021 — Reserving Fuel

Hey. How's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner, and this is the All Play podcast. So similar to last week, it is 4:34 in the AM, and the mind is once again racing after taking the dog out for his 3:30 AM duties. Yeah.

You know, I just was laying there again, and the mind is still racing. And it started making me think about, all the stuff I had to get done. And, you know, normally or, like like, I guess in the past and, like, what I've been trying to do recently is, it just got me thinking about, like, reserving fuel. So in the past, I would typically you know, if there's some personal stuff that I wanted to work on, I would try to wake up early in the morning and use some of that good first of the day brain juice to try to, you know, fire on, you know, doing, like, the kinda, like, deep work, deep discovery, problem solving stuff for the my personal projects. Because, I mean, after, you know, a whole day of, you know, either jumping in and out of meetings or working on, you know, other things that are kind of, like, solved.

You're just kinda tweaking them and stuff. That I don't know. It's just there isn't much fuel left in the tank to kinda dig into, like, the real grindy stuff at the end of the day for your personal stuff, compared to the way that it is in the morning. So, you know, I I would typically reserve this time for personal stuff, but actually, there's a few client projects that are I wouldn't say they're necessarily behind, but they've been kinda balling up. And I just wanna try to, like, get back to smooth on those.

So, unfortunately, I am gonna be using this morning to work on a client project with the hopes that that'll then free me up in the afternoon for a big block of time to work on some personal stuff. So we'll see how that goes. No guarantees, obviously, that that's the way it's gonna play out and, whatnot. But, yeah, reserving fuel, it's tricky. Like, using the good fuel and then, like, you know, getting to the bad fuel, it makes me you know, it's kinda like when you top off your car, it seems like that first quarter or half a tank really lasts for a while.

And then you get down to the, you know, the second half and then you get down to that last quarter, and it's just like the gas is just flying out of the thing. Unfortunately, I still drive a gas based car, but, yeah, I don't know if it's just bad gas, you know, sloshing around at the bottom of the tank or if it's just a weird mental perception that you're just more maybe conscious of, checking it more often when it gets slower. I don't know. You know, it's like those weird things where if you're looking to to maybe purchase something, you just see it everywhere. Maybe that's a similar thing with, with the level of your gas tank, but I'm not a 100% sure.

But I do know that when you choose to, like, reserve your fuel and when you choose to expend the fuel, there's definitely an art to it. And I'm still trying to figure that out, but I do think that the early morning juice or the early morning fuel is just a better fuel. But yeah. So that's where I'm at. The it's so tricky because, like, I feel like I'm conflicted with, like, a lot of different things.

Like, I wanna work on some personal stuff. There's also just, like, some really cool activity going on for, like, some relief efforts, which is really cool. I I I don't know if I, touched on this in an earlier episode, but I'm over in the Verbs discord and, you know, after hurricane Helene came through and, you know, did all the damage to to Florida and then also worked its way up to North Carolina and South Carolina and just really I mean, it's amazing that, those communities were even impacted by a hurricane being so far inland. There was a a a little bit of, like, a relief effort that was started called disaster check-in.com. And it was a way, essentially, like a website and a phone number to where people could post their their latest status.

And then if people wanted to kinda check-in on them, they could then do, like, a, reverse lookup based on the phone number and see that last person's status that was posted. Because obviously, cell networks were down and people were also, you know, when all these things happen, it's just the infrastructure and the utilities and stuff are just so hammered that it's hard to really get reliable signals and reliable communication. So it's a really awesome community effort by some people within the Verbs, Discord to coordinate and get disastercheckin.com up and running. And then since then, there's been a lot of work on trying to get water out to, people. And similarly, over in the Verbs Discord, Daniel Colbourne has been basically, like, being the conduit and the on the grounds, coordinator and, you know, relay to, to this group who is now helping with this Asheville help, initiative, which is really awesome.

So it's basically a tool that allows the management and the kinda like the tracking of of all these, like, water dispatches and, like, refill locations. And, you know, it's like, man, I, like, so want to help with that because even back in, when I was up in New York, I happened to run this bus service called Rockabuss. It was actually just like a way that we, like, rented some school buses and we would pick people up in, like, Williamsburg in the lower east side and then, have them go out to, like, Fort Tilden and and the Rockaways. It's just like an easy way to get out there. But, when hurricane Sandy went through, that was a huge devastation to that area.

And I would go out there on the weekends and basically, like, shovel sand out of people's basements. And, and also, like, because we were so kind of, like, integrated with the community, I ended up actually changing over the rockabust site to be, like, a relief effort site. So it listed all the different ways that you could help, the different organizations that were out there. We even ended up running a few buses to send people out so that way people could kind of, like, had a means of of being able to get out there and help all these different people that were kind of, like, displaced or their homes were just, overtaken by the storm surge and all the sand that washes through. But it was it was a heavy situation, and I think those kind of communal really it like, bringing people together to make something that then hopefully helps the relief of those is such a powerful thing.

Even, with, you know, even COVID and stuff. And, actually, back then, I was thinking about how how can people kinda get together and and pool their their resources or efforts in order to help more people, whether that's through education or just who knows? So it it got me thinking about public works projects from back in the day where, you know, basically, when people needed jobs, you know, governments and other things would start to build libraries or zoos or what what have you. And these were all under these, like, public works programs, which is just trying to help people out in the community. Also ended up building these long lasting structures and kind of, like, foundational things that actually then kinda continue to contribute to that, community for the long term.

And, it got me thinking more about actually commune well, so I was like, well, what would be like a modern day take on that? It necessarily isn't all wrapped up in the politics, but still could basically have the spirit of, like, a public public's works program, but, you know, in these kind of more grassroots ways of collaborating. So I started thinking about it like this, Communal Works. And actually, me and my buddy, John, we kinda put together a little website, but it's not really what it should be right now. But this whole idea of, like, communal works or bringing people together, that's such a powerful thing.

So it's like, I'm so torn preserving fuel, trying to get client work stuff done, Would love to be contributing to that. Also kind of thinking about this, like, bigger, grander thing of how to coordinate and collaborate and, you know, just put some good back into the world. And that's where my mind's at at a 4:44 in the AM. I'm at over the 10 minute mark, and yeah. So I'm gonna be, trying to make the best use of the fuel that I have for today, stretch it out, try to get some client stuff done, and hopefully contribute to, that project that's in the works.

So, I guess I'll try to drop some links in the in the show notes if you wanna get involved over there. I'm not sure if, where they're at. I'm still trying to catch up because I haven't been able to really check-in on it over the weekend, but some good stuff going on. And I do think some of these communal things are the way that we're gonna, you know, build a better society now and then moving forward. And so I get really excited when I see people coming together working on that kind of stuff.

So I'm gonna leave it there. I'll drop some links in the show notes. Have a great day. And yeah, make sure you check out the show notes because I actually do put some time writing some stuff there. Sometimes they end up being little mini blog posts that may or may not fully relate to the audio, and so having them together is like a combo punch.

But yeah. So I'm gonna leave it there. Have a great one. Later.