J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

What I’m Doing to Stay Organized in 2024

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On April 14

In Getting Organized

We recently moved to a new place in San Francisco, which created a cascade of to-do items. The move coincided with the death of my mother-in-law and our daughter starting a new school–three big life changes at once. It’s been a challenging time, but I’ve managed to not drop too many balls, even in the thick of it. Here’s a quick overview of the tools and systems I’m currently using to keep track of everything.

Operating Systems, Calendar and Contacts

My main computer is currently an iMac, but I use a Samsung phone. Fortunately, MacOS and Google play well together. Google Calendar and Contacts synchronize well with their Mac counterparts. I remember the bad-old-days of manually deduping contacts after failed synchs (looking at you, PalmPilot, and you too Now-Up-To-Date Plus). The only contacts I handle manually are a csv file of addresses for holiday card mail merges.

Task Management

I started using the free version of Todoist a few years ago, and now I’m happily a paid subscriber. I haven’t found a better option for handling repeating to-do items, subtasks, and task sharing, all with an intuitive interface and perfect synch between phone, desktop, and web.

The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to get Google Assistant to add a task in Todoist–something I’ve tried to do a few times while driving. Anybody know how to do this?

File Management, Backup, and Synch

All of my personal, writing, and music files are on my iMac, which I backup to external hard drives, Dropbox, and Google Drive. I get by on the free version of Dropbox but I pay $2/month for extra storage on Google drive, which I use to backup and deliver large music and database files.

The only exception to that is photos, which I take on my phone and backup to Google Photos. I gave up on Apple’s photo management years ago–it’s just too weird and unwieldy.

Notes

About a year ago I abandoned Evernote and switched to a combination of Google Docs and Google Keep. We use Google Docs for shared notes like shopping lists and I use Google Keep for personal notes. Keep is very primitive, but it synchs flawlessly. Evernote suffers from feature bloat, note duplication while synching, and relentless upgrade notifications. I still use it to reference an occasional legacy note, but I’ve pretty much given up on it.

I would only ever use Google Docs for notes and other temp docs. My friend’s sister lost an entire novel on Google Docs (or possibly Google Drive). Google’s tools are cheap and convenient, but they’re constantly deleting data, features, and even entire products and services with little warning or recourse. That’s just how they roll.

Money

For years I used Quicken and entered or downloaded every transaction. This worked great for account reconciliation and taxes, but was a subpar system for planning future cash flow.

Now I just use spreadsheets. I use a Google Sheet that pulls stock prices to track investments and sector percentages. For cash flow I use an OpenOffice worksheet with a block of income and expense categories that I copy and pasted into each month. At the end of each month I reconcile the amount with my actual checking account balances. It’s a simpler and messier system than using Quicken, but I can quickly see what the next month is going to look like (and if I need to move money).

For taxes I just download a csv from each account for the entire year and categorize the expenses manually.

Goals and Plans

For years I set annual goals, but recently I switched back to a “one goal at a time” system. I keep a big spreadsheet of what I call “life purpose projects” with different categories (health, household, financial, writing, music, etc.)–basically everything that I’m working on. But then I designate ONE main thing that I’m trying to accomplish each quarter. In 2024 Q1, for example, my main goal was to complete and revise a rom-com script (which I did…more to come on that topic).

I also track monthly and annual big-picture to-do items and targets related to work, money, travel, etc., but it’s been clarifying to have a singular “goal” with a defined timeline.

Paper

Most of my bills and statements are paperless, but I do keep some physical receipts, and there are always a few bit of important paper to keep track of. I limit myself to a single file box, which works pretty well. Everything else gets shredded.

Physical Objects

Okay that’s too big of a topic–I’ll save it for another post!

I’d be curious as to what you use and what you no longer use to keep track of it all, feel free to comment below.

Alta (She Made History)

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On April 6

In Culture Rants/Shares, Personal Updates

My mother-in-law passed away recently. I had a good relationship with her, despite the fact that we were both stubborn people with frequently divergent opinions.

Alta was a poet, famous in some circles for both her poetry and her press. Andrew Gilbert has written an outstanding obituary on kqed.org that really does her justice.

Though Alta was complex, loved attention, and was sometimes overly dramatic, I liked her and have an enormous respect for her life’s body of work. She dedicated herself to art, compassion, equality, and all the qualities that I consider to be progress in the greater picture of civilization.

We live in an era where the radical right is actively dismantling human rights, especially women’s rights. Abortion rights have been trashed, they are coming hard for birth control, and famous influencers say publicly that women should lose the right to vote.

But because of the work of Alta and her peers, the right faces an uphill battle. There are too many female role models in all walks of life to say with any credibility that women “can’t” occupy a particular societal role. There are simply too many living, successful counter-examples of women playing prominent roles in the arts, politics, sciences, and every other sphere. Women still face discrimination prejudice, and under-representation in many fields, but culturally we’re in a much different place than when Alta was growing up. And that’s partially due to her work.

So hats off, and respect.

New Progressive House/Deep House Jondi & Spesh Album

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On December 2

In Creative Work/Career, Electronic Music

Just a quick post here to announce a new album: Jondi & Spesh – REFLECTIONS

This is my sixth full-length electronic album with my longest-term collaborator and one of my closest friends, DJ Spesh. Way back in the day we hopped on a young genre called “progressive house” and rode it a long way.

