Recap of today - 11 March 2025

TODAY WAS A GREAT DAY

Today was an insanely productive day, from the get-go. My normal routine involves my Morning Pages first, followed by an hour, sometimes 90 minutes, on my stationary bike and elliptical machine.

Then we truly start the day.

I have a to-do list that I use to point myself to where I should start. As a manager, this involves mostly checking in with people. As the person controlling the purse strings, I’m called A LOT. Our business is both property management and farming. Which means there’s stuff to be done daily that needs some sort of cash.

Anyway, today’s agenda was mostly a catching up day. Catch up with the budget. Catch up with the work program. Catch up with company monthly taxes (deadline in Kenya for many employee related payments to the government are the 9th of the month.

MORNING PAGES INSIGHT

It all started at the Morning Pages; I had a revelation.

I started blogging years ago, before it became fashionable. And I always struggled with what to write. I’d have a super bright idea and start writing, and somewhere into paragraph 1, on the fourth or fifth sentence, I’d hit a super brick wall. Interest lost, rambling and not even interesting to me.

The next day, I’d do the same thing. Start writing about something I thought was interesting, but I’d give up. Maybe I wanted to write about my diet, extreme Keto, as close to being a carnivore that you can get. But I’d start by explaining what Keto is, explain the bad things that carbs (essentially glucose) can do to you, and why your body doesn’t need it.

Yawn, yawn.

Then I’d get motivated to write about how my lists (lists of everything) help in in organizing my life. And on the second or third sentence, never too far from the top of the blog, I’d hit another brick wall. This one suggesting that nobody cares about lists, and the audience already knows the basic stuff that I’m writing. About calendars, targets, blah, blah, blah.

Even I’d get bored just thinking about the tortuous effort it’s taking to write.

MORNING PAGES, IT’S ABOUT PAGES, NOT CONTENT

Why are Morning Pages so easy to write. I do it religiously every morning and I actually look forward to it. I can’t wait to sit at my desk with my notebook in front of me and start writing. I remember that when I started writing Morning Pages it wasn’t so easy. I’d write and write and write until my brain got tired. The next morning I’d do the same thing, and it was boring. Julia Cameron says use an A4 sheet and write 3 pages. I’d normally exceed the 3 pages and that’s where the lack of discipline came in.

What happened?

I did a Reddit search on the Morning Pages dilemma. Why are some people struggling and found that I was not alone. Some people struggle with the physical act of holding a pen for any length of time, and they opt to type their Morning Pages. I can tell you, writing with a pen and typing are NOT the same thing. I love writing with my hand, there’s a lot of truth of being more connected with the text you are writing, and the much slower pace is welcome. Your brain is normally a few thoughts ahead of where your hand is, much closer if you’re using a keyboard, but the writing does something special.

It edits since by the time you’ve finished the sentence, you’ve actually forgotten where your brain was going.

The other thing is that I needed to get a comfortable length that wasn’t too short and not too long. Just write so that I didn’t have to spend an hour each morning on the writing, and it wasn’t too short to be ineffective.

I found writers who said that 750 words was the sweet spot. Not for me. For me, 3 pages of A5 (a slightly smaller page than an A4) worked wonders. 

My handwriting is also small, and that led to very dense A4’s early on. The 3 pages of A5 are comfortably done within the 30 minutes I’ve allocated myself.

And here’s where it becomes interesting, since I’m aware of the end of the writing, it actually is way better than floundering on the page till my brain gets tired. No matter how interesting the writing is, I stop at the end of the third page. Even in the middle of a thought.

1000 WORDS

So, I hit on the idea to limit my blog ramblings to a word count. Initially thought 500 words would do it, but that’s too short. And after a bit of trial and error, I ended up where I am now.

So, what does this have to do with the greatness of today? Well, I decided to box everything into a slice of time. If it’s not done, step away and go ahead and move on to the next thing.

My meeting notes were taken and as soon as the time allocated for the meeting was over, I closed it. Didn’t ask anyone to stay and finish the few items that are left in the agenda. I took my to-do list and worked on a couple of items and discovered that my lists were always too ambitious. My to-do lists are like a never-ending list of everything that needs (whether it’s today or next year) my attention. And those items that are so low priority muddle up the list and I cannot figure out what I should be looking at.

Worse still, I cannot remember where I am in the list. So, the list was culled and those items that simply aren’t on today’s radar slunk back.

