Sacha Greif wrote about side projects in his last newsletter [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/sacha-greif-newsletter], making some good points about the benefits of such things. He mentions that these side projects allow us to exercise creative muscle we might not otherwise get to and build up our resume. And I agree. He also defines a side project fairly broadly and recommends keeping them to 10 hours in duration, start to finish.The issue though, is this: for some, even 10 hours are hard to c…
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I find a strange dichotomy with the direction of iOS, and correspondingly, with OS X. The push for focus, for embracing the constraints of iOS, where you can only work in one application at a time, has been a welcome change for me. Having this direction partially come over to OS X has also been positive (I say partially because full screen mode doesn't stop me from swiping between spaces, but only slightly alters my perception of my work environment). The contradiction comes with the Notificati…
The web is the backbone of so much of what we do, the pipeline, but how we access it changes so quickly. The various services that make use of this pipeline offer us a myriad of choices to ‘plug in’, and it can be hard to find the right balance that enables us to partake, yet not be inundated. The intake Shawn Blanc recently posted an article comparing RSS and Twitter [http://shawnblanc.net/2011/06/rss-v-twitter/] that resonated with me. Through a series of good points, he illustrates how the n…
There was a chunk of time in my childhood — maybe as long as two years — where every kid at school was completely focused on marbles. Having first persuaded our parents to buy us each a large bag of them, the school yard was daily transformed into a huge marble tournament. I can't remember all the specifics of the games (dropsies rings a bell), but the overall sense of building a collection is still vivid. Every game in which you bested your opponent, you got to keep his or her marble. You save…
With this attempt to focus more on doing [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/in-search-of-depth/], it's helpful to first examine why so many people struggle with the constant desire to tinker with, tweak, or worst of all, completely change their productivity system. Whether this is a problem only for us technical folks or whether there are certain types of people with this tendency who exist across all industries and focuses, I'm not sure. But I am sure of this—it's a problem for me. And I'm not a…