I’m currently 40,000 feet in the air as I write this. There’s nothing quite like 6 hours on a plane with no connectivity to allow one to meditate on and process the results of a 7 day team retreat. It also leads a long task list in one’s notebook! What I found myself meditating this time around was the people. How we’re all so varied, so unique, and yet with striking similarities repeated across a group of individuals. After spending 7 full days in the same house with 22 other people, I’ve real…
The fine folks at Help Scout asked that question [https://www.helpscout.net/blog/product-managers/]. And co-founder Nick Francis seems to indicate that the answer is yes. I quite enjoy the Help Scout blog, specifically the writing of Gregory Ciotti [https://twitter.com/GregoryCiotti]. But this particular piece didn’t sit well. It starts with a somewhat inflammatory opening statement. The one in big bold text: > To build a great product, you need design and you need engineering. Somewhere along…
You may have come across this article from last fall at some point. It’s a long, well thought out piece by Kim Stanley Robinson exploring the actual potential for humans to be able to live on a planet other than this one. His prognosis? Not good! As someone who spends a lot of time lamenting what we’re doing to this planet, I appreciate a science fiction writer taking the time to add a dose of reality to our consciousness. As he starts out, he reminds us that interplanetary travel is an idea th…
2Do was not a tool I was looking for, but suits my needs better than OmniFocus has the past several years.
Back to the topic of why newsletters are a good choice [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/finding-our-way] for writers. This piece by Simon Owens perfectly sums up my thoughts. In it, he opines that email newsletters are similar to the handmade zines of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In contrast to carefully edited and displayed content of the web, newsletters are more haphazard: > Many newsletters feature a hodgepodge of unrelated sections, images, and GIFs, and they take a distinctly informal tone in…
How are we contributing to making things worse for others?
Interesting take on the “Internet Sabbatical” and its ilk. Matthew Malady found it was a waste of time. His reasoning is that giving up constant distractions the online life brings is not equal to the price of giving up the access to instant knowledge available online. His conclusion: > At the end of the experiment, I wasn’t dying to get my phone back or to access Facebook. I just wanted to get back to being better informed. You’ll likely not be surprised at all to hear that I disagree with his…
Put the important things first, processing second. Or third or fourth. Whatevs.