Week 15 – How to become a kick-ass 100 year old

Hi Reader,

This week, we are looking at productivity. First, we are reminded about the excellent state of productivity tools for hitting deadlines and the problems with using those same tools for deep work. I share a productivity hack for optimizing your reading order and finally Tom Bilyeu and Peter Attia discuss how to maintain productivity and performance as a 100 year-old and what we need to do know.

🐦 Tech (mainly) tweets I'm reading

Austen Allred from Lambda School collects unknown start-up biographies.
Peter McCormack details crypto hopes & expectations with a lesson from the dot-com bubble.
Patrick Collison reflects on the state of productivity tech.
Steven Sinofsky predicts a change in cloud pricing.

📢 Communication

Instead of writing a thousand words is a stunning visual essay about the use of diagrams to describe ideas. Any mathematician will recognize diagrams as a powerful productivity tool. As designers will know, access to pen & paper can, for many classes of problems, be more augmentative than a calculator or even a computer. I think diagrams are especially useful for "ideas in formation", those intuitive hunches you get that complete themselves when communicated to someone else.

🥕 Longevity

Why you need to protect your joints if you want to live to 100 is a great interview between Tom Bilyeu and Peter Attia that I missed in November. They touch on everything from the feasibility of living forever and our psychological demons. The most insightful was Peter's description of the sport we should all play - the sport of "being a kick-ass 100 year old".

🏎  Performance

As some of you are gearing up to spend the holiday reading books, I wanted to recommend a reading strategy that has been helpful to me. Coda or equivalents provide dynamically self-sorting tables that are great for priority lists. I maintain a list of things I want to read with estimated priority and always pick from the top. It would be great if Goodreads offered this feature.