This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to WordPress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog.

When I moved the blog to Jekyll last year I made several decisions about the posts I would bring across. One of those was to drop several of the post types that I’d added over the years leaving only a normal blog post as the type of content I could post. I hoped that by stripping out all the cruft I would be able to focus more on my own writing and build up more of a routine to posting. Inevitably that hasn’t panned out. There have been times where I’ve posted regularly, but just as I felt like I was getting into some kind of pattern things would happen and I wouldn’t post.

Of course one thing that has never changed was that I still read articles. In fact this year I’ve focused more on RSS as a means of reading and as a result I’m reading far more than I used too. I’ve also adopted Good Links as my read later app of choice and am developing a reading work flow to help me process what I’m reading. Part of that process involves sharing what I read. So for the same reason I added the ability to share links on my blog many years ago I’ve added that ability to this one. It’s in a state I call earliest usable product like much of this blog is, but I intend to keep improving things continuously over the next few weeks.

Life is about tradeoffs. When we know what to say no to, and we know why, we can say yes with comfort and confidence to the things that matter. To the things that last.

In conversation with one of my favourite authors Austin Kleon, Ryan Holiday finished a post with this quote. They were discussing the choices between work, family, and scene, but I the sentence above can be applied to a lot of things.

Today, the third Monday of January, is commonly referred to as Blue Monday. It’s considered to be the most depressing day of the year. By this time people are feeling down because they have broken all their New Year’s resolutions and there’s still another week until pay day.

Day’s like this that receive a lot of coverage in the press can be both damaging and helpful to mental health awareness. They can harm mental health awareness by giving the impression that depression or other illnesses only happen on particular days, but they can be helpful by bringing conversations up with people. They can be helpful to highlight that every day can be a Blue Monday, it is not confined to a single Monday in January. Instead it can strike on any day, at any time. My Blue Monday’s have been on a Friday in December, a Monday in August, and a Tuesday in January. Each on years or months apart. What’s important to know is that they are all survivable.

If you are struggling with your own Blue Monday you’re not alone. People are there to help you, be they family, friends, or healthcare professionals. They all care about you. Don’t suffer in silence.

Part of my approach to the new year involved rediscovering one of my habits. I’ve been trying to write a blog post more often. I initially intended to use my Micro.blog and to post all my content there, but given the chance to reflect I realised I wanted my longer posts to live here. I’m not committing to a set number of posts per week, but I am committing to posting here more often.

All week I’ve been thinking about what to write about. Everytime I opened my iPad and sat down to write something I couldn’t think of anything to write. It started to become a problem. I wanted to write a post, but I didn’t know what to write. I wanted to write a post but I began to feel like I didn’t have anything to say. I wanted to write but I began to believe I didn’t have anything to say or write.

This is evening as I sat here recovering from my counselling session I was bumbling around on the internet. Something made me google a photographer whose blog I used to follow years ago. I even have one of his photos. To my delight I found his website and realised he was still blogging regularly. As I scrolled through his posts I came across one titled Stop hiding behind complexity. The first line struck me:

Whether we like to admit it or not, we sometimes enjoy making the simplest task more difficult because it's easier to blame the many loops it would have taken to finish it if we don't succeed.

I realised perhaps this is what I’m doing with my blog. I want to write a post but I think that I need to write something significant. Instead of sitting down to write something, be it about something I’ve read or done this week, I’m making the simple task complicated. The likelihood is that it’s easier to not post something and hide behind the thought that I have nothing to say than it is to open Obsidian and write until I’ve put something together worth posting. If I want to write for my blog more often, it should be as simple as writing a post and publishing it. No second guessing myself and no worrying about whether I have something to say. Just writing.

Over the years I’ve developed a few strategies to help get me in to the right frame of mind to work. One of the best ones is my time for work playlist, I put it on when I need to focus and it never fails to get me into the right state to focus on a project. I’ve worked out that the best albums for me to work to are film soundtracks. The nature of films means that they often build to a finale towards the end of the film, and the soundtracks have a big part to play in that. I find that as the urgency in the music builds my focus deepens and by the end of the soundtrack I’m immersed in my work.

