I’ve got some annual leave time from work coming up. I’m not going away on a holiday. It’s going to be time spent at home supporting the family.
Despite there being a lack of travel and adventure tied to this leave, I still need to make sure I construct a plan for the time. I don’t want to get to the end of it and be confronted with a return to work, only to realise I’ve wasted my leave not doing much besides noodling around on the computer for no meaningful outcome.
A recent post from David Sparks about Intentionality aligns well with this thinking. I also like his idea of using a birthday as a personal annual review day. That’s clever. With my birthday being smack-bang in the middle of the year, it also can work as a half-year review.
Roald Dahlās books brought me hours of enjoyment when I was a child. There was little that could top the excitement of reading one of his books that would, of course, be illustrated by Quentin Blake. He created a world into which I could immerse myself, no matter how fantastical the setting might be.
Now, via Jason Kottke, I’ve had an opportunity to see, in the video embedded below, the environment in which Dahl worked, and to him him speak of the mindset needed to create such amazing works of fiction.
There are concepts arising in this video that have started to again be considered relevant in todayās modern world as being helpful in improving productivity and performance.
Highlights from this short clip include:
The need to immerse himself, for around 4 to 5 hours per day, in the work, and be away from other things. This reflects perfectly the concept of 'deep work' as recently brought into public consciousness by Cal Newport. It takes time, focus and the avoidance of distraction to reach a zone of high productivity. This place is rare in the modern workplace. Making time for extended periods of focus can represent a huge competitive advantage over the competition.
The simplicity of the tools. No computers, typewriters, productivity methods. Just paper, pencil, a basic desk and a thermos of tea. The tools don't make the work. They are, however, customised to his needs.
Our family recently travelled to Bali for a holiday break. It was a week of relaxation at the tail end of a year that has been pretty crazy, and a 2019 that we expect will be even more hectic.
When you travel with kids, conversations can move in varied and interesting directions. Our 7-year old boy took a particular interest in the toilets that were installed throughout the hotel we were staying. The brand ā TOTO ā is one seen all over the world, but less so in Australia. He was enthralled by the features: from automatic flushing with infrared sensors, to in-built bidets. Even the design of the loos was novel to him. He was fascinated. Next he realised that TOTO had also been responsible for the all of the tapware as well. Incredible!
As a responsible Dad, I kept the toilet banter going, egging him on to explain to me further what he loved about them. I tried to add some interesting educational angles as well. I suggested that as a Japanese company, TOTO probably took great care in their manufacturing processes. I explained how Japan was the cradle of modern manufacturing methods, and how the Toyota Production System changed the world. I’m not sure he bought into my lesson on lean thinking, though. I will have to try again in the future.
Over the length of our stay, our conversations escalated to the point where I suggested we contact TOTO directly to let them know what great work they were doing with their toilet design. He took to that idea! So we did it. My son wrote an email to TOTO Customer Service, noting how impressed he was with their toilets, and expressing his desire to have them installed in our house as well.
I figured that would be the end of it. I didn’t expect to hear back, or if we did, I assumed it would be a boilerplate response. After a few days, we did in fact receive a reply, and it was a wonderful, personal email from TOTOās Senior Manager of Customer Service. In the email, she expressed gratitude for my son’s kind words, and also offered to send him some tokens of appreciation if we could provide our mailing details.
We replied, and for fun, included a photo of David and I enjoying ourselves in Bali.
A few more conversational emails bounced back and forth between TOTO and ourselves, and they asked if we could send a photo of David with his items once they arrived.
Within the next few week, we received an express mailed package from TOTO in Atlanta, to us in Perth, Australia. Just this concept alone was enough to blow my sonās mind. As promised, we sent another photo back with David holding onto the gifts he had been sent, and this was acknowledged by TOTO with thanks.
I see two key lessons in all of this:
Always embrace crazy conversations with your kids. Theyāre fun, and you never know where they might end up.
Genuine customer service ā not selling ā is the key to building great brand equity. I might never buy a TOTO toilet. My son might never buy a TOTO toilet. But I think both of us will be TOTO brand ambassadors from this point forward. Not because we were sent some trinkets, but because we had a genuine human interaction. We connected with a person who was obviously engaged enough in their own job to engage positively with us. If that employee is happy, then the company must have something going for it, and thatās the kind of company I want to see succeed.
