How to embrace the good enough & The power of personal curation

My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the weekly digest about creativity and productivity-boosting tools and resources, combined with useful insights, articles, and findings from the fields of design and tech. The newsletter built for the creative community.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 281 👋

Well, just like that we entered the month of July. It feels like the past six months went by in a glimpse. Whenever I am experiencing something like that, it is a great reminder to sit down and reflect on all the things and events that happened throughout the past months. I reflect on what happened at work and in my personal life. A process like that helps to make sure I am still on track towards my goals, but it also allows me to revaluate my priorities.

The process itself is a very personal one. Usually, it is only me, a pen, a notebook, and my MacBook with my preferred note-taking app open but nothing else. I go through my daily notes to reflect on the ideas I had, the struggles I had to deal with, the events I was a part of, and the experiences I gained. Based on that information, I then create a new note in my note-taking system, and gather my thoughts, write down my feelings, and questions that came up while reading through my daily notes.

It is a great practice to offload everything that got stuck in my mind and maybe caused some chaos there. It helps me making decisions, and plan ahead. Most importantly, it gives me guidance towards the evaluation of the status quo of both my personal and professional life.

It is a therapy session.

Let's embrace information overload with personal curation

Every single day, we get hit by wave of content. It often feels overwhelming. News, articles, podcasts, newsletters, social media, and other formats plaster our timelines, inboxes, and are almost everywhere. Suddenly, it became one of the hardest tasks to filter signal from noise in our digital lives. People experience it as a burden if there are still some unread newsletters in their inboxes at the end of the day. They never touch their RSS readers since every day 10, 20, maybe 50 new articles pile up there. They abandon podcasts because they are way behind on episodes.

I was there a couple of years ago. I was following so many creators, writers, journalists, subscribed to countless RSS feeds, newsletters, and podcasts, and I got overwhelmed by all the content and information I got hit with every single day. There was the deep urge to keep up with everything, however it was impossible. Once I saw unread newsletters piling up in my inbox and the unread counter in my RSS app reaching four digits, I lost motivation to keep up. Suddenly, my content and information consumption was only driven by reaching inbox zero. I was no longer consuming because I wanted to keep track of specific topics or catch up with news, learn something, or to explore. It felt like a burden instead.

I did not really have any plans on how to tackle that burden. All I knew was that my goal is to revive my joy of consuming all different kinds of mediums. I am subscribing to multiple newsletters because I want to receive any new content by those specific creators as soon as they send it out. My RSS reader is packed with lovely personal blogs by people I deeply admire, so it feels natural to me to keep up with their writings. In my podcast queue you currently find over 200 podcast episodes. My Up Next list in my audiobooks apps consists of over 100 audiobooks.

That is a lot of content to consume. And I am adding a lot more every single day. While doing so, I realized what I am actually doing is personal curation and it helped me to no longer experience information overload as a burden, but rather embrace the fact that there is alway some kind of content to consume.

Read the full post here:

Let’s embrace information overload with personal curation

Information overload can be overwhelming, but once you filter signal from noise and create your personalized information and content streams, it becomes a goldmine of knowledge.

Creativerly •Philipp Temmel

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Fresh Updates & News

Play launches Figma Import →

With the newest update, Play released a highly anticipated feature, the Figma Import, which allows you to copy your Figma design and paste them directly into Play. Besides that, this release brings SF Symbol Animations, System Colors for Accessibility, Data for Pickers, and more. You can find the full release notes here.

AFFiNE July Update →

The July Update of AFFiNE brings a new mindmap feature and a new edgeless toolbar. With the new mindmap feature, you can create stylish mindmaps with a single drag and drop. Besides that, the update introduced the possibility to preview and edit your content without switching, synced docs, advanced mutimodal AI, edgeless text, templates, and more.

Vivaldi 6.8 →

Vivaldi's newest update has landed on desktop, Android, and iOS. On desktop, this update introduces the functionality to display real-time tab memory usage, a break mode button animation mimicking guided breathing, the possibility to import Chrome extensions, Workspaces quick command, and ad blocker updates. On Android, you can now enjoy customizable buttons in the address bar, bookmarks nickname matching, easier start page customization, and a better ad blocker. For iOS, you can now find your inactive tabs in the tab switcher, open bookmarks, reading list, and history in the background, and the same bookmarks matching, easier start page customization, and ad blocker update as on Android.

Mental Wealth

❯ Why users are ignoring your features – “Premium dating subscriptions, VPN access and weekly sausage rolls—what has happened to banking? Instead of a single and clear value proposition, premium bank accounts are mostly bundles of loosely connected features and perks. It's difficult for any individual to browse through a tier comparison table, and assign an expected value to each option. They don't know what they'll use, or what it's worth. A similar disconnect happens all the time in software (with features), making it much harder to onboard and retain new customers.”

❯ Truly Championing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – “Research consistently demonstrates that organizations that prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) outperform their peers, not just in employee satisfaction but also in innovation and financial returns. Could leadership rooted in empathy be the game-changer in today's diverse, multi-generational workplaces?”

❯ The Affliction of Abundance – “You’re about to launch a new product, but you can’t decide on the tech stack. You’ve been researching for weeks, worried that you might miss out on the perfect solution. Sounds familiar? This is FOBO – the Fear of a Better Option. It’s the lesser-known cousin of FOMO, and it might be secretly sabotaging your decision-making process.”

❯ How to embrace the good enough – “The headline sounds a bit bigger than the topic of user experience. And truthfully, it is. The struggle for perfectionism is uniquely human, and its pursuit is exhausting and never-ending. Between social media, our innate competitiveness as human creatures, and a myriad of other things, it’s not hard to understand how common it is.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

Based on some recent shady practices, unethical decisions, and the lack of transparency of AI-driven companies, I updated my post about AI's major alien concept. Perplexity has been all over the news since journalists found out that it is scraping websites, although their operators do not want them to be accessed by bots, Figma doubled-down on AI features and turned the training of them fueled by users' content on by default, and OpenAI stored your chats on your computer in plain text.

❯ Quick Bits

• Figma disables its AI design feature that appeared to be ripping off Apple’s Weather app
• OpenAI’s ChatGPT Mac app was storing conversations in plain text
• Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly okay to steal content if it’s on the open web
• Elon Musk denies tweets misled Twitter investors ahead of purchase
• Samsung expects profits to jump by more than 1,400%
• India's X alternative Koo to shut down services
• Jeff Bezos to sell another $5bn of Amazon shares
• Brazil blocks Meta from using social media posts to train AI
• EU says Instagram’s paid ad-free option breaches rules
• UK leads Europe for GenAI patents but Germany is catching up, UN report reveals
• Not-so-OpenAI allegedly never bothered to report 2023 data breach
• Canva CEO Melanie Perkins thinks the design world needs more alternatives to Adobe

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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