Alan Jacobs shares why he likes writing his newsletter each week (emphasis mine): > Since I wrote that post I have started a newsletter, because a email newsletter is also a seasoned technology, and I wondered if I might be able to do some things with it that I can’t do with this blog. I’m still experimenting, still learning, still looking for what will make that project sing — but I am really enjoying it so far, and getting some lovely responses from people, and this morning I realized that on…
Good software is built by helping people do what they need better than they can currently. Adding new features does not necessarily have that result.
Matthias Ott is another person making a fresh plea for people to ditch social media and publishing platforms like Medium for a much more promising and healthy technology: > There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website. Hear, hear. Not only does he share why running your own site is good, but he takes it a further step an…
In the past, I’ve used Sketch a lot to illustrate concepts for my team, or create user journeys, or onboarding flows. Although it’s a full design tool for making mockups or full product designs, I found it also worked well for conceptual models. Here’s an example [https://wildbit.com/blog/2017/07/22/a-framework-for-creating-a-robust-onboarding-workflow] I made for showing the ideal user journey for a Beanstalk customer. Over the past couple of years, I haven’t needed to make this type of thin…
Matt Haughey shares some tips on how to use Slack in a manner more respectful of your team members. Things like: > Use emoji, bulleted lists, and bold and italic text styling to make your titles and key points stand out in longer messages. This is especially useful for announcements or meeting recaps. That applies to any kind of digital communication, but sure. However, the more I read the article, the more it made something obvious: Slack, and other instant chat tools like it, are not the best…
The Wildbit team focused on focus for the month of June. We went through the exercise of being super mindful of our time with the goal of getting in 4 very focused hours of work each day. Before we started, I spent some time tweaking RescueTime so that it would automatically show my overall productivity and how much focus time I was getting. As part of that process, I subscribed to their email newsletter and quite enjoyed some of the articles they referred to. This was one of them. In this pie…
It’s been one month since I turned my phone into a device that, for the most part, does not give me any new content. No email, no social media, no RSS, and not even any work communication. A few people have asked how it’s going. In a word, lovely. Absolutely lovely. Since iOS debuted Screen Time, our family has reviewed the numbers for anyone who owns a device (4 out of 6 of us). I’ve been tracking this since October and we mostly use it for talking about screen usage and addiction, not tellin…
I must confess that I’ve finally succumbed to the world of Fortnite. And I'm enjoying playing with my kids.