Phil Bowell

It’s a dark mode day. Outside is gloomy and grey, it’s raining, and everything feels like it’s in dark mode. There’s been a few of these kinds of day recently, normally they coincide with extrovert days at work, when my calendar is chock full of meetings and there’s no room to actually Do The Work.

Today is a bit different.

Whilst it’s a dark mode day outside, and consequently a dark mode day on my Mac I only have a couple of calls today so I have chance to find some flow. These days feel rare and for once I’m happy it’s a dark mode day. I can cocoon myself at my desk, headphones on, my time to work playlist in my ears and I’ll have a stretch of time to do some design work.

Barry Hess in a post about the state of his task manager makes the point that he is DDoS’ing himself with To-dos and Reminders. Essentially there is so much stuff in his task manager and he has lost trust in the way it works to ever see the right things at the right time.

I feel his pain. I have been bouncing around task managers for, at least, the last 6 months trying to find a way that works for me to see what I need to do at the right time. It feels that the biggest issue for me, is that as work dials up its corporate security it becomes harder to wrangle all the incoming jobs in one place. Tasks can be assigned to me in at least three different pieces of software, none of which are able to be integrated. On top of this I have the tasks coming in from chats and meetings, plus keeping track of and breaking down all the tasks into chunks that make them doable.

All of this leaves me with a constant feeling of overwhelm. There’s too much to do and no enough time to do it. There has to be a better way…

One of the most active blogs in my feed reader is by Louie Mantia. He has an interesting point of view that sometimes differs from mine (mainly politics) but I like what he creates and find it inspiring. In his recent post titled Learn to Code, Don’t Learn to Code he states this:

Both parties can understand the other’s limitations without learning how to do it themselves. And—in my opinion—you can more easily push the limitations without learning it.

I agree with this and it has been my experience as well. I can code html and css, but the developers I work with on a daily basis are far more skilled than I am. On the occasions where I’ve ceded to their wisdom we’ve ended up with a finished product that’s not quite as good as it could be. In contrast, the time when we’ve worked together to arrive at something closer to my design, we’ve ended up with a finished product that is better than what I created originally. When I’ve pushed them to see how close they can get to something I’ve designed, they’ve discovered that they can do more than they thought and then those new techniques have fed my designs and refined them further.

At work we’re doing a team visibility piece to help others in the business get to know us. We’ve been asked to answer some questions and I thought it would be fun to share them here…

Favourite movie: It would be a three way fight between The Usual Suspects, Shawshank Redemption, and The Dark Knight.

Tea or Coffee: Coffee, but not any coffee… my friends would say it has to be “snobby”!

Biggest fear: Wasps! Evil creatures.

What’s your idea of a perfect day? It’d have to be somewhere warm and starts with coffee looking out over a scenic view (mountains or sea), a long breakfast with friends, then an afternoon spent reading, before dinner out with friends.

How would friends describe you? I hope reliable and kind would be in there somewhere!

I’d love to hear some of your answers. If you want to share, please post them on your blog and link to this post.

I generally don’t comment about politics on social media, or really in life in general. I find the whole topic to be divisive and alienating especially as someone who is not liberal enough for the left and not conservative enough for the right, it is a hard topic to broach.

What I can say is this: I am very disappointed in the current state of politics both in the UK and USA. In the UK we have ended up with a government that will inflict great damage on society and is already doing so. In the US it feels like no matter the result, the same will be true.

I find myself wondering how it is two supposedly educated countries find that their choices for their political leaders are so poor, leaving voters with a bad and worse. My only hope is that we don’t see scenes in America similar to the last election and people manage to keep their heads screwed on.

I have this weird stumbling block with my blog. I want to blog, when I do it I enjoy it and when I get into a good rhythm posting regularly I enjoy it even more. I should then be doing it regularly, and in fact I want to do it regularly, but I have this weird block. I’m a designer. I don’t like using things out the box and prefer to have my own design on my own website, so when I don’t have one it becomes a blocker and I don’t want to invest time in blogging until it’s design is my own.

I can you asking, so why don’t you just get on with it and build your own design. And the answer is simple. My personal computer is an iPad and I’ve found it hard to get the right setup so that I an easily code up what’s in my mind, that’s not to say it’s not possible, just that I haven’t found something that clicks with me so far.

All this is really a long winded way of saying, it’s all just excuses. At the end of the day if I enjoy blogging and writing then I should get my finger out and do it. So here I am, trying again to find a rhythm and just do the blogging.

