Raptitude

For me it was this, generalized to "Ultimately, no one, nobody else, will be able to or willing to care about your best interests except yourself."

People, families, groups, systems and institutions act primarily through their own structures and in their own best interests, are able to forget, misinterpret or simply not care about what you want/need/desire/expect/(feel you) deserve from them, and can never care about you as an individual as much as you can care about yourself.

This can apply to small or big things. This even applies to formal, specific, contractual obligations others have to you. That's just paper. It can be at best ineffective to expect others to act in your (best) interest while you are not there supervising and understanding everything they are doing. Trust, but verify, and be ready to protest for and enforce your rights.

The world is full of minor and major bullshit many have given up on to change, to care about, or feel powerless to change anything about. If anything moves in this world it is through the stubbornness of dedicated individuals. Since you yourself have only limited time and energy, be ready to endure this bullshit which makes life seem insufferable and unfair.

Also, today's society has no effective mechanisms to punish misbehavior at small scales, and repeat offenders who move between communities.

I may have been childish, naive, too hopeful or entitled to expect otherwise, but nowadays I know that at any time, people or the universe…

Rather than having a daily list, I use Feeder (Chrome extension: http://feeder.co/)
to read my RSS feeds, I had always preferred it to Google Reader, I never did get myself into the mantra of checking Reader often (it ended up being once every few months, when I randomly remembered)
; however Feeder is nice in its minimalistic approach, just showing me how many items for each feed, which encourages me to zero it out, although unlike Reader it just shows the titles of RSS feed items, so I end up judging whether or not to read an article based on the title.

A few feeds I follow:

News

* Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss and https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss [a lot of the posts are repeated over both, and note these are not necessarily the front page posts, my guess is that they are upvoted new posts, so I end up reading some posts before they reach the front page])

* Phoronix - http://www.phoronix.com/ (http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php)

* ThreatPost - http://threatpost.com/ (http://threatpost.com/feed)

* TheNextWeb - http://thenextweb.com/ (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thenextweb)

* Wired - http://www.wired.com/ (http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index)

* iClarified - http://www.iclarified.com/ (http://iclarified.com/rss/rss.xml)

* TorrentFreak - https://torrentfreak.com/ (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Torrentfreak)

* r/WorldNews - http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews (http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss)

Blogs

* Securelist -…

This passage from raptitude post always sticks in my head, comparing 2 mental approaches to a disgusting part of a cleaning job he was squeamish about, basically practice to feel & observe the fear but do not resist or react to it:

http://www.raptitude.com/2010/08/how-to-make-life-agreeable/

>...It usually involved holding your breath and averting your eyes as you scoop out the food-slime and hurriedly direct it toward the garbage bin, bracing yourself throughout, as if you’re jumping into icy water.

It’s the same strategy a wide-eyed Fear Factor contestant uses as he chomps frantically on the June bug in his mouth — he doesn’t want to confront it, he wants to escape it.

That method didn’t work for me, it just made me more aware of how awful it was. As soon as I tackled one sink, I began dreading the next room.

I don’t remember when it clicked, but after not too many kitchens, I learned the secret:

Let it feel like whatever it feels like.

Just do it and let it have its way with you. Turn toward it, not away.

Whenever I came to a gunked-up drain, I just scooped it out without rushing. I reached into the drain with no more reluctance than I would have reaching into a cookie jar. I looked at the mess with a stoic curiosity, allowing the swollen noodles and bread-mush to rest freely in my fingers for the two or three unhurried seconds it took to transfer them to the garbage can.

As long as I wasn’t rushing or trying not to touch it, it was painless. It wasn’t worth…

That's one of the best articles you could read on the subject, I might give it another read seeing as you've linked it here.

This was another favourite, the one that started my 'journey': http://www.raptitude.com/2011/05/procrastination-is-not-laziness/

YMMV, but to-do lists were just another source of pressure for me, so I've been trying to create external pressure for myself instead. I was a software developer wanting to learn data science but never went through with any of the MOOCs I started, even though I was interested in the subject. So I started a Masters to give myself that framework of accountability, deadlines etc.

I realise that's an extreme example, so I'll give a smaller one too. My wife wanted a Wordpress plugin and I offered to help, and immediately set a date for when I'd work on it. Even though she wasn't forcing me or anything, she was the external pressure I created, and rather than make me anxious it actually helped me focus and get the job done.

The biggest realisation for me was that the barrier to starting something is orders of magnitude bigger than the barrier to keep going, so you can try to experiment with ways to fool yourself into starting. Things like saying "I will work on this but only for 15 minutes, after which I'll reward myself with some time on the Playstation" often lead to me getting into flow before the time is up, and then just carrying on, sometimes for hours.

I just returned home from hauling most of my clothing to the local Goodwill. On a related note, I look forward to seeing more people wearing startup/conference t-shirts around NYC, since they comprised the lion's share of my wardrobe...

I've been researching these services for the past few weeks since I've committed myself to liquidating most of my belongings (I live in a small apartment with no closets -- thanks New York! -- and was inspired by this blog post: http://www.raptitude.com/2011/01/i-dont-want-stuff-any-more-only-things/), and would prefer to see them in the hands of friends and those in need rather than a landfill.

Does anyone have recommendations for where/how to donate more valuable items? For example, I want to donate an expensive drone I never use, but would prefer to see it go to a classroom/after-school program. Thinking I'll search DonorsChoose.org and offer things to teachers, but is there another service?

I love this on a number of levels. First, a great question, and more than half the battle imo is asking the right kind of question. David Cain has touched on a version of this also [1]. And I very much am a person that can get lost in my own organizational overhead and know I'm being very out of balance between thinking and doing, and in search of an overarching framework or limiting principle.

And I don't know that this solves everything, but it does bite off a piece of it, in a way that I think I agree with. The further out, the more circumstances can change, and the closer up, the more practical reasoning matters (they seem to use reasoning to mean something close to practical logistics). There's probably more to it, of course, but it's a good question and good start to an answer.

1. https://www.raptitude.com/2014/02/keep-your-doing-and-your-deciding-away-from-each-other/