Friday, October 30th, 2026
Sunday morning at 2am, the clocks fall back and every one of us gets a free hour.
I've been thinking about that hour all week, because it turns out to be the perfect question for a roundup like this one. You get sixty minutes you didn't earn. What do you do with it? Most people will sleep through it or hand it to their phone without noticing. A few will use it on purpose.
Every pick this week is about that choice, in one way or another. The book is about the small, ordinary moments where your life actually gets decided. The first article is about what endless scrolling might be doing to your memory and attention. The second and third are about what Main Street is really dealing with heading into the holidays, and where the money's going to land. The podcast is a two hour conversation about getting your attention back from the machines built to take it. The song is a reminder about who you're doing all of this for. And the show is about a man who finished his mission and has to figure out what he's supposed to do with the rest of his life.
Grab a coffee. Let's go.
Book of the Week
If you've ever read Farnam Street or listened to The Knowledge Project, you already know Shane Parrish. He's spent years studying how smart people actually make decisions, and this is the book where he boils it down into something you can use on a Tuesday afternoon.
The big idea is simple, and once you see it you can't unsee it. We assume our lives are shaped by big decisions. Which job to take, who to marry, whether to start the business. Parrish argues that's mostly wrong. The bigger driver is the thousands of ordinary moments in between. The email you fire off when you're irritated. The meeting where you go along with the room because you didn't want to be the guy who pushed back. The thing you keep doing because you've always done it. Those moments stack up, and by the time you get to the big decision, the small ones have usually already decided it for you.
The reason we blow those moments, he says, is that we're running on defaults. He names four of them.
The emotion default. You react to how you feel instead of what's actually true.
The ego default. You protect your self image instead of seeking the right answer.
The social default. You do what the group does because standing out feels risky.
The inertia default. You keep doing what you did yesterday because changing takes energy.
Read those four again and be honest about which one ran your week. For me it was emotion and inertia, neck and neck.
What I like about the book is that it doesn't tell you to fight those defaults with willpower. Parrish knows willpower loses. Instead, he talks about building the strengths and the safeguards that create a little space between what happens and how you respond. That space is where clear thinking lives. Sometimes it's a pause. Sometimes it's a rule you set in advance. Sometimes it's just knowing yourself well enough to say, "I'm angry right now, so I'm not answering this email until tomorrow."
The second half of the book gets into how to actually make a good decision once you've got that space. Define the real problem. Look at more options than the obvious two. Think about what happens after what happens. Then commit and own the result.
This is one of those books I wish I'd read ten years ago. A lot of my most expensive mistakes weren't bad decisions. They were default reactions I never stopped long enough to question.
Get it here: Clear Thinking on Amazon
Three Articles Worth Your Time This Week
Source: ScienceDaily, from Semmelweis University
Researchers at Semmelweis University in Hungary studied young adults between 18 and 35 and sorted them by how they actually use their phones. Not just how many hours, but what they're doing with them.
They found three groups. One group mostly uses their phone to talk with people. A second group mixes in news, entertainment and some scrolling, but stays under roughly four or five hours a day. The third group, which they call heavy process users, spends four to five hours or more a day mostly just consuming content. That group made up about a third of the people in the study.
The heavy consumers did worse than you'd expect for their age on memory and attention tasks. They also reported worse sleep, a stronger craving for constant stimulation, and more trouble resisting the urge to check their phones.
The part I found most useful is what drove the problem. It wasn't some personality flaw. It was mostly weak self control and a strong fear of missing out. That's good news, because both of those can be trained.
The researchers are careful to call this an association, not proof. Fair enough. It still matches how most of us feel after a long scroll. Foggy and restless.
Their advice isn't to throw your phone in the ocean. It's to use it on purpose. Cut notifications, limit the feeds, keep it out of the bedroom, and move your body.
Article 2: Main Street businesses are powering through 2026
Source: Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council
This one is a survey, and it's worth reading because it's what owners are actually saying, not what the headlines say they're feeling.
The SBE Council surveyed 516 small business owners with between 2 and 99 employees in September. The headline is resilience. About 81 percent say they're meeting or beating their financial expectations for the year, and 61 percent say they're doing better than last year.
But dig one layer down and you can feel the tension. Inflation is still the top worry. Concern about a recession or slowdown jumped a lot since February. And gas and energy costs went from the ninth biggest concern to the second.
The stats that hit me hardest were about customers. Over a third of owners say customer spending dropped in the last six months. About 27 percent say customers are taking longer to decide, and a quarter say people are postponing purchases altogether.
Read that again if you sell anything. Your prospect isn't saying no. They're saying "not yet," and they're taking longer to get to yes. If your follow up stops after two emails, you're leaving money with people who were still thinking.
One more number I liked. When owners were asked what's most effective for getting new customers, social media came in first and word of mouth second. Paid ads were a distant third. That doesn't mean ads don't work. I run them for a living. It means the fundamentals still matter most.
Read it here: SBE Council Small Business Check Up Survey
Article 3: Small businesses are set to capture a record $118 billion this holiday season
Source: Stacker, with data from Intuit QuickBooks
Quick disclosure before you read this one. The data comes from surveys Intuit commissioned, and Intuit sells software to small businesses, so they have a reason to sound upbeat. Keep that in mind. The numbers are still worth knowing.