Spesh and I had a long moment of fame in the late nineties and early 2000’s when we were hosting the most popular electronic dance music party in San Francisco (Qoöl at 111 Minna), touring the world in support of our releases on Spundae Records and our own label Loöq, getting voted among the Top 10 DJ’s in San Francisco by the Nitevibe poll, getting ranked as one of the top albums of the year in Muzik Magazine (right next to Madonna), licensing music to prime time broadcast shows (CSI), and composing music for the most popular dance game of that time (Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution). I can’t really ask for any more musical success or fame than all of that, but Spesh and I–all these years later–still enjoy making music together and sharing it with the world.

It’s all gravy at this point. Gravy I hope your ears enjoy! Available on Beatport, Spotify, Apple Music, and most other music streaming services and stores. We’re also on Instagram.

How I Maintain Motivation (and dopamine levels)

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On October 10

In Health/Body-hacking, Mental Health, Metaprogramming

I have the GG (val/val) variant in SNP rs4680, which corresponds with high COMT enzyme activity. COMT breaks down dopamine in the part of the brain related to higher cognitive and executive function. People with my COMT genetic variant tend to have a hard time sustaining attention and motivation in low-stakes situations. We tend to do a little better when the stakes are a bit higher and intense, like hand-to-hand combat or downhill racing.

I did well in school, but paying attention during lectures was always difficult. My mind would constantly wander. By my third year in college I’d come up with systems (mainly active note-taking/idea synthesis during class) that allowed me to excel. But the first fifteen years of school were a struggle in terms of paying attention and retaining information, even if it didn’t look that way from the outside.

After I graduated, I soon learned that most jobs were pure torture for me. Sustaining my attention for eight hours a day was too difficult and too boring. I decided early on that a 40+ hour workweek would ruin me. I needed to find an alternative. I settled on computer programming because I could do it part time, at my own pace, on my own schedule. I could then use the rest of my time to make beats, write fiction, play games, spend time with friend and family, or just let my mind wander.

Obviously my personality isn’t the result of a single genetic variant. But I’ve learned that maintaining a high level of motivation and attention for long periods of time requires a few “tricks”. Since ~40% of the global population has the same rs4680 COMT variant, maybe you find yourself in the same boat.

  • Goal-setting. Mostly self-explanatory. I go back and forth on exact goal-setting methods, but currently I’m liking three month horizons for my main goals, with monthly sub-goals. The key to using goals is to enjoy the process, and not hang your happiness hat on completing the goal or not. Set an ambitious but doable goal that can be achieved with concrete consistent actions. Allow yourself to be happy while pursuing the goal. If you achieve it, pat yourself on the back, give yourself a treat, then set another goal. If you don’t, analyze the game and iterate your strategy.
  • Supplements. Lithium orotate up to 5mg daily to balance neurotransmitter health and stave off depression and anxiety. Fish oil for brain cell membrane permeability. Tyrosine up to 500mg/day for a direct dopamine boost. Collagen and other sources of glycine to support deep sleep and brain recovery.
  • Clean(ish) living. Too much alcohol, sugar, and refined carbs blunts motivation. Exercise amps it up. You don’t have to be a monk.
  • Death-framing. What’s important if I hold the reality of my own mortality in mind? Will I regret not getting those extra billable hours? More likely I’ll regret never attempting a particular writing or music project, or not visiting a friend, or not doing something fun with my family.

That’s about it. Hope that helps you, rs4680 G/G or whatever kind of mutant you are!

Purpose Is the Fifth Idol

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On September 16

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares, Utopian Speculations

In Tim Ferriss’s recent interview with Arthur Brooks, Brooks discusses the four false idols, what Thomas Aquinas called “the four substitutes for God.” Aquinas named those substitutes as honor, wealth, pleasure, and power, but Brooks uses fame as an Instagram-age stand-in for honor.

In this short, Brooks uses U.S. cities to demonstrate each of the four false idols, or vices: New York is money (wealth), D.C. is power, Vegas is pleasure, and Los Angeles is fame. He asks which one motivates you? Which one leads you to make poor decisions?

That got me thinking, what’s the main vice of San Francisco? Historically, pleasure has its role in the Barbary Coast sense. So does wealth (gold rush, tech booms, etc.). But I would say SF’s main vice is purpose. A lot of San Francisco’s ambition is funneled toward meaning, vision, and progress. This can become pathological in a number of ways. San Francisco’s Summer of Love had a dark, druggy, rapey, violent underbelly. Visions of improving society with technology can easily tip into Panglossian techno-utopianism.

And maybe that’s what Aquinas meant, at least partially, by honor. Because there’s a performative aspect to the pursuit of purpose and progress. We (especially San Franciscans) want to to appear as if we’re doing good deeds and making the world a better place. So sometimes we virtue signal more than we act virtuously. It’s not for want of fame, it’s the desire to have a good reputation, to be seen as honorable, that can get us in trouble.

And then there’s the true believers, who get a dopamine high by pursuing their dreams for the future of humanity and society: a colony on Mars, self-aware computer programs, fleets of self-driving electric cars, fusion power that provides unlimited electricity at negligible cost. What could go wrong?

Even the artistic side of purpose has a dark side. Putin’s dark reign is greatly inspired by the science fiction works of author Mikhail Yuriev. Purpose is my own main vice–my desire to write science fiction is largely purpose driven. And while I don’t think my science fiction works have injured anyone, it’s always possible to put bad ideas out into the world. And the blind pursuit of purpose via art can easily lead a person to personal and financial ruin.

So yeah, purpose is the fifth idol. Fame certainly belongs on the list, but Aquinas didn’t know about Hollywood or Instagram. So honor should be subdivided into fame and purpose.

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