I took the budget that I’ve been looking at since January (with only a few items which have no meaning in March hanging on) and did a great job.

I also wrote two articles – who cares what they were about, point is, as soon as I got close to 1,000 words, I needed to feel closure.

It is all about TIMEBOXING and not caring about perfectionism in CONTENT.

Death and Taxes

TAXES

Give unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar. I recently heard that taxes in the USA were started as a way of collecting money for the war effort. I should have known that.
 
There’s a consensus that taxes are required in order for our governments to provide us with common services – like the police force, the army, and some social stuff like education and healthcare.
 
The purpose then would be to make sure that nobody is taken advantage of.
 
So, why do we really hate paying taxes? The easy answer is that none of the money that we pay in taxes goes to provide the stuff that the government says they will provide. In essence, we don’t trust the collector of the taxes to honor the promises they made in how they are going to use it.
 
I don’t believe that the government will do anything that they say they’ll do. And since I don’t understand some of the more complex details around the collection and use of various taxes, this is a scam.
 
A huge scam.
 
Taxes and tax laws make up a huge part of life. People pay them without really understanding why they’re there, and I’m one of them. There are levy’s, value-added components, capital gains, property, income, goods and services, adjustments, incremental supplements and I could start creating names that nobody understands for anything that I need to collect.
 
Government then creates institutions to collect, collate, filter and sieve (I’m joking, not), and then penalize individuals on being successful.
 
I can see why some people don’t declare or announce their various successes in business.
 

DEATH

It’s quite unfair to compare death to taxes but the comparison doesn’t stop at the thought that both are inescapable, unavoidable conditions of being a citizen who works and earns money.
 
It’s also the excruciating fear of inevitability that accompanies the thought that one day, I too will die. The fear grows with each passing year, getting stronger and stronger as the body gets weaker and weaker, until, like taxes, death comes along and penalizes you for being alive.
 
And you’d think that with you being dead taxes would end, oh no. When you die, an accounting of your life is done and a final tax bill is inherited by those you leave behind, or by the government.
 
Nobody benefits; nobody wins.
 

DEATH AND TAXES

There’s incredibly no way to survive any of the two, unless, of course, you head over to and live in the Cayman Islands where you can live in the tax-free haven. You’ll still have to die though eventually, but when you do, you may have saved something of your existence on the planet so that those you leave behind can think suitably of you and not with ire and disappointment.
 
Why does the Cayman Islands not tax its citizens and why doesn’t the rest of the world follow? What do they know that the rest of the governments of the world are still to learn? And can we ultimately throw off the shackles of providing the government with a piece of our hard-earned money and still get the services that they are supposed to provide.
 
Has it ever occurred to you as curious how those who work in the tax departments are flush with cash? Food for thought.
 
In any case, following up on the idea of a tax-free (and longer life) heaven, I propose that the government start behaving in a more investing and mentoring frame of mind. I also propose that, just like citizens are penalized, and in many cases for simply missing a payment deadline, that the government is also graded, rated and scored on its use of the funds we provide. The scorecard can then be used to kick out those in government driving the agendas and replace them with more competent bodies.
 
This is all possible, we just need the will to make it happen.
 
And if the succession group fails, then they also get kicked out and new people assume the mantle of managing the people’s money. It is the people’s money after all.
 

DEATH... AGAIN

Finally, I hope, it seems inconceivable that citizens should pay taxes for an entire lifetime, even when they are close to death. I’m sure I’m not the only one that has thought of this, but after a lifetime (say 40 years of paying taxes), the government should remove the IV needle from those particular citizens and allow them to graciously wander in the country that their money has helped to build and not bother them again.
 
After all, they’ll still be buying food, paying for transportation, buying gifts and going on trips. In other words, they’ll continue to spend money without the added burden of continual tax payments. Tax is a burden; it’s in the very word itself. If you tell someone, you are very taxing to listen to, it’s not really a complement.
 
And in any case, we expect that at that level of contribution to the governments initiatives, if someone has lived and worked and paid taxes for a very, very long time, perhaps the reward for the good citizenship is to leave them alone in peace. As I get closer to retirement (well I’m actually retired) it would be nice to be left alone to teach, to write and not fear that I could be thrown into prison when my mind is not able to wrap around the new taxes that are sure to prop up in this technologically sophisticated world we live in.
 
