[Electric Speed] Incredible scheduling tool | Age-positive imagery (yay!)

A note from Jane

I have spent the last 10 years living in Charlottesville, Virginia. While I moved here for a new and exciting job, that job ended two years in and not exactly according to plan.

My husband, Mark, and I decided to stay put because moving is a pain and as a freelancer I could work from anywhere. When people ask why we live in Charlottesville, my stock answer has been “inertia.” And it is true. We simply can’t be bothered. (A friend of mine calls Charlottesville the “velvet ditch.” Make of that what you will.)

Yet I’ve never had much (any) fondness for this town, and I feel sorry for the people who think they can warm me up over email or social media by talking about how much they love Charlottesville and UVA, how beautiful it is, etc. It’s a sure way to make me less enthusiastic about connecting. (Sorry if you are one of these people. I try not to hold it against you, I promise.)

But finally Mark and I overcame our inertia.

Over the holidays, as I visited family and friends in Cincinnati and Indiana, I swore up and down I would not engage in nostalgic thoughts or conversation about moving back. Sentimental hogwash!, I told myself, in the voice of Mr. Potter.

But as I drove through fields of gold—yes, still gold in wintertime Indiana—and walked my old Cincinnati neighborhood, I realized it wasn’t nostalgia at all. It was meaning and love. These places resonate with me. And Charlottesville simply does not. I no longer want to grow old in a place I don’t care for.

Mark and I move back to Cincinnati in April. We’ve been away long enough.

Recently a colleague reached out via email to schedule a meeting. Right in the body of the email was a calendar with her available times. I clicked on an appointment slot, and—within seconds, without me having to type a single letter—the meeting was booked and on my Google calendar. I literally had to do nothing else.

I immediately looked up the tech behind this magic. It’s called Mixmax and the instant scheduling tool is free. It’s been a long time since I was so seriously impressed.

Google Trends is a free resource from Google that shows what people are searching for and what topics are trending. (As I write this, trending topics include Lakers, Ash Wednesday, and Mardi Gras 2022.)

Glimpse is a Chrome extension that works in tandem with Google Trends to bring you even more insights. For example, when I searched for author Brandon Sanderson, Glimpse told me the monthly search volume for his name over time and which social channels talk about him most (YouTube and Reddit, it turns out). You get 20 free searches per month.

In the last issue, I asked you to tell me your favorite source for quotations. Here’s what you said:

As a former speechwriter, I always kept quote dictionaries on hand. But online, good sources are BrainyQuote and SearchQuotes. But beware: these sources skew white and male. —Amy on Discord
Lib Quotes: 100-percent sourced quotes. —Michelle Miller
Library of Congress, Bartleby, LitQuotes, Lib Quotes, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1955) —L Rockhill

Next question: Your favorite gadget for charging gadgets? Hit reply to this email or share on Discord.

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