Archive
Everything I have written, newest first.
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💯 100 Blogs Later - Lessons Learned & Hours Burned
A reflection on what I've learned about productivity in my first 100 blog posts, and a debut of my sketching era.
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🍳 (Not So) Burned Out
Journaling—and reviewing what you've journaled—can play a powerful role in reflection and growth. For me, it's showing how steps taken by Past Ryan are helping Current Ryan.
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💞 Do What You Love (Kinda)
Seize opportunities to do projects and tasks that you are genuinely drawn towards, even if it's part of an overall job you don't "love."
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🏃 Working on the Go
Trying to get work done in the midst of heavy travel can be crazy making. It can also be invigorating, presenting unique opportunities and insights along the way. Lean in.
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🎡 How to Build a Creativity Flywheel
Five things anyone can do to jump start and sustain a creative flow
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🥱 Be Bored
In a world of scant attention, there's something we can do to try and reclaim focus that's both obvious and obnoxious: be bored.
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🙋♂️ I'm the Author, it's Me
As AI threatens to subvert the very purpose of written communication, it's important to me that you know that I, in fact, actually wrote this.
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🍃 Our Hidden Suns
Behind the leaves, beyond the clouds, shine unique suns that remind of us who we are. Don't forget they are there.
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🤐 "What are you babbling about?"
On trying something because it feels good to try, without getting too caught up in the desired outcome.
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🧵 On Following the Thread
Just because you don't know where something is going doesn't mean you shouldn't go there. The unknown, when pursued with authenticity and intention, can be some of the best life has to offer.
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🌸 The Flower and Flame of Memorial Day
Honoring sacrifice with service, one wilting flower, one spreading flame at a time.
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👇 The Unfolding Experience of Now
On being and experiencing the great unfolding.
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🤫 AI Lies — Surprise!
Use the models, yes, but beware that no matter how large their language, their preference of using the smallest effort can lead to deceitful outcomes.
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🔄 To read, to write, to discuss...to think!
A reflection of the reasons to read, write, and discuss, all in service of deepening our capacity to truly, unmistakably think.
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🍎 5.5 Hours in NYC
A focused trip helps me understand the impact I'm capable of and reminds me of the cost of moving quickly
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🧭 Directionally Correct
In moments of overwhelm, we'd do well to not only pause, but to objectively question if we're heading in the right direction. And if we're not, we'd do even better to adjust. Quickly.
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🧠 In Defense of Introspection
The reflective connections made between where one was and where they are now inform where one goes next. Don't let billionaires convince you otherwise
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💁♂️ Life is Yes
Saying "no" creates the possibility of "yes," but discerning which to say isn't always easy. To get there, we have to explore the value of each option, and then...jump.
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⛔ Life is Temporary
Life will, eventually, end. Fully facing up to that fact and all its implications can help us find meaning now, while we still have time to live that meaning out.
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🎉 A Moment, a Celebration
In the Year of Focus, I'm leaning into moments that command attention, even when I didn't expect them to.
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⊹ Eisenhower and You
Claude and I are on some coding adventures, and I cannot quite believe how easy it is bring ideas to life. First up: dynamic tools to assess prioritization and identity.
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🫨 "Coding" for the Rest of Us
To move forward a project I've had in mind for quite some time, I spent an hour with Claude Code. It will not be my last.
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🙅♂️ Life is No
"No" is an essential word, and we say it implicitly more often than we think. That's a very good thing.
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🧬 Life is Procedurally Generated
The world around us is constantly being generated in response to conditions outside our control. Plan and act accordingly.
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⏩︎ Life is (Too) Fast
In world where things move ever faster, intentional slowness helps get more done and deepens appreciation for the world swirling around us.
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🧹 Keeping House
A quick update on switching to Ghost, an upcoming name change, and a pay-what-ya-want model.
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⌛The Year of Timeliness
What is time, and how do I actually use it? I spent substantial portions of this year evaluating time and my relationship to it, and, as with any sufficiently nuanced prompt, I'm left with more questions than answers.
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🎙️ (Un)productive Hobbies
While I do care about the things I put out into the world, I have an increasing comfort with putting them out with the understanding that others might consume them and claim that I do, indeed, suck. And that comfort feels pretty dang good.
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❓The Questions Themselves
Some questions may never have satisfying answers. Perhaps those are the most meaningful, and worthy of love, of all.
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📍Where You Are
Wherever you are, dear reader, be there. And please — please — try to give yourself some grace for not yet arriving at the places you've not yet been.
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⋰ Forward, Back, Left, Right...Diagonal
It could be taking a step back and trying to see the whole board, looking for ways to accomplish the mission without religious adherence to the well trodden, limited paths.
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🫸 Patience, My Love
Patience — ugh! Where's the fun in that? As someone almost always in go-mode, I'll admit that patience isn't my favorite virtue.
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🫵 You, You
It's important for me to be me, and for me to share my journey with others to help them to be them.
