At some point over the last two weeks I came across a subreddit about ’non zero days’. As far as I can tell, the community on Reddit sprung up in response to a comment made by ryans01:

Rule numero uno - There are no more zero days. What’s a zero day? A zero day is when you don’t do a single fucking thing towards whatever dream or goal or want or whatever that you got going on. No more zeros. I’m not saying you gotta bust an essay out everyday, that’s not the point. The point I’m trying to make is that you have to make yourself, promise yourself, that the new SYSTEM you live in is a NON-ZERO system. Didnt’ do anything all fucking day and it’s 11:58 PM? Write one sentence. One pushup. Read one page of that chapter. One. Because one is non zero. You feel me? When you’re in the super vortex of being bummed your pattern of behaviour is keeping the vortex goin, that’s what you’re used to. Turning into productivity ultimate master of the universe doesn’t happen from the vortex. It happens from a massive string of CONSISTENT NON ZEROS. That’s rule number one. Do not forget.

Working in the technology sector as a consultant means that I sometimes find myself working with public figures in the tech community. I can’t think of many points in my life where I have found myself working with people whose talks I have watched on YouTube or whose writings I have read in various publications on a regular basis.

Naturally the process of following public figures primarily through the lens of the persona that they expose to the world results in expectations being formed which are rooted in the images that those people aim to project of themselves.

I remember content consumption being quite a simple process before I owned a smartphone. I had some preferred RSS feeds that I subscribed to with a reader of my choice, which I would go through on my laptop whenever I had time and save articles that I was interested in reading later.

In the years since I first started using smartphones I’ve gone through a few different mobile-first apps such as Flipboard and Pocket, trying to augment/improve my content consumption workflow, but as of last week it seems I’ve come back around largely to my pre-smartphone habits.

Since the start of the year I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to write more. I realise that many of my biggest hurdles at the moment can be traced a lack of regularity and discipline, but there has been one thing in particular which has caught my attention recently when I’ve been going over topics I’d like to write about: length.

I seem to convince myself that if I cannot (or don’t think I can) write about a certain topic up to a certain arbitrary length, it is not worth even trying to put together a post on that topic.

The past month has seen me think a lot about portability in development teams and across environments. The first real development project I worked on last year made use of a utility script which provided a unified development environment interface for all of the developers, a go script. This was something of a revelation, as it really helped with my onboarding and environment setup, and allowed me to be a productive contributor right away.

I went through a period last year where I was listening to a lot of podcasts on the Nerdist network. The stand-up comedians who often feature on various Nerdist podcasts will every so often talk about career progression and recognition in the world of stand-up.

A point that has been brought up in those podcasts which continues to resonate with me is to ‘just kill’ (write good material, perform it well, listen to the crowd’s feedback, make adjustments and get a better reaction next time). Forget about everything else. Forget about other stand-up comics who are becoming more well-known than you, whether you think they deserve it or not, whether you think it should be you instead of them. Forget all of it. Just kill. Keep killing, keep iterating, keep improving, and your stand-up material will speak for itself.

Making time is getting harder as the years stack up.

The things that I wish I could make more time for are not particularly extravagant. Reading. Exercising. Preparing lunches and dinners in advance. Writing music. Studying foreign languages. Revisiting video games from my childhood. Diving into the history of cinema. Listening to lengthy post rock records without interruption.

I had a routine that I really liked towards the end of this summer. I woke around 06:00 every morning and began my daily bodyweight workout while listening to a non-fiction audiobook. After my workout I would work through the next section of my Japanese textbook, with some vocabulary and kanji drills before and after. I wouldn’t even think about food until noon, because I was practicing intermittent fasting, and I was amazed at how much time in my day had previously been taken up by thinking about food.