From a business perspective, customer service shouldnāt be about hitting sales targets or avoiding bad press. It should be about working to have people care about your brand.
So thanks TOTO, for bringing fun and joy to me and my sonās lives, and for making sure this particular Bali holiday will have a very strange and unique anchor memory.
I believe personal finance should be a core subject taught to our children at school. We should teach how to manage and budget money, the concepts of savings and compound interest, and the risks of credit and deferred payment. Finance and money management education should be threaded through each year of schooling. I think it would offer more practical value - and a better return on investment - than some of the traditional subjects taught.
An opinion piece in The Age by Liora Miller, āIs PayPass the enemy of the young?ā reflects on some of the risks of tap and go payments, especially for young people.
Australian Tax Office research this year reveals that only one in five Australians still prefer using cash for purchases.
Last week I bought lunch from a sandwich shop. I paid with cash. The look of surprise on the serverās face was clear; to the point where we both made a joke about the rarity of somebody paying with āreal moneyā as opposed to PayPass tap and go. In Australia, tap and go is essentially the default.
Cash use in Australia has fallen by a third in a period of six years.
Thatās about how long tap and go transactions have been available, and I would think the next third of cash usage will decline more rapidly than another six years.
When I use tap and go, I take the extra step of entering the transaction into YNAB on my phone. YNABās direct bank import features donāt work with Australian banks but I consider that a feature because entering each transaction keeps me connected to my money and my budget. I recognise, however, that Iām an outlier. Most people are not taking a similar extra step - itās spend and forget.
A cashless society in the near future appears to be an inevitability. We need to focus on ensuring young people understand the implications of deferred payment.
This is the key point of the article, but unfortunately, Miller fails to suggest how this might happen. This brings us back to my initial premise: that we as a society need to get serious about financial literacy.
I am Treasurer and Director of Midlas, a not-for-profit organisation that offers financial counselling as one of its key community support services. The government provides funding support to enable Midlas to offer this service. Yet demand is outpacing supply, and this is a common refrain across all the providers of financial counselling.
As great as it is that government provides financial support to assist organisations such as Midlas help people in financial stress, the policy settings are wrong. Just like medicine, where spending on prevention is cheaper and more effective than spending on a cure, spending on financial education would be more effective and deliver greater good than spending on help after the damage is done. Avoiding financial stress would lessen the prevalence of issues that often stem from financial stress, such as illness and poor mental health, relationship damage, homelessness, and drug and alcohol abuse. Not only would this benefit the individual but it would help broader society who share the negative impact of these societal problems.
Through us, the government needs to get serious about teaching our kids about personal finance and money management. The growth of tap and go is a lead indicator of a problem that may come to bite us in years to come. We should act before personal indebtedness becomes a national plague.
It was recently reported and brought to my attention that Elon Musk had issued a memo to the staff of Tesla. Iām no Musk acolyte, but within his commentary there can be found some good stuff. Within this particular memo Musk highlighted a number of productivity boosting tips. One tip jumped out at me because it is aligned with how I explain to my customers the way I aim to deliver the Business Evaluation service of the Entrepreneursā Programme. This is fundamental to how I work to be respectful of their time commitment.
Elon Musk was reported as writing:
Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get rid of all large meetings, unless youāre certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.
The aim of my engagement with my customers is not to prove myself, or the worth of the service, by hanging around for hours and hours on end. If something can be achieved in two hours rather than four, then itās bad business to take the four hours. If the work needs four hours, then I will commit that time. I wonāt commit six.
What I say to my customers is that I want to stay with them for as long as I am delivering genuine value that is over and above the time, effort and person-hours they are committing to the process. Once I see the value they are receiving is tapering off, then I will wrap things up. The last thing I want to do is overstay my welcome, using up their time when they could be doing something else that could contribute more to their business success.
Just as Musk implored his staff to keep meetings short, so I remind and encourage myself to only use as much time is necessary ā and no more.
I lean heavily on my diary to plan ahead, guide me through my days, and establish a rhythm to my life. The type of work I do has a tendency to drift towards haphazard if not controlled, so a calendar helps me establish and maintain order.
