I find it easy to get caught up in whatever is on my mind. That’s why I find mindfulness practices particularly helpful, and T.E.A. - Thoughts, Energy, Attention - is something I’ve been using on and off for a few years to clear my head and focus on work and decisions that matter to me.

It’s short and simple, and only takes few minutes:

• Thoughts: What’s on my mind now?
  • Is my train of thought helpful? What can be done to change it?
• Energy: How am I feeling?
  • How is my energy level? Can I maintain or improve it?
• Attention: What matters to me?
  • What should I focus on? What should I accomplish?

I’ve seen a common variation of the same acronym stand for Time, Energy, Attention - but I found that didn’t work well for me. Maybe that’s because I’m terrible at estimating or understanding time, or maybe that’s because the most important decisions sometimes end up not taking any time at all. Either way, I try not to concern myself with time. Hence: Thoughts, Energy, Attention.

You can read more about T.E.A. in this PDF from Google.

In the past few years my work heavily shifted towards being mostly done in a web browser. Much of what I use today is email and documents, and I’m able to SSH into a dedicated Linux machine for rare instances of coding or running some scripts. Because of that my primary machine these days is a trusty Chromebook - really just a web browser with an OS stapled on top of it.

I’ve used Vimwiki extensively for nearly 10 years now: it’s a fantastic way to organize my thoughts and everything I learn about the world, and it works with the tool I know and love - Vim. My Vimwiki followed me across machines, and I use Google Drive to keep it in sync regardless of the environment I use the Vimwiki in.

It took me way longer than I would like to admit to get Vimwiki working on my Chromebook: here lies the journey of getting the Vimwiki to work on a ChromeOS. There are three major hurdles I had to jump over:

• Getting Vim to run on ChromeOS.
• Getting Vimwiki, Google Drive, and ChromeOS to play together nicely.
• Getting the web view to work.

Good news is that ChromeOS allows you to run a Linux environment. Bad news, is that things can’t get a tiny bit finnicky.

First, set up Linux to run on ChromeOS via “Settings > Advanced > Developers > Linux Development Environment > Turn on”. After a few prompts and a freshly brewed cup of coffee, you’ll have a Debian Linux environment running on your Chromebook.

Newly installed Linux is accessible from the terminal:

Pop open the terminal and update Vim and get the latest version of Python:

sudo apt install python3 vim

Download and install Vimwiki however you’d like: there are extensive instructions on GitHub. If you’re anything like me, you might have a self-installing vim-plug, and all you need is just plop your existing .vimrc into your Chromebook Linux instance.

Now, for getting Google Drive, Vim, and ChromeOS to play together. ChromeOS and Linux are integrated well enough, and you can access your home directory through ChromeOS native file manager:

To share files in another direction, there’s a handy “Share with Linux” option for files:

This option shares files with Linux via /mnt/chromeos. In Google Drive, I have a vimwiki/ folder which contains wiki/ and wiki_html/. I’m able to share that folder, and update Vimwiki configuration accordingly:

let g:vimwiki_list = [{
  \ 'path': '/mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive/vimwiki/wiki/',
  \ 'template_path': '/mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive/vimwiki/wiki/templates',
  \ 'template_default': 'default',
  \ 'template_ext': '.html'}]

Now there’s a corner case I ran into when I had Vimwiki set up on a different account than the one I use to log into the Chromebook. Only the primary account’s Google Drive shows up in ChromeOS file manager. To work around that, I had to share my vimwiki/ folder with the primary account, and then share that with Linux. The resulting directory was available through a /mnt/chormeos/GoogleDrive/ShortcutsSharedWithMe/...:

At this point Vimwiki works just fine: working with the wiki and generating HTML is functional. All that’s left is getting the generated Vimwiki to show up in the web browser. Ever since Chrome disabled local file access, I (expectedly) haven’t been able to get :Vimwiki2HTMLBrowse to function, since simple file:/// URLs aren’t accessible for security reasons.

