when you’ve committed to eating healthy.
This got me thinking this week a lot about positive defaults. This is where you set up low-friction ways to align your short-term decision making with your long-term goals. Examples might include:
Putting only healthy food in your refrigerator and pantry to eat better
Keeping books on your nightstand and charging your phone outside the bedroom to read more and scroll less
Always having a stack of blank paper and some good pens on your desk to encourage sketching
In the past 14 weeks I’ve written a few posts about bigger topics that I had ideas bouncing around my head about. It felt good to clarify my thoughts and put them out into the world. But I’m at a point this week where I need to let some things percolate a bit more before I tackle another one of those.
I could default to not sending this email.
But instead, I’m going to set myself a positive default for this newsletter so it always gets sent.
If I don’t have a larger topic to tackle, I will follow a very common newsletter format that many of the great internet writers (Tim Ferriss, David Perell, Ali Abdaal) use:
A list of recommendations of interesting things from my week.
So here it is for this week! Let me know what you think of this format as a supplement to the other content I’ve put out. If you get this via email and hit reply, I read and respond to every one.
See you next week!
Anson
P.S. The irony here is that I actually probably wrote more in this email than many others, but it was far less stressful and happened much faster. The power of the default is to just get me writing.
💻 Designing - Semplice
I’ve been tinkering with a personal website redesign. My current website was set up in about three hours after my old website lapsed for a few years. It’s built with Squarespace and designed to do the job of parking my name on the internet. I’m constantly amazed at what modern web designers and developers are doing, and want to design a website with a bit more pizzazz.
Semplice is a Wordpress theme that gives you infinitely more power than Squarespace while still being drag-and-drop and relatively no-code. I’ve been playing around with it and I’d highly recommend it. However, it is a bit pricey, and significantly more technically complex than Squarespace.
📺 Watching - Severance (Apple TV)
This show is a visual treat and a well-timed commentary on work culture. The basic premise is that a group of people undergo a procedure that divorces the experience of their work selves and outside selves, splitting their personality into two halves that never meet. As an industrial designer, I really enjoyed The Verge’s piece on the set design that discusses how the physical space and props contribute to the tone of the show.
🔈 Listening - The Futur with Chris Do - Why you dread doing the work with Nick Harauz (Podcast)
The Futur is a great podcast about creativity, business, and entrepreneurship. This episode resonated with me in several ways. They give a good reminder to cut yourself some slack and factor in a “time tax” buffer in your work because you never get as much done as you think you will and you’re just stressing yourself out if you ignore that fact. They dive into struggles that every creative faces such as procrastination, perfect-scenario thinking, and why it’s sometimes so hard to do the thing you’re supposedly passionate about.
💬 Quote of the week
A good reminder to be present, because it’s the only thing that’s real:
“There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here.”
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, by Eric Jorgenson