The problem Iāve faced in more recent times is having an overabundance of calendars I need to refer to before being able to commit to something. In simpler times, if I had a gap between 9am and 5pm, it was available to be taken up by a meeting. With the added complexity of kids and a wife who has an even more complex and random schedule than my own, things have reached a point where I need to check about 5 different calendars before I could confirm if I actually had availability for a meeting, irrespective of whether there was a gap in my calendar.
This year I made a personal pact to get better at managing this uncertainty. Iāve considered how I could build a system that works better for me and my family, while maintaining flexibility for my clients. Many of the methods Iāve adopted are not new ideas; in fact, some are a blast to the past when people used paper day-runners and had a personal assistant (secretary?) who would prepare things on their behalf. Alas, I have neither of those, so I have leveraged my skills in process design and automation.
Following is an outline of my diary management workflow as it has developed to date. It remains a work in progress and I expect it will continue to change.
Structure
I started by establishing clear and non-negotiable days for which I was available for visiting and meeting with clients. I refer to these as āExternalā days. The remaining days were locked in as days to spent at the office - my āInternalā days. These days are consistent every week, to help with that rhythm.
When visiting clients a lot of time is lost in transit. By collating these visits into a fewer number of days, I reduce my transit downtime, and have the opportunity to fill those days more effectively.
My āInternalā days facilitate getting into a flow state more often because they arenāt broken up by meetings and appointments. Again, a more productive outcome.
My next area of improvement was in the way I was booking the meetings with clients on my āExternalā days. I had been spending too much time and effort bouncing emails back and forth, doing the āavailability exchangeā - trying to find a time that works for me and them. I needed to find a better way that was efficient but respected the impact of items on my other calendars.
I started with a trial of Calendly. This cloud-based service provides a method for people to book a meeting time that is subject to the parameters I set. Calendly was good, but had its drawbacks. I use FastMail for email/calendars/contacts and it uses standards-compliant IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV protocols. Unfortunately, Calendly wants to only work well with Office 365/GSuite/iCloud. My employer provides me with an Office 365 account so I could still make use of the service, but it meant that I had to remember to replicate my Fastmail calendars to Office 365. It worked, but it never felt simple and seamless.
Enter, WhenWorks. After trialling this for just a couple of weeks, I have purchased an annual subscription. WhenWorks is fundamentally an iOS app that is supported by a cloud-based booking platform. By running on my device it improves on Calendly because it can access all my calendars, irrespective of what platform they reside upon. WhenWorks can take into consideration the impact of every single calendar when making times available for others to book.
WhenWorks is simply brilliant. It looks great and offers a full range of options without being overwhelming. Most importantly, my clients have used it without any problems whatsoever.
Automation - TextExpander
For the first half of this year I have been using saved email templates in Cloze to correspond with clients and ask them to select a meeting time using my Calendly service.
Now with my change to WhenWorks, Iām moving away from Cloze and back to using TextExpander to send email using Mail.app instead. With TextExpander I can make a few choices upon snippet execution that lets me customise a boilerplate email. This way the email the client receives is quickly and efficiently tailored to the type of meeting we will have, and will prompt them to schedule a meeting using the appropriate WhenWorks meeting template relevant to that meeting type.
The last step is incredibly low-tech, but has made a profound difference to my state of mind at the beginning of each day. It is not a new approach. It is common sense. It is simple. But it requires discipline.
I have set a daily repeating task in OmniFocus that commences at 4pm and is due at 5pm, prompting me to prepare for my next dayās meetings. Thatās it; a simple prompt.
This prompt, however, ensures I remember to gather the various documents, information and whatever else I need to have ready to be successful for the events of the next day. Sometimes this process takes 2 minutes, sometimes the full hour.
Since doing this, Iāve found I donāt have stress the next morning, suddenly realising that Iāve got a meeting first thing that I have not prepared for. It creates a calm state of mind for the evening, knowing that Iām ready for the next day. It enables my mind to cogitate on what I have coming up, such that when events unfold I find myself better prepared and ready to roll than I otherwise would have been.
Final Thoughts
Each of these elements is fairly straightforward in and of themselves. Bringing them all together, though, has improved my flow, and has largely resolved the problem of double-booking and calendar mixups.
