I love milestones.  Times of year that mark change and give you a chance to pause and reset. I think that’s part of why I had such a hard time living in California during college, and why I appreciated the seasons so much when I moved back east.  They provide a very natural rhythm. The time between Christmas and New Years is one of my favorite transition times.  I love the fact that nearly everyone is on vacation, so everything slows down.  In the past I have usually stayed at work during that week and used the time to catch up on everything. With new years, I love the opportunity to pause, take stock of everything, get organized, and get ready to hit the ground running in the new year. For me, this is my “spring cleaning”, more than anything I do in the spring.   Here’s what I’m working towards this week to get cleaned up and ready for 2013:

• Resetting email. I got crushed on email in the last month, and have a lot of open threads (I apologize to anyone I owe an email to).  I am working towards inbox zero by New Years.

• Rebooting my blog — as of yesterday, I’ve merged my blog and my tumblog into one.  I’ve moved my blog archives dating back to 2006 to the Wayback Archive, and am doing everything on Tumblr now.  Fewer things; more focus.

• Mundane things around the house — Yesterday Cescalouise and I cleaned out our basement, and I organized my mess of a closet.  Both feel super good to have done, and help create an overall sense of healthiness.

• Going to get a haircut :)

And as always happens, I’m using this time to get inspired about 2013.  I’ve been collecting some quotes that are getting me fired up.  

It's hard to find the right balance when bringing technology into our lives.  I do think lots of us suffer from some form of internet / social media addiction, and it's getting easier and easier every day to bring all of that with us everywhere we go. This will only continue to accelerate (and I don't even have Google Glass yet).

A few weeks ago, I went to a discussion at the New York Public Library for Steven Johnson's new book -- for the event, Steven's "debate" opponent was Sherry Turkle, author of "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other". The thesis of Sherry's book is essentially that we are all addicted to our phones, and that we're trading away our real-world connections for distant digital connections.  She has spent countless hours interviewing teenagers, observing moms and dads in the playground (with their faces stuffed into their iphones, of course), etc.  And basically came away with some troubling, if unsurprising, results.

I am not terrified by all this, but I do think we're at a moment now where we are still forming our cultural norms around all of this, and it will take a while.

For instance, Frannie and I have a rule of no screens in bed (that includes TV) -- it just seems like the bedroom should be a place to unplug, slow down, and relax.  But over the past few days while she's been away, I've been breaking the rule.  On Sunday night, I blew through my email backlog on my laptop (woo!), and on Monday night I followed #Sandy via Twitter on my phone.

Of course, this sparked an argument discussion last night when I continued to break our rule by bringing my laptop to bed to write "one last email".  To make matters worse (better?) I posted a snap poll to twitter to see what people thought about this particular nuance of digital culture. The results were mixed:

Some great gems in there.

I do think that thinking about this in terms of addiction seems about right -- we have this thing with really powerful social pulls drawing us in, and we need to make sure we understand how to live in moderation. I might even argue that the addictive strength of the internet and social media is stronger than that of alcohol or other drugs; at least the social aspect of that addiction. i.e., I may feel some social pressure to drink more than I should, but it's not coming at me 24x7 from hundreds of friends, thousands of acquaintances, and millions of others.

So, this is something we'll have to keep figuring out.

I've always thought of tennis as perhaps the most difficult of sports.  It's like hitting a baseball, but while you're running, and with 90% of the addressable target area out of bounds (in the net, outside the lines, etc).  To top that off, you're a team of one, battling yourself, inside your head.  So it's really easy to get frustrated and implode when things start heading south. I played a lot of tennis as a kid, but basically haven't played at all for the past 15 years or so, until recently.  Over the past few weeks, I've picked it back up and gotten really into it, and it's been really fun and also a challenge.  My playing style has always been aggressive and error-prone.  I have (IM*H*O) beautiful strokes, but go for a lot of winners and tend to make a lot of unforced errors.  Historically, I often lose to players who can simply get the ball back and put me in a position to beat myself.  On serve: it's aces or double faults.  You get the idea. Clearly, this is a frustrating way to play, and to be.  And it puts me into a position to love and hate tennis at the same time, and to get really down on myself for not living up to what I see as my potential. Recently though, I've been working on a way to address this.  I've been going into playing tennis expecting it to be frustrating, and knowing that overcoming that frustration is part of the challenge, and part of the fun.  Seems like a subtle difference, but it's really been game-changing for me. If I go in expecting to have a mental challenge -- and knowing that I'll get through it -- rather than being surprised when it happens, it's somehow way easier to deal with.  It becomes part of improving my game, just like working on my strokes, and it generally helps me relax and get loose, rather than get frustrated and tight. This may seem like a stretch, but it reminds me of what a good friend once said about eating magic mushrooms: that it's a challenge and an adventure;  that he fully expected to get freaked out and scared, but working his way through that, and getting over it, is part of what he liked about it.  Seems crazy in some ways, but I get it.  So, I guess I'm saying playing tennis is kind of like tripping on mushrooms. And of course, it's the same with being an entrepreneur.  Apparently Reid Hoffman characterized entrepreneurship as "throwing yourself off a cliff and building a plane on the way down", which feels right.  And my friend Nick has described the roller-coaster ride of entrepreneurship -- one day you feel like you're killing it and you've got the whole world figured out, and (literally) the next day, you can feel like you're 100% wrong and totally screwed.  That's for real -- in the past, I've felt it on something like 8-hour cycles -- and it's part of the reason why co-founder chemistry is so important; to help you weather that storm. In all of these cases, I think the trick is not letting yourself feel like all is lost -- expecting there to be (sizable) bumps, but understanding that of course there are, and that's part of the challenge and part of the fun.  Somehow, thinking about it that way really changes things for me.  

