This is a fascinating read that presents the idea that calendars should be multi layered.

We tend to think of calendars as 2D grids with mutually exclusive blocks of time, but as this example shows, not all events automatically cancel each other out. Depending on their characteristics, they can be layered on top of each other. This means we manage time in three, not two, dimensions.

Think of a meeting you need to travel to. In your calendar will be an event for the actual meeting, but you need to block off time before and after so that no one else schedules something in that time. So really the unavailable time covers when you start travelling, the meeting itself, and the time travelling back. The total time makes one layer, the meeting is a second layer, and perhaps some tasks you need to accomplish in the meeting are a third layer. It’s a great concept and one I would love to see someone build an app based on it.

Back on Wordpress. It’s been a few years and many attempts to revitalise my blog, but I’ve decided to move back to Wordpress. The ease of posting from any device using apps has trumped everything else. Things will be a bit rough over the next few days and weeks as I get old posts back but stay tuned for more.

Just saw a a post on Threads from Figma… describe your creative process in three words or less.

My attempt: Steal, splice, iterate.

Maybe I should elaborate?

Steal: Be inspired. Steal ideas from others, but also from your past. At the start, or even in the middle of, a project I tend to ask myself two questions. Have I solved a similar problem in the past and has someone else solved it? If the answer to either of those questions is yes or maybe, then I look at those projects through he lens of the one I’m working on.

Splice: This is where I take what I’ve discovered when looking back at what has been done before and splice in new thoughts and ideas.

Iterate: This is pretty self explanatory, but essentially I spend the rest of the time repeating the process until I come to a point where I have something that is hitting the problem head on and the design is coming to a resolution.

I’ve seen a few posts from people sharing where they’ve been and thought it was interesting. So I’m sharing the countries I’ve been too as well:

• Denmark 🇩🇰
• France 🇫🇷
• Switzerland 🇨🇭
• Israel 🇮🇱
• Italy 🇮🇹

I’ve also stepped foot in Belgium and Luxembourg but they were both on the way to Switzerland so I don’t count them.

When I was growing up we had most of our family holidays in the UK and I think I’ve visited nearly all the counties in England, most of Wales, and a couple in Scotland.

I’ve been looking at some of the things Google announced this week. Whilst some of the things are quite interesting – like the Pixel Tablet and stand – others are just plain puzzling.

I understand that Google was is trying to flex and show off their AI abilities, the new Magic Editor that they announced doesn’t sit well with me. I take photos to preserve memories. I can look back through my photo library and memories are triggered by the visuals, even the ones that are less than perfect.

Showing off the capabilities of their new photo editor, Google talked about how we want things to always look good. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s not how life is. Not every day is sunny and bright, but Google is giving us the ability to make it appear like it is. Take a cloudy overcast day, there may be some really fun things that happen but it looks a bit grey. Google wants to make it easy for us to edit that photo and make it sunny with ease. It creates a disconnect with reality. The images of our memories won’t match.

Social media already causes a lot of people to live their life in a highly edited false way. Making it easier to trick ourselves into remembering something in a completely different way isn’t necessarily a good thing.

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.

It’s taken me a long time with lots of googling and trial & error, but I finally have tags working on this site.

Out of the box Jekyll provides a tagging function. You can define tags at the start of blog posts along with the other data you wish to add, but annoyingly Jekyll doesn’t automatically provide archive pages.

When I first built this version of my site I started to add tags to my blog posts. I managed to figure out how to display them on each posts page but that was as far as I got. I made a couple of attempts at adding the functionality I wanted to the tags in the form of a page for each tag that lists the post attached to the tag. I wanted people to be able to click on the tags at the bottom of the posts and go to the tag page, and I wanted to list all the tags in use on the site in the archive page.

Finally today I came across this list of Jekyll plugins. In the list was a plugin designed to generate archive pages for years, months, days, categories, and tags. With the aim of todays tinkering focused on getting tags working I limited the archive plugin to just generate the pages for tags. Joyfully it worked first time. It took me some playing around with the templates to get them looking how I wanted, but I had pages generated for each tag and links to each page from the bottom of the posts.

