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- #17: You'll never miss a task again
#17: You'll never miss a task again
Shem Opolot
April 28, 2023
Happy Friday 🎉 My seven-year streak of not paying full price for a Blankets & Wine (think—a miniaturized one-day Coachella—if you’re not East African) ticket is in jeopardy. Hit me up and fix that, please.
🧹 Housekeeping…
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Okay, let’s get into it 🚀
💡 1 thing I've learned this week
Capture, organize, and execute
You had a bright idea!
You were probably in the shower, on a run, or squeezing your eyes shut in bed.
What do you do?
Like a timid pupil afraid of giving the wrong answer in class, you mumble: “Write it down” under your breath. And you’re right!
But where and how?
Capture all ideas in one place. Any more and your brain hates it. A book, an app, it doesn’t matter. Just. ONE. PLACE.
Organize the tasks based on common themes. For example, I must do these lest I get divorced, These will make me richer than Elon Musk, and I need to do these so I can still see my feet when I look down.
Execute.
The ideas we get often fall in the same buckets tied to what’s most important to us fundamentally.
Capturing helps you remember all of them because our brains are as fickle as your friend group planning an out-of-town trip together.
Organizing makes a long to-do list less intimidating. Because we all know it’s one thing to write things down, and it’s another thing to do them.
Tying the ideas to something of fundamental importance is like hiring a dwarf, keeping him in the condom pocket of your jeans, and ordering him to scream periodically into your soul saying: “Hey! This is important to you because of this”.
Now go and grab life by the short and curlies, without fear or favor, as we used to say.
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🙏🏾 1 thing I'm grateful for
Flushable wipes.
Marriage introduced these to me, along with the mani-pedis secret women (or the patriarchy?) have criminally hidden from men for generations.
I won’t get into the benefits.
Look them up if you haven’t heard of them and all will be clear to you.
🚀 Pro-tip
Making you a better writer in 3,2,1…
Uganda has a new president!
Start with a hook. See what I did up there? People don’t have time, man. Grip them early and fast
Remove “that” if it doesn’t cause the sentence to crumble.
Instead of: “She told him that she would deliver on Friday”
Say: “She told him she would deliver on Friday”
Use shorter words. If you must choose between two words with similar meanings, pick the shorter more familiar one. There’s no reason to use “utilize” instead of “use.” I’m willing to die on this hill.
Avoid qualifiers (very, really), and write more precisely. Instead of “very cute” say “adorable.”
Embrace the shitty first draft. To get the good stuff out, you have to expel the bad. The final draft rarely looks the same as the first draft, but the first draft must come, well, first.
Using varying sentence lengths to avoid sounding like a robot.
On varying sentence length…
The better—and more confident—you become as a writer, the better you become at breaking or bending these rules.
Because there are no absolutes.
These rules vary depending on what you’re writing.
A story reads differently from a grant application, but tips 1-4 cut across.
But you’re smart; You knew that.
🧩 Games
An optical illusion
Brought to you by Braingle.
Are the two bold vertical lines straight? Feel free to whip out a ruler.
Answer below
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❓Riddle answer
Answer: The lines are straight
This is the Hering Illusion: When two straight and parallel lines are presented in front of a radial background (like the spokes of a bicycle), the lines appear as if they were bowed outwards.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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