The Sunday Digest: Break it up!

Happy Sunday!

Curious about that headline? Maybe you, like us, caught wind on Wednesday of what the FTC wants to do to Facebook. But we’re thinking more of the question we asked readers this week: How do you give yourself a break? 

Responses ran the gamut of personal go-to’s in a year of upturned expectations: Seasonal Spotify playlists; VR bowling; reviewing a year’s worth of journal entries. Unwinding, in a word. Letting the tension flow out. Booting down, if you will.

There’s another way to pose this question, though: How—literally, how—do we go about giving ourselves the proverbial Break? What’s the game plan?

If there’s one thing we tried to answer across the bundle this week, that’s it. Our own responses careened between the sweet spots of the newsletters they came from: Applying behavioral therapy to productivity. Fighting loneliness by reading everything you can. Refusing to judge yourself for flitting between softwares. And if those examples seem like a stretch, we also ran a communal game of Among Us. Seriously—Everything bundle writers got together on Wednesday night and played our hearts out. It was extremely fun…and it turns out you shouldn’t let Austin Langlinais out of sight for a second.👀👀👀

We wrote about plenty more, of course—from live-streaming and developer communities to passion economy news and the week in strategy. So sit down and dig in; you might even find that you’ve given yourself a break somewhere along the way.

What We Published

The lowdown on this week’s output, including 6 articles, 2 podcasts, and 2 live conversations.

⚡️ Cognitive Behavioral Productivity

by Jonathan Shi in Superorganizers

With this dive into modern psychology, Jonathan Shi explains why often get in our own way when it comes to productivity: We overuse tools of control when it comes to our feelings of procrastination and burnout, and that ends up making things worse rather than better. Moving between various tools in psychology, the piece offers an alternative approach to unblocking yourself: behavioral therapies.

🔒Read (8 minutes)

🕊 Follow Your Curiosity. Read Your Ass Off.

by Andy Sparks with Jerry Colonna in Ask Jerry

Asked where his inspiration comes from, Jerry’s answer is simple: it’s the title of this post. The key to true exploration and inspiration, he’s learned, is following curiosity to your sources—and then tracing those texts to their own sources. That method is the foundation