The final task was getting a list of tags on the archive page. It took a lot of googling and faffing but eventually I managed to achieve what I wanted.

Now I just have to spend a bit of time making sure everything is tagged up as I want before I can explore how to make use of the tags in other ways.

For the last few years 99% of my personal computing has been handled on the iPad Pro. For the most part it was ok. Sometimes I would need to jump through some hoops to do things and occasionally I would fall back on my work Mac. The only item that has suffered in that time has been my ability to work on my personal website.

I tried several times to build workflows in shortcuts to enable me to do what I wanted, but most of the time they were buggy or didn’t quite work how I needed them too. Sadly, the outcome more often than not, was abandonment and my site fell into disrepair and neglect.

At the start of 2023 I decided I needed to revive some hobbies. One of the biggest, longest, and most enjoyable hobbies I’ve had has been running my own personal website or blog. So I’ve dusted off my old MacBook Pro and begun to play around once again. It’s been fun and refreshing and I now find myself wanting to write more as well. Having a thing that I’ve built as a home on the web seems to make a big difference in how much I want to write things to publish.

Sadly, using my MacBook Pro (from 2015) has shown me why I wanted to replace it with my iPad. I like the flexibility of the iPad, I can draw on it, I can write on it, I can do nearly everything I want to on it, except code and build a website. But my Mac is showing its age. It can’t run the latest version of macOS which makes me nervous. It means it will stop receiving security updates and apps will eventually not be able to receive updates. I’ve already experienced a couple having to roll back to older versions because they won’t run.

As a result the Apple website has become a place I visit often. The new M2 MacBook Air looks very appealing, but it’s not cheap, and given the current climate, out of reach at the moment. So I find myself eyeing my iPad Pro again. Then I get frustrated that I can’t do what I want to on it, which, when you think about the fact it has been around for over a decade, is kind of crazy that the device is still so hamstrung.

I know that bemoaning the state of the iPad a common theme at the moment, but I’m genuinely frustrated that the device continues to be held back by software deficiencies and design. It’s more than capable of doing all the things I can do on my old MacBook Pro in terms of hardware, but it remains shackled with one hand behind its back. For now I will continue to tinker with my site on my Mac, and then find ways to write and post to this site from my iPad. While I do that I’ll sit in hope that Apple eventually takes off the chains of iPadOS.

I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour or whether it’s seeing some people I know have their artwork displayed in a local gallery. It creates a spark in me. A desire to create things.

I’m inspired.

Except.

When I sit down with my notebook and pencil or my iPad and Apple Pencil I don’t know what to draw. I know I want to draw something but I don’t know what. So instead I turn to Ulysses and I write something. That’s fine, I enjoy it, but I want to draw something. I want to create something visual. Maybe I’m out of practice. I’ve spent so many years creating websites and designs for other people that when it comes to creating something for myself I have no idea where to start. I’m paralysed by the blank page. So I’m finding myself trying to research the drawing process. What can I create and how do I work out what I want to create? Maybe it’s a case of picking up my pencil and drawing, letting it wander around the page and seeing what emerges? At the very least it would be a start. Some marks being made. Let’s see…

I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour or whether it’s seeing some people I know have their artwork displayed in a local gallery. It creates a spark in me. A desire to create things.

I’m inspired.

Except.

When I sit down with my notebook and pencil or my iPad and Apple Pencil I don’t know what to draw. I know I want to draw something but I don’t know what. So instead I turn to Ulysses and I write something. That’s fine, I enjoy it, but I want to draw something. I want to create something visual. Maybe I’m out of practice. I’ve spent so many years creating websites and designs for other people that when it comes to creating something for myself I have no idea where to start. I’m paralysed by the blank page. So I’m finding myself trying to research the drawing process. What can I create and how do I work out what I want to create? Maybe it’s a case of picking up my pencil and drawing, letting it wander around the page and seeing what emerges? At the very least it would be a start. Some marks being made. Let’s see…

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to find a new way of doing social media some of the things that social media gets right keep cropping up in my feeds.