Intuit surveyed 6,000 US consumers in August. Shoppers say they plan to spend about $278 billion this holiday season, and they expect around 43 percent of their holiday budget to go to small businesses. That's up from 41 percent last year and 36 percent the year before.
A few things in here every owner should notice. Social platforms like Instagram and TikTok are now the fastest growing place people say they'll buy from small businesses online. Younger shoppers are using buy now, pay later more often. And about 43 percent of consumers say they'll use AI tools somewhere in their holiday shopping, even though only 15 percent have actually let an AI finish a purchase for them.
The one that should make you pause is about pricing. Plenty of small businesses have raised prices or are thinking about it, but only 9 percent of shoppers say price increases feel fully justified.
Put that next to Article 2. Customers want to support you. They're also watching every dollar and taking their time. That's not a reason to discount. It's a reason to explain your value clearly and follow up longer than feels comfortable.
Podcast of the Week
Phone Addiction Scientist: Doing This Gives You An Hour Back Every Day, The Diary of a CEO with Dr. Sahar Yousef
This one dropped October 15th, and it runs two hours and thirteen minutes. Listen at 1.5 speed on a couple of drives. You'll get more usable ideas than most books give you.
Dr. Sahar Yousef is a cognitive neuroscientist who teaches at UC Berkeley and runs a research group called the Becoming Superhuman Lab. Her work is about attention, focus and how high performers get deep work done without burning out.
She starts with the myth that's costing most of us hours a day. Multitasking. Every time you switch tasks you pay a switching cost, and you carry a little residue of the last thing into the next one. So the guy who thinks he's crushing five things at once is really doing five things badly.
From there she gets into why our phones feel impossible to put down. She compares a lot of what's on them to junk food, built with bright colors, variable rewards and endless feeds to keep you coming back. And she makes a point that stuck with me. A lot of the time we don't grab the phone because we're bored. We grab it because we're uncomfortable, and it's a fast way to not feel something.
The tactical stuff is excellent. Switch your phone to grayscale, which she said led people in her lab to use their phones about an hour less a day. Filter notifications so only the people who truly matter can break through. Work in focus sprints, with a clear output defined before you start. Pick your one to three most important tasks for the day and let everything else fill the gaps. Take real breaks, like a walk or making tea, instead of scrolling.
Near the end, she and Steven talk about looking at your time from the end of your life, and what actually matters when you get there. It's a heavier ending than you expect from a productivity episode, and it's the part I've thought about most.
If you only listen to one chunk, go to the section around the hour mark on focus sprints and life priorities.
Track on Repeat
Love Letters to God (10th Anniversary Edition), Nahko and Medicine for the People
This song first came out in 2016 on HOKA, the album where Nahko and the band really went big without losing what made them special. This fall they put out a 10th anniversary version, and they've been on the road with a HOKA anniversary tour. I've had the new version on repeat since it landed in my feed.
Nahko's music has always lived somewhere between folk, reggae, hip hop and a church revival in the woods. His story is woven through a lot of it. He's of Apache, Puerto Rican and Filipino heritage, he was adopted as a baby, and he spent years finding his way back to his roots. You can hear all of that in the way he sings. Nothing about it is polished. All of it is honest.
The idea behind this song is one I can't shake. That the way you live, the work you do and the way you treat people can be a love letter to God. Not a performance. Not a list of rules. A letter.
When the band released the original music video in early 2017, it was directed by Josue Rivas and centered on the water protectors at Standing Rock. That's how Nahko works. The spiritual and the practical are never far apart. Love God, then go take care of people and the earth he made.
I've been asking myself what my letters look like lately. The emails I send, the way I show up for my clients, the time I give my daughters, the hour I'll get back on Sunday morning. Some of those letters are pretty good. Some of them I wouldn't want anyone to read.
Play this one loud on a long drive. Then think about who your days are actually addressed to.
Show of the Week
The Terminal List, Season 2, on Prime Video
If you missed season one, here's the short version. Chris Pratt plays James Reece, a Navy SEAL whose team is wiped out on a mission and whose family is murdered when he gets home. He figures out it was a conspiracy that ran all the way up the chain, writes a list of everyone responsible, and goes after every name on it. It's dark, violent and not for everybody, and it was a huge hit.
Season two landed on October 21st, all eight episodes at once, and it's adapted from Jack Carr's second novel, True Believer. David DiGilio is back as showrunner. Tom Hopper, Constance Wu, Dar Salim and Luke Hemsworth return, and Gabriel Luna joins as Freddy Strain. This time the story goes global, a spy thriller across several continents, and Reece starts pulling on a thread that leads back to his own family's history.
What makes this season interesting to me isn't the action, although there's plenty of it. It's the question underneath it.
What do you do after the list?
Reece spent an entire season being driven by one thing. Every name, every move, every risk was about finishing that list. Then he finished it. And the mission that kept him moving is gone, but he's still here, carrying everything it cost him.
Prime calls this season a journey of violent redemption, and I think a lot of men will see more of themselves in that than they'd admit. Not the violence. The emptiness after the mission is over. The question of whether you can become something other than the guy who was built for the fight.
It's still a Chris Pratt action show, and it delivers exactly that. It's just asking a better question than most.
Watch it here: The Terminal List on Prime Video
Resources
Enjoy the extra hour on Sunday. Spend it on something you'd want to remember.
One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman
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