That’s where Python comes in, with it’s native web server module. I made a small alias in my .bashrc:

alias vimwiki="cd /mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive/vimwiki/ && python3 -m http.server"

Next thing you know, I’m finally able to access the generated web version of my Vimwiki via localhost:8000/wiki_html:

The Eisenhower matrix, sometimes known as the priority matrix, is an invaluable planning tool, and something I have been consistently using for the better part of the last decade.

As someone who has a short attention span and easily gets overwhelmed, I find Eisenhower matrix to be an invaluable tool in allowing me to focus on what’s important, rather than what’s right in front of me.

Oh, I still struggle to make sure that things that are important to me are what matters to others, but that’s a whole different battle - at the very least I’m able to keep my own head straight, and that’s a win in my book.

Without any further ado, I present to you the decision making framework developed and popularized by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States (and clearly a notorious efficiency nut).

It’s pretty simple, really. Take everything from your long single-file To-Do list, and place it on the matrix based on its urgency and importance. Work through the matrix in the following order:

• Urgent and important: get these done, now.
• Important, but not urgent: decide when you want to do these, actively make time for yourself to work on those.
• Urgent, but not important: delegate (read on below if you have no one to delegate to).
• Not urgent and not important: take time to eliminate these tasks.

Do now: a common pitfall

It’s easy to throw everything into the “urgent and important” pile. In reality, that’s not often the case. If you find yourself throwing everything in the first quadrant - I implore you to think of your tasks in relative terms. Out of everything on your mind, I’m sure some things are more important than others.

I find that over time most of my work shifts into a single quadrant (usually the “important, but not urgent”), and I find it helpful to redistribute those, or populate the matrix from scratch.

Schedule: mindful use of time

One of the goals of the Eisenhower Matrix is to increase visibility into how you spend your time. While it’s easy to spend most of the time in the “urgent and important” quadrant, the best work happens in the “important, but not urgent” section of the matrix. That’s where the best use of your time is, and that’s where most of the energy and attention should be spent.

Otherwise you’re just running around like a chicken with its head cut off, although I can sympathise with the difficulty of getting out of the urgency trap. It’s not trivial, and probably downright impossible in some cases.

This is where the biggest pitfall of the Eisenhower matrix lays in my experience. You want to maximize amount of time spent in the “schedule” quadrant, but you don’t want to end up with a massive list that becomes a yet another To Do list, because one dimensional To-Do lists suck.

Delegate: to whom?

Not everyone has someone to delegate work to. Or not everything can be delegated. In these cases, I treat the “delegate” bucket the same as “eliminate”. Hopefully that won’t come back to bite me in the future.

Eliminate: it’s hard

I really like following up on things, to a fault. I don’t like leaving loose ends, unanswered emails, or unspoken expectations. I find it helpful to schedule time to explicitly eliminate certain work, and communicate explicit expectations to everyone around me about that. Because of that, that’s where the most of my procrastination happens. Telling people “no” isn’t always easy, and I still don’t have the best process for combing through the “Eliminate” quadrant.

I know many people are a lot more comfortable letting unimportant things quietly fall through the cracks, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’m making a little cheat sheet for myself. As I progress in my career, much of my work revolves around communication, and I’d be remiss if I don’t share a formal framework I use. I like checklists, spreadsheets, and anything else that organizes the world around me, and it’s fun to make one about communications.

Checklist

This is a checklist for high stakes emails, let’s dig in:

