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The Joy Protocol

“Optimize for joy” was the advice my friend gave me when I decided to leave the job that […]

Personal OKRS

I am crazy about OKRS (Objectives and Key Results). I have been evangelizing this system of staying on […]

My Year of Living

As I’ve written before, instead of resolutions I usually pick a subject and spend the year studying it. […]

Give Up Your Resolutions

For the last five-some years, I’ve given up making New Year’s Resolutions. Instead I have what I call the New Year’s Project. Each year I pick a large topic, and spend my time on and off throughout the year teaching myself about it. One year it was futurism (an obvious topic, consider how many New Year’s predictions articles always get run). I read up on who were the leading futurists, joined a futurist group and went to their meetings, and worked on making predictions myself. I learned useful concepts like cone of uncertainty, and how to take the long view, and how to do scenario planning. But most importantly I learned we cannot know the future, and as we try to plan we must be always ready to shift. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying to plan; it just means maintaining a yogi-level flexibility.

This last year I decided beauty would be my project. Not art and architecture, which I have always appreciated, but traditional feminine beauty. I have always had an uneasy relationship with the ideals of feminine beauty– having been raised a feminist I suspected makeup and infrastructure garments were a tool of patriarchy to hobble us by taking away two hours of our life every morning. But hey, why not question my assumptions?

a makeover for eleganthack

My blog gets varying levels of love. Sometimes I’m posting all the time, sometimes a month or two […]

travels with amelie

IMG_2302, originally uploaded by Box and Arrow. Now it Italy, but had a brief stop for a birthday […]

First day of preschool!

First day of preschool!, originally uploaded by Box and Arrow. And at the end of her first week, […]