Red Zone Tasks
This Sunday marked the annual shift in Sunday habits:
Out with a productive morning filled with a bike ride and maybe an omelette followed by reading in Cal Anderson or just puttering on a side project for an hour or two.
In with me parking my butt in front of my computer for five hours straight and watching NFL Red Zone.
If you don’t follow football (I don’t blame you), Red Zone is a maelstrom of football content. Every Sunday there are around a dozen games being played: usually six to eight of these are in the morning, then three or four in the evening, then one night game that’s usually the marquee matchup of the day.
Red Zone mashes all of these games up in a blender and then asks you to chug. It cuts between whatever game has more interesting scenarios going on (Saints have a second and goal with two minutes left in the half? Rams picked off Tolzien and are in field goal range? Marshawn is taking his first snaps back after retirement?). In the (likely) case that there are interesting things happening in multiple games simultaneously, they’ll broadcast two or three (or even four) games live.
It is maximally designed to inject you with as much live football as possible. No commercials, no highlights, no boring half-time commentary. Just football.
Here‘s a good example of the mayhem.
Every year I look forward to the start of the football season despite my better instincts. I know that wasting a Sunday watching football is the media equivalent of empty calories; I know that football is largely a monstrous sport that wreaks havoc on players and exploits team’s communities; I know my time is probably better spent doing anything else.
So I compromise with myself: throughout the week, I compile a list of tasks which require a modicum of effort but zero focus to handle while watching football. I dub these Red Zone Tasks. Here are some Red Zone Tasks from this week:
- Cancel Pingdom account
- Pull up Vancouver Airbnb from last year and workshop December dates
- Run a linter on all of Buttondown’s CSS
- Send followup email to client about case study
- Drain barrel
- Download three movies for upcoming flights
- Order new climbing shoes
Sometimes this feels like cheating at productivity, in the same way that piling up trivial todo items on a todo list just to get the satisfaction of checking them off the list feels like cheating at productivity. It’s still an unproductive way to spend a huge fraction of the weekend.
But it’s my way. And even though every Sunday it suddenly becomes three in the afternoon and I am still in my sweatpants and I smell mildly of musk and squalor: I love it dearly. We are nothing without our habits and bizarre rationalizations.
(Notably not a Red Zone Task: writing this email. This, in case you couldn’t tell from the slight tardiness, comes after football.)
Technically Speaking
I am what I would describe as ambiently bad at front-end performance. I know all of the ways to be good at front-end performance, but I am not in the practice of actually doing those things.
This is especially true in Buttondown: my goals with getting it out the door were:
- Deliver it to production quickly.
- Make sure it works.
Neither of these things are really that closely entwined with front-end performance, but now that things are relatively stable I wanted to take a closer stab at it. Load time is pretty reasonable thanks to the lightweight app blueprint and the magic of Cloudfront, but I spent the past week shrinking the un-minified bundle from a hair under four megabytes to less than two megabytes. I want to write up the process in detail, but for now here are some tweets showing the process.
Three things I really liked this week
- The year of knots.
- Good junk.
- The Internet Archive has published the entire collection of Harvard’s Botany Libraries.
Happy Sunday
I hope you find shelter.