• Goals
  • What are you trying to accomplish? Why? (It could be worth asking why multiple times.)
  • Will this email help you accomplish the goal?
  • Can the goal be summarized in a single sentence? If not, it’s probably not specific enough.
• Audience
  • Who is the audience?
  • What does the audience care about? How can you connect the subject of your email to things they care about?
  • Does every recipient need to be there? Who’s missing?
  • What action do you want the reader to take? Is there a clear call for action? For executive communications (who have notoriously short attention span), you’ll want to both start and end with the same call for action.
• Content
  • Is there a nuance that would be lost in email that requires face to face conversation? Does this need to be an email?
  • Does every sentence and paragraph support your goal?
  • Does this need a TL;DR?
  • Is the narrative structure in place? Is there a clear beginning, middle, and end? No need to write a novel, but without this the content risks being disjoined.
• Impulse
  • Is now the best time to send it? Friday afternoon is almost always a no-no, unless you purposely want the reader to pay less attention to the issue.
  • If this was shared broadly, would you rephrase it? If yes - you definitely should.
    • To double down, if email is about someone, write as if that someone will eventually see it. It’s fine to be candid, it’s not fine to be rude.
  • Are you angry? Upset? I get notoriously cranky in the late afternoon, and avoid sending anything important until the next day - or, if time sensitive, until taking a short break or a walk.

Example

Let’s apply this to an example. Say, I’m writing a book, and the editor I’m working with hasn’t been responsive. I’ve tried talking to them about it, but they’re not responsive. I think it’s the time to escalate to their supervisor.

Here’s the quick, dirty, and impulsive draft I would write:

Hello X,

Y hasn’t been responsive when reviewing the chapters, and it’s really difficult to get back to chapters after a whole week passes by. By then I don’t even have the context! I’ve raised this multiple times and to no avail. Can you please get Y to be more responsive or find another editor for me to work with? I haven’t been able to make meaningful progress in a month!

Pretty brusque, isn’t it? I don’t normally dissect every email like this, but sometimes it helps to take a closer look and formalize the decision making behind each sentence. Thankfully, much of this becomes habitual over time.

Goals

First things first, I want the editor to be more responsive. Why? To have a shorter feedback loop when it comes to making changes. Why? To make it easier to write - it’s difficult to come back to the chapter after a long amount of time passed. Why? This pushes back timelines for each chapter.

I don’t really care about how to achieve this goal: the same person can be more responsive, or maybe I get a new point of contact to work with. Maybe there are other options I haven’t considered.

To summarize in a single sentence, the goal is to “reduce the feedback loop”.

Audience

The audience is the editor’s supervisor, or maybe someone else from the editorial team who’ll have the incentive to escalate.

I know that the timelines are very important to this publisher, which is something I can use. I can frame the concerns around impacts of the timeline - even if it’s not something I necessarily care about myself.

Since there are multiple ways to achieve my goal and I don’t particularly care about how, I can make the call for action open ended. I’m doing this because I’m comfortable with either outcomes - like the editor not being to improve response times, but the publisher providing more leniency around the schedule - which, while isn’t ideal, still helps.

Content

As multiple people can help me accomplish a goal, and I might not be aware of all of relevant parties - email format works best.

Narrative structure here is simple - I have a problem (the beginning), here’s why it’s bad (the middle), let’s fix it (the end).

This email is short enough not to require a TL;DR.

Impulse

As my concern is about a particular person, I have to talk about them. I don’t want to avoid candor, but I can approach the situation with empathy and assumption of best intentions something along the lines of: “I understand X has other commitments”. Focusing on facts and leading with empathy would help here.

Having an unresponsive editor is definitely frustrating, so it’s worth taking a step back, and maybe paying extra attention - there’s no use having frustration show through.

The result

After running through the checklist, we end up with (what I hope is) a better, more actionable, and less icky email:

Hello X,

When working with Y, it takes up to a week for me to receive feedback on the chapters I wrote. I understand Y is working with multiple engagements, but I’m concerned about the timelines for the book. If we continue as is, it’s likely we’ll have to push publishing date by X months.

Could you help me find a resolution here?

It’s short, omits unnecessary details, and leaves the reader with a clear (but open ended) call for action. Now, all that’s left is to schedule send that email in a morning, and wait for a response!

Following Europe’s 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California passed its own California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2020. I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of the law or the differences between the two, but from what I understand this gives you the right to know exactly what data of yours do businesses use, and request that this information is to not be sold or to be deleted.

