(Re)Focus (Premium)

Back in March, I wrote a Premium newsletter editorial called Focus in which I asked readers about an idea I had banging around in my brain: Instead of focusing so broadly on personal technology, which includes some pretty inane consumer products and services, maybe I should focus exclusively on productivity.

Since then, a lot has changed. COVID-19 interrupted everything and introduced new kinds of uncertainty into our lives. All of the business and personal travel I had planned was canceled. And like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve gone through alternating periods of hyper-focus and being completely lost and unable to get anything done.

And then Mehedi left.

Goddamn it. I mean, I knew it was coming. Mehedi had arranged his internship at Qualcomm months ago, and while the pandemic ruined his opportunity to live in San Diego this summer, he’s still working for them remotely from London. I knew he wouldn’t be able to that and write for us. But it was still weird when it actually happened. We had morning rituals, mostly involving the three of us---Brad, Meh, and me---making fun of others and each other, for crying out loud. And now it’s over.

I hope Mehedi comes back in even a limited capacity after his internship is over, and he knows that offer stands open for the duration. But in keeping with my general life philosophy, I’m going to use this loss as a jumping-off point, to make a change for the better. I’m going to finally dig in on that focus I openly wondered about in March, and which readers seemed to support enthusiastically. I’m going to pick up where we left off as the pandemic ravaged the world.

Not that I ever really gave up on it. Since March, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would mean to shift my focus this decisively, and what kinds of things I might not write about going forward. And what I realized, over time, was that I needed a way to frame this each time I was confronted by a possible topic to discuss. This is especially true of news, since I’m picking up that slack now that Mehedi is gone.

And I think I found a fun way to look at it.

In his book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, author Michael Pollan summarizes the question of what he believes people should eat with the phrase, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." While that exact succinctness isn’t quite possible for how I view the way forward here at the site that bears my name, I can get pretty close:

Personal technology, with a focus on productivity, mostly Microsoft.

I know that doesn’t sound too different from what I wrote back in March. But I feel that it’s defensible, and doable, and … right. So while I will absolutely veer sideways from time to time, I feel like that’s where I should be centered.

And while three days of writing is not usually an accurate reflection of this site overall, the last three days have been interesting. On the one hand, there’s been a metric ton of news content to...