July 2026

Hey all,

Yet again, I’m just barely squeaking by with this month’s newsletter. Some months are just harder to get out than others. Earlier this month, I attended the Critical NW festival near Seattle (our fourth year!) and then spent the following week recovering from strep throat. Time slips away.

Despite my struggles to get this particular edition published, the newsletter itself is doing particularly well. Beyond the slow-but-steady drip of new subscribers, I’ve officially launched a YouTube version of the newsletter. It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, and it’s exciting to finally get it going.

I’ve got more details about the new YouTube content below, but needless to say, you should check it out and subscribe.

I hope your summer is going well!

-Dann

🧮 All about those stats

One of the coolest things about having a monthly newsletter for five-plus years is that you have a treasure trove of content just begging to be analyzed. What started out as a simple query (“I think the length of this newsletter has gotten longer over time. Is that true, and by how much?”) grew into an in-depth exploration of my newsletter, writing, and creative process.

It’s probably not super interesting to anyone except the author (ahem, me), but I figured I’d throw it up on the Dann Chronicles website anyway. The new Stats page explores all the glorious details of my years of work.

I think the Vocabulary section is particularly interesting. Across 84,000-ish words, I’ve used 9,000 unique words. And the curve of new words never quite flattens, which means each newsletter I’m somehow still introducing words that have never appeared in past editions.

Best of all, I find stats like this inspiring. It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees when you’re just focusing on publishing a single newsletter each month. But before you know it, years have passed and you have this library of content to be proud of.

🚰 Newsletter to YouTube pipeline

I’ve had a YouTube channel for many years and gone through phases of productivity and motivation to post new videos. Somehow, this sporadic hobby has allowed me to gather an audience just shy of 10,000 subscribers.

Most of my success has been from Obsidian-related content. Videos like Use these 10 Obsidian tips to level up your note taking productivity and How to create a template in Obsidian (Beginner’s Tutorial) still get great traffic and engagement. But I’ve already shared the most valuable insights I have with Obsidian, and forcing myself to come up with new Obsidian ideas just to create videos feels like it would result in lower-quality videos. Since YouTube is primarily a fun hobby for me, I really only want to create a video on a topic if I feel like I actually have something interesting and valuable to say. This strategy has resulted in months with no new videos uploaded.

But I’m still writing and putting new content out into the world, primarily in the form of this newsletter. And that gave me an idea.

After months of toying with the idea, I’ve decided to launch a video version of The Dann Chronicles.

You can find the playlist for The Dann Chronicles video essays here. The topics may be familiar to avid readers: each month, I pick one or two topics that I wrote about and transform them into video essays. I rewrite a script (different mediums require different formats) and work with an editor to splice it all together.

I’m curious to see whether these new videos will get any attention. I imagine they’ll never be as popular as my productivity content. But I figure I’m writing my newsletter anyway, I might as well take advantage of that content to create some video essays for YouTube.

Would love to hear what you think.

🐌 The art of slowing down

The internet is full of productivity advice: hacks to help get more done in less time and squeeze every bit of value from every minute you work. I want to push back a little.

I hereby grant you permission to listen to your favorite podcast on 1x speed and to take your time reading books for pleasure.

I feel like we, as a culture, idolize speed readers. Listening to things at 1.5x or 2x speed is basically the default for many people. I, too, have been seduced by advice in the past for how to squeeze more content into less time. This is a fantastic tool when the situation calls for it.

But there’s a joy and pleasure to slowing down when consuming simply for entertainment’s sake. I think that’s easy to forget as we try to cram in more, more, more.

I no longer aspire to be a speed reader. I don’t mind that it takes me longer than others to read a book. And the queue of my favorite podcast grows and shrinks depending on how much free time I have to listen. It’s a good feeling when I know I have several episodes there waiting for me.

I’m not sure who else out there needs to hear this. But take your time.

🧘 Mindfulness simplicity

I’ve always had an on-again-off-again relationship with meditation. The value of the practice itself really clicked for me after reading The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness: How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life in Ten Minutes a Day by Andy Puddicombe, co-founder of the Headspace meditation app. But understanding a concept and actually practicing it in real life are two different things.

For me, I think the main source of conflict came from the integration of technology. Meditation itself requires no tech, of course, but many tools exist to provide users with guidance, assistance, and motivation. It’s rewarding to finish a meditation session and review my Whoop data to see exactly how my heart rate slowed and stress dropped.

But the “big three” meditation apps never really fit my needs. Headspace, Calm, and Happier Meditation (formerly Ten Percent Happier) are all premium paywalled apps with celebrity/expert guides, courses, and slick production. But they always felt more like listening to a podcast than meditating to me.

I’ve recently picked back up on my meditation practice, but this time with the app Center. It’s as bare-bones as you can get: set an amount of time, sound, intervals (if any), and that’s it. It syncs to Apple’s HealthKit, so my sessions are auto-imported into Whoop for analysis and tracking. Best of all, it’s completely free.

I imagine many people are turned off by the thought of bringing technology into their meditation practice. But for those looking for something in the middle (a touch of technology but without all the bells and whistles) I’ve been enjoying my time with Center.

🎤 Public speaking

If you primarily know me as newsletter/blog/YouTube guy, you might not know that all this is just a fun side project for me. In my day-to-day life, I’m a FinOps practitioner at Squarespace. This is an engineering role that specializes in the cost of running a company in the cloud. Think of it as a bridge between Engineering and Finance.

In my capacity as a FinOps practitioner, I’m also active in the wider community, primarily through the FinOps Foundation, a nonprofit trade organization for all things FinOps. They host an annual conference in San Diego. I presented at the very first conference (back when it was in Austin, TX), but hadn’t given a talk there since this recent 2026 conference.

As you can imagine, Artificial intelligence was the topic of the year, as with every other tech conference. I was given the honor of presenting on the topic of AI for FinOps (how to use AI to do your job better). This should not be confused with FinOps for AI (how to manage/optimize the cost of AI itself).

Last month, I shared an article I wrote based on my recent talk ‘AI for FinOps: From Hype to Helpful’. Since then, the talk itself was published on the FinOps Foundation YouTube channel. I wanted to share it, in case that’s of interest to anyone here.

The key insight is that knowledge workers should be treating their work and documentation like a codebase. Agents are great at working with code, so adding all your work context to a single directory and pointing your AI there means you’ll get the same benefits even if you’re not writing code.

End note

If you’ve enjoyed this, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend. You can send them here to sign up.

I send these newsletters once per month, and I’m happy you’re along for the ride. I’m trying to make it one of the best things that arrives in your inbox each month, so thoughts and feedback are always appreciated. You can just reply to this email.

Also, if you find anything interesting, send it my way.

Thanks for reading. Until next time, Dann