A "touch grass" stack > tech stack

Walks, wonder, conversations, and other highly unscalable tools

"Jesus. Go touch grass." -- my reaction to a founder sharing their tech stack on LinkedIn.

(their list included 10+ tools including: second brains, AI, and things that allowed them to do things 10x faster)

(and don't even get me started on the comments recommending even more!)

Tech stacks seem soooo shiny. The bigger your tech stack, the more people think you’re ahead of the curve, strategic, productive, innovative, and impressive✨. We’re obsessed with the future and don’t want to get left behind — or worse, become irrelevant.

Meanwhile, experimenting, getting stuck, thinking, wondering, daydreaming, and wrestling with ideas are regarded as inefficient. Optional. The stuff of dinosaurs! 🦖

We’ve accepted such a narrow definition of what drives and defines meaningful work. LEGITIMATE work.

What if the things we’re treating (and downright dismissing!) as extras are actually the foundation of our best ideas, most meaningful work, and deepest sense of aliveness? Not optional, but essential? What if it’s the strongest infrastructure we can build?

A “touch grass” stack 🌳✨🫶🏼

I don’t want to build a tech stack. tbh, it sounds exhausting… and incredibly rote.

So instead of a tech stack, I’ve built a "touch grass stack" 😉:

🌳 Thought Girl Walks (without my phone)
🎨 Making time for art or play (especially easy when you have nieces and nephews around)
💕 Having conversations with people who light up my brain
🍀 Increasing my surface area for luck by reaching out to people I think are doing cool things
📝 A notebook (ok ok my Notes app too!) with half-formed thoughts and ideas
☀️ Sitting in silence for 10 minutes while I recharge in the sun like a crystal
📖 Reading fiction (or poetry) when I feel the pressure to optimize for speed over substance
🌙 Daydreaming and imagining alternate scenarios when my inner critic gets loud

None of these things show up on a dashboard. They can’t be measured, automated, or scaled to 10x. In fact, they probably slow me down 🤷🏻‍♀️.

(yep, sometimes it takes me an hour to write an email (the horror! 😱) or an afternoon walk ends with no new a-ha moments (gasp!))

There’s no leaderboard for awe. No productivity hack for being moved by something beautiful. I can’t post screenshots of how much wonder increased my YOY growth.

And yet these things have shaped my work far more than any app ever has.

So whenever I start feeling a (false) sense of urgency or feel like a weirdo because I’ve never used Claude, I remind myself that I’m built (and building) differently and go touch grass 😉.

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One great conversation is worth ten productivity hacks any day, which is why I’m sooo looking forward to Creative Coworking tomorrow (and every Tuesday).