One of my most important insights of the last years: Procrastination is cheating yourself. To procrastinate means that you waste your time in every way. You don't use it to do the things that need to be done, nor do you use it to properly relax and gather your strength. The truly worst form of procrastination, however, is pseudo-work. You may know the phenomenon: often you find yourself in a situation where you can't find the strength to pursue a thing effectively and instead you settle for minimally dealing with it in some way.

On 13.02.2022 I published this article. Within an hour of publication, the article appeared at #1 on Hacker News. I would like to show in this post how many hits I had as a result, what it brought in the long term and how you can do that at all.

A few days ago I came across this article. The author shows how to access a Drupal system in the backend with a Vue.js app. For authentication he uses an API key - and I find that dangerous. Here's why.

This is a call to mediocrity. Do things without intending to hit the big time. Do! Start! Don't think about the output, but make the way to your goal. Yes: all too often you've set out to do it, and yet you've failed again and again to meet your standards. Every text, every website, every important email: you've twisted words, deleted sentences, and rewritten. Often enough you crumpled things up afterwards and threw them away. But how much didn't get done in the first place?

Have you ever heard of the Fediverse? Not me. At least until a few days ago, when @hagengraf told me about his Instagram alternative Pixelfed on Twitter and in a blog post.

Leverage effects allow us to have an impact far beyond our actual size. They are a multiplier of our results. The effort I invest is multiplied by the leverage effect and added to the result.

Change is in the air.

It's been a while since I published the last blog post. But the time at the end of a year is a special time: it gives you a chance to shut down and take a fresh look at things with some distance. Unfortunately, the importance of distance from everyday life only becomes apparent when you've already gained that distance.

For a few days I have been carrying a quote around with me: "The effort is enough". I got it from the book "Ego is the enemy" by Ryan Holiday. It's a fantastic sentence that exudes incredible serenity.

This quote means that success should be measured by the effort we put into our goals, rather than merely looking at the outcome. And this basically aligns with my view of goals: focus on the things you have control over, rather than things that are out of your control.

The time I take to work, I want to make as effective as possible. I therefore avoid surfing the web or writing messages on my smartphone at the same time. Instead, I try to jump right into the work process and generate a flow that carries me quite a bit through my tasks. But I have many different projects going on at the same time, and I've often found myself unable to choose one to keep working on, despite having so many projects. It was a bit like the forest you can't see for the trees.