Henlo peeps. I'm Saad Hasnain, back with another خوش خط newsletter. More like a mayoos-khat this week 'cause my courses are really giving me the big sad. T'is also the reason why I skipped an edition last week, but alas, that's @lifeatlums.
🤗 Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes
💡 3 Ideas ——————— ۳ خیالات
Hedonic Treadmill
One is weary of living in the country and moves to the city; one is weary of one's native land and goes abroad; one is weary of Europe and goes to America, etc.; one indulges in the fanatical hope of an endless journey from star to star…
One is weary of eating on porcelain and eats on silver; wearying of that, one eats on gold.”
—Soren Kierkegaard
Wave
Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave.
And then it crashes in the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there.
The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from, and where it's supposed to be.
— Chidi Anagonye // The Good Place
Eisenhower Matrix
What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. — Dwight Eisenhower
With the workload this semester, and the piling up projects and obligations it is increasingly getting hard for me to prioritize action items above the noise. I usually end up succumbing to distractions and poor decisions lol. But if there's one tool that has repeatedly helped me make rational choices: it is the Eisenhower Matrix. Simply put, it's a decision matrix where you separate your tasks based on their corresponding properties i.e urgency and importance. Visually, it looks like this:
If it's urgent and important — do it immediately
If it's important but not urgent — schedule it
If it's urgent and not important — delegate it (or automate it)
If it's not important and not urgent — eliminate it
Often time, we overvalue the importance of things just because the urgency gives the illusion of importance. I have found that putting this in boxes really helps in getting a big picture outlook on what matters and by creating a contrast you can see what requires the most time and attention. It's a simple tool, but quite effective.
📖 Stuff To Read ———— پڑھنے کا مواد
Your course readings....🥱
🎒 What's Up in LUMS? —— یہ لمز میں کیا ہورہا ہے
Campus 🍭 update: Mondays kou freshies ka SDSB se Khoka aur Khoka se SDSB tak ka safar ➿.
It's 14 February. Happy Islamic Affection Day. Keep it Halal my dudes and dudettes.
The Crackhome did a Secret Santa Valentine's thing which was just people friend-zoning each other with wholesome messages. Pata nahi kahan se laatay hain yeh ideas.
🍿 What To Watch? —————— نیٹ فلکس اینڈ چل
🎵 Some Good Music ——— خوش موسیقی
What I'm chilling to:
🎵 Chillout Lounge — Spotify Playlist
What I'm hyping to:
👀 Cool Stuff —— کول سٹف
Google's Appsheet
There's a new trend in town: No Code. It started with Airtable, but it seems Google is jumping on the bandwagon too. The idea behind these up-and-coming no-code apps is to put data to work and build apps without the user having to write a single line of code. And it's fair. Programming is ridiculously difficult sometimes: you have to learn the syntax, do lots of practice and it still takes quite some time to gain mastery until you're ready to deploy your software to the public. What startups like Appsheet and Airtable are aiming to do is to cut down that barrier, providing a user-interface to functionality-based problem solving much like what GUI did to the Command Line ages ago. And though I'm skeptical if the no-code promise is gonna catch on. It's nonetheless an interesting progression to be looking forward to.
Audiblogs
If you're someone who prefers listening articles to reading. Here's a cool chrome extension that allows you to send any web page to your select podcast app!
Foam
This one's a little technical, but exciting nonetheless. Earlier this week, Notion took a DNS hit and although it lasted for an hour alone, it was a terrifying prospect. I've never been this scared about losing my data given that Notion is technically my second brain at this point housing my projects, notes, drafts, course schedules, and whatnot. Call me paranoid, but the downtime was enough to realize the importance of my data and the need to keep backups. And perhaps, to shift to a more decentralized and custom-hosted alternative. That's where Foam comes in. It's an experimental extension that lives inside VS Code allowing you to take Markdown notes inside of the code editor. You can upload this directory to a git repository and voila: granular control over the server-side of things... well, sort of. It is to note that it's a bare-bones alternative, and is nowhere close to the functionality that Notion provides, but alas, one can only rely on big tech so much.
💖 If you've reached this far. I gotta say: Thank you for caring enough to read this. If you want this delivered to your inbox every week, you can subscribe below and l’ll add you to the mailing list. Have a nice week!