I love milestones.  Times of year that mark change and give you a chance to pause and reset. I think that’s part of why I had such a hard time living in California during college, and why I appreciated the seasons so much when I moved back east.  They provide a very natural rhythm. The time between Christmas and New Years is one of my favorite transition times.  I love the fact that nearly everyone is on vacation, so everything slows down.  In the past I have usually stayed at work during that week and used the time to catch up on everything. With new years, I love the opportunity to pause, take stock of everything, get organized, and get ready to hit the ground running in the new year. For me, this is my “spring cleaning”, more than anything I do in the spring.   Here’s what I’m working towards this week to get cleaned up and ready for 2013:

• Resetting email. I got crushed on email in the last month, and have a lot of open threads (I apologize to anyone I owe an email to).  I am working towards inbox zero by New Years.

• Rebooting my blog — as of yesterday, I’ve merged my blog and my tumblog into one.  I’ve moved my blog archives dating back to 2006 to the Wayback Archive, and am doing everything on Tumblr now.  Fewer things; more focus.

• Mundane things around the house — Yesterday Cescalouise and I cleaned out our basement, and I organized my mess of a closet.  Both feel super good to have done, and help create an overall sense of healthiness.

• Going to get a haircut :)

And as always happens, I’m using this time to get inspired about 2013.  I’ve been collecting some quotes that are getting me fired up.  

It's hard to find the right balance when bringing technology into our lives.  I do think lots of us suffer from some form of internet / social media addiction, and it's getting easier and easier every day to bring all of that with us everywhere we go. This will only continue to accelerate (and I don't even have Google Glass yet).

A few weeks ago, I went to a discussion at the New York Public Library for Steven Johnson's new book -- for the event, Steven's "debate" opponent was Sherry Turkle, author of "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other". The thesis of Sherry's book is essentially that we are all addicted to our phones, and that we're trading away our real-world connections for distant digital connections.  She has spent countless hours interviewing teenagers, observing moms and dads in the playground (with their faces stuffed into their iphones, of course), etc.  And basically came away with some troubling, if unsurprising, results.

I am not terrified by all this, but I do think we're at a moment now where we are still forming our cultural norms around all of this, and it will take a while.

For instance, Frannie and I have a rule of no screens in bed (that includes TV) -- it just seems like the bedroom should be a place to unplug, slow down, and relax.  But over the past few days while she's been away, I've been breaking the rule.  On Sunday night, I blew through my email backlog on my laptop (woo!), and on Monday night I followed #Sandy via Twitter on my phone.

Of course, this sparked an argument discussion last night when I continued to break our rule by bringing my laptop to bed to write "one last email".  To make matters worse (better?) I posted a snap poll to twitter to see what people thought about this particular nuance of digital culture. The results were mixed:

Some great gems in there.

I do think that thinking about this in terms of addiction seems about right -- we have this thing with really powerful social pulls drawing us in, and we need to make sure we understand how to live in moderation. I might even argue that the addictive strength of the internet and social media is stronger than that of alcohol or other drugs; at least the social aspect of that addiction. i.e., I may feel some social pressure to drink more than I should, but it's not coming at me 24x7 from hundreds of friends, thousands of acquaintances, and millions of others.

So, this is something we'll have to keep figuring out.

I've always thought of tennis as perhaps the most difficult of sports.  It's like hitting a baseball, but while you're running, and with 90% of the addressable target area out of bounds (in the net, outside the lines, etc).  To top that off, you're a team of one, battling yourself, inside your head.  So it's really easy to get frustrated and implode when things start heading south. I played a lot of tennis as a kid, but basically haven't played at all for the past 15 years or so, until recently.  Over the past few weeks, I've picked it back up and gotten really into it, and it's been really fun and also a challenge.  My playing style has always been aggressive and error-prone.  I have (IM*H*O) beautiful strokes, but go for a lot of winners and tend to make a lot of unforced errors.  Historically, I often lose to players who can simply get the ball back and put me in a position to beat myself.  On serve: it's aces or double faults.  You get the idea. Clearly, this is a frustrating way to play, and to be.  And it puts me into a position to love and hate tennis at the same time, and to get really down on myself for not living up to what I see as my potential. Recently though, I've been working on a way to address this.  I've been going into playing tennis expecting it to be frustrating, and knowing that overcoming that frustration is part of the challenge, and part of the fun.  Seems like a subtle difference, but it's really been game-changing for me. If I go in expecting to have a mental challenge -- and knowing that I'll get through it -- rather than being surprised when it happens, it's somehow way easier to deal with.  It becomes part of improving my game, just like working on my strokes, and it generally helps me relax and get loose, rather than get frustrated and tight. This may seem like a stretch, but it reminds me of what a good friend once said about eating magic mushrooms: that it's a challenge and an adventure;  that he fully expected to get freaked out and scared, but working his way through that, and getting over it, is part of what he liked about it.  Seems crazy in some ways, but I get it.  So, I guess I'm saying playing tennis is kind of like tripping on mushrooms. And of course, it's the same with being an entrepreneur.  Apparently Reid Hoffman characterized entrepreneurship as "throwing yourself off a cliff and building a plane on the way down", which feels right.  And my friend Nick has described the roller-coaster ride of entrepreneurship -- one day you feel like you're killing it and you've got the whole world figured out, and (literally) the next day, you can feel like you're 100% wrong and totally screwed.  That's for real -- in the past, I've felt it on something like 8-hour cycles -- and it's part of the reason why co-founder chemistry is so important; to help you weather that storm. In all of these cases, I think the trick is not letting yourself feel like all is lost -- expecting there to be (sizable) bumps, but understanding that of course there are, and that's part of the challenge and part of the fun.  Somehow, thinking about it that way really changes things for me.