Markus Heurung

I don’t like reading newsletters in my mail client. Not that I don’t like newsletters. My best information sources are newsletters. Besides blogs and twitter.

But with subscribing to more newsletters my mail client transformed even more to a place where I wanted to be contacted personally and not as part of an audience. It’s a place that might even trigger notifications and disturb me. If the sending person is important enough. No newsletter is that urgent or important. I tried filtering and putting them into out of the inbox into folders, but it was still a mix of two different mediums.

Reading and communication are two different things for me.

Just today Jason Snell posted an article how he sends newsletter into the RSS service feedbin, and that’s the same way I consume newsletters, by reading them in reeder, my feedreader of choice.

To make the emails accessible via RSS, I use the service Kill the newsletter which is a simple solution to this problem: you can create mailboxes with a unique email address which you can use to subscribe to the newsletters. This mailbox is accessible through a dedicated Atom feed you can subscribe to. That’s it.

I’ve converted almost all of my newsletter subscriptions to Kill the newsletter and my mailbox got even lighter.
I love it!

During the last days I realised some things about myself and how I want to handle stuff differently. We all had a rough year now and for me it was really hard to deal with a lot of things. Life happened in abundance and I wasn’t able to do anything besides that. This still frustrates me a lot.
But I was able to build up a routine, almost up to the level of a proper habit. Thanks to Roamresearch’ Daily Pages I was able to set up a journaling habit. This got me to writing at least half of every day in the last year which is huge for me.
And I’m really enjoying it more and more.

The way I approach this is by setting up a daily page with a couple of questions like “How are you today?”, “What are you looking forward to today?” or “What’s your plan for today?”.
This gives me enough at hand to write a few sentences and I don’t need to find a muse or have a great idea about anything. I’ve started to push this further for other journaling or review techniques. A weekly review habit is not far!

Some of these answers get copied over into our Basecamp where we use these as a small daily report so we can keep in touch – a huge helper for our remote team. It was Basecamp with where I started answering theses daily questions. This way some of my writing already got a tiny audience.

So, in February I found Daily Blogging Challenge set up by Jeff Perry in which I commit to write a (small¹) blog post every day in March. A small community gatheres in a Discord server where daily topics are organised and announced. This way all participants help each other to achieve the goal of this challenge.

Today’s topic is “Routine”.

Since I know myself enough that little pointers on what to write about lower the barrier and I want to write more in public, I accept the challenge!

The indieweb is a fabulous place on the internet, maybe my most favorite one. I long saw myself as part of that community, but never made it to be active or even be able to contribute in a way that mattered.
The same happened with the lovely Drupal community. I lost touch and barely kept contact to all the nice people there.

And this nagged me to the point of feeling ashamed because I felt like I didn’t contribute at all anymore. It hurts that I can’t share my knowledge and experience on the interwebs, that I can’t create like I want to. I did before, like almost a decade ago.

But today I found a page on the indie web wiki that opened my eyes and explained this all in a shockingly simple way:

life happens - IndieWeb

life happens is a summary expression of numerous things that people experience in their actual physical lives that suddenly take higher priority than nearly anything else (like participation in volunteer-based communities), and the IndieWeb community is here to acknowledge, accept, and be supportive of community members experiencing this.

Jup.

This page is here to acknowledge that yes, life happens, and that the IndieWeb community believes in mutual care-taking as a form of community resiliency.

The list on that page felt like a checklist where I ticked almost all the boxes.

That’s where it clicked: life is happening, all the time. I have a life.

A full one.

And that little epiphany just made me really happy. Thank you, indieweb community.

/via dominik – thank you!