Jake Weidokal

Is it normal for a toddler to want spicy pickled garlic for breakfast? 😅

I scribbled in the margins this morning that the passage below made me think of the amplifying effect of social media. But then I was struck by the idea that I might still have this Bible in 50 years. If I come across my marginalia 5 decades from now, will social media seem like a distant memory? I think so. But what will have risen in its place? It got me thinking a lot about what stands the test of time, and what doesn’t. It’s crazy to me that I can’t imagine social media, at least as it is now, being around for 50 more years, but these words are from 2,000 years ago.

Ephesians 4:17-19 NIV
[17] So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. [18] They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. [19] Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.

I really enjoyed this conversation between Brett Kistler and Joe Hudson. They discuss that what we call “time scarcity” is really emotional overwhelm.

The key to overcoming that overwhelm and feeling like you have more time? Being present.

This message really resonated with me. It’s easy to whip out my phone when I’m feeling overwhelmed, which creates a vicious cycle. But the times when I lock myself in, be present, and experience my emotions are when I feel the most fulfilled and time abundant.

Here are some quotes that stood out to me, I recommend giving it a listen for yourself!

“Because we’re present. Yes. But in that time scarcity thing, what we are is we’re in the future. And so that’s the other big component of time scarcity: we are in the future. We’re thinking about what we have to do next.”

“Time scarcity is almost always a response to stress. And stress, we like to think, is that we have too many things to do and not enough time. But stress is often about not feeling our emotions.”

“So if you think of that, 80% of society feels time scarcity, you could just also say 80% of society is not present most of their time.”

“Branson, who said the best time management is exercise. If you’re exercising, you feel like it creates more presence. Anything that you do that creates more presence creates less time urgency, or less time poverty or whatever — the worst scarcity.”

“It also reminds me of the saying, which is: if you want something done, ask the busy person.”

That last one stung a bit. The busy people are busy because they say yes to everything.

Let me know if you like posts like these, I’m thinking about curating more content I’ve found impactful from around the web. More of the off-the-beaten-path type of stuff that isn’t making the rounds on social media.

Indexing is one of my favorite parts of journaling. It’s joyfully tedious. There’s no way to do it quickly, and the slower the better in my opinion. I love going through each page one by one, and copying the gist into the index at the front of the journal. The end result of having a fully indexed journal is satisfying, but even better is the process and getting lost reminiscing in long forgotten memories.

I have to admit, when I first launched Fed Meetup, I wasn’t very proud of the UX . I pieced it together quickly to meet a need at NASA, and didn’t make the time to go back and clean it up.

But that bad user experience has been a thorn in my side ever since I launched the tool. That’s why I redesigned it from the ground up.

The result is a clean, intuitive, and much more beautiful interface. The new 4-step progress indicator helps you track exactly where you are in the process. Everything is now clearer and simpler.

This was a fun passion project to elevate the user experience. If you’re a federal travel coordinator, I hope you love using it as much as I loved building it.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

fedmeetup.com

I spent this morning writing an outline for a blog post with the draft title: “I spent eight years crafting the ultimate pocket journal setup”. I’ve been wanting to do this post for years, but it feels like it’s going to be a huge undertaking. I care about this a lot, so I really want to do it right and share all the details with more pictures than anyone probably cares to see. I can’t promise it will come soon, but I’m excited to start working on it.

This morning I was assembling a Minnie Mouse puzzle with my daughter and all was going well, until we got to the end and realized we were missing Minnie’s phone. “Let’s find phone!” my two year old shouted. And off she went, scouring the house for a little purple phone.

I laughed when I saw the first place she looked.

She walked over beside our couch, lifted up an air vent cover, and peeked inside. “Phoooooone?”, she yelled down into the vent.

It was nearly impossible for the phone to be in the vent, because it’s too big to fit through the vent cover. But she was determined to find it there. When I told my wife about this, she said she’d shown our daughter how to check the air vents a few days earlier after we had guests.

She learned a search pattern, checking vents, but applied it where it didn’t belong. We can make the same mistake with the “universal aims”: Love. Belonging. Purpose. Joy. Peace.

We look for love in hookup culture, romance novels, and AI companions.
We look for belonging in anonymous forums, likes on our posts, and parasocial fandoms.
We look for purpose in status games, promotions, and hustle.
We look for joy in binging TV, retail therapy, and quick dopamine hits.
We look for peace in riches, wellness fads, and week-long vacations.

Do any of these resonate with you? I know some do for me. Some of these methods you may think will actually lead to the aim. For example, maybe you think wellness will bring you peace. I don’t think that’s quite right. Focusing on wellness will significantly improve your quality of life, especially if you haven’t focused on it before. But I’m convinced it will not bring you true and lasting peace. The key words are “true and lasting”.

I’m sure that if we could flip a switch and become omniscient, seeing ourselves looking in these places would be just as absurd as my daughter looking down into the air vent and shouting for her toy phone.