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⇒ (Moving) Forward
Amidst all these changes, between every stage and task, I find myself building momentum. I'm moving, yes, but more specifically moving forward, even if I'm not entirely sure where to.
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🤞 A Skeptic's Hope
I am, by nature, a skeptic. At times, I've leaned too deeply into that skepticism, allowing it to poison the possibilities of better outcomes.
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📣 Out Loud
It's worth it sometimes to speak those things we think should be left unspoken, to use our voices even when we're unsure what good it'll do.
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📖 21 Lessons From My Father
I heard him, at least enough to store this conversation in my brain until it would surge into relevance many years later, but I didn't really hear him.
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🧠 Where Is My Mind
Take stock of where you actually are, pausing the obsession over where you want to be.
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🔋 Lunar Lessons
There's a comforting constancy to the moon. What are your constants?
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🔋 Memorials & Purpose
I am here because others are not. I must move forward because others cannot.
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🔋 Finding Weird, Part 3 - The Bridge
We are at our best when we are ourselves. Our strange, unique, goofy selves. Believe that, and you will be better for it.
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🔋 Finding Weird, Part 2 - Strength
Even in the darkest of times, there are wells from which we can all draw strength.
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🔋 Embracing Weird, Part 1 - Fear
A less delicate way to describe it would be to ask: “What makes you weird, but, like, in a good way?”
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🔋 A Zebra's Perspective
My mom is fond of the phrase “turning the cube.” If you're looking at something from one direction, how can you turn it around to view it from another side?
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🔋 Priority Pivots
Prioritization is a part science, part art. You can research and understand it, but you don't really feel its complexity until you're faced with competing paths and you have to pick one over the other.
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🔋 The Humbling Quest to Get More Done
The quest to get things done is endless and humbling. But that doesn't mean it has to own us.
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🔋 Two Productivity Questions We Should (but don't) Ask
When we set out to start something, it's all too easy to skip straight to the doing without spending time on the why.
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🔋 Back to Basics: Taking Notes & Taking Actions
One of the most common issues I hear from folks in the quest to be productive is losing track of action items. They write note after note and cast them into the sea of good intentions, hoping that the relevant action items will somehow float to the surface instead of sinking to the depths.
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🔋 A Productivity Nerd's Top 5 Lessons of 2024
In early 2024, a theme came to me even though I wasn't really searching for it: the year of clarity.
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🔋 Let Yourself Get Distracted
Beating your head against a wall to try forcing focus is not going to help. Ask anyone ever who has tried to do so.
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🔋 Optimizing for Profit
When you create, when you introduce parts of your weird and unique self into the world, can you avoid the temptation to immediately optimize your content for profit?
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🔋 You Should Miss a Deadline
I'm growing more comfortable with missing deadlines, and I think you should too. That's probably a weird thing for a CEO to say. Borderline unprofessional, even.
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🔋 Why I Write
And if you're worried about finding readers, send me the link to your new creation, and I can guarantee you'll have at least one subscriber.
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🔋 Rest
Rest. Okay? Actually rest. Those words are as much for you, dear reader, as they are for me.
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☄️ Emerging from the Notification Hellscape
Luckily, there's a pretty darn simple way to climb out: turn off a bunch of notifications. Seriously. Do it right now.
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☄️ A Man Who is Freezing
“Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?” So asked dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his novel walking through a day in the life of a Soviet labor camp prisoner.
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☄️ Actionable Notes
Broadly, I see notes as falling in two categories: action items and reference material. They're often commingled, so the question is how you separate them in the moment and for future access.
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☄️ You Can't 10x Your Productivity
There is no magic tool, approach, notebook, writing device, philosophy, mentality, or habit that can make this happen. None.
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☄️ In Search of Equanimity
It took time for me to embrace leadership. In high school, I led no clubs and was captain of no team (to the contrary, I literally got last in multiple cross country races).
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☄️ I Just Don't Wanna
Today is one of those days. The to-do list is full, the calendar is set, and the clock ticks ever forward, but the brain just isn't fully there.
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☄️ Preemptively Closing Loops & Go Bags
The fewer decisions I have to make before I head out, the better. Something as simple as having a bag that's ready to go without much thought effectively closes loops before they even open.
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☄️ The Onion Attention Challenge
Those in search of productivity maximization tend to over-index on time management and under-index on attention management.
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☄️ Unto the Senseless Breach
How very much of our nature do we disguise when we enlist. How readily we favor our rage. And, hand-to-hand or not, we are never the same for it.
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☄️ Externalizing Gratitude
The practice I'm building now is to turn some of my daily inward gratitude outward.
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☄️ Joy in Saying No
I am, to put it mildly, a fan of the “closing loops” method. I believe it to be one of the highest impact productivity tools one can implement, based in no small part on my own experience.
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☄️ Thanks For Your Patience
When you're responding to something later than you'd like or you show up behind schedule, try replacing “sorry for the delay” with “thanks for your patience.”
