2022-11-28

I tend to look at the world through project-colored glasses. A thing is broken: fixing it is a project. A thing works well: it could work better, and that’s a project. Hiring a subcontractor is a project; finding the right person to get advice from is a project; running through my own tests so that I can determine the scope of work is a project.

Now that I think of it, the funny thing about this newsletter is that it has never really been a project. It was just something I started writing, and then people started reading it, and eventually it became an identifiable thing. All of its quirks, all of its rhythms and conventions – they developed not through planning and execution but through evolution, emerging on a particular Monday because they felt good when the newsletter was composed the previous Friday. In many ways the newsletter is about projects, but the newsletter itself is just an accumulation of reasonably good decisions, many of which were made by a person almost ten years younger than I am now.

I think I had been writing it for about three years when I realized I could use the newsletter as an excuse to take on more projects. “Doing this project will burnish my credibility with readers,” I would think to myself, “and anyway, I can try a new tool out and then tell people how it worked.” The end result – the “tool guides” we’ve published every fall since 2016 – were only ever a part of the story, though. A tool’s qualities are relative to the intentions of its user and the context in which it is used, and so this year I bring you not so much a tool guide as a record of the work I attempted in 2022 – and a catalog of the things that helped me complete (or at least advance) that work.

-Spencer Wright

Planning & Strategy.

With any luck I will turn forty in a few months, and in preparation I have spent much of the past year reconciling myself with the idea that this is what my life is like, and I may as well adapt myself to it. I now see a therapist weekly – a low-stakes routine that at minimum encourages me to bike into Manhattan once a week. I have also found meditation to be a good way to de-tension (I’ve mostly used these guides), and have finally, after about eight years of inactivity, begun exercising daily again – a habit which feels impossible when I’m not doing it, but which is probably the single most important mental health practice I’ve ever tried.