Journal

A few weeks ago, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write here. You can read the post I ended on, but it was a pretty anticlimactic conclusion. If I’m being honest, I just felt like I was getting nowhere useful and decided to move on. The wonderful thing about thinking, writing and waiting? Your brain keeps working it out.

Today, the fully-formed thought entered my mind that I should use this blog to journal the work that I really want to do. I’ll get to that (the work I want to do) in a minute, but I want to spend a while on the journal part first. It’s worth noting that this idea did come up in the earlier posts, but it hadn’t grabbed me in the same way it has now.

When the idea entered my mind, I was cleaning the kitchen after dinner (which, coincidentally, is when many of my best ideas come to me). As soon as it did, I ran to my office and grabbed The Making of Prince of Persia, the journal that the game’s maker Jordan Mechner wrote, published in beautiful hardback by Stripe Press.

I needed to finish cleaning the kitchen, so I quickly searched for Jordan’s name in my podcast app and found an interview on the Design Better podcast. A few minutes in, one of the hosts mentioned Brian Eno’s book A Year with Swollen Appendices, a journal and appendix of essays talking about his work, collaborations and ideas.

I finished cleaning, made a cup of tea, ordered Brian’s book from City Lights book store and… started writing this post, so—as usual—I’m figuring out what I want to write as I’m writing it. I always think that lists feel like the most honest form of half-finished thoughts, so let’s write a list with some rough thoughts and see where we land.

1. The “work I really want to do” is tell the stories of beautiful places, starting with Northern California and specifically with Point Reyes (and even more specifically with Point Reyes Lighthouse).
2. I want to tell those stories with field recordings, audio stories, writing, poetry, photography, video, and maybe eventually books. Sounds like I need to figure some stuff out? Yeah, that’s the point.
3. I figure stuff out through writing. That’s what I love most about writing. It helps me figure stuff out. It creates forward momentum. It allows me to look at myself in a way that I otherwise can’t.
4. I thought I wanted to be an author, but what I really want is to be a writer. Maybe there’s no difference to you, but for me it’s this: to be a writer I just need to write. There’s no baggage attached to it.
5. Morning pages changed me. Journaling about my life changed my life. It helps with projects like this, too, but I don’t want my morning pages to just be about projects. Morning pages are for everything.
6. So, this daily blog could be a journal of the work that I want to do. Like Mechner’s journal it can help me figure the work out. Like Eno’s journal it can lead to related essays and experiments.
7. It can also be meta: a journal about the journal. What do I want this journal to look like? Which tools could make it easier to capture what I want to capture? What—if anything—gets in the way?
8. On “things I want to capture”: I might want to include images, video, audio and other things that I don’t usually capture in these posts. I want it to be a high fidelity journal of the real work.

That’s… pretty much it? More thinking to do, but that’s exactly what this journal is for. I might keep the old posts around or I might tuck them away. This site might look different soon, live elsewhere, use a different stack, or whatever. I’m here to write work into existence, and to share the work that I create. That’s what this daily blog is for.

This post is a part two. I won’t add much preamble, because you can read that in the part one—suffice to say that this is about the million moments in a day—almost any day, really—that I could write about.

1. Throughout the walk we talked about so many things: morning pages, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, meditation, artificial intelligence, design, writing, growing up, travel, relationships, family, internal family systems, This American life, Pico Iyer, the New Camaldoli Hermitage, solitude, storytelling, and more. I could write about any of those discussions. I could pull quotes out. There’s something about the act and art of conversation, about meeting someone on the same frequency, about energy-giving conversations.
2. We’d both brought cameras, but I don’t think either of us took any photographs. We were wrapped up, I think, in the non-stop conversation. I’d brought my recorder and binaural microphones and didn’t record a single thing. The place was the setting for a great conversation, and I think I existed in that conversation more-so than the place for those couple hours. There’s something here about tools that can influence you even if you don’t use them. About preparing, just in case. About being absorbed by discussion and ideas.
3. We walked by a few folks, and a few folks walked past us. Each time it happened, I thought about the snippet of conversation overheard in either direction, and thought about what we fill in ourselves when we overhear something. How did folks end up at the point in the conversation they’re at now? Where will they be ten minutes or two hours from now? What can I infer about them? There’s something about the countless conversations happening at any moment. About the strangers you almost meet, but not quite. About tiny moments that you might wonder about for minutes or for months.

