SS7: Catch Up

Release date: 3 May 2025

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Been a minute. Welcome to a new issue of my newsletter Snapshot!

This issue will be a catch up. Life really got in the way in the last couple of months but I have been making progress towards my goals slowly but surely.

Building three cells

My side project time has been spent on building Three Cells. It's live and anyone can use it.

The core idea of this application is help you arrive at your dream life using the simplex method — the approach of iteratively arriving at the optimal solution for a problem. In the future I will write in depth about how it works. As a quick summary, this is the simplest and most impactful method I have stumbled upon so far for tracking your daily life and achieving your dream life.

I can't take credit for the idea though. This is the approach Jim Collins takes in his own life. I found out about this through Cal Newport's podcast episode and then listening to the Tim Ferris interview of Collins himself discussing this approach.

The difference between this tool and all the others that I have created previously is that I have actually been using it myself. Ever since its creation, I have been using three-cells.com daily. I believe this key difference will enable me to work on this for a long time.

I hope to add so many more features to this in the future. Stuff that I have wished existed in one place. Habit tracking and multi-scale planning (from Cal Newport) as an example.

Books

At the start of this year I planned to read more books than ever before in a single year. This wasn't hard to beat though because the number to beat is pretty low. Nevertheless I feel quite confident saying that I have gone from an occasional reader to a consistent one.

For my annual plan, I set myself the target of reading at least 25 books this year. As of now I am already on my 9th book. I planned to read roughly 2 books a month — told myself 1 book every two weeks is a good target to start with. So far that has been going well and I'm very glad that's the case.

You can find what I've been reading on maghfoor.com/books. I update the list immediately as I finish a new book.

See you for the next issue

I also recently discovered Cal Newport's multi-scale planning — I will discuss the idea a bit more in the future. I've really enjoyed the principles of this method and have started incorporating it into my own life. Which is why I talked about adding it to three cells earlier.

That's all for now. I wanted to keep this one pretty short and concise to get back into the rhythm of writing again. This is one habit that needs a lot more work and attention.

Anything above 0 compounds.

[email protected] is my email and you can contact me at any time :)