Pockets of Freedom

Aaron Pace
4 min readFeb 3, 2024
Photo by Christina Isabella on Unsplash

My normal days begin at 4:00 am, and I’m often awake earlier than that. Several of my friends think I’m crazy. Considering I go to bed after 10:00 pm most nights, I don’t have much of a counter-argument to the crazy theory.

I’m not here to brag about how much I get done in an 18-hour day. Truth is, I waste a lot of time. At regular intervals, I find myself squandering away an hour or more scrolling through social media without any object in mind. For a time, I removed all social media apps from my phone, but found myself bored again and reinstalled them.

Rinse and repeat.

There’s a bit of buzz right now about replacing doom-scrolling with microlearning. At the Association for Talent Development, they define microlearning as something that “enhances learning and performance in the most efficient and effective manner possible through short pieces of content.”

Phrasing there makes it sound like microlearning is the most efficient and effective manner available for learning. It’s not a valid assumption, but serves to drive their point home. Truth is, there’s not a one-size-fits-most way to learn.

But this isn’t just about learning in place of doom-scrolling either.

I’m consistently inconsistent at keeping a daily planner.

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Aaron Pace

Married to my best friend. Father to five exuberant children. Fledgling entrepreneur. Writer. Software developer. Inventory management expert.