Of course this stuff is never done, and it will change with workload and circumstance. For now, however, I feel like it has gotten me closer to the concept of āmind like waterā than I was previously.
Itās very easy to spend time focusing on work. It has a tangible reward - income! It provides an emotional response - we might love it or hate it (or even just feel meh about it). And, for many, it defines who we are.1
Iāve been taking stock, and have realised that I need to add some more variety to my days. I do my work, I look after my kids, and despite us sometimes being ships passing in the night, I share time with my wife. What has gone missing though, is a third interest. What else can I do? How else can I bring some interest, variety and further meaning to my life?
I donāt want to be passing time here on our earth, responsibly moving projects and tasks forward without having some fun and spontaneity along the way.
Itās clear what my answer must be - I need to find some hobbies!
Ideally, these hobbies will stretch me out of my comfort zone. While I have always been enjoyed technology and basketball, I should move outside these domains to see if I can find something else that is fun and different.
Iāve drafted a list of ideas, with ideas ranging from board games to cooking. I plan on experimenting across a range of areas to see if anything grabs me. And because you canāt manage what you donāt measure, I will try to keep a journal in Day One to track any major hobby events and record my thoughts and impressions of things I try.
I hope I find a new and interesting activity to engage with, but even if I donāt, it will be an interesting life experiment.
This concept of work defining who we are is particularly weird. The work we produce is a product, not a state of being. By defining ourselves by our work we are limiting our potential. The work we do should be a combined result of our skills, traits and personality. The work is achieved because of who we are; it is not who we are.
Some days the work just flows. Tasks feels easy, decisions are made, words transfer from the brain to the keyboard with nary a pause; and engaging with people makes you realise the world is full of interesting characters.
These days of flow are generally few and far between. We structure our days such that we have no breathing room. Alternatively, we donāt structure anything and drift through without a clear and achievable goal in mind. If we can happen to find the Goldilocks Zone between those two extremes, and establish a mindset that is engaged yet relaxed, well, I think thatās where the magic happens.
Most days, of course, the work doesnāt flow. Things are a grind and stuff fails to work out as intended.
So the days where flow occurs; embrace it, because thereās no guarantee it will be back tomorrow. Get the most out of this rare and elusive asset!
I joined both Facebook and Twitter many years ago, when they were technical ideas, as opposed to advertising machines driven by algorithms.
Part of the reason for joining in the first place was for me to reserve my namespace. Just like gold rushes of old, itās always important to claim your username before somebody else jumps in before you and puts their stake in the ground. While Twitter and Facebook took off, I also had my namespaces at long-forgotten sites like Pownce, Myspace and Technorati.
The Halcyon Days
Over the following years, my engagement with Twitter and Facebook increased. Facebook was great for retaining connections with people I knew IRL while on Twitter I built a list of followers that I didnāt know, but whose insights and commentary I enjoyed. This ultimately revolved around my two greatest hobbies: basketball and the Apple IT ecosystem. From around 2011-2015 really were the salad days of these two services.
The problem for them (not me), however, was that I wasnāt paying the bills. Nor were any of the other users. We know how this story goes. As per the trope, if youāre not the customer, youāre the product. There was a realisation that I was certainly the product - being sold as advertising fodder by these services that needed revenue to keep the lights on, and investors invested.1
Addiction
Over time, these services added dopamine to my day. The nefarious social engineering tweaks they built to maintain my engagement were difficult to defeat. Likes, comments, shares, retweets. All these things built in a way that tries to make you feel like you are valued by your audience, but which are all just further measures to build an advertising profile of each of their human products. But it kept me coming back.
My usage continued to grow until a series of events made me question what the hell I was doing. Firstly, most of the Facebook people I realised I either saw in real life ā which was much more satisfying ā or I never saw them, and didnāt have space in my life to genuinely care about them. The algorithm would occasionally surface them to my feed, then they would bubble down again to be forgotten. On Twitter, there was growing awareness (and evidence) of the hate, vitriol, bile and mistreatment of people, both inside and outside my personal feed.