Occasionally I’ll come across a new album that has a similar effect to the play list and I add it on the end. This week when I came across a new album I realised that it might be time to review the albums that I have in there. When I opened it up I had amassed over 6 hours worth of music. I realised it was time to review what albums I had saved, along with the fact that I rarely even got to the soundtracks at towards the end of the playlist.

Most of the time when I used this playlist it was to settle down to a block of work, generally in the afternoons when I have fewer meetings at work. That means a block of work a can last between 1 and 3 hours, so I really had no need for the amount of music that was in there. On a Wednesday afternoon work has implemented a no meetings policy, it means we have a consistent free block of time we can set aside for deep work, and my playlist gets used a lot on those afternoons.

When I assessed the albums that I had in there, I decided it was time to limit the length to about 3.5 hours of music. I picked my top 2 soundtracks and added in the new one to hit the magic length of time. I structured the playlist with the longest first moving to the shortest last. We travel through Dune, Tron Legacy, and The Dark Knight, which nicely breaks my work period into three chunks should I need to pause for a few minutes and move my legs. I’ve been using it this week and it’s working very well. If you’re interested here’s the Apple Music version for you.

One thing I want to do more of this year it to write. Back when I started blogging in 2005 or 2006 I used to post everyday, often more than once. It might have been the novelty of being able to write something and have it appear on the internet for people to read that made it easier. It might also have been that the blogging community was in full force at the time, but one thing is for certain it was my hobby and I enjoyed it.

Since those heady days of the my blog something has gone astray. It might have been that all the bloggers I followed at the time became “serious” about blogging. They made careers out of it, and it made me feel like I had to be “serious” as well. Twitter also had a large impact. A lot of people, myself included, became more focused on posting there than on their blogs. Sharing took place there, but it lacked the same feel. What I do know is that somewhere along the way the joy of blogging disappeared and I lost interest.

Over the years I’ve tried to kick start the habit again but it’s never lasted more than a couple of weeks. This Christmas I’ve had some time to think and reflect over the events of the last couple of years. One thing that has become clear is that I lack a hobby, something for myself, and I want a hobby as much as I’ve realised I need one. I’ve decided that one of my intentions this year is to blog more, to find my hobby again and write for me. I try to journal most days in Obsidian which helps my mental health, but I want my blog to be more. So I’m starting off in January with a simple goal. To post something at lest once a day. Whether it’s a thought, or a link, or a longer piece is irrelevant, I want to make the act of posting a habit again. Most importantly I want to find the joy of sharing again.

This morning I found out that it's world elephant day. It's one of those facts which has stuck in my mind ever since for the simple fact that elephants are my favourite animals.

My parents tell the story of when I was small and we went to zoo together for the first time. There was one animal I wanted to see, the elephants, but for little me they were terrifying. I had only ever seen pictures of elephants in books, where the scale of the images didn't communicate to me how big the creatures are in reality. When you're a small child and see a picture of an elephant on one page and a duck on the next, the two appear the same size. So when I saw the sheer size of the creatures, I burst into tears.

I don't remember the day, but it makes me want to go back and reassure my small self that it's ok, elephants are still awesome.

Over the last couple of years I've struggled with my mental health. It's the second serious bout of depression that I've had in the last 8 years. This time, I've found elephants oddly comforting.

My Mum and my Aunt have often sent me small videos of elephants in that time and never once have they failed to bring a smile to my face. Baby elephants are funny. They do daft things and they have fun little personalities. Who can't help but laugh at the elephant that kicks it's trainer in the bum while standing next to him? They are like naughty teenagers.

There's another side to elephants which I've really come to appreciate in the last couple of years. The caring, nurturing side of the adults. I'm sure other animals exhibit these characteristics to their young, but something about the way the elephants express it is very comforting. Perhaps it's their size, and the strength and power they display, that makes it more surprising when you see a mum curl her trunk around her baby and pick it up from the ground. There's a gentleness from these animals that you wouldn't expect. At a time when the world seems more broken than it ever has, there's something oddly comforting in seeing a large creature display such gentle and caring behaviours towards others of it's kind.

I don't really know where this post is going, or really what the point of it is, other than that I wanted to write something today. So here it is. Make of it what you will.

