Weekly Update: Time Management, Algorithm Avoidance, and This Week’s Reading

This week there were aspirations and plans but ultimately more time leaked than I planned for which, to be fair, was 100% on me. I managed only two of the four times I expected to get on the bike this week. Sunday night I joined the LGBTQ+ and allies ride over on Zwift and it was, as usual, a blast. Very friendly and positive. One thing I was very interested to note: For the first 20 min of the ride I pushed hard to keep up with the group and was patting myself on the back for being able to do so. But then the leader mentioned it was a “banded” ride – as in we were all connected to each other by rubber band – as long as the pedals turned at all we were kept together. I wondered then how much harder I, and others would work when they didn’t know this – pushing just to the edge to keep up rather than just relaxing.

The next ride was the first training ride for the Gran Fondo training plan – I’ve done this training before to get ready for the sorts of long rides I like to do in the summer. It was good but the other days of the week I didn’t ride – Monday and Friday I tutor downtown, Thursday night I went to see a play that Daegan was working as crew on. Wednesday I just skipped it. Today I had good intentions of going after I went to the grocery store but I seem to have the cold Sage and Daegan just had. So I’m sitting here and sniffling, writing tomorrow’s entry today in the hopes that tomorrow I will feel better and use that time to get on the bike.

But otherwise I think I’ve been doing reasonably well with meeting my time management goals. I just need to renew my commitment to training on the bike if I want to have the sorts of adventures I had in the summer of 2024. On the plus side the weather is warming, it’s 15°C out now and all the snow is melting. I am beginning to see how I might be able to get out for some outdoor rides soon.

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Avoiding the algorithm has been a mix. On the one hand I’ve broken down and gone back to Instagram. I missed the social contact I had there with people I actually know. The banter with strangers on TikTok was fine but it’s nice to run into people I actually know in the online space.

On the other hand, I’ve been paying closer attention to what and more importantly, how I am listening to music. If we look back to my teenage years when I first really started getting into music, it started with listening to albums. Songs were played in order, and in the beginning when they were on cassette, they also had to be turned over in the middle. To this day I still remember the feeling of the feeling of knowing that the song was the last on a side – it was often like the last song before an intermission – just a little bit more poignant than the songs before then but rarely as poignant as the last song of the album. Nothing illustrates this better than A Day in the Life:

That ending was so final that it supported the hoax that Paul McCartney had died and that last note was meant to represent his coffin closing.

As I got older and owned more hardware I started making mix tapes. These could be either for myself to soundtrack something – a drive around the back roads of Vermont, a self-pity session alone in my room or in university, the background music for a party. Or I’d make them for friends or people I was romantically interested in with favourite songs, comedy bits or in the case of aspirational girlfriends, songs with not so subtle romantic references in titles and lyrics. Hey, don’t laugh, I made one way back in 1991 and that person still lives with me today.

But now many of us listen to AI playlists – many of them now filled with AI-generated music. The illusion is that especially on Spotify, I can pick something like “Cycling Workout Mix” and it will pick a bunch of tracks of a certain tempo and energy and put them in a mix. It did a reasonably good job but also got to be very “samey”. You can see that for sure if you look through my summer listening stats. Hours on the bike listening to mostly 90s big beat music didn’t just result in my listening to lots of that on the bike, it became an algorithmic ouroboros. The things I liked to listen on the bike are also what Spotify fed to me when I was not on my bike. For that reason alone, I suspect my #1 track of August was likely to be this one:

Which is a perfectly fine song but if I chose an AI-generated mix there, if it even remotely fit the genre, it would play. And the more it played the more likely it was to play. I wonder if I left it to play endlessly, how long would it take for that to be the only song?

Or as I would often do, choose all of the songs I mark as “liked” in Spotify and put them on shuffle. This gave a little more variety, but still took the element of choice out of it. This was also another case of “Give me something I will probably like and if I don’t like it I’ll go to the next track.” This is a far cry from carefully choosing an album or curating a playlist for me or myself. It also feels a little more insidious as well. In this sense I’ve gone from having choices and preferences to accepting what is given to me that I’m told “You like this.” In this day and age I see a bigger and creepier metaphor here – having one’s preferences trained out of you so that you consume what is offered without question.

So the move to Qobuz has me thinking a bit more about this as it doesn’t seem to have these AI playlist. There are some human-curated ones, many from other subscribers. But for the most part I am listening to albums which is different and comfortable. I think I’ll make some playlists this week also. That could be interesting – and useful. I noticed last night that I just downloaded hundreds of songs for listening to on shuffle when in the subway where there’s no mobile data service. I deleted all of them and will go back now and carefully pick out a couple albums and maybe a homemade playlist. This is closer to what I’d do before getting in the car to go somewhere in the 80s: Grab 4-5 cassettes, maybe 1-2 of them my current favourite mixtape and that’s what I had to listen to. Not every song I ever liked between 1986-1990 (a literal playlist I used to have – shuffle it and you get a mixtape I might have made in those days if I’d randomly chosen songs – which is foolish because the care that went into those was huge.) So let’s see how that goes.

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I’ve been reading almost every morning either as I have coffee and breakfast or on the bus to work. Sometimes it was books – most recently Greyhound by Joanna Pocock. This was a fascinating but also quite sad comparison of two trips by Greyhound bus the author took in the US – one in 2006, one in 2023. My last Greyhound trip there was in 2002, traveling from San Francisco back home to Springfield, Missouri after dropping off our yurt that we sold to someone in California. It was fun, interesting, and adventurous. It doesn’t sound like it would be nearly as pleasant now which is a little sad.

But I also read some great online content that I can share with you too. As I said before, I track what I read online and mark them in my Obsidian vault when I’ve found them interesting so if we have similar tastes, consider these recommendations:

I was already thinking about how I consume music now and talking about it here but this article, 25 Years of iPod Brain resonated – particularly in how seriously we took our music back in the day. Now they’re much more throwaway and I’m not OK with leaving it like that.

Dan Sinker is a treasure and I’m excited and inspired to read what they right every time they post something. This one is nominally about the movie The Goonies, a popular 80s movie targeted at older kids and young adults. Like many of my other favourite writers, they start talking about pop culture and somehow turn it into being about more serious things like actual culture, current events or politics. This is one example of that and definitely worth a read.

Like the author of this piece I use an RSS reader to track posts and articles from people and places I like or that post interesting content. I follow a couple of you this way and then I can use that reader to stick the article or post in my Obsidian database, pull it into my iPad and then read it wherever I want on or offline. I can even annotate it if I want. (Or tag it #interesting and then share it here). But one of the things about RSS readers or podcast apps – there’s almost always an “unread” or “Unlistened to” count – the WordPress reader has a similar number if I recall. If you’re not reading a lot this can go up and up and feel like an actual obligation. Why am I so far behind on my blog reading or podcast listening? But these aren’t voicemails demanding your response or even an email. They’re just posts and you get to choose whether or not you have time to read them or not. Your feeling you should is just a Phantom Obligation created in great part because the design of the readers are similar to our email apps.

I love my fitness tracker – and I love the Apple Watch I use for this more because it gives me less negative feedback (Your sleep was SO BAD LAST NIGHT! YOU MUST FEEL AWFUL! YOU HAVE NO ENERGY LEFT DON’T EXERCISE WHATEVER YOU DO!) but as you can see, I also take these messages seriously. Tim Hartford talks about his experiences both good and bad with a fitness tracker in Without my fitness tracker I’d never have run so far. Or behaved so weirdly. It resonated with me a lot.

What about you? What’s new? What’re you reading?