As a California resident, I decided to dedicate a long weekend to exercising my privacy rights. The long weekend turned into a week worth of back and forth with a dozen-or-so companies, and me having a much better idea of what information about me is out there.

Turned out many large websites provide privacy dashboards where you’re able to review and see information collected or inferred about you. But most of this data is hidden behind a formal request process which takes a few days to a week.

First, I decided to stroll through Google’s privacy settings. There are two ways forward: privacy dashboard, or full-on Google Takeout. Google Takeout allows you to download an archive of everything Google has on you, which took a few days to process, and is near impossible to go through while keeping your sanity. So I decided to play with the privacy dashboard instead.

Google Maps has location history of most places I’ve visited for the past ten or so years (creepy, but I found it useful on more than one occasion), and YouTube and Search history stores thousands of searches. I already had Assistant history disabled, since storing audio recordings is apparently where I draw the line when it comes to privacy. Targeted ad profile was an interesting thing to look at, accurately summing up my lifestyle in 50 words or less. I ended up disabling targeted ads from Google (and all other services as I went about on my privacy crusade).

Google had some of the finest privacy controls compared to other services, with actionable privacy-leaning suggestions. Google’s not known for its services playing well together, but privacy is where Google feels closer to Apple experience - everything is in a single place, surfaced in the same format, easy to control, and plays well together. Given the amount of transparency and fine grained control, I feel pretty good staying in the Google ecosystem.

Next I looked at LinkedIn. Outside of the expected things – emails, phone numbers, messages, invitations, and a history of just about everything I’ve ever clicked on, a file labeled “inferences” stood out. Whether LinkedIn thinks you’re open to job seeking opportunities, or what stage of career you are in, or if you travel for businesses, or if you’re a recruiter or maybe a senior leader in your company.

Since LinkedIn is a professional network, all information I share is well curated and is meant as public by default – and I found LinkedIn privacy settings in line with my expectations.

As an avid gamer, I went through Steam, Good Old Games, Ubisoft, Epic Games, and Origin privacy details. Unsurprisingly, the services tracked every time I launched every game, shopping preferences, and so on. Thankfully the data seemed confined to the world of gaming – which made this level of being creepy somewhat okay in my book.

I also looked at random websites I use somewhat frequently – Reddit, StackOverflow, PayPal, Venmo, AirBnB, and some others – not too many surprises there, although I did end up tightening privacy settings and opting out of personal data sharing and ad tracking for every service.

Last year I requested deletion of all my data on Mint, Personal Capital, and YNAB (You Need a Budget), and to be honest I’m a little relived that I didn’t have to look at the data these companies had on me.

Amazon data sharing turned out to be the scariest finding. Until now I didn’t really self-identify as a heavy Amazon user, but that turned out to be a lie: Prime shopping, Kindle, Audible, Prime Video.

The amount of data Amazon kept on me was overwhelming: Kindle and Audible track every time I read, play, or pause books, the Amazon website keeps full track of browsing habits, and Prime Video has detailed watch times and history. Most of this data ties back into real world – including nearly every address I ever lived at or phone numbers I had.

Even scarier, despite never using Alexa, I found numerous recordings of my voice from close to a decade ago – me checking status of the packages, but a few of me just breathing and walking around. I found no way of deleting these, as they didn’t show up in any privacy settings (including me installing an Alexa app just to get into privacy settings).

All of this gave me pause. It feels like the privacy controls are either lacking, hidden, or spread out thin across Amazon’s various apps. And I’ve only briefly scanned through the data Amazon had on me.

That’s where I had to take a break.

I have accounts with hundreds of services, and I have no idea how my personal data is used, and what it’s joined with. As I’m go on about my daily life, I’ll start tightening privacy controls, and maybe deleting services and their data where possible.

It’s just too creepy for my taste.

While you have control over the services you have accounts for, companies and ISPs collect a trove of private information on you even while you’re not logged in. For that, I strongly recommend using a VPN. I’ve been using PIA since 2019 and I’ve been very happy with it. Wholeheartedly recommend.