Downfall
As the services became politicised, they became weaponised. Intolerance grew, they became echo chambers, and the value of what was being expressed was minimised. From link bait to listicles and lame videos, both services were serving up nothing but empty calories. I realised that I was using my most valuable resource ā my time ā on two services that were giving me nothing back in return for my investment.
Hence, the decision to withdraw my namespace claims. I have deactivated Facebook. I have deleted Twitter.
Reversion
What is great is that I donāt feel I have lost anything. I feel just as informed, and I actually feel calmer. I donāt have this buzz in the back of my brain, like an itch I canāt scratch, knowing that I need to check my feeds. It has freed up the time to do more productive things. Iāve been reading actual books again. I have watched TV shows and movies with full focus.
Itās been great to have more free time to invest in activities that provide mental nourishment, rather than the fast food diet I had become used to with social media. Ironically, I think I had it more right 10 years ago, before the age of social media, where this is exactly what I would do. I would read, learn, converse. I didnāt like, share and tweet. But I think, on balance, I was all the better for it. Iām enjoying this rebalancing Iām going through now, and I hope that it continues.
If you want evidence of just how much you are the customer, be sure to download the document from Twitter that shows just what information they have on you, and how you are linked with a range of brands and services for marketing towards. Itās kind of chilling. ↩
A few months ago I stopped using Facebook. I deactivated my account, deleted the Facebook apps from my iOS devices, and went cold-turkey. I have subsequently had to reactivate my account because of the need to engage with some groups that exist only on Facebook, but I continue to ignore my timeline.
It has been a great change for the better. Facebook adds a huge weight of nothing. Itās empty calories. It uses up time that could be better spent elsewhere. I havenāt missed any news; I donāt feel less engaged with the world. To the contrary, actually. I feel more engaged. I donāt crave the little dopamine hits of likes and comments. Iām still writing and recording aspects of my life, but now they are feeding content that I own, whether itās on my own microblog, or in my Day One journal, or (heaven forbid) through one-on-one conversations.
It surprised me just how easily I was able to ākick the habitā of using Facebook. I thought I would miss it. As if to emphasise just how hollow the platform is, Iāve not had any of my myriad followers reach out to check if Iām still alive since my departure! That point highlights the disconnected connectedness Facebook promotes. Sure, you ālikeā somebodyās post, but do you remember it 30 seconds later? Would you notice if it were not there? The evidence would suggest not, and that spot in the timeline would just be filled by something else.
If I could dump the Facebook platform entirely I would. As it is, I will use it as little as possible, and only as required for specific functional tasks. I am not willing to gift my attention to Facebook, for it to leverage into profit. My hours on this planet are too valuable to give you them for free.
If I have the option to communicate through text or voice, Iām choosing text every time.
I donāt love writing; itās not a passion. Iām more happy working with numbers, to be honest. What I am definitely not, though, is a talker.
In writing, I feel that I can more eloquently express my views. In conversation I never quite feel as agile, by comparison. It takes a lot of focus to think on my feet and maintain the flow. Add to that, the little voice in my head that is always there in the background, questioning whether the person Iām talking to is listening, if they care at all, or are they bored out of their brain. Talking comes with pressure!
When I write, however, it comes out much more formally than when I speak. I struggle to achieve a relaxed tone in my writing (as this article may attest!). I also have no indication as to whether my words have ever been read ā conversations donāt have that issue.
Ironically, so much of my work relies directly on my ability to have conversations with clients. There is a discerning factor, though. In these instances, I prefer to consider myself an empathic listener and interpreter. The more I listen, the more I can understand. If Iām talking, Iām not getting to the root of the issues and concerns of the firms I am trying to help. Sure, I will add some value through some suggestions, ideas and stories, but that tends to come more easily.
Then I go away and write some outcomes and actions!
Podcasting
Podcasting has definitely gone mainstream now. There is nothing in technology more reliant on voice and speaking than podcasting. Blogging Iām comfortable with - itās writing. Podcasting? I have been a happy listener for years, but have never been a producer.
A new version of the app Anchor has been released for iOS and Android. The app has had a pivot with its focus now being the generation of short, simple podcasts. Iāve downloaded it, but havenāt yet had a play. I will probably try recording a few podcasts, but I have strong doubts that any of my efforts would be any good.
