Spring is a good time to take a look around. So I had a look around and put a few things in order. Some changes are even visible here. I wrote a few days ago that I had made some updates to the websites, then they were related to the themes, but later I added another one: updated logos for both blogs. And I took a new photo of myself. I realised that I was too smiling on the previous one. Well, anyone who has ever seen my face knows that’s impossible, I don’t smile.

Anyway.

The blogs have been updated, the logos and photos have been updated, some tidying up has been done in the files, folders, notes, tasks and so on. I even cleaned up things I’ve been trying to clean up for… well, a long time. But I didn’t stop there. I’ve done a full review of all my systems and found some things I should have changed a long time ago. And all this got me thinking.

1. The people who make their living building, describing and marketing all these tools for personal knowledge management, task management and so on, do they really use them? It’s impossible to use all that and still, I don’t know, get things done?
2. Because at the end of the day, for almost everyone (as long as they don’t write books about PKM for a living), it’s just about doing things. And we all get paid for the things we do. Not for the way we’ve done them, but for getting them done.
3. I realized that I don’t want to bend my values anymore, if I don’t like a service, tool, application, company or whatever, I won’t use their products.
4. After significantly reducing my time on Mastodon, I’ve received feedback from my partner: “You talk to me a lot more”. It was a good feedback that made me think, what the hell am I doing?
5. I talked more with friends and noticed that we are all less active on social media. I can’t say for them, that would be too much, but I’m curious if they’ve noticed that they’ve been less active since we started talking more in private. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
6. Some people say that society has started to see that big tech is evil. I don’t think that’s true. Some people have lost faith in big techs, that’s all.
7. Life is the art of choice. We make choices every day, every moment. We choose what we eat for breakfast, how we spend our time, whom we give our energy to. Well, it’s easy to make the wrong choices and I make a lot of them.
8. Some of these thoughts have been on my list of ideas for full blog posts for ages. It’s time to throw them out here and move on. If they haven’t been full posts yet, they won’t be.
9. There’s no such thing as too much self-care. It’s good to take time to look after yourself, no matter how much time it takes.
10. I really enjoy making things work. I really do. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to see things get sorted because of me or because I helped someone else.
11. For people who tell others that it doesn’t matter if some app or service doesn’t care about privacy, or that it’s your contact list that’s being sent to the cloud of some weird shitty company, I have one thing to say: I’m the one on that contact list, and if you don’t care about privacy for yourself, at least try to respect others who do.
12. Not everything has to be interesting or exciting. Some things can be boring and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s good not to be excited, because the constant flow of new experiences prevents us from appreciating, well, everything we already have. And there’s a lot to appreciate.