Wizard's chess, Notion dashboards, and turning my brain off

Field Notes: 008

May 01, 2025

Welcome to The Slow Lane ☁️ Every ~~Monday~~ week, I send out field notes from the trenches — a candid peek into how I’m balancing creativity, business strategy, and the chaos of an ADHD brain while building an Internet business.

🗒️ Top of Mind

A front-page report from my world — what I’m testing, tweaking, and totally overthinking

Baby’s First Vlog!

It’s been 15 years since I uploaded my last vlog to YouTube — it feels so good to be back. In this video:

Why doing mindless, easy, boring work has been good for me as a creative freelancer
The daily activity that’s helping me release my instinct to plan everything out ahead of time
How I’ve been thinking about personal branding completely wrong

Pawn to d4

My interest in chess began when I saw Ron Weasley command a magical stone army, and was reignited by Elizabeth Harmon dominating the board in The Queen’s Gambit. Even though I’ve had interest for a while, I never did anything about it until I was offered a chance to test Duolingo’s new chess product. Ninety minutes of lessons later, my new hyperfixation was secured.

I did my usual YouTube deep dive, but quickly realized I won’t learn the game by watching alone — I need to play.

Learn Chess with Dr. Wolf was recommended to me, and it’s the easiest few bucks I’m now spending every month. He points out what you missed, lets you take back questionable moves, and explains what went wrong after the game.

Lately I’ve been sneaking in games between meetings, after work, and before bed — not thrilled that it’s more screen time, but I’ll take it over mindless scrolling any day!!

The End of an Era

We just wrapped up The Bare Minimum Artist’s Way series on the

Internet People

Substack and podcast! It has completely taken over the past 14 weeks of my life — very much worth it! But let’s just say I’m glad it’s over!

In our final episode, we did a post-mortem on the whole journey, including our most life-altering takeaways — like one of mine: Get quiet, make stuff, and trust that it’s working out.

The episode (with video!!!) is out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube!

Notion Spring Cleaning

Every season, my Notion setup starts feeling chaotic, overwhelming, and in dire need of updates to make it work with my life better.

Since I’ve become a lot busier since the last time I worked on my personal dashboard, so I went back to ole faithful — our Priority Planner (top left). I added a custom button to auto-fill my recurring tasks in at the top of every week, and I’ve been feeling a lot less scattered since coming back to this tool we spent so many months designing!

The Priority Planner is only $18 if you want to get your paws on it!

🍿 Media Worth Mentioning

A roundup of books, shows, podcasts, and anything else that stuck with me

You (Season 5)

This final season felt underwhelming compared to the stellar first three, but this show has built such good will with me that I don’t even care. Watching Lonely Boy Penn Badgley play Joe Goldberg has been one of the delights of the last 7 years!!!!

Chess Rabbit Hole

I always start with YouTube when a new interest is brewing, and this video by Michelle Khare was a fun gateway into the game:

After getting my bearings of the basics, this series by Gotham Chess has been extremely helpful:

This 10-min video is PACKED full of gold and has been a good reference to revisit:

🌀 Clicks & Curiosities

Little corners of the internet I got lost in this week

I’m always in for a Lin Manual Miranda impression, and the song makes it even better
My algorithms are FULL of chess now — like this video of the GOAT, Magnus Carlsen, arriving 2:30 late for a 3 minute game… and still winning.
I love videos of experts weighing in on scenes from TV and movies, like this: Michelin-star chef rates every fine dining scene from The Bear

Thanks for reading to the end :)

I’m sending this on a Thursday, which seems like excellent data that something about this format feels too difficult to fire off on Monday (you know, when the previous week is still fresh in my head). The goal is for these field notes to feel completely natural, easy, and a place where I don’t have to worry about anything “making sense”. The goal is creative freedom.

I’ve been having a ton of conversations about how to use Substack as a vehicle for creative expression and developing your personal brand, and it’s nice to feel like I’m walking the walk.

This is how we figure out who we are! And I’m doing it!

Take it easy,

MJ :)

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