Field Notes 12 // Heatwaves, agency, and the Kindle
This is Field Notes, my monthly newsletter on technology without the hype. Subscribers get it weeks before it goes up on the blog. Subscribe below.
I’ve never been so happy to see the rain. Living in a top-floor flat – albeit one with lovely views – I could feel the air thickening as I ascended the stairs to my front door during the recent UK heatwave. By the time I got inside, I almost felt like I was wading through it to move around my home.
That’s how I had to live for about a week, taking brief respite in the office or the cinema. I became an expert in home ventilation – studying the optimal times to open and close windows, blinds, and doors; identifying the perfect position for my fans at each time of day. But short of sitting in front of my floor-standing AC unit until it all ended, the heat was inescapable.
Staying productive in that kind of heat is impossible. As the afternoon peak encroaches, you feel your mind start to melt. You get fidgety. No matter how much water you drank, how hard you’ve attempted to heatproof your office, your focus inevitably wanes. You’re forced to plan your entire day around the weather, focusing your intense work in the cooler mornings and evenings. But no matter how dedicated you are and how much you normally achieve, you can’t overcome the limitations imposed by nature and the human body.
We celebrated the end of those sweaty days with a long walk through some local woodland, accompanied by some friends and their dog, and capped with an afternoon at the pub. It happened to coincide with the Champions League final, and I ended up with Arsenal fans crowding around my phone as it went to penalties, forced to keep a straight face as Gabriel skied the decisive shot.
Now, at the time of writing, the heat has returned. The thermometer has hit the mid-30s for most of this week in the UK. After enduring this sauna, I’ll flee the country on a short business trip to Austin, Texas of all places. The temperatures are similar, but air conditioning is universal, and I’m looking forward to gliding from hotel to Uber to office with minimal discomfort.
A year with my Kindle
It occurred to me recently that it’s almost exactly a year since I bought and reviewed my Amazon Kindle, and with the benefit of hindsight I still can’t believe I didn’t buy one sooner. It’s one of my best tech purchases ever.
It sounds silly, but the Kindle has made reading much more accessible. I can throw it in my bag for my commute, plane trips, and car journeys without a second thought to size or weight. It means books – many of which would be sizeable hardbacks if I read them in physical form – are always there, and that makes it much easier to jump in and out of what I’m reading.
I also enjoy that the Kindle is such an unfussy device. It’s always on, and the pages load instantly. It has an effective but subtle backlight, so I can use it in dark places without disturbing the people around me, and my highlights are pushed to a file I can grab on my PC for review. I can realistically see myself using my current Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition for many years, and for that reason don’t regret splurging on the high-end version at all.
The one cloud on the horizon is planned obsolescence. Amazon recently announced that early Kindle generations will no longer be able to download new books or connect to Amazon at all if they’re deregistered, so it’s clear that my device could have an artificially limited lifespan even if the hardware remains perfectly serviceable. The unsupported Kindles are those released before 2012, so I hope my 2024 model has at least 12 years left in it, but the move will certainly factor into my purchase decision if I ever replace it.
Agency and growth
A common theme I’ve encountered over the last month has been agency – the difference between living life and having life happen to you. First I heard the excellent George Mack discussing high-agency people on a podcast, then I read a blog post about how a tiny faction of outputs produces the greatest effect. It argued that growth is about generating a sample size sufficient to identify what those outputs are and focus future work around them.
Perhaps the caffeine from my last coffee is speaking as I write this segment, but I feel very bullish on opportunity at the moment, as though anything is possible with enough focus, analysis, and – most importantly – action.
There are people out there who have made any number of things work for them: tech start-ups, online writing, streaming video games… pretty much anything you could think of. There is a market for these things if you stay persistent and find enough people who like the same things you do.
And that market doesn’t have to be huge. Assuming your aim isn’t to become a billionaire, a little more than 800 people paying £5 per month is equivalent to a £50,000 wage – and that’s not even accounting for future growth based on your momentum and secondary revenue streams like sponsorships.
It can feel like the internet has been fully established at this point. Like the door is closed, and the ladder was pulled up behind the successful creators. But if that were true, you’d never see new faces making their living doing what they love. You only need to find a few hundred people who like what you do to do well – the challenge is primarily one of consistency and reach.
This month on the blog
In case you missed them, here are my best posts from June.
Things that left an impression
-
I stumbled upon a piece by Kaguura Gichuru about Price’s Law – the idea that a small percentage of inputs produce an outsized portion of the output – and how this applies across business and growth. Rather than downplaying less productive endeavours, he argues that they’re all valuable and necessary to help you to zero in on what works.
-
AI productivity app maker Forestwalk wrote an interesting blog post that sparked discussion about the psychology of free trials. When they exceeded free trial usage limits, one of their vendors sent them an invoice for the overages – even though they hadn’t provided any billing information. On reflection, there are many reasons that might leave a more bitter taste in a prospect’s mouth than a hard cap.
-
Finally, I was reading an article about why AI won’t replace software engineers when I came across a notable statistic: Forrester found that of companies claiming to have reduced headcount due to AI, only one in ten said they had a mature implementation ready to fill the space left by those jobs. If you’ve been following all the knee-jerk reactions and “AI washing” in tech, that might be unsurprising.
Until next month – subscribe below to get next month’s newsletter first!