The first is that social media made it easy to follow people. Mastodon is not intuitive in how it handles following people across it’s many instances. RSS is great for following individual blogs as long as you have the necessary infrastructure in place (an account to act as a sync service and some apps to read in), but even then it’s not always easy to subscribe to the RSS feed of a website.

Go back a decade or so and browsers were heading in an interesting direction. Safari on the Mac had RSS built in and Firefox had a feature called live bookmarks. Both allowed you to “bookmark” a website and the browser would automatically use the RSS link it found on the site and notify you when there was an update. To me this is the most logical place to integrate RSS or a “follow” button for the internet. What was missing was some king of home page or feed akin to an RSS readers or that of Twitter. Browsers of today offer a great experience for browsing the open web, or at least starting a Google search and going from there. What I would like to see is a browser that places as much emphasis on bringing a social experience to the open web.

Imagine this… you are browsing the internet and come across a new blog, you’d like to follow it so you click the follow button in the header of that website. The UI of the website reflects that and your browser adds the website as website to it’s bookmarks. You close the browser and go off to do something else. A while later you come back, click on your browser icon and instead of being greeted by Google you are met with a feed reader type UI that shows you recent updates from the sites you follow. This is your curated space but it’s all tracked and kept in sync by your web browser not a social network. I think that would be an interesting way of handling social stuff on the web, the browser would be your home and not just a gateway to everything.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to find a new way of doing social media some of the things that social media gets right keep cropping up in my feeds.

The first is that social media made it easy to follow people. Mastodon is not intuitive in how it handles following people across it’s many instances. RSS is great for following individual blogs as long as you have the necessary infrastructure in place (an account to act as a sync service and some apps to read in), but even then it’s not always easy to subscribe to the RSS feed of a website.

Go back a decade or so and browsers were heading in an interesting direction. Safari on the Mac had RSS built in and Firefox had a feature called live bookmarks. Both allowed you to “bookmark” a website and the browser would automatically use the RSS link it found on the site and notify you when there was an update. To me this is the most logical place to integrate RSS or a “follow” button for the internet. What was missing was some king of home page or feed akin to an RSS readers or that of Twitter. Browsers of today offer a great experience for browsing the open web, or at least starting a Google search and going from there. What I would like to see is a browser that places as much emphasis on bringing a social experience to the open web.

Imagine this… you are browsing the internet and come across a new blog, you’d like to follow it so you click the follow button in the header of that website. The UI of the website reflects that and your browser adds the website as website to it’s bookmarks. You close the browser and go off to do something else. A while later you come back, click on your browser icon and instead of being greeted by Google you are met with a feed reader type UI that shows you recent updates from the sites you follow. This is your curated space but it’s all tracked and kept in sync by your web browser not a social network. I think that would be an interesting way of handling social stuff on the web, the browser would be your home and not just a gateway to everything.

A little under four months ago I made a decision about my blog and moved it to use Ghost with the aim of building a more regular posting habit. Needless to say it hasn’t really happened. So I’ve decided to make another decision and go all in on Micro.blog.

Recently I’ve been on a slow and considered drive to simplify things in my life mostly in the digital realm, but not all of it. As a bit of a geek I’m prone to finding things, trying them out, or trying to build systems to enable me to do things. More often than not I abandon them (Notion, I’m looking at you) and return to something that does one thing well. For me it is Things for tasks, Craft for work notes, and Obsidian for my personal notes. There are no doubt other app of similar veins that don’t spring to mind right now.

Last week as I sat at my Mac a thought popped into my head. When I first started blogging back in 2005 the tools I was using were of a similar vein. At the time Wordpress was a much simpler blog focused CMS, there were no block editors or extra baggage to try and wrestle into submission. I could post quickly from my browser. Eventually I settled on using MarsEdit as my posting mechanism. It did exactly what I wanted allowing me to post to my blog without the need to fire up my browser. As I dwelt on that thought I realised that over time my blogging ideas have become more and more complicated. I wanted to create link posts, quote posts, or long form articles, all on a website that was well structured and looked good. Alongside that I had Twitter, and then ultimately Micro.blog. Small posts went into those places and soon enough I didn’t really know where I should post what. The resulting side effect? I stopped posting.

