17 Feb 2026 #misc
Dear diary:
Today was my second day without social media. I’m starting to notice the changes. I took notes as the day went by and tracked my feelings.
I started reading another chapter of Financial Freedom by Grant Sabatier. Main lessons?
#1. Financial freedom is about time. Having more time for you. Using time to make your money work earlier and for longer.
#2. Money is infinite. We can’t make more time, but we can always make more money.
After my reading time, I joined a meeting with my contracting client.
I was so tempted to check my email or fire up LinkedIn. That’s usually what I do during long, unproductive meetings. That’s how my meeting time looked. For this one, my only contribution was, “Yes, that’s correct!”
Instead of scrolling, I took a receipt and doodled circles. I drew a big circle in the middle, then smaller ones, then smaller ones…until the page was full. That’s a drawing exercise I found the other day.
Big observation: When I feel like procrastinating, I used to scroll. Now I count to three, finish a tiny task, and sustain for five minutes.
16 Feb 2026 #misc #experiments
Yesterday I began an week-long experiment: no social media, no feeds. I’m writing this at the end of the first day of the experiment.
Here’s what I noticed after one day without social media:
#1. Start with an intention. Usually before working, I check my email and log into Medium and other accounts to reply to comments. Today I didn’t need a website blocker since I started with an intention: no social media.
#2. Read more. I filled the slot before working with a book. I picked Financial Freedom by Grant Sabatier. Then after lunch, instead of scrolling, I kept reading another book. Yes, I read more than one book at once—One strategy to read more books.
#3. Time for side projects. With the extra time, I worked on my February book project. The first draft is ready. And after a day’s break, I’m now editing it.
#4. An alarm as reminder. The other day, I found out about the 3-alarm method. I’m using it to remind me of a “Do Nothing” time to embrace boredom.
15 Feb 2026 #misc
A post on social media convinced me to quit it for a week. Ironic, right?
The other day, a LinkedIn connection shared that “we don’t owe the Internet consistency.” It was an invitation to disappear from social media without apologizing.
That’s what I’m doing this week.
To cut phone time and embrace boredom, I’m quitting feeds for a week. That’s Medium, LinkedIn, dev.to, YouTube…
Quitting feeds frees up between 45-60 minutes each day. Yes, that’s how long I scroll down feeds on average, even when using social media consciously. Every time I open a social media app, I remind myself: “creators don’t consume.” A reminder to spend time making, not scrolling.
Even though I’m disappearing, I’ve scheduled posts so my system runs without me.
I’m planning to use that extra time to read books and finish my February book experiment. I will share the results soon.
14 Feb 2026 #writing
At times, writing (or creating anything) can feel pointless.
We don’t see results or traction. That’s when we should think we’re writing for our past selves, documenting our journey, or creating a time capsule.
But these days, my scrolling led me to How to Make a Living as an Artist. A street artist wrote it for other artists. But the next line captures the essence of writing or any other creative pursuit:
If you make something that you like, at least one person will like it — you. If you make something you think other people will like, you run the risk of no one liking it at all. That would be sad.
Write what you’d read. Code the app you’d use. Paint what you’d hang in your living room. At least one person will like it. That’s enough.
13 Feb 2026 #mondaylinks
Hey there.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. When coding was the bottleneck, we used 2-pizza teams. Now, with AI writing decent code, we have to rethink team organization. AI is turning teams into 1-pizza teams (7min) while creating new roles.
#2. Most of us coders are problem solvers at heart. The worst part is that makes us addicted to being useful (6min).
#3. We are at a turning point of our career as coders (5min). Software’s first “season” is over. But the next one will be “more interesting, more economically valuable, and more mentally stimulating than we can imagine right now.”
#4. Anthropic found that over-relying on AI leads to a “statistically significant decrease in mastery.” A truth everybody already knows (2min).
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about the stats that deflate the AI hype (2min) (more revealing that Anthropic’s study) and how I’m embracing boredom (3min) (My phone screen time was quite shocking).
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Until next Friday. Keep coding smartly
Cesar