I really donāt like the sound of my own voice. I feel bad for people who have to listen to it normally, so to record myself and have to listen to my own voice in an extended recording is confronting in the extreme. Iām also not sure that I could maintain a coherent and interesting structure while speaking. Writing is different. You can plan, outline, edit, rewrite. Voice recording requires a lot more editing effort to achieve the same, and Iām no audio engineer.
I donāt own any professional podcasting equipment. I donāt have a good mic. If I started a podcast it would be rudimentary at best. Then again, that makes me sound like the target market for Anchor.
Finally, but probably foremost, there is the issue of content. What to talk about? What to say? Why would anybody bother to listen?1
So I may, or may not, trial a podcast. I might record it, hate the result and delete it. Or it may turn out okay and I might share it to my blog. Who knows? I donāt know!
To be fair, all these questions could just as easily be levelled at this blog, but here I am, typing away. ↩
I am always searching for the perfect notes app, and the best way to integrate that into my workflow. Iām not sure I have found the former and I havenāt achieved the latter, but I keep trying. Itās ultimately a Sisyphean task, because thereās always another note taking app just around the corner which will constitute a new way of working with it. Nevertheless, I try.
With our proliferation of devices itās no longer enough to have a decent desktop-based notetaking process. Access needs to be ubiquitous, and that means cloud sync. While a few years ago that would limit the candidates significantly, nowadays sync is the price of entry. When the iPhone arose and syncing was hard, the best option was Simplenote. This app used its own sync engine to provide lightning fast sync. I had a large number of notes in Simplenote, but it was convoluted getting them on my Mac, which required Dropbox and NVAlt - an app which I love the concept of but it never really grew on me.
Nowadays there are an abundance of options, such as Apple Notes, OneNote, Notability, OmniOutliner, and the list goes on. The problem with this is fragmentation. Taking notes is one thing, finding them again later is quite another. If I donāt have all my notes in one location, they may as well be lost. Plus that location needs to be available wherever I am and whatever device I have to hand. Spotlight search is useful, but I want to know where that note is, and I donāt want to have to trawl through search results to find it.
For the moment I have settled on Bear for notes. It syncs reliably across iOS and macOS, it supports Markdown syntax and can export into a variety of formats. It also looks really pretty.
Despite my use of Bear, I havenāt totally solved the fragmentation problem. I continue to use Goodnotes for handwritten notes taken with my Apple Pencil, DEVONThink Pro for reference material, and Ulysses for long-form writing. So stuff remains scattered.
Life can get overwhelming. Work to do, dinners to cook, kids to care for, relationships to tend. Trying to do it all can be fatiguing. I have found this to be particularly true over this current long school holiday break, where the presence of children and their needs are incessant, but the other parts of life still need to be managed.
Trying to balance it all is not easy, and I donāt believe there is any magic bullet that will solve it all. There are only ever going to be 24 hours in a day. So I think the best response to the pressure comes down to 3 main things1:
Scheduling: maximising the efficient use of time.
Accepting: thereās no such thing as perfection.
Breathing: maintaining mental health through awareness of the bigger picture.
Scheduling
Planning and scheduling can ease the mental burden. By making an agreement with yourself to do certain things at specified times there is clear evidence that time is being utilised to effect and things are getting done. At these times there is no need to worry about all the other things that arenāt getting done in the moment because at least you are doing something.
Personally this year I am trying to improve the structure of my scheduling. I am establishing days as either internal or external. Internal days are dedicated to working on the tasks I have recorded in OmniFocus, following the general Getting Things Done approach to task management. I will also use this time for internal meetings, planning and the like. External days will be available for me to get out on the road, visiting clients, following up business development opportunities, and networking.
I have taken my management of External days one step further by setting up a Calendly account. This service allows me to permit clients to book meetings with me directly, subject to my availability. Calendly knows the days I have set as External, and it knows when the slots I have made available are taken up, preventing them from being double-booked. Much time and effort was wasted last year mucking about with the to and fro of trying to coordinate meeting dates, so I hope this more automated approach will ease the burden.
Accepting
I am the type of person that wants everything to go just as according to plan. Of course, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. I have to accept the foibles of humanity and roll with the punches when things donāt go the way I wanted.
