Author: Seth Werkheiser

Delete It

How do you handle a new thing? I recently bought a new MacBook Pro, my first new machine since 2014 (and 2009 before that).

 I actually just got a new computer because my old one died. It feels like the first computer I’ve ever had as an adult. It has nothing on it, and every time I download something, every time I add something to it, I’m like, “Do I want this to be on there forever? Or do I just delete it?” I’m deleting a lot of stuff and it feels really good to keep everything clear, to have that lack of clutter.

Emily A. Sprague at The Creative Independent

My photos sit in the cloud, my music streams from Bandcamp and Apple Music. All of my important documents sit on DropBox or Google Drive.

That said, here are a few things I’ve installed on my new machine.

TextExpander: A few keystrokes and whammo, a string of text, a phone number, or a line of code. I use this every single day.

Spark: Holding my breath on this one, but this email app lets me export tasks to Tododist, snooze emails until later in the day (or any date I pick), and schedule emails to be sent (usually at 7am the next day).

Bear: A replacement for my beloved Evernote. Syncs wonderfully between Mac and iPhone, so I can bounce text and code between the two throughout the day as needed.

Todoist: I’ve tried OmniFocus (just too much), and Things (pretty, but I can’t make it work for me), but I’ve fallen hard for this minimal, stripped down to-do app.

Abelton Live: Bass riffs become loops, all easily recorded and sounding great. I only have the Intro version, which works fine for now, but could see upgrading in the new year.

Work When You Work

There isn’t a magical formula for success that relates directly to when you do your best work.

Every roommate I’ve ever had goes to bed around 11, so for me, the night is really nice because everything gets really quiet. I’m a big believer in not going to bed before something’s done, so I usually get around two hours of work in somewhere between 10:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. 

Photographer Aundre Larrow at Megenta

I started waking up real early, and started creating at 7 a.m, like real full-on sessions, not just like I’m poking around. I’m in. What I started doing before that was the last move of the night I clean the whole studio. Fill up the water pitcher, when I wake up I have the teapot ready, there’s nothing to do except get started. And I realized there sun’s shining down, you’ve got that pure energy, you’re just up, and all of a sudden it was turning 11 a.m and I hadn’t even looked at my phone and I was like, oh I just learned how to do it. 

Producer Nick Hook at Abelton

If you’re not a morning person, it’s okay. If you’re a night owl, great.

Personally I get up early and get cracking at some work, then I have the rest of the morning and afternoon to tackle my biggest work. And honestly, I’ll let some tasks slide into the early evening, because by then I am motoring, and can buzz through whatever else is on my to-do list.

Hello, Clarice

The “Fansville” Dr. Pepper commercials are amazing. I can’t believe these companies have so much money they can afford to make TV-series quality footage just to sell sugar water, but hooooray, capitalism!

The premise here is someone stole a trophy, and the sheriff goes around town trying to find the culrpit. Note the last guy in this clip, and his delivery of, “hello, Sheriff.”

That has to be a nod to ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ right?

Define Your Own Success in 2019

“Lately I’m feeling more successful than I have in a long time, just because you change the parameters for yourself about what that means.”

Jill Sobule at The Creative Independent

If success is only this one thing, then anyone else who doesn’t hit that mark is then… not successful? Like so many things in life, it’s not so black and white, and we need to find so much of that for ourselves.

Perhaps my current situation isn’t on par with other 40-somethings, but that’s okay, because I’m happy, the bills are paid, and well… yeah, that’s success for me. Sure, there’s countless other bullet points I could list, but why? They aren’t for you, or your life, you need to figure that out, too.

Eight years ago I was on a bike with no job and some money in the bank, and I look back, and I was having fun. That was fine for that moment, and informed who I am today, and that’s okay.

Would I have liked to “arrived” a little bit quicker than 2018? Sure, but as they say it’s the journey, not the destination. I know I wouldn’t be able to appreciate all of what I have now if it just sprang out of nowhere.

MUSIC MONDAY: Alice Ivy, ‘Charlie’

From ‘I’m Dreaming’ which came out this year.

I am an absolute sucker for the use of old-timey samples.

The horn lines of  ‘Charlie’ are a mixture of a sampled saxophone I played into Ableton and an instrumental I found online. What inspired me when beginning to produce this song is that opening radio sample. It was from the 1950s post-war America period; Stepford wives, brand new kitchen appliances, the “American dream”. Charlie is a tongue and cheek homage to that period. Those vocals are snippets of an out take recording I made of Georgia van Etten just hours before she was to board a plane to the UK to live indefinitely, the lyrics don’t actually make sense!

Alice Ivy

Not Fake

You know what’s not fake?

Coffee shops, record stores, and diners filled with wonderful people who know your name – that’s real.

Shows filled with people who paid for a ticket when they had a zillion other entertainment options at home on their couch – that’s real.

Long emails with old friends, message threads with friends far away, phone calls with best friends – those are real.

So much of our work is built on a foundation of for-real relationships, connections, and places. They’re hard to measure or quantify, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

Meanwhile, the promise of the internet and log files and Google Analytics promised us cold, hard metrics that would gauge and improve upon.

And here we are, years later, questioning if anything on the internet is real or not. Do we give up, throw away our Twitter handles, and cancel our internet service?

No.

But maybe we count metrics that matter, like actual customers, instead of “eyeballs.”
Revenue, instead of (possibly fake) likes.
Profit, instead of (possible fake) comments.

100 plus

I finally passed 100 posts, and… here we are. I’ve been keeping up with this blog a bit more, and I’ve had a handful of great conversations as a result.

These posts take a bit longer to publish than a Tweet. Email replies come a bit slower. Scheduling calls takes some effort.

But anything worth doing requires some effort. That’s why it’s called effort, and not “sitting on the couch eating Cheetos.”

Work goes into something – practicing guitar, learning how to program, how to be a better partner – and someday (probably not tomorrow) you get better.

Running a few miles a day back in 2016 led to a half-marathon just two years later. If that’s not a metaphor, I don’t know what is.

Not Knowing is Okay

Maybe we all need to leave social media and start blogging again. Then we just need to follow everyone’s blogs in an RSS feeder, and then that will fix everything.

Just replace all these apps and social media outlets with an RSS feeder loaded with 100s (or 1000s) of sites that will display a notification of all the un-read blog posts we need to get through.

If the goal is to keep investing time in knowing what everyone else is doing, then I guess that’s a solution. But maybe we can save those 7+ hours and get back to reading, making music, taking photographs, or going on walks.