Enjoyed watching Mr Gregory Porter at the Jazz Festival tonight. Wonderful music. 🎵
I enjoyed David Sparks’ calendar tricks webinar about getting the most from a digital calendar. I’ve tried some of his tips in the past but I think it might be time to have another look at them.
Love this project by Max Braun to bring an iSight back to life. I bought a Logitech stream cam as it was the nicest high quality webcam I could find. If only they still made the iSight.
In Atomic Habits author James Clear states:
The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state. This is why it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.
Reducing friction is a concept I’m very familiar in my work as a designer, but for some reason it’s something that I forget in my day to day life. So I’m trying a little experiment with my blogging. I’m going to test a few different ways of posting and then whichever has the least friction thus enabling me to post more regularly then that’s what I’m going to go with.
Giving Ulysses another go to see if I should keep the subscription or not.
Happy Easter!
“He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.” Matthew 28:6 NIVUK
Having a culture of writing at work
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.
Having a culture of writing at work
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.
The missing link
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.