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.