This saddened me. Blogging is a hobby, one I’ve invested a great deal of time, energy, and money into. I decided it was time to simplify. So I began looking around at setting Wordpress up again, then I realised, it’s too complicated and I need something simpler. So here I am. Micro.blog has more or less everything I want from a blogging engine. A simple posting engine, it looks good and I can customise it myself at a later date. So now I have one place to come when I want to post something. No matter what it is it will go here, one place to share what I want with as little friction as possible. Let’s see how it goes.

The last few years has seen the prolific rise of the content creator the people who create content for other people to consume. I dislike this phrase. I don’t like it for a few reasons, but the primary one is I don’t consume content and I hate to break it to you, but neither do you.

If you read books they are written by an author, someone who has taken a lot of time and expended a lot of energy in dedication to writing. Yet we don’t call books content, we recognise them for what they are. Why then do we call blog posts or articles published on the web content? It takes just as much time and energy to write a series of posts on a blog as it does to write a book. Those people are not writing content, they are also authors they just happen to author a website instead of a book. So lets call them authors or writers.

The same goes for video. We don’t classify TV programmes and films as content, they are made by teams of people including directors, actors, presenters, writers, sound engineers, editors, and many more that I’ve missed. Why then are YouTubers classified as content creators? Are they not film makers? More often that not they do all of the roles that whole teams do for films.

Likewise with podcasts, another form of “content” that I “consume”. The skill and effort that goes into producing a podcast is the same as the skill and effort that goes into producing a radio show. We listen to radio shows just as we do podcasts, we don’t consume them. Why then do we not call the people who create them by the terms they deserve? The people who make radio shows are referred to as DJ’s, presenters, or broadcasters. Why do we not use these terms to talk about people who create podcasts? They may not broadcast their shows by a signal and mast, but they are still broadcasting their shows for all to hear on the internet (just as most radio stations do today).

I think it’s time we started to move away from the generic terms we use to define people who create and publish things on the internet and instead start using the respected terms we have been using for decades in the more “traditional” industries. It does a disservice to the skills of those creators when the vast majority are very talented people and deserve the credibility that comes with proper names for their professions.

The last few years has seen the prolific rise of the content creator the people who create content for other people to consume. I dislike this phrase. I don’t like it for a few reasons, but the primary one is I don’t consume content and I hate to break it to you, but neither do you.

If you read books they are written by an author, someone who has taken a lot of time and expended a lot of energy in dedication to writing. Yet we don’t call books content, we recognise them for what they are. Why then do we call blog posts or articles published on the web content? It takes just as much time and energy to write a series of posts on a blog as it does to write a book. Those people are not writing content, they are also authors they just happen to author a website instead of a book. So lets call them authors or writers.

The same goes for video. We don’t classify TV programmes and films as content, they are made by teams of people including directors, actors, presenters, writers, sound engineers, editors, and many more that I’ve missed. Why then are YouTubers classified as content creators? Are they not film makers? More often that not they do all of the roles that whole teams do for films.

Likewise with podcasts, another form of “content” that I “consume”. The skill and effort that goes into producing a podcast is the same as the skill and effort that goes into producing a radio show. We listen to radio shows just as we do podcasts, we don’t consume them. Why then do we not call the people who create them by the terms they deserve? The people who make radio shows are referred to as DJ’s, presenters, or broadcasters. Why do we not use these terms to talk about people who create podcasts? They may not broadcast their shows by a signal and mast, but they are still broadcasting their shows for all to hear on the internet (just as most radio stations do today).

I think it’s time we started to move away from the generic terms we use to define people who create and publish things on the internet and instead start using the respected terms we have been using for decades in the more “traditional” industries. It does a disservice to the skills of those creators when the vast majority are very talented people and deserve the credibility that comes with proper names for their professions.

For the best part of the last year I’ve been all in on Obsidian for my note taking. I’ve enjoyed writing in it, seeing it evolve, and playing with it’s theming engine (a bit too much sometimes) but recently I’ve been finding a few issues that have been getting under my skin. The experience of using it on my Mac is fine, in fact it works very well especially when paired with my large external display. When it comes to the iPad and my iPhone though, the experience is way too different. No matter how good the theme is something never quite feels right about the way the app looks and more importantly, the way the app functions.

