A few more thoughts on the New Year

This is more or less the last topic I'd already thought of when I started. Not that I had the previous posts all planned out, but I had some idea that I wanted to finish going over my lessons for 2020 before I move on to what will probably be more topical, short posts, ideally some thoughts stemming from reactions I get... we'll see.

Another shout out to Tyler Cowen. My final resolution owes inspiration partly to him, partly to Sam Altman who he had on the show. Tyler's an influential blogger and economist at George Mason University, while Sam is the chairman of Y combinator (just Google it). I'm not about to start emulating their lifestyles anytime soon, but one easy thing they talked about concerned responding to email. Sam said one of the easiest ways to tell which startup founders were most likely to succeed was based on how quickly they responded to his email, and the timescale went from the order of minutes for the most successful to days for the others. For Tyler's part he says he treats email like texting. He doesn't like texting because it gives people an unfair feeling like they can jump to the front of your information queue, but he loves voluntarily putting their email there anyway, because it shows he take them seriously and they should too.

I don't want to start a Dropbox or Airbnb, but this just seemed like common sense. I can't say how many times I received an email in 2019 that I thought looked too long or boring and then put it off until I'd fully forgotten about it. I'm talking about email that I did need to reply to, often in a minimum of a few days, and procrastinating on them was always a bad idea. One especially unfortunate symptom I've noticed is that when I'm busier, I'm often more likely to respond to an email quickly. In those cases, I get a sense of pride from being able to keep so many balls up at the same time. Conversely, if I'm twiddling my thumbs at home or distracted at work, I sometimes think "can't answer that straight away, shows I'm not doing anything." Apparently I'm treating semi-important emails like a teen treats a first date, and I wasn't getting any happier for it.

So the list of resolutions was: start a blog; podcast less, read more; and answer emails as quickly as you can. On a side note, moving forward I'm going to have to put up a lot of experimental stuff here, and leave aside all dreams of perfectionism. Starting, I hope, with a song I wrote tomorrow. Go easy on me, it's all an experiment.