This is why planning methodology has moved away from āwaterfallā to āagileā ā because nothing works as intended, so change the plan rather than pretending that perfection is about to occur.
Breathing
In the chase for productivity at the micro-level, it is easy to lose context. Really, in the grand scheme of things, itās highly likely that none of what we are doing actually matters that much. Now, this is not me promoting nihilism, because what we do does matter to those in our circles. What I am saying is that there are going to be few times where there is not sufficient slack in the timeline to pause; to take a time-out. In this moment, breathe.
Go outside, take a walk, talk to a friend, pray, meditate ā just do something different and unrelated to the task. Taking a break will freshen the mind and offer an opportunity to perceive that larger context. The thing that was causing stress may suddenly not seem quite so significant afterwards.
Ultimately, having a sound and stable mind will allow a focus on scheduling and facilitate acceptance of what can and cannot be achieved. Itās a virtuous circle.
Because any good list worth itās salt has 3 things. Not 2, not 4. Three. ↩
For months my home WiFi has been less than satisfactory. Dropouts, slow connections, complete failures to connect, router reboots required, and so on.
I have a slightly more complicated than average setup but itās nothing so extreme that I should have had such annoying problems. I donāt live in an area with a lot of competition for WiFi spectrum and my hardware is all of the non-cheap variety.
I have tried different configurations from using my ISP provided D-Link DVA-2800 (the worst modem/router I have used in my life) as a single WiFi router, then in conjunction with the device I have used constantly for a number of years ā my Airport Extreme ac (the tower one). I have variously extended this with an Ethernet backhaul to a second, older Apple Time Capsule (the one that looks like a Mac Mini) and I have tried an approach where the D-Link has operated in bridge mode with the Airports acting as the router.
No approach has been that great, and none have solved the problems I outlined earlier.
My pain points
The constant problems I faced with all of these different approaches were:
poor coverage, with 5GHz only working within a small radius, and failing coverage entirely at the extremities of my house and garden.
failure of devices to roam across two routers with the same SSID. This is a known problem with consumer grade WiFi that doesnāt offer intelligent roaming. My devices would hang on to a weak signal from one access point as opposed to switching over to a closer, stronger point. This problem was especially noticeable with MacBooks.
slow initial connections (again mainly with MacBooks) as they searched and connected to the best available signal. I have a feeling there is a software bug in there somewhere as well, because toggling WiFi off/on on the laptops would often then result in a speedy connection.
general frustrations with setting up. The D-Link interface is an abomination. The Airport software is much better, but it always seemed to take a bunch of clicks to get anywhere, and as with a lot of Apple stuff, it was short on diagnostics.
Given all these problems, I decided it was time for a change. Many of the podcasts I listen to feature ads for the Eero mesh WiFi product. This advertising is useless to me as far as selling me their product because they don’t retail in Australia. It did, however, get me interested in the idea of a mesh network, and helped push me into the arms of Eeroās competitor1.
In Australia, the best option seemed to be the Google Wifi 3-pack. I pulled out my wallet and bought a pack for AU$399. Not cheap but my hope was that lowering my blood pressure with less frustration made it a good investment.
Setting it up
In my case, the setup was not quite as simple as Google makes it out to be. This may be my own fault, because I probably overthink things, to be honest. I knew I still needed a router to transfer my NBN Fibre-to-the-Node (and then copper to the house) connection. This meant I had to keep my horrible D-Link to act as the modem. With my Apple Airport, I had the D-Link set to bridge mode and the Airport took on the task of the primary router and DHCP server. This obviated the need to ever deal with the D-Link software.
I went with this same setup with Google Wifi, but no success. It couldnāt establish a connection to my ISP through DHCP, as required.
To resolve this problem, I had to go back to my D-Link and take it out of bridge mode. I had to have it act as both a modem and a router (but disable its WiFi) and have it farm an IP address to the primary Google Wifi point. This is frustrating because it creates a ādouble-NATā situation that seems unavoidable. Two devices, both creating a pool of IP addresses. The Airport wins here, as it was able to manage the DHCP connection with my ISP just fine.