Life is odd. Sometimes it seems to just pass us by, each day sliding into the next, the week begins and ends before we’ve even had time to catch our breath. At other times the days are slow and packed with things, little moments that create memories or that build up to make a week to remember. Lately life seems to be passing by at a great rate of knots, it whizzes by in a string of meetings, groceries, tv shows, and sleep. There barely seems time to take a breath before the next thing starts.

Occasionally I become aware of this speed and force myself to find a slot in my calendar that allows me to sit and take a moment to be still. A moment to sit and calm myself. A moment to reach out to God and speak to him.

I’m trying to cultivate these moments. I want to have more of these pauses in my life, where I can sit and be, resting in the presence of my Lord and dwelling with Him. I’ve been listening to a series of 5 songs over the last week or so. They start with one of my favourite songs, Oceans, and then are followed in any order by 4 more. Sung by Anthem Worship the artwork that goes with them is a single flower photographed on a clean coloured background which complements the colour of the petals. Each manages to capture the feelings evoked by the music. When they play I find myself listening to the words and looking at the images, a small moment of still and quiet. Like a prayer they draw me to my God.

I have them saved as a playlist in Apple Music, it’s titled “Take a moment” and when I need too I can sit back for a moment and say to Siri. Play “Take a moment” and the songs come on, my iPhone displays the artwork as they play and I can pause and step away from the pace of life to find a moment of rest before resuming my day.

This is a post which I’ve had brewing in the back of my mind since September. This year marks the end of my 3rd decade, September will be my 40th birthday the end of what has turned out to be quite a hard decade. A look in the mirror and I can see how hard it has been.

At the start of the year I weighed myself and had a little bit of a shock. My weight hasn’t just gone up, it’s ballooned and I am the heaviest I have ever been by a large margin. What’s worse is that I look at photos of myself and am shocked at the size of my stomach and my physique. One thing is clear. It’s time to change and do something about it.

This week I’m going to begin a trifecta of things. I’m going to start tracking what I’m eating and how much. I eat a lot of fresh food, but also a lot of convenience food, so that needs to change. My initial aim with tracking what I’m eating is to make myself more aware and then to try and make some more healthier choices.

Secondly I’m going to drink more water. I have a large water bottle that can hold two litres of water. I’m going to build a routine of filling that up first thing in the morning and finishing it by the end of the day. If I want something sweeter or a soft drink I will go for sparkling water and a slice of fruit.

Thirdly, I need to start exercising. I optimistically joined a gym back in September and have been a grand total of once a month since. I’m going to cancel my membership and use the money to subscribe to Fitbod instead. Then I am going to add calendar appointments for workouts throughout the week.

I’m sharing this in an effort to try and build a commitment with myself. I plan to share my progress each month with how I’m doing on each of these three fronts. If I can establish some good habits in the next month I will start to share some of the statistics around my weight, but for now this is all I’m comfortable sharing.

One of my aims for this year is to try and develop some more healthy foundations or habits in my life. For many years now I’ve wanted to blog more regularly like I did in the very early days of discovering what the small web could be. It was a place of individuals sharing their lives and thoughts on their own websites. Comments were on, people linked to each other, and a feeling of community developed.

In the years since my blog has been through many incarnations, it’s been Wordpress powered, Jekyll powered, Micro.blog, and back to Wordpress. But one thing for certain is that posting over the last decade has dwindled to almost nothing, but with the odd renaissance here and there. The desire to blog has always been there but for one reason or another never lasted, or more accurately I was never able to form it into a habit like I used too.

Over the last year I’ve noticed a significant change in what I call the small web. I’ve found a lot more personal blogs who post regularly and, most importantly, interesting content. It’s sparked my creativity again, and so I’m taking some steps to start again.

One of the barriers that I’ve struggled with over the last years is that I’ve wanted my blog to be too complicated. I wanted to have small posts to replace twitter, links to be bookmarks, as well as a place to share my work, and write longer posts like this one. What I’ve realised is that when I enjoyed blogging in the early days (2007ish era) it was a lot simpler. To begin with I had one post type and it was a lot easier and a lot more fun. I realised that I needed to return to that level of simplicity if I was ever going to form a new habit of blogging regularly. So that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve installed a new theme that takes away the temptation to try and add new types of posts and instead places an emphasis on writing blog posts. So that’s what I intend to do with more regularity.

I’ve begun the long process of adding in some of my old posts from previous iterations of this site. My apologies if this triggers a load of posts in your RSS. I’m working backwards, and I’ve now added all the posts from 2023 and 2022. It will be a slow process as I’ve decided to add each post manually, importing from the markdown file I have saved. Initially I am just adding the more formal posts but may go back and add all the link posts I’ve made at some point.