Whilst I don’t want to confuse motion with progress, I’ve decided it’s time to try another app. One that I’ve found myself coming back to multiple times and have used for one off projects in the last 12 months. I’ve decided it’s time to give Craft a try for my note making. I gave Obsidian at least a 12 month run, so it’s time to give Craft the same.

There’s several things which draw me to Craft, most prominently is it’s native to all the platforms I use. I might be sat at a Mac all day while I work, but when I’m not I use my iPad as my personal computer and it’s during this time when I do most of my note making. Craft’s iPad app is excellent and I’m enjoying using it. The second thing which draws me to the app are it’s integrations. It works with Shortcuts with out me having to think of clever workarounds to do what I want. It has built in actions to send text to Things and Ulysses so I can turn notes into blog posts. Finally, it has many of the features of Obsidian that matter to me. I can connect notes together and see what is linked to it from elsewhere. I have templates for note types that I can easily use to start a new note. The only thing it lacks at the moment is some form of graph view so I can visually see connections between my notes.

I’ve still to decide where to do my journalling. I was using Obsidian for that, but again, for the reasons I’ve already outlined I don’t want to continue. It might be time to revert to Day One on my iPad, but I may also give the daily notes of Craft a try. This is after all an experiment in implementing a note making method in a new app. It works for some, the question is, will it work for me?

For the best part of the last year I’ve been all in on Obsidian for my note taking. I’ve enjoyed writing in it, seeing it evolve, and playing with it’s theming engine (a bit too much sometimes) but recently I’ve been finding a few issues that have been getting under my skin. The experience of using it on my Mac is fine, in fact it works very well especially when paired with my large external display. When it comes to the iPad and my iPhone though, the experience is way too different. No matter how good the theme is something never quite feels right about the way the app looks and more importantly, the way the app functions.

Whilst I don’t want to confuse motion with progress, I’ve decided it’s time to try another app. One that I’ve found myself coming back to multiple times and have used for one off projects in the last 12 months. I’ve decided it’s time to give Craft a try for my note making. I gave Obsidian at least a 12 month run, so it’s time to give Craft the same.

There’s several things which draw me to Craft, most prominently is it’s native to all the platforms I use. I might be sat at a Mac all day while I work, but when I’m not I use my iPad as my personal computer and it’s during this time when I do most of my note making. Craft’s iPad app is excellent and I’m enjoying using it. The second thing which draws me to the app are it’s integrations. It works with Shortcuts with out me having to think of clever workarounds to do what I want. It has built in actions to send text to Things and Ulysses so I can turn notes into blog posts. Finally, it has many of the features of Obsidian that matter to me. I can connect notes together and see what is linked to it from elsewhere. I have templates for note types that I can easily use to start a new note. The only thing it lacks at the moment is some form of graph view so I can visually see connections between my notes.

I’ve still to decide where to do my journalling. I was using Obsidian for that, but again, for the reasons I’ve already outlined I don’t want to continue. It might be time to revert to Day One on my iPad, but I may also give the daily notes of Craft a try. This is after all an experiment in implementing a note making method in a new app. It works for some, the question is, will it work for me?

We’re a week into July now and my decision to write some personal objectives for the quarter to go alongside my work objectives is proving to be an interesting experiment. I’ve begun to try and build some new habits to help me achieve not just my personal objectives but also my work ones.

The first of those habits has been to set aside the first 30 minutes of my work day to read and write. After I sit down at my desk with a coffee, I check in on Teams and my email to make sure there’s no fires, and then pick up my book. I open Obsidian to the literature note for that book, pick up my pencil and begin to read. As I go I underline anything that stands out, and then when I finish a section I write a note in my own words that covers those underlines. It’s fast becoming one of my favourite parts of my work day and I’m noticing an interesting side effect. When my time is up and I move on to some design work, I’m more productive and able to more easily focus on what I’m working on.

