John Jago

Take on less than you think

I cut out a lot from my undo.studio website today and yesterday. One problem I always have is that I focus too much on what could be rather than what is. Stripping away all empty promises, all things that I think I might get to some day but don’t, I’m left with only that which has value in the present. That’s what I did to this website.

Being a founder of a startup leaves little time for personal projects if I don’t want to be glued to a computer all day. However, sometimes I have time to do things, just slowly.

The only thing left on undo.studio is the writing, the work logs.

It’s not a blog, and these are not tweets. It’s more like a diary. I so much enjoy reading Method of Action, blank.page, and Road to Ramen that it just makes sense for me to have a little journal of my own. Perhaps some other person will add it to the previous three I mentioned as something they enjoy reading. I often use that as a heuristic: how do I respond myself to something? If I enjoy it, others will too. It works surprisingly well. Maybe because most humans are fundamentally the same.

It’s finally a place for me to put technical posts on solutions I find while wrangling code, something I feel is too temporary and unpolished for my personal blog, which I want to reserve for polished essays. It’s also a good measure of progress for myself on how far I get through side projects.

Lastly, I hate having to maintain duplicate things. Any programmer would know. I think having a list of projects that is almost a mirror of what’s on my personal site is sloppy. I feel that each thing should have a home. So the project list is gone from undo.studio.

Along with a couple tweaks to the styles, it feels much cleaner. It’s like cleaning up a room. With everything clean, I can focus better and have more clarity, and in that empty space execute on the things that matter most.