Daily List + Morning Walks + Frank Ocean Quote

(1) DAILY LIST: The most consistently I've ever functioned in the day-to-day (freelance singer/songwriter, money mostly made in web design, branding and photography work) is when I got a simple notebook I kept in my laptop bag and started every day with the date and a brain-dumped list of to-dos spinning around my head. Sometimes I wrote the same task for a week, but it lived better on the page than in my head.

(2) MORNING WALKS: I can't overstate how much going on a walk every morning changed my mental health and ability to deal with the day. I don't know the one-to-one correlation, but I feel a significant difference on the days I don't.

(3) FRANK: Although sometimes to my own detriment, I live life by the philosophy that all these rules and ways of being in the modern world are literally made up by someone else. (We all just get born into a planet floating in space.) Frank Ocean has a lyric that says "living in an idea — an idea from another man's mind". Sometimes that gives me a real "f*ck it" attitude, but oftentimes, I find some flavor of grace (for myself and others) in the concept.