Doing interesting adjacent things

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? Riffing off the same topic I talked about yesterday, ideation. One of the things I mentioned in the last episode was that new ideas often come from knowing one thing deeply and a few other things lightly or shallowly.

[00:00:34] The reason this helps with new ideas is because the perspectives and paradigms you learn in other areas or topics can often provide insight when applied to the topic you know deeply. For example, one of the more interesting productivity books I've read in the past couple years is called Work Clean, and it takes ideas learned from how a commercial kitchen operates and shows you how to apply them to your knowledge work or your digital work.

[00:01:08] It was not only very cool to learn about the concept of mise en place, which is a French phrase that means to put in place. It was also a really cool read. I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you wanna check it out. So anyway, over the weekend, I put aside one hour to play with some adjacent tech that I've been meaning to try out for a whiel.

[00:01:33] For those of you curious. It was GatsbyJS, a static site generator that I had yet to actually play with, and it was a lot of fun. It uses mostly tech I'm familiar with, but in interesting and different ways that I hadn't tried out yet. And after that hour, I put it away and went about the rest of my weekend.

[00:01:56] It was maybe a few hours later that I found myself typing away in Obsidian – my note taking app of choice recently – and it was a bunch of ideas that I just had for stuff I could do within WordPress, which is my topic of deep knowledge. And a lot of it came through the stuff that I had played around with in Gatsby just earlier that day.

[00:02:22] Now it doesn't always happen that quick. Sometimes I'll try lots of things and have no ideas, and that's fine too. You never really know how much marination is needed in your subconscious or even what the ingredients will have to be in order for new ideas to surface. But the more you lightly try other things or, you know, go even deeper in your topic of deep knowledge, the higher your chances are of new funky ideas.

[00:02:53] But it's also not just about ideas. Playing around with or trying new adjacent things is just really refreshing. It can be fun to be a semi beginner at something in a no pressure situation, and it can revive your interests and sometimes even help with burnout if that's something you're going through.

[00:03:17] My weekend was pretty busy, you know, but it was mostly busy with non-work stuff. I didn't even really do much side hustle stuff. In fact, I think I touched code for just, mm, two hours in total this weekend? Instead, I spent my weekend helping to host a baby shower for a friend and smoking shisha with my siblings and catching up with my mom, kickstarting my spouse's birthday week, and of course watching The Last of Us.

[00:03:54] So I did interesting adjacent things for work and also for my personal life. In fact, my personal life was overdue and needed some personal attention from me, and, uh, it was really, really good. So I'm going into this new week fairly refreshed. I have some interesting ideas that I wanna try out during the week in WordPress, and I feel like I got some good people time.

[00:04:26] I feel connected to the people in my life and I'm looking forward to doing my work, and it just feels really, really, good. It's just so important to try new things, other things, you know?

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.