v49 - Saving Face Oil

Breaking Change Breaking Change

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The curse of productivity is that it's self-perpetuating. Respond to e-mails with lightning speed and you just get more replies. Demonstrate your reliability to others long enough, and they'll just bring you more shit to do. Develop productive routines and habits and—before you know it—your natural disposition will shift towards being done with things and away from actually doing things.

Left unconstrained, optimizing for a productive life can diminish the joys of living. Many of us who opt into the lifestyle of "staying on top of shit" do so, ostensibly, to maximize time for creative work, or for leisure, or for family. That's the spirit with which I first discovered Getting Things Done near the beginning of my career. And it really worked! I have no doubt I owe much of my success to adopting a clear productivity process, low-friction tools, and ruthless discipline.

But even for the handful among us who successfully find a productivity regime we can stick with, the technologies that both enabled remote work and unintentionally led to the disintegration of work-life boundaries have resulted in a situation where highly productive people often wind up cursed with the inability to turn it off. I had no problem forgetting about the hundreds of e-mails and things to do in 2009 when I would—get this—leave my computer at the office overnight. But once I started working from home, there was no longer a natural threshold through which to transition from being "productive" to being "unproductive". I doubt I am alone in this.

Depressingly, even after I retired and no longer had any job at all, I found myself continuing to be hyper-vigilant about checking e-mail, tackling todo after todo, and generally prioritizing productivity over whatever shit I claimed to want to do. I've been promising myself a hedonistic life of video games, vodka, and gummy bears since I was 19 years old. And yet, even though I have plenty of money, zero constraints on my time, and a backlog of thousands of games, here I am writing a fucking blog post instead of literally ever doing the one activity I set out to achieve before starting my career.

Moreover, when others look at me and how I go about getting shit done, and—rather than wanting to emulate it—they tend to walk away feeling grateful they're not as tightly-wound as I am. When I consider all the people in my life, it's starting to feel like there are essentially two classes of humans: people who never get shit done and people who never stop getting shit done.

This state of affairs was clearly suboptimal. That's why, last year, Becky and I adopted a bespoke weekly schedule that enables us to get things done without getting carried away. The key insight was, as usual, to implement a strict timebox. We call it "weekstart", and this is how it works.

What is a weekstart?

Weekstart kicks off Monday morning and ends with the dinner bell on Tuesday.

Spoiler alert: there's more to this…

This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on January 1, 2026.

As promised last month, this issue is just oyster meat. It's a new year and as good a time as any to hit reset and get this monthly newsletter back on its preordained beginning-of-the-month-ish delivery cadence. That makes this a quick turnaround after our last issue, so there's not much new to report. Good thing I asked you all to lower your expectations!

Let's see, since we last corresponded:

• Mike McQuaid wrote that he's joined the POSSE Party, so I pulled a quote and recruited him to help deal with maintenance and triage. Another early adopter posted an architectural review of my codebase to Reddit
• I spent a few afternoons tweaking a ChatGPT-powered Shortcut for Japanese study and was impressed to find Shortcuts is sneakily more functional than one might assume. Its new Use Model action allows users to tap into cloud-based Private Cloud Compute and ChatGPT for free, which is a total game changer. Native app developers can only access on-device models, which makes Shortcuts a uniquely powerful tool in its own right
• Aaron & I kept the streak alive by executing the 2nd Annual Punsort algorithm. I think his puns got less terrible or I got better at ranking them—either way, things seemed far less contentious than in our first go-round
• I did all four Disney parks in one day and live-wisped the ordeal over 12 hours, 16 rides, and 30,000 steps. If you missed my photos and videos, you'll just have to get in the habit of checking my homepage or Instagram every day, I guess! I got a couple remorseful emails from people looking to find my auto-deleting wisps/stories after they were, in fact, deleted. 💨
• Becky gave me a Steam gift card for Christmas, and this humorous trailer immediately sold me on Ball x Pit. I've since played it and can confirm it to be a Good Game: part Vampire Survivors, part Plants vs. Zombies, part Breakout.
• A few assorted takes:
  • If you or a loved one are worried about losing your job to AI, this essay is what I've been pointing people to lately
  • Macs have FileVault encryption enabled by default, which has always diminished their utility as home servers—if the power goes out, there goes your remote login access! They finally addressed this in macOS 26 Tahoe: inbound SSH connections following a cold boot will now unlock and finish booting my FileVault-protected Mac Studio
  • What populist candidates promise and what they prioritize once elected are rarely in agreement. So it goes in Japan, as an anti-foreigner platform gives way to a policy agenda that will attract more foreigners by further weakening the yen
  • If you're running modern Apple hardware, I recently learned there's a setting to make sure Safari actually renders content at a "ProMotion" 120Hz refresh rate

For the second year in a row, us kids paid a visit to dad's second-favorite spot in Walt Disney World on Christmas Day:

Fortunately, gallows humor has always played in the Searls family.