Now, my list above assumes that everybody is aiming at these universal aims. While this does happen on a subconscious level, many, maybe most, people get their methods confused with their aims. They think their aim is riches, or hustle, or hookups, or time to sit and read their romance novels. This is a tragic misunderstanding. And it’s a prime reason many people are so dissatisfied and utterly confused about it. They thought riches were what they needed, so they attained it, but something still feels wrong. They feel discontent, empty. This is because what they were really searching for was peace, and riches wasn’t the way to attain that in the first place. Instead, they probably assume something is wrong with them internally because everyone else seems to be made happy by their riches, especially scrolling through Instagram. So they medicate to numb the pain and make themselves look as happy as they can on their social media, feeding the algorithmic illusion for others. Maybe this sounds familiar?

The key to breaking this cycle is to stop and consider your aims. Ask the questions: Why are we here? Why am I here? What are the highest aims that surface in great literature across time? Why do these highest aims keep surfacing? Where do they come from? What are they?

I don’t have perfect answers to these questions, but they are deep questions that have been helpful for me to consider in formulating my aims.

Once you have your aims figured out, then it’s worth considering where to search.

You’ve already been searching, so take some time to consider where you spend most of your time. Do a minute-by-minute audit of your days. Where you spend your time is where you’re searching. Again, it’s important to look back at literature across time to find the correct ways to search. If you look to your friends or present day examples, they will be searching in the ways I listed out above. But the true aims, and the methods of moving toward them, surface in literature across time, because they’re true, and truth is eternal. For me, the Bible is the clearest source. But the Bible is not the only place truth can be found. Truth is powerful and makes its way into human expression across time. For example, I can learn from the Bible that riches are not peace, but I can also see this theme in A Christmas Carol or Great Expectations.

“Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income”
Ecclesiastes 5:10

The author of Ecclesiastes highlights the unsatisfiable nature of greed.

“There was a time, when you were another man. All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you.”
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Dickens shows that the pursuit of riches can become all consuming and change who you are.

“He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald points out that a false search can take us right past our true aim.

So test your aims and your methods against the cautionary tales that have stood the test of time. Look for truth, and ask: Are you looking in the right places?

Testing out a new newsletter template. It’s crazy how quickly I can make these changes with Claude’s help.

I found a better way to migrate my Google Photos between accounts. I realized I can use Partner Sharing to automatically “save” the photos to a new account. It makes me a little hesitant, because it says the photos don’t count against my storage quota, so they must still be saved under the original account technically. Apparently, when the photos are deleted on the original account, then they will be saved into the new account that they have been shared with. It smells fishy, but I’m going to try it out. I’m making backups of all photos first before I try it though. I’m really hoping this saves me from all the downloading, unzipping, and uploading 🤞

Thank you to the good people of reddit and UConn for sharing this method. I’m glad I came across this because I was already seeing issues with missing metadata from some of the photos I was exporting from Google Takeout.

I got a notification from my old college that I was hoping I would never get. When my wife and I created our Google accounts through Kent State University, they included an awesome promise, free unlimited storage for life. I couldn’t find the old policy for storage, but here is the policy for email.

Kent state university will maintain a students' email account for the life of the student to facilitate communication as an alumnus, or until such time that a former student requests that the account be closed.

So, of course, we took advantage of it. We’ve been using those alumni accounts for Google Drive and Google Photos for years, since the storage was free.

But recently, Kent decided to change their policy on storage.

Your ability to access FlashLine, Canvas, Kaltura, email, Google Drive and Microsoft services will be deactivated on October 14, 2025.  After this date, you will no longer have access to your email or cloud storage (such as Google Drive or OneDrive). Please review the instructions below to ensure you do not lose anything you wish to retain.

Now we have until October 14 to move all of our files and photos, or lose them all.

I expected this would happen someday, because how in the world could Kent expect to maintain unlimited storage forever for a growing alumni body? But still, it sucks now that it’s happening.

Those accounts have all the photos and videos from when we were first married, our first house, our daughter, everything. Not to mention, I have all sorts of important tax and legal docs stored in Drive.

So my heart sank when I first heard the news from Kent, but now I’m in the middle of the dull monotony of downloading and re-uploading a terabyte of data. I bought a Google One account for storage, because we’ve been happy with Google’s various cloud services. I expected Google would have an easy way to magically move data between Google accounts, but that was not the case for many of their services.

Google has two services called Transfer and Takeout. Transfer is the good one, that automatically moves your data to a new account, and works with Gmail and Drive. But for Photos, where I have most of my data, I have to use Google Takeout. That’s their service for downloading your data to your device.

So the roughly Terabyte of photos and videos that I need to migrate is getting chunked into 50GB zip files that I then need to download, unzip, and re-upload into Photos in my personal account.

It’s taking a long time, and I’m bored.

I’ll be looking into redundant storage options, because I don’t want to go through this all over again if Google discontinues Photos. It wouldn’t be the first thing they’ve discontinued.

Update September 12, 2025 8:56 AM
I found a better way to migrate my Google Photos between accounts. I realized I can use Partner Sharing to automatically “save” the photos to a new account. It makes me a little hesitant, because it says the photos don’t count against my storage quota, so they must still be saved under the original account technically. Apparently, when the photos are deleted on the original account, then they will be saved into the new account that they have been shared with. It smells fishy, but I’m going to try it out. I’m making backups of all photos first before I try it though. I’m really hoping this saves me from all the downloading, unzipping, and uploading 🤞

Thank you to the good people of reddit and UConn for sharing this method. I’m glad I came across this because I was already seeing issues with missing metadata from some of the photos I was exporting from Google Takeout.