I’m pleased that I’m starting to build this habit and the influence it is having on my working day. My next small target is to keep some momentum now that I have finished reading the first book of this new habit. I have the next book lined up ready.

We’re a week into July now and my decision to write some personal objectives for the quarter to go alongside my work objectives is proving to be an interesting experiment. I’ve begun to try and build some new habits to help me achieve not just my personal objectives but also my work ones.

The first of those habits has been to set aside the first 30 minutes of my work day to read and write. After I sit down at my desk with a coffee, I check in on Teams and my email to make sure there’s no fires, and then pick up my book. I open Obsidian to the literature note for that book, pick up my pencil and begin to read. As I go I underline anything that stands out, and then when I finish a section I write a note in my own words that covers those underlines. It’s fast becoming one of my favourite parts of my work day and I’m noticing an interesting side effect. When my time is up and I move on to some design work, I’m more productive and able to more easily focus on what I’m working on.

I’m pleased that I’m starting to build this habit and the influence it is having on my working day. My next small target is to keep some momentum now that I have finished reading the first book of this new habit. I have the next book lined up ready.

A year or so ago I moved my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll, going from a CMS powered website to a static site generator. The idea behind it was to make designing and building the site easier from my iPad, and in the hope it would give me a push to post more often.

It didn’t work.

So I find my self making another move and switching to Ghost to give that a try. It works with Ulysses which is my text editor of choice and an app I have installed on all my devices. Posting should be a lot easier now, but I’m unsure whether that will really make much of a difference. As I write this post, the question I keep finding myself returning to is why am I not blogging more?

Is it because I don’t want to? I don’t think so. I always have it nagging at the back of my mind that I want to write and post more. Is it that I don’t know what to write? That’s probably got something to do with it. Is it that I get hung up on it being my personal site and I want the design just right? That also likely is a cause. All of those are things that I can change, finding the way to change them is the key.

The first step I’ve made is to write myself some objectives. It’s that time of the year at work where we are moving to a new performance year. Part of the process involves me writing some objectives, this year I’m trying to use the OKR methodology to give myself some clear objectives and measures. I’ve decided to also write some personal OKRs for this quarter. We’ll see if they have an impact, but this post is the result of one of them, and we’ll see if I can keep going.

Over the last few months I’ve come across a number of personal blogs which have been inspiring me and fuelling my own desire to blog more. One of those is from Arun Venkatesan. His most recent post about his writing process is fascinating and worth a read. I like how each of his posts is seen as a creative exercise about something he is interested in. It’s more of a slow blogging process than the stream of links and sharing that’s became popular in the mid 00’s and has lasted until now.

Chris Hannah with an interesting post about writing at work. I go through phases at work where I will write a lot to help me clarify projects and make sure the problems we are trying to solve are clearly defined. Chris highlights a few other reasons he writes at work, with this one in particular standing out:

Gives the opportunity for more people to gain knowledge - Sometimes when you’re on a call or in a meeting, knowledge stays within small groups of people. But by having a written record, it allows more people (if shared appropriately) to also read it. For example, maybe a new employee wanting to know more about a piece of work/functionality, or someone on the same team that wishes to gain a better perspective of a bigger piece of work.

Sharing of knowledge is crucial in the workplace, especially in the world of hybrid and remote working. Conversations happen in private chats or small video calls and not always everyone who needs to be there is present. Some food for thought.

Chris Hannah with an interesting post about writing at work. I go through phases at work where I will write a lot to help me clarify projects and make sure the problems we are trying to solve are clearly defined. Chris highlights a few other reasons he writes at work, with this one in particular standing out:

Gives the opportunity for more people to gain knowledge - Sometimes when you’re on a call or in a meeting, knowledge stays within small groups of people. But by having a written record, it allows more people (if shared appropriately) to also read it. For example, maybe a new employee wanting to know more about a piece of work/functionality, or someone on the same team that wishes to gain a better perspective of a bigger piece of work.

Sharing of knowledge is crucial in the workplace, especially in the world of hybrid and remote working. Conversations happen in private chats or small video calls and not always everyone who needs to be there is present. Some food for thought.

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.