How to treat the pandemic as the ultimate editing function.
If ever there was a time in our lives when we needed to shed our baggage, this is it. Maybe the pandemic is the ultimate editing function. Welcome to your “Great Midlife Edit.” What are you ready to let go of that is no longer serving you?
Chip Conley, AirBnB CEO Whisperer and Modern Elder Evangelist
What are you willing to edit in your life?
What will be your guiding star in this process and who will hold you accountable?
I’ve tended to be ahead of the curve multiple times for no apparent reason other than my capabilities to forward-read trends and so when I wrote and published Fierce Reinvention in 2017 was I being prescient for what was to come in 2020? It’s about the time line of other prescient moments of mine over time, but hey let’s not get hang up on that.
I love Chip’s framing of this year as providing the forcing function for a Great Midlife Exit.
Afford yourself of the opportunity to fiercely reinvent your life. Perhaps there are things that have accumulated around you that no longer serve your true purpose any longer.
Shed them.
No regrets.
For me, I’m in the process of shedding old life and project management systems and exploring new ones.
It feels like I am shedding an old skin that no longer serves me and tentatively slipping on a new, shiny one.
Evernote has been a constant companion since the early 2000s and I’ve been trialling their latest beta, but it doesn’t quite do it for me anymore. I’ve used other systems and recently explored Notion, but like Evernote it requires me to compartmentalise things and this feels artificial.
It ain’t how my brain works, so why should my ‘second brain’ be limited by such structures?
I remember how years ago I used to spend many hours on a Sunday evening placing emails into folders in Outlook. I never had enough time to keep up with the deluge and I often forgot where I’d placed an email when I needed to reference it in a hurry. And then along came gmail. It had a really powerful and intuitive search function and since I moved over to it I haven’t placed one email into one folder.
Oh, and I got my Sunday evenings back!
And so I was looking for something powerful yet unstructured.
I do believe I’ve found this with Roam Research. I’ll leave it to you to explore this system if you want, but I am highly recommending it.
It feels liberating to be applying an editing function to the systems that run my life and I encourage you to have a hard look at what you can change around you too.