Alright, that’s the first half of the day, so I’ll pause here again and come back tomorrow. I feel like I’m cheating a bit here, but it’s my daily blog, you know? Besides, lots to write about once I’m done.

Sometimes I wonder how I’m going to write about something every single day. Before I sat down to write this I wondered if I’d have anything to write about—but then, I thought about my day. Our days are filled with so many moments, and any one of them is worth meditating on.

This will be a meta post, because instead of writing about any one of them in detail, I’m just going to call out what I could have written about (and perhaps, of course, I’ll come to write about all of them). I’m writing it to remind me that there’s always something to write about.

To frame the rest of the post: I went on a short hike today with a new friend in the morning (which I will be writing about soon) and then spent the afternoon/evening with my wife and our dog (which I’ll always write about, for the rest of time). Alright, that said, let’s get into it.

1. Preparing for the hike, I packed my Ricoh GR III, my field recorder, my binaural microphones and my earmuff-style windshield. There’s something in here about the size of the gear I buy and why I do it. There’s something about opening yourself up to potential. There’s something about quality, and intention, and presence.
2. I drove from my home in Oakland to San Francisco to pick up a friend. It was early enough that there was no real traffic on the Bay Bridge. It was a beautiful morning. Visibility was perfect. I had one of those moments where I couldn’t believe that I get to live in this incredible place. There’s something in here about having a car for the first time, learning to drive in America, the freedom of driving. There’s something about that view as you cross the bridge, about how driving in California is certainly no punishment, good driving music.
3. When I arrived, I parked up (which is not an easy task in San Francisco) and grabbed a flat white at Sightglass. There’s something in here about the energy of San Francisco vs. Oakland (and Brooklyn, and London). There’s something about the flat white, and about coffee in S.F. vs. NYC vs. London. There’s something about the crowd you get in coffee shops in each place and what they’re typically doing.
4. I met my friend and we jumped in the car. We drove over the Golden Gate Bridge and had our first in-person conversation. There’s something about driving over that bridge, about the conversations you have in a car vs. on a walk vs. sitting across from one another in a coffee shop. There’s something about someone hearing the music you’re listening too and whether you connect over it.
5. When we got to the trailhead and started looking for parking we happened to be talking about how some of the best things in life come from embracing cringe, and accepting that you might put yourself out there only for things not to work out. It was busy and it looked like we’d struggle to find parking, but I drove all the way to the end vs. squeezing on the side of the road. When we got to the small car park, there was a single empty space just waiting for us. It felt like the universe had decided to reward our perseverance (“there’s probably not a space up there… but what of there is”). There’s something about fate, fluke, coincidence, or about comedic and wonderful timing.

Okay… I’ve appended “pt. 1” to the title of this post and I’ll come back with a pt. 2, because it turns out there were even more moments to write about than I thought there would be. Any one of the points above could actually be 3+ posts. I guess my point has been proven. Back tomorrow though, because 1: I always am, and 2: I want to capture those other moments.

Something fun that I played with for a few minutes today: using Tailscale on my Mac Mini and my iPhone, plus Termius on my iPhone, to hack on my personal site on the go using Claude Code. It felt sort of… magical? Three simple and wonderful tools that I could set up in minutes.

I’d go into the details, but you can (of course) just point Claude at this post and it would tell you exactly what to do. It’s simple enough, in fact, that you could research the old fashioned way (google dot com) and be on your way in no time. I recommend the former because… you know.

