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Any strategy for limiting your work in progress will help here (here), but perhaps the simplest is to keep two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed.” The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long. Fortunately, it’s not your job to tackle it: instead, feed tasks from the open list to the closed one—that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that you can’t add a new task until one’s completed. (You may also require a third list, for tasks that are “on hold” until someone else gets back to you.)
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
You can waste a lot of time trying to decide whether your thoughts are actually true; again and again your mind will try to suck you into that debate. But although at times this is important, most of the time it is irrelevant—and wastes a lot of energy. The more useful approach is to ask, “Does this thought offer anything useful? If I let it guide me, will it take me toward or away from the life I want?” If this thought is offering something helpful, then make good use of it; allow it to guide what you do. But if it’s not offering anything of value, unhook.
The Happiness Trap
Russ Harris
Inside, I ran into Jay Knowles, the Music Row songwriter. (It was a small town in a big city.) We talked about Nashville’s recent reputation as “Bachelorette City,” for which he offered a theory: although more than a quarter of Nashville was Black, the town was widely seen as “a white-coded city.” “I’m not saying this is a good thing,” he emphasized, but tourists viewed Nashville as a safe space, a city where groups of young white women could freely get drunk in public—unlike, say, Memphis, New Orleans, or Atlanta.
Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville | The New Yorker
Emily Nussbaum
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