As the title says, welcome to the eighth official version of my blog. This one has been a while in the making. It started as a new theme on Wordpress over a year ago, included a short holiday on Ghost before ending up being powered by Jekyll. That makes this the first version of my blog not to be powered by Wordpress and in all honesty it’s a refreshing change.

Since I’m using a new engine to power things, I’ve decided to take a bit of an iterative approach. What you see here is what I would call the Earliest Testable Product (ETP). It has all the basics I would like to include on my blog, a home page, an about page, an archive page, and the blog posts themselves. My intention is to gradually add features over the coming months, improve the design of some elements, and ultimately add a place to display some portfolio pieces.

The biggest decision about this new version of my blog was the move away from Wordpress. The CMS has powered this site since the very beginning, but recent versions have made me start to question how suitable it is for a site such as this. Wordpress has begun to feel quite heavy and complicated with lots of new features being added that I had no interest in. I began to crave a simpler way of doing things. Something flexible that didn’t require my Mac for me to work on so that I can do things from my iPad as well. It’s the ability to develop from my iPad is a big part of the decision. It has become my go to device away from work and the one which I do most of my writing on so being able to develop the blog from iPad became a big factor in picking the new engine.

In the next few weeks I plan to put together a roadmap to work through for both features and design improvements, at least until I get the key things implemented. In the mean time, if you see anything that seems out of place or broken, drop me an email.

Yesterday as I was sat on my sofa watching the Sunday morning church service on YouTube I had my MacBook Pro open on my lap to make notes in Obsidian. After the service had finished I spent a few minutes to tidy up some formatting and make sure the correct bible verses were being referenced, I realised how much I am enjoying using the app. It got me thinking about why.

Over the course of the day it slowly dawned on me what it is that I like about it. It doesn’t tick all the features I was hoping to find in the my notes app, but it does tick one that I didn’t list before. It is a tool for thinking, and really that’s what I’ve been looking for.

Ephemeral notes still go into Obsidian through my daily notes, and where appropriate they are linked to project notes, but I’ve found that I’m creating notes about subjects that I am thinking about or trying to learn more about. Looking at my Obsidian graph I see some small clusters starting to form. There is one about note taking itself as I read around the subject of evergreen and atomic notes; there is one around habits and routines; and there is a larger one forming related to my work and current thinking about the concept of Minimal Viable Products (MVP).

As I’ve been looking into these different applications and their feature sets, I’ve been exposed to some ideas about note taking that I had never really considered before. The concept that a “notes” app can be more than a scratchpad used throughout the day but a tool for thinking has connected with me. Really it is not a notes app but something much more useful and important. I guess this is why many people refer to these tools that I’ve been exploring as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) or their second brain. I’m not sure either of those terms sit right with me, I think they are more than that. I am not purely gaining knowledge by using this tool and it’s not thinking for me like a second brain should, but I can use this tool to see connections between ideas. It forces me to distill concepts down to manageable chunks so that I can form my own ideas from them. This is why I’ve begun referring to it as a tool for thinking and why it’s starting to become a key part of my creative process. Time will tell if it lasts.

Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Israel. Racism has been in the news a lot of the last year or so, and yet we hear very little of the fact that anti-semitism is on the rise.

I have visited Israel twice. It’s a place that quickly won my heart with it’s beauty and history. Last time I was there was in 2014 and I was able to visit Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. To this day when I think about my visit the feelings come flooding back.

The museum which tells of all the events that took place across Europe overwhelmed me to the point that I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to walk to the end and find a place to sit down. After a cup of tea our group then visited the memorial which names all the people who died. It was just as overwhelming. A friend who was part of our party was able to find the names of her family members in the memorial and so the Holocaust became even more of a reality to me. We learn all about the atrocities of World War 2 in our history lessons, but until there is a personal connection with the events it’s hard for it to feel like a reality. My Grandad once wrote me a letter about what he did when he fought in the War, it made the war a reality to me and not just something to learn about. Seeing my friend find her family members in the memorial had a similar effect.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this post, other than to say I will remember them. I hope you will too, and I hope that together we can all make sure that something like it is never repeated.

There are very few Jews left who survived the Holocaust, so we must find ways to make those connections with history a reality for the generations who cannot hear first hand what it was like. I think the stories of family members will play a crucial role in that. Let’s make sure it never happens again.