MONEY

1. Digital money makes us decadent

You can buy anything almost anywhere.
Thanks to modern technology, we don’t even need our wallets anymore.

We can pay on the internet with PayPal, in stores with Apple Pay, Google Pay, or simply with our credit card. We don’t really need cash anymore — paying digitally is usually much more comfortable.

But without us realizing it, it costs us more. The convenience of digital payments is that we don’t have to touch our money — which is the downside. We lose the sense of money and how much we have.

Anyone who has ever paid with cash knows the feeling. We want to buy something, but first, we have to take a painful look at our wallets.
Only after a check whether there is enough money can we continue.
Thanks to digital payments, we don’t have to worry about our wallets. …

The morning makes the day — and it is true.
How I start the day determines how the day will be.

The morning decides whether I am tired.
Whether I have enough energy.
Whether I am in a good mood.
With which ideas and impulses, I go into the world.

Here are a few principles on how I ruined my whole day right in the morning.

Starting the day with a confrontation

I am always tired in the morning. Quite normal, but it goes away after a while.

Nevertheless, for the moment, I am grumpy.
I just got up, not much time to get ready. …

MONEY / SOCIAL MEDIA

Elon Musk can’t keep his hands off Twitter.
Recently, he recommended that his followers should use Signal.

Telegram is a WhatsApp alternative — in my opinion, a pretty good one. It is free to use is considered very secure. But the best:
We can program our own bots!

Here is how to build one with Node.js.
Let’s put loose & build our own Telegram Bot!

Getting started

First, we need to register our bot. We can do that in the Telegram app by contacting BotFather.

Just type “botfather” in the search box, and choose the suggestion with the blue tick.

PRODUCTIVITY / CREATIVITY

The Pomodoro technique is not about food. It is a time management technique, named after the Italian word for tomato. The inventor called it after his kitchen clock, in the shape of a tomato.

I’ve been using it for creative tasks for a while now — and I’m amazed.

The principle is insanely simple:

• Write down a task you want to accomplish. For example, draw a sketch, or proofread a text.
• Then you take 25 minutes to complete this task. Set a Stopwatch.
• For work time, put your phone on silent and minimize other sources of distraction.
• When the 25 minutes are up, you take a 5-minute break. After that, you continue, as long as you have different tasks. …

Let’s get started right away. To create your own repository in Docker Hub, you first need to create an account — you can do that easily here.

Then you can log in to the terminal with your account. Docker must be installed locally, of course.

docker login -p "<password>" -u "<username>"

Now we can start creating a local Node.js image, which we then publish as a repo to Docker Hub.

1. Create a new project directory.
2. Move into the directory and runnpm init -y und npm install express
3. Then, we create two files: app.js and sDockerfile.

In the app.js we create a simple express…

WRITING

Platforms that pay via member reading time pay less for short content. On your blog, shorter reads make less money due to less advertising, for example.

Yes, longer content makes more money. But that’s not how we should value content — because the short ones are worth a lot more than you think.

Short content sharpens your writing skills

Pick up one content idea. Estimate how long the reading time of the finished writing will be. For example, 4 minutes — then halve the number. Now you have the length you set as the maximum — 2 minutes in the model.

So try to write something with 2 minutes of reading time. When done, have someone read it, or read it yourself. …