💯 100 Blogs Later - Lessons Learned & Hours Burned

100 posts both feel believable and insane at the same time.

I've spent many a late night, plane ride, and 10-minute flex period writing here.

I've been blogging since 2022, and I intend to write here for many more years to come.

I've changed my website host, my blog name, my featured images, my cross-platform strategy, and a number of other things.

But I haven't changed what I initially set out to do: write about productivity through the only lens that feels fully authentic: through that of my goofy, heartfelt identity.

And before I get to anything else, I need to express something: I am thankful to you, dear reader. As I ruminate on with regularity, we all have limited attention and time. Thank you for lending me some of each of your finite mental energy on my musings over the years.

For this hundredth post, I spent some time looking back on my history here, and I'm surfacing here five things I've written that are both meaningful to me in hindsight and that showcase various aspects of what I think and write about. I hope these summaries may be useful to you as well, especially if you haven't been here since the beginning.

And heck, if you have found my work valuable in your own journey, consider sending this post to a friend, colleague, or family member who may also find it valuable.

As an aside, my latest interest has been in creating one-line sketches which animate to show the path I took to draw them. I've never been a good visual artist, but why not give it a shot? For each of these 5 highlighted posts, I sketched a new featured image which you can see below (you may need to click the posts themselves to see the animation). Hope ya dig 'em.

Here's to the next 💯.

The Flattening

One of the posts I cite to the most is one I wrote in May 2024: The Flattening.

Citing a silly Apple ad that created intense backlash, I spoke to my concerns with one-dimensional analysis, which I've reinforced constantly in the years since:

We are looking for ways to optimize, to cut costs, to get more done, to do things faster…all of which can be honorable pursuits.

It’s not those ends I typically take issue with—it's when we don't interrogate the means. It’s our insatiable desire for “hacks” over an embrace of fulsome process. It’s our temptation to simply click a button to create instead of drafting and deleting and editing and trying. It’s our search for anything that allows us to avoid struggle of all stripes, somehow ending with the finished product without having learned a damn thing along the way.

The “means” and the process and the struggle matter. Using tools to make things easier and more efficient can be wise. But when we do that, we should consider what we're losing in the process.

You Can't 10x Your Productivity

Much of what I write intends to rebut common "productivity" advice. As somebody immersed in that ecosystem, I find it continually disappointing how many folks are shilling ideas and structures and systems—often for a fee—that fundamentally will not actually help people achieve a fuller sense of what they are capable of.

And so, I wrote about it:

You cannot 10x your productivity. There is no magic tool, approach, notebook, writing device, philosophy, mentality, or habit that can make this happen. None.

You know this intuitively. And yet, at some point in your life, perhaps recently, you've been enticed by the notion of trying something new that would "fix" your subpar productivity. Maybe you've been trying some new method. You may have even purchased something to try and make this happen. Maybe you bookmarked a link or an article that you'll surely return to and that will surely change your life…once you get to reading it.

Hopefully the things you've tried have helped. Boy oh boy, have I tried a lot of things. I'm also an enthusiastic believer in zeroing in on a system that fits your unique personhood and that allows you to get things done in a way that's satisfying and important.

But 10xing productivity (or anything in this vein) is pure clickbait. It takes honest assessment (what are you being productive towards?), trial and error, practice, and commitment to move the needle on productivity. The sooner you give up on trying to find the magic fix, the better.

It was also one of the first times I cited to Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks. I ran the numbers, and perhaps fittingly, that book shows up in exactly 10% of my posts to date. It is the single most influential book on productivity I've read in my life, and that's saying something.

Life is Temporary

I had someone the other day pay me a particularly high compliment in that they said I show up with a really contagious energy. I strive to speak life into this society of ours, and I mean to leverage this blog in some way to that end.

And so it is perhaps surprising how frequently I write in these pages about death. I am of the firm mindset that doing so doesn't have to be done from a negative place, but that it can instead be a topic approached with reverence and curiosity.

Earlier this year, honoring the fifth anniversary of my father's passing, I wrote:

The future isn't promised, which means I shouldn't wait for some eventual possibility to manifest before I start living. Indeed, I must live it all now, including the thorny and evasive questions. Perhaps especially those questions.

To seize the opportunities that exist, and to live my life as proudly and authentically as I can. To be there for my loved ones and to make the moments count.

Because when that supremely ordinary and final event occurs and I am no longer, I hope my final thought, if I'm blessed to have one, is that I lived.

Emerging from the Notification Hellscape

One of the literally life-changing decisions I've made is to switch off essentially all notifications on my phone, so I'd be remiss to not include my post on this very topic in this list.

I wrote:

Here's the threshold question: is this something I need to be notified of?

If you actually look through your notifications and see all the things you're permitting to harvest your attention, you can almost certainly find things to switch off.

Think about it this way: what's the consequence of not receiving a particular notification?

Do you really need the headline news every minute of your waking hours? (no)

Do you really need to be alerted to every email? (no)

Do you really need to be alerted to any email? (maybe not)

The list goes on.

The Flower and Flame of Memorial Day

This year, I had the honor of delivering Memorial Day remarks. Teeing up the text of the speech, I wrote:

In truth, I always struggle with how best to address this day. When I was asked to deliver Memorial Day remarks at a recent event, I did what I often do when challenged: I read, I thought, and I wrote.

I titled the remarks "The Flame and Flower of Memorial Day," pulling from themes in historic speeches that rose to the moment of this somber day. I was particularly inspired by the 1884 speech by Oliver Wendell Holmes, which is worth reading in full.

In short, I came to an unsurprising but evergreen conclusion: to honor sacrifice, we must serve with our whole selves.

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This blog has been frustrating at times. It has been rewarding almost without fail. It has been instrumental in my growth as a leader and a thinker and a writer (and now...an animator?).

This corner of the interwebs has helped me explore the depths of my three-dimensionality. And I hope, dear reader, that it has done the same for you.

Always Growingly Yours,

—Rye