Stay tuned for next month's note, as I'll have just gotten back from the storied land of Shizuoka following the next chapter of our condo purchase journey. We're still on track to close in July, but in mid-January I have the not-technically-mandatory opportunity to pick out the curtains and the drapes at a sort of mini trade show event held by the developer. Well, curtains, yes, but also air conditioners. And tile. And how to finish the balcony. And how many mirrors we want, and where, and whether to tint them in sepia tones. And which LED mood lighting package should line the toilet. Should I pay for them to seal a brand new Japanese wood floor or is that a scammy upsell?

Reply and tell me what to do, please—the decision overload is truly overwhelming.

Anyway, the next week of my life is going to be spent poring over a dozen product catalogs. Bridging the language and cultural divide is extremely slow going. It's a good thing I failed to predict how much work this condo would turn out to be, or I'd never have gone through it. If you catch me having any fun this month, yell at me and tell me to get back to work.

Speaking of bridging language and culture, keep reading for one more stupid thing.

Content warning: more content…

My most-used display has been Vision Pro ever since it launched in February 2024, but it's been used exclusively as a Mac Virtual Display. This is not only because the Mac is a real computer and visionOS is an IMAX-sized iPad, but because its software keyboard is worse than the worst iPhone keyboard to ever be released. And while I'd be happy to pack a travel keyboard, Vision Pro is already too bulky to fit in my bag. As a result, I may as well lug a real computer around with me and just use Vision Pro as a dumb display.

My second most-used display is an iPad mini, which essentially replaces my iPhone when I'm at home. It's set up to be more book-like: an iPhone stripped of any way to communicate with the outside world, with the exception of e-mail. Only problem is that when I do want to type, I'm stuck with what is probably Apple's second-worst software keyboard after visionOS.

My third most-used display is one of a handful of XR/AR glasses—I've been using the XReal Air 2, but am currently trialing the RayNeo Air 3s and Viture Luma Pro. With these, I can use output from any device straight to my eyeholes, so long as it supports DisplayPort over USB-C (e.g., iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Steam Deck). These are great, but once you pair an iPhone or iPad with a desktop-grade display, their lack of a similarly serious keyboard becomes apparent. Besides, when you've got shit on your face, guessing where touch targets are on a screen you can only see indirectly is maddening.

I've wanted the same solution for all three of these modalities: a well-made, pocketable keyboard I could pair with multiple devices. Yesterday, Clicks announced a mobile keyboard that looks like a real contender for solving this problem:

I'm reserving judgment (and praise) until I get my hands on this thing, but the headline features made it an insta-preorder:

• Designed to be held while attached to a phone or as an independent accessory
• Doubles as a MagSafe battery, so it manages to be useful even when you're not using it
• Pairs with up to 3 Bluetooth devices (already bummed it's only 3…)

Little touches abound, too:

• "Batwing" mode, where you can rotate the iPhone to a landscape orientation and—rather than have the display dominated by a software keyboard—actually have the full screen estate for your content while you type
• It appears to have a simple sleep/wake switch, meaning iOS won't banish the software keyboard whenever it's in range
• Quite a few special characters are handled by function keys

Alas, the one thing holding it back is no escape key. Not sure how I'll manage.

$70 if pre-ordered today (shipping in "Spring"), $110 after launch.

Becky gave me a $100 gift card to Steam for Christmas, so for the first time in a decade I endeavored to hunt for some hidden gems in the Steam Winter Sale. I haven't even booted it up yet, but this trailer immediately convinced me to instabuy Ball x Pit.

I'm sure the game is great, but I wish more trailers were this stupid and irreverent. Gaming is a silly hobby and the best favorite game marketing isn't afraid to embrace that fact.