We’re so spoiled for tools right now when it comes to building software. There’s never been a better time to express something in this medium than right now. I’m glad that I learned to program, and I still recommend learning how to program, but these tools are such a delightful addition to that skillset. You can use them when you want to, vs. when you need to—which (in my opinion) makes them more fun.

If you end up playing with this little Tailscale-Termius-Claude-Code stack, I’d love to hear about it, and I’d especially love to hear if you end up using it for things other than building software. Claude Code, it turns out, isn’t the best name. You can use it for so much more than code.

I’ve got a whole name in between the name I was born with. I was born Craig Frost. Short and sweet. About as short as it gets, actually. Fewer syllables even than McLovin, who had only one name. When I was five years old my school teacher, Miss Scott, had us clap the syllables in our name to make music. My contribution was, let’s say, snappy.

I was always a little jealous of kids with a middle name, so I made one up. I told everyone my middle name was Thomas. I’m not sure why I made it up, I’m not sure why I told anyone, and I’m not sure why I chose Thomas. I wrote it on my homework. I practiced writing it over and over. I wanted a middle name and I gave myself one, because why not?

When my wife and I married we took each other’s names. In the U.K. you change your name by deed poll, which effectively means… writing it down on a piece of paper, and getting a couple of friends to sign it (and watch you sign). Easy—but still, how many times do you change your name? Finally, it was time to make my fake middle name real.

I snuck it in. I practiced my new signature over and over. I thought about all of the homework that had just become legitimate. I thought about all of my small lies that had suddenly become truth. Well, sort of—I wasn’t Craig Thomas Frost, after all, I was Craig Thomas Atallah Frost. Something completely new. An entire name between my name.

Names are funny. I used to share a name with many people (enough that someone added me to a group chat of Craig Frost’s). Now I don’t share my whole name with anyone, and share my surname with just one person in the whole world, who is also my best friend in the whole world. It’s weird, and it’s wonderful. I’m so grateful that we share it.

I’m feeling a little mad today, but for no particular reason. Do you have those days? I do, occasionally. I probably didn’t eat enough, or ate the wrong things, or didn’t drink enough water. Anyway, I was feeling kind of mad, so I thought I’d capture some things I’m grateful for today.

1. Making coffee. Now that I take Adderall I can’t really drink caffeine in the morning, otherwise I feel very weird. I picked up some decaf because it turns out that I enjoy the ritual and the smell most of all. I made a flat white this morning, and it made me feel great.
2. Driving my wife. Only to the BART, but it’s something I like doing for a couple of reasons: it’s a few minutes to chat at the beginning of the day, and (because I didn’t learn to drive until years later than my wife) I’m slowly repaying my sizable passenger prince debt.
3. Looking at the stars. I took our dog Cacio out for a late night walk, and the sky was so clear. I spent half of the walk staring up at the sky, and it felt as though I could see so many more stars than usual. There’s nothing better to put a day and life into perspective.
4. Our happy dog. Several times today, and right before sitting down to write this post (with her now sat next to me), I turned around to find her smiling at me and ferociously wagging her tail. It makes me so happy every time, and reminds me how grateful I am for her.

Do you ever feel like you learn the same lesson over and over again? That was me today as I lamented in my morning pages about how it’s so difficult to just share small, regular updates with everyone at work. Low stakes, low pressure, high visibility and always good vibes.

Some 750 words later and I’d realized (yet again) that I’ve felt this pain before, and solved it before, and felt good about it before. It wasn’t some new product. It wasn’t some home-grown tool. It wasn’t some mega-Notion-brain database. It was a channel, in Slack, for all. Now, I’ve done all of those other things, but the most successful was always a silly little channel. Just a message in a stream. No titles, no tags.

I remember back in 2020 hearing about someone at Deliveroo who had made a channel like this, and it was better in name and in framing than anything I’d come up with before: WAYWO (what are you working on). I won’t describe it here, because it turns out (unbeknownst to me at the time) that they wrote about it (and on Medium, no less). Stop reading this post and read that post! Clap. Comment. Be inspired.

