Micro-optimizations
Doing small things might add up to something big
I learned this simple but brilliant grocery-shopping list trick from someone on TAFKAT (The App Formerly Known as Twitter) recently: you message the person going to the grocery store, yourself or your roommate/partner/kid/parent/etc, with a list of ingredients —
“…why are you emailing me about something I do literally all the time, and have done since 2004?” you think to yourself, while hitting send on the following text to your partner: “tomato paste, cereal, maybe yogurt but I will check if we need it before you go sorry, good hummus not that weird one we have 2 of now, garlic maybe? coffee filters!!!!, salad stuff idk, snacks but not too salty pls, something for dinner? tin foil, tape(?)”.
I’m telling you this because the critical twist is that you send each item as an individual message in short succession, not a single message with 3-11 random things. With the individual messages, the person at the store has a check-off-able list to work from, reacting to each message as they pick up the item:
Broccolini (👍)
Half’n’half (👍)
Whole chicken to roast (❤️ because you got three half-chickens on special!!)
Mascarpone (👎 they didn’t have it, or crème fraîche as an alt, and I lost enthusiasm/gave up looking)
Seasonal Mrs Meyer’s* hand soap (👍)
You get the idea.
If this is a message thread between two people shopping together I guess it could also be a contest to see who can move through the store more efficiently, which to me sounds like a really miserable time for both parties but maybe that could be fun for you? Otherwise, it’s a way to, ah, remotely monitor that the shopper is getting all the things on the shared list.
Anyway I’m probably late to the party on this, but I’ve found it very helpful! I’m typically a pen-and-paper grocery list person, but that means I end up with dozens of old wadded-up lists in the bottoms of all my tote bags, all our junk drawer pens migrate permanently to my pockets or the car, and when I’m at the store, I almost always end up looking something up on my phone anyway, and tbh because I’m fishing my phone out of a pocket while holding a pen… I usually end up drawing on my sleeve or jeans or hand/face (and I like to use a sharpie, so).
I’ll admit that I’ve tried actual list and note apps and none really worked for me. If you’ve got a great one that you’d recommend, I’d like to know about it 🙏
(Oh and this is what I’m doing with the chicken: roasted over cabbage like this but with the anchovy butter from this.)
Here are some things I read/found ~this week:
Some/a lot of thoughts on this….
1. Maaaaan I wish I’d registered the domain californiaforever.com when I put that as my twitter bio “location” like 8 years ago.
2. I’m very… conflicted on this whole thing. On the one hand, omg yes build housing! On the other, ahhhhh we meant please build housing in the actual Bay Area where people’s jobs are?? This is like a cartoon illustrating NIMBYism: no one funding this is picking up from Los Altos/Tiburon/Atherton to move to eastern Solano county adjacent to an Air Force base. On another other hand… will BART connect to it? because BART should connect to it— hahahaha just kidding you know it’ll operate on a proprietary fleet of little in-town robo-taxis and food delivery drone startups 💀. I have other conflicts, of course; I loved living in the Central Valley for several years and think some it is nearly perfect, but then again I like sometimes stiflingly-hot weather and the meditative quality of driving past agricultural fields, orchards, and vineyards.
3. When you say “we believe in looking back to go forward… going back to the basics that were once the norm across America”… it’s, I mean, well it’s just that when we look back, the basic norms don’t really look that good? (Also, TIL that Berkeley has an Othering and Belonging Institute which does really interesting research.)
btw I’m now a single-issue voter: put solar panels on at least 50% of all surface parking lots!
OK actually I’m a two-issue voter: solar panels on parking lots and ban right-turns-on-red. (I learned to drive in Pittsburgh, which is basically nothing but hairpin turns, hill stops, and blind corners; in much of the city and surrounding areas there are no-right-on-red signs, so this is actually kind of natural for me and I get really flustered when someone honks for me to make a right on red, even where it’s permitted. It’s dangerous and unnecessary and anti-pedestrian.)
The Power Broker has been on my to-read list since forever; I’m sure I’ll get around to it. As a non-New-Yorker but an amateur urban planner, I have lots of opinions about freeway corridors in cities*. Did you know that in addition to allegedly being extremely racist, Robert Moses couldn’t actually drive a car? Wild.
The Skip is an actually good career newsletter; I may have recommended it in the past. The newsletter is mostly tech-focused (and product within that), but this most recent one feels kinda universal?
Were you looking for a list of neo-noir films to queue up for movie-on-the-couch-with-stew season? No, me either, but I’m glad I found it. Do I need MGM+?
I guess today is sort of all about making lists, using lists, accessing lists, etc. (Also extracting one’s self from a bunch of wikipedia tabs.) Anyway if you’ve Googled for a movie or show, then marked it as “want to watch” with a little save ribbon on Google, it seems like the only way to easily access that list of things you’ve saved is… to literally Google for “my watchlist” while signed in to your account? Anyway this is the link to your list.
“you can create fake text but video is more authentic”, or something
“X is now an app that forcibly puts abhorrent content into users’ feeds and then rewards financially the people who were the most successful in producing it, egging them on to do it again and again and make it part of their living.”
* Orange Clove > Acorn Spice; neither are available in refill sizes ☹️
** mostly: “they’re really bad” and “good for San Francisco and Seoul and Boston for tearing them down and replacing them with parks”