I hope that as I slowly lose the ability to run and chase after money, then my contribution to the country I’m soon to depart from is in the form of the wisdom of age. Granted, not everyone is wise, but that’s a minor point since there aren’t too many old people.
 
Death and taxes are related. It’s possible that taxes cause death, but I won’t go there now. I’ll just leave you with that thought.

1,000 Words

It’s 10:29 PM and this is writing is an exercise to see what 1,000 words feel like writing. I’m writing this to clear a mindset of chronic procrastination on this blog. I normally start writing, and eventually, somewhere in the middle of the writing, I give up.

That’s because there’s no focus. No direction and I’m not really saying anything. I may start off with great intentions, to write about, say, technology. But then I deviate into education, and I decide I need a diagram and then something else to explain that, perhaps a diagram, and on and on. About thirty minutes into the thesis, I simply save the draft, with good intentions. The good intentions to come back to it.

I’m writing this in Microsoft Word and already I feel as though this is an achievable goal. Word’s tracking my progress and so far, I’ve done 135 words. Not too shabby, that’s a little over 10% of the work done.
And it’s only two minutes into the writing. So, it means that I can write all of this in 20 minutes – if I’m rambling on like I am now.

In real writing though, I’d have an outline, and I’d stick to the bullets that I write. But I’d be conscious of the craft of limiting the words to a fixed number and not so open-ended like I normally do. Without a target.

This writing also doesn’t have a content target, it’s not like I’m writing to say anything, other than to get to the other side of 1,000 words and see what that feels like. And I have just passed 262 words, so officially 25% of the writing would be done. For a blog that’s not serious, it means that I can write an article and post it daily.

This test comes off the Morning Pages that I do diligently every morning without fail. Even when I have a morning appointment, I make sure that I sit down for the 30 or so minutes it takes to get the Morning Pages done.

So, if the Morning Pages are so disciplined, why is the blog so difficult to write?

It’s not that I don’t have the topics to write about. I have a ton of ideas and the way the process works shows. I will start writing in earnest and then somewhere veer off on a tangent. The tangent will get me lost in the spaghetti world of nonsense at which point I’ll see that I’ve lost interest in the article I was writing.

Not that I write for myself, I try my best to think of something that I think would be interesting to share. For example, in 2023, I started on the extreme Keto diet – so, so close to carnivore. For a while it was very carnivorish and then I added non-starchy vegetables. I was very worried about the health effects it would have from the loss of some vitamins, especially stuff like vitamin C which is in short supply in meats. And I found out that meat has just enough vitamin C if you’re not eating starches – glucose.

I did a number of articles in that vein and discovered that since the articles were exploratory, they were easier to write. I was thinking along.

The Morning Pages are like that. The unstructured method and the lack of focus on content makes the writing flow. I don’t worry about what I’m saying, I just write. And since this exercise is simply an exercise to get to the end of 1,000 words, I am finding the same rhythm has set. Writing about the act of writing, and then expressing some thoughts on diet while thinking of what I’m actually doing. I have now passed 615 words so I’m well past the halfway mark and on to the zone marathon runners call The Wall. 

When energy drains from the exertion and the glucose levels are low. At this point in a marathon run, you feel like you should walk for a while.

And so it is with my regular writing, this is the point at which I cannot see the end and so I put away the computer and do something else. However, in this case, I know that the end is near, it’s about 300 words near. And that I can do. No matter what I write about, I know that the end is coming and I can publish.
If I’d learned to treat writing as a structured process and not think of it as a creative journey, with no goal and I should try to keep walking until the Muse shows up, then I would have had a better time with the blog. It was however a really long time to see that the business of writing is a business and if I want to get to the finish line of something, I must not only have content goals (which are good) but I must also have a target in terms of the time I will take to write and, in the case of writing, the number of words that I want to write.

Content can be king but it’s an elusive and hazy, foggy, murky companion. A review, for example, of a product that I like can be done in 300 words, if I choose it to be 300 words. Or it can run until I think I’ve said all I have to say about the product. If I choose the 300 word review, then it seems to get done well and quickly. If I just sit down and write about this product that I think I like, the review is never published since I’m never sure that I have covered everything I want to cover.

The goal of this exercise was to write till I get to 1,000 words and see if that length is a comfortable length for a blog article – one per day. It’s now 10:47 PM, so it took about 30 minutes to get to the end of this article. And I must say I think that 1,000 words may be the sweet spot.

THE END (1,027 words)