If you’re still here though, one final note: I’ve found over and over again that if you want something to stick, you should keep it simple. In this case, by avoiding too much structure; by using the tool that people are already using. I give Slack a lot of flack, but words in a big old undifferentiated stream are better than no words at all.

p.s. Hey Rob, big fan, love your work, realizing now that I sat next to you at a Mr. Bingo talk in Shoreditch. See you on the internet, etc.

This might simply be the British part of me talking, but this post will be insufferable for two reasons: it will sound like I’m virtue signaling and it’ll look like unsolicited advice. It’s probably both; intended to be neither.

As I trimmed the stems of the flowers that I get delivered for my wife every month (how virtuous), I realized how much of a gift it is to do small things for others (if you want to). It’s small; it’s a really small thing—I accidentally subscribed to flowers and never stopped—but it’s a small act of service that I now cherish. It’s a gift, really, to both of us.

Before the subscription I’d bought my wife flowers, of course. When I did, though, I remember her doing the work to give them a place in our home. I thought that the gift was the flowers, but I’ve come to realize that the gift is the work. Buying groceries does not produce a great evening with friends, but cooking something with love might (etc.)

The might seem obvious to everyone else in the universe (?) but it took a little while to dawn on me. Besides the gift of noticing my own act of service, it reminded me of the many (many) acts of service that others do for me. The countless acts of service my wife has always done for me, and that she does for countless others (yes, she’s pretty great).

To make myself really cringe-worthy: the best present, it turns out, can simply be presence. A gift can be attention paid. Time spent—even just a little. I feel lucky that I get to spend those few minutes each month, and—fortunately—my wife appears to like the flowers.

It was drizzling this evening when I walked the dog. After a few minutes of walking, I became very aware of the mist settling on my face. I became aware of how my hair felt a little heavier, but didn’t feel wet. How my boots made that sound that shoes do as they lift off a wet pavement.

I wondered what else I might notice, if I chose to.

The scattered light from headlamps.

The streams running in the gutter.

The beads of water in my brows.

I decided to feel the cold that was managing to get past my Barbour jacket and cardigan. The feeling of the collar on my neck. The tension I was holding in my shoulders (and my back, and my hands).

Some of those things weren’t nice, but I felt glad that I could notice them; that I could pay attention to them. I decided that when I got home I’d notice the warmth, and the lack of cool collar on my neck.

Once I’d got home and got warm, I pulled a few cherry tomatoes out of the fridge and grabbed the salt cellar. I noticed the variation in color of the tomatoes. The pattern of the marble on the cellar.

I decided that I’d write about it (hello), so I sat down and paid attention to how the seat felt underneath me, how the mouse felt in my hand, and how it felt to punch the keys on my keyboard.

We experience so much, and pay attention to so little.

Paying attention to things just makes life richer, I think. Really paying attention to everything—every little thing—occasionally is just a profound experience. How much, we can feel, if we choose to.

Not much more to it than that. Just a little note to me (and to you, if you need it) to pay attention to things more often. To be thankful for the warmth, for the salt and for the tools to express myself.

A very short post today to capture a thought that just came to me: the unread items in your bookmarks or reading list might represent the person that you wish you were. Those that you’ve read—or that never make the list because you have to read them right that moment—might represent the person you currently are.

I don’t know if this will hold up, even just for me. It sort of holds up when I look at my reading list now—longer pieces about this or that topic that I want to know more about so that I can be perceived as a person who knows about it. Why do I save them? Is it still useful to save them? That’s something I’d like to think more about.

I fully endorse buying books that you’ll never read. I think there’s symbolism in thinking about buying the book. In the act of buying the book. In occasionally spotting the book weeks or months or years into the future. Why not bookmarks, too? What if bookmarks occasionally presented themselves at random?

Actually, that’s something that I sort of want, now. I want for bookmarks to present themselves, maybe even based on some information that’s known about me. Maybe just at random. Who knows. It’s fun, actually, just writing in order to explore this thought. Even more fun to just hit publish on writing like this.