☄️ Externalizing Gratitude

A few months back, I wrote about my new process of starting each day with gratitude. While I can't report perfect consistency, I can happily share that I still stick to this as a general practice.

It's helpful to have it at the top of my daily note, the template I turn to every morning on workdays. If I start jotting down notes for my first call of the day in that template and I haven't already captured my dose of gratitude for the day, it's a visible reminder that I still need to do so.

But am I, once again, missing an important step here?

At a recent nonprofit gathering, thank you notes were discussed at length. How do you cultivate donor relationships? Thank you notes, preferably handwritten, personalized and timely.

I know this to be the case, yet I struggle to build it in as a consistent practice.

That gathering prompted me to adjust a daily task in Todoist, my to-do list driver, to reflect a slightly more assertive tone:

Look, I know that this type of reminder cuts against my advice elsewhere to give yourself grace when you don't get things done. But this particular task has been nagging at me for quite some time, and I keep growing my list of people I'd like to thank. Some are donors, sure, but there are plenty of other people in my professional and personal life who are quite deserving of gratitude.

The practice I'm building now is to turn some of my daily inward gratitude outward. I don't need to thank everyone all at once (right now I quite literally have 50+ folks in the queue), but one or two each morning seems reasonable. If I miss a day? Well there's that grace coming right back in, baby.

And yeah, sometimes these will be email or text thank yous. They aren't as personal or warm, but they can still convey outward gratitude. And recipients may in fact prefer them, because:

Barely legible scrawl aside, there's something else handwriting has going for it: it's a uniquely human action, untouched by the scourge of AI generated messages (though I'm sure, even without googling it, that there's some idiotic machine out there that takes AI generated text and turns it into printed handwriting).

If I receive something handwritten, I know a person took the time to write it. That matters, and will matter perhaps increasingly more as we get sucked deeper into this generative void.

I currently frame this blog as "the crossroads of humanity & productivity." So what of the productivity side?

Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks continues to resonate. I wrote last week about finding joy in saying no, which starts with embracing the discomfort of declining to do things you wish you had time to do.

Burkeman's writing on that topic immediately took hold, as did his central thesis: humans average about four thousand weeks of life, and the sooner you come to terms with that finitude, the better.

Subscribe for Tuesday thoughts from the crossroads of humanity & productivity

Through this lens, when someone does something to help you, they are using a portion of their meager four thousand weeks to do so. For whatever reason, they prioritized you for that period of time over literally anything else. Implicitly or explicitly, they put aside many other things on their task lists for you. They were less "productive" elsewhere because of it.

It's no great stretch, then, to decide that they deserve your gratitude. So be a human and say thanks, will ya?

I'll end with a note that this post falls into the unofficial category of "things Ryan is experimenting with that seem well reasoned but may or may not stick." Which is to say, I'll have to share an update on whether I kept up this practice of externalizing my thanks. With weekly entries and plenty of things that fall into that category, 2024's year-in-review post may be a doozy.