Hello again lovely email people, how are you getting on? Not too bad, I hope. Here in London it’s been windy these past few days, and my neighbouring chestnut trees have been rolling and dancing. The pigeons are quite relaxed about this; the squirrels not so much.
š Art deco will be the visual language of 2021: Over the past few decades, we’ve gone from limited and costly technology to having mainframe computer performance on our wrists. We built so fast, we focused on the bare essentials. We celebrated function over form. Our phones becoming standardised aluminium rectangles, our living rooms resembling a doctor’s office. Every trend is an answer to the movement preceding it, and minimalism has just about had its run.
š¹ Blip - 1977 Mechanical Pong: This portable Pong clone is as amazing is it is difficult.
š¤ How to Increase Happiness, According to Research: “How to Build a Life” is a new column that aims to give you the tools you need to construct a life that feels whole and meaningful.
š³ How To Make Bonsai On The Cheap: You don’t have to spend the earth to create your very own bonsai. This channel makes for fascinating and engrossing viewing.
š How to Draw in Six Steps: Drawing can be a meditative way to relax. The NYT took a member of their editorial board focusing on business and economics, who doesn’t know how to draw, so they made him try this out.
š Prayers for Richard: In 1957, at the height of his fame, Little Richard saw a big ball of fire in the sky above the stadium. Its message was clear: he had to leave show business, quit singing the devil’s music, and get right with God. He enrolled to study to become a minister. What he had seen was in fact Sputnik, the Russian satellite traveling 18,000 miles an hour in the night sky.
š¦ Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping: In Bali, western immigrants are selling products they’ve never handled, from countries they’ve never visited, to consumers they’ve never met.
š “Luxury Was an Emotion”: Neiman Marcus and the Decline of Luxury Americana: As the department store files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, its American idea of luxury seems obsolete.
š Famous Hope Quotes as Charts: these abstract charts represent the most popular quotes about hope on Goodreads.
š¼ People Are Submitting Their Best Painting Recreations To This Instagram Account: Being stuck at home for prolonged periods of time has inspired some people to get creative. While some are cutting their own hair and trying out high-fashion looks, others are recreating famous paintings ā and you’d be surprised how good they are at it.
Every inspiration starts with a little distraction
It was easy to assume we would have plenty of time on our hands. We would be able to undertake our lengthy mental list of nice-to-dos that we’ve never managed to tackle because of all the time spent at work, or commuting to and from work.
One thing this curious period has taught us, however, is that freeing up time doesn’t make us any more focused. If anything, we have to work harder to avoid becoming distracted. Our homes, both the domestic environment and the people with whom we live, are loaded with distractions of all kinds.
I’m interested in the tension between focus and distraction. A lack of flow, like writer’s block, is often described as something inflicted upon us. But if we are to take credit for our creative achievements, perhaps we should also be accountable when those achievements are not forthcoming. Of everything influencing our output, surely the application of our own focus must take the majority share.
When it comes to distraction, many of us have a difficult relationship with technology. Some mobile phones, like the Light Phone and Punkt MP02 are designed to promote focus and reduce distraction. I like the principles but I don’t fancy sending my current handset to landfill, so something like LessPhone, a minimalist Android launcher designed to help reduce phone use, might be the thing.
There’s also the gun-to-the-head approach of Write, a highly-constrained writing environment where if you stop typing for more than a few seconds, all your work is erased. This is specifically designed to smash through writer’s block by forcing the creation of raw material of any quality.
But, if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s probably not the kit at all. Just as distraction at work is a cultural disfunction rather than a technological one, so the same is true in whatever environment you find yourself in now. To take control, you can develop healthy ways of identifying and coping with the triggers that cause distraction.