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☄️ On Feedback — Soliciting, Listening, and Responding with Intention
I get a lot of feedback in this job. A lot. Students, alumni, staff, board members, donors, partners, colleagues, strangers…there's no shortage of folks who opine on how I'm doing.
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Artificial Knowledge
You didn't earn the knowledge for yourself. That, better than anything else I've come across, captures my concern with the wrong type of AI usage.
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The Human Behind the Profile
Social media is a curated, incomplete view into someone's life. We all know this, yet it's inexhaustibly easy to forget.
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How the End Gives Life to the Means
It is because this life ends that every living moment matters.
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Procrastination in a Bunker
I arrived organically at something I still find true today: choice is inversely correlated to your inherent likelihood of getting things done.
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The Thing That Made Me Read
I generally don't like “hacks,” but here's one anyway: find your productivity enabler.
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For Country and Guac
Pledging allegiance should be a big deal, shouldn't it? If it becomes a rote exercise, it arguably loses its sincerity.
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Is Be
On an evening flight home from a deeply rewarding trip, I caught a confounding mix of exhaustion and pulsing energy. I started writing, and words coalesced into verse.
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Think - Part Two
Thinking is harder than not thinking. Growing is harder than not growing. But that higher up fruit is oh so much sweeter.
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How Dare You Procrastinate
Picture this. You're putting off an important task but you feel so guilty about putting off the task that you can't even relish the things you are doing instead of the thing you should be doing.
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The 98: Multitasking Lies
The sooner you acknowledge that you're almost certainly part of the 98% who cannot multitask, the sooner you can build a system that is built around the brain you actually have, not the one you wish you had.
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Cross-Pollinating Productivity
What can we learn from going outside our industry and examining how folks in very different fields get things done? I'm starting to think that the answer is: quite a bit.
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The Power of a Name
Before we start something big, we should think about who we are and who we want to be.
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The Flattening
Whenever something nuanced and complex is flattened into a single dimension, we should ask what we're losing along the way.
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Habitual Mindfulness
I've had an on-and-off mindfulness practice for many years. Unfailingly, I find it beneficial. And unfailingly, I do it for a period of time and then seem to stop.
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Starting With Gratitude
What's something I'm grateful for today? This is the question at the top of my daily log. It's the question I start with before kicking off the workday, answering emails and hopping on calls.
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Deep Work Experiment
What would the Warrior-Scholar Project team be able to accomplish if we each blocked off four hours of distraction-free, focused work time every week?
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Productivity ≠ Self Worth
You are a whole-ass human with talents, desires, experiences, and qualities that make you who you are.
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Appreciating a Disaster
A few weeks ago, I went to a concert with my mom. It was a disaster. Being the odd person I am, I loved it.
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Your Contextual Value
Your value can be context dependent, which means that the more that you are aware of your context, and the more you intentionally curate your context, the more value you might be able to bring.
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Your Maximum & Unique Value
“Does the VA really want me spending my time on entering things into charts instead of focusing on time with patients and analysis of their complex conditions?” I love this question.
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2023 Productivity Year in Review
Why should we focus on being productive? What does it actually mean to be productive? If we are at 100% productivity (whatever that is), what are we sacrificing to hit that questionable target?
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Serve
Veterans and nonveterans alike should strive to build service into their lives. Be it time, treasure, or talent, everyone has something to offer.
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Solitude
I am a person who practices solitude. The syntax of that sentence probably sounds off, even clunky.
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If My Kids Ask About Joining the Military
I will also share with them in detail my own struggles with and reflections on service, including the perplexing but unmistakable pride of it all.
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Think.
Think. This is what my father taught me. When I faced a challenge, made a poor decision, or tried to figure out what to do with my life, he would give this simple yet profound advice: think.
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Go With the (Lazy) Flow
Culture is a strange thing. Leaders can and should be intentional about how they build and reinforce it, but sometimes it develops or regresses for completely unforeseen reasons.
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The 5 AM Flight (and other questionable decisions)
On paper, it makes sense. But as it turns out, human beings aren't made of paper.
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Two Thousand and Two Ways to Feel Inadequate
From time to time, I find it really helpful to name how I'm feeling, and my hope is that being open about my internal struggles here can help others acknowledge and deal with similar struggles.
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Saying Yes
Nearly five years ago, this is where I said “yes” to Warrior-Scholar Project co-founder Jesse Reising about joining the organization full time. That conversation changed my life.
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Presumption of Guilt - My Disabled Journey
It's the most vulnerable thing I've shared publicly, and because I still feel like an imposter in the disabled community, I worry about this having some type of negative fallout.
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Write. It. Down.
Your brain, like mine, will probably continue to lie to you and tell you that you're going to remember the thing and that you don't need to write it down.
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2022 Productivity - Year in Review
I find that it's wonderfully useful to take stock of the systems, apps, and processes on which I rely to run my daily life, and I figure others might benefit from the lessons I'm learning along the way.
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It's Alive!
It's time to dust off this 'ole thing and get cranking on some content.