Up and running
So now with this configuration my D-Link establishes the Internet connection while Google Wifi manages the internal WiFi and ethernet network. From this point it was smooth sailing. The Google Wifi app is quite good, apart from feeling very out of place on iOS due to its Android Material design aesthetic. Itās also weird to have to rely on a mobile app with no way of accessing the Wifi units through a computer. Finally, no iPad app - just a scaled iPhone app. Come on, Google, you can do better than that. While the Airport Utility looked prettier, Google Wifi gave me more control.
The network quality that Google Wifi delivers is excellent. Iāve been able to use ethernet to create a wired backhaul to the second device that sits near our TV, and I have some strategically placed switches to extend my ethernet network for fixed devices. That each Google point only has a single ethernet jack is a little disappointing, but not really surprising given the typical home market it is aiming at. I have the third device in my bedroom. This one is not using Ethernet backhaul, but leverages the āmeshā approach that is the whole point of the system anyway.
Since installation the WiFi throughout (and outside) the house has been fast and flawless. I am mostly able to connect to a 5GHz ac signal and roaming happens silently and easily. I donāt notice connections slowing down or failing. Whenever and wherever I open a MacBook it establishes an instant connection, whereas it used to take ages and would still sometimes fail.
Netspot results
A Netspot signal-to-noise quality comparison may indicate I havenāt experienced much change in overall signal quality with the change to Google Wifi, other than the Google Wifi result perhaps being a little āsmootherā and without a single hotspot near the router.
But itās the lack of problems with handoffs and roaming that are the real story here. That and the fact that I can more often use a 5GHz ac connection that was previously limited to inside my study.
[caption id=“attachment_404” align=“alignnone” width=“2007”] Signal to noise heatmap with two Apple Airports[/caption]
[caption id=“attachment_405” align=“alignnone” width=“1642”] Signal to noise heatmap with Google Wifi[/caption]
You will have to excuse my variation in measuring points - this was not an entirely scientific method.
Conclusion
Overall, Iām happy with the purchase. Once I got everything set up and working correctly itās been a hassle-free experience. The initial experience, though, was sketchy.
Iād love to know if anybody has had success having a Google Wifi setup connect to an NBN connection directly through a bridged modem like my Apple Airport could. While it isnāt really a problem, the knowledge that I have a non-optimal configuration with two NAT devices operating is annoying to me.
Would I recommend this product to others? Yes, absolutely. I also think that most other people would have a much more successful plug and play experience than me. This is the curse of the tinkerer.
An unintended consequence, I would imagine. Podcasts are global, so if you are going to advertise on them, maybe consider having a global approach to retail. ↩
With a hat tip to Gabe Weatherhead at MacDrifter who put together his list of favourite Mac applications for 2017, I am following suit.
Third party apps are what make a platform great. Despite the macOS ecosystem perhaps not being as vibrant as it once was, it is still served by a wonderful cohort of professional and hard-working developers. Even though Iāve bought their apps, I sometimes feel I owe them more because using their software is what makes using my Mac both fun and productive.
Thereās a long tail of apps I use beyond those included in this list. Yet these I have detailed below are those I used extensively in 2017 and that I value and enjoy. These are the apps that I would most miss if they suddenly went away.
1Password for Families
Online security is no joke. Itās easy to dismiss password hygiene as tin-foil hat material, but when you think how much of our lives are conducted online, I donāt want a veneer of security ā I want an ironclad guarantee. 1Password guarantees I can have unique complex passwords for every site that I maintain an account. I have no idea what any of these passwords are. But I do know my password to unlock 1Password. After that, itās nothing but ā-\ to long me in anywhere.
Iāve waxed lyrical about OmniFocus before. Without this app there is no way I would be able to keep all my balls in the air. As much as parts of its design frustrate me, and the pace of its development is glacial, it works. Every day it delivers value by making my life easier. There are sexier to-do apps out there, but OmniFocus is rock solid.
My wife doesnāt have Launchbar installed on her MacBook. So when I try to use it, I feel lost. After years of use Launchbar feels an extension of the operating system and is completely engrained in my muscle memory. I switched to Launchbar years ago after Quicksilver became unstable and Iāve stayed ever since. I know others swear by Alfred, but Iām definitely a Launchbar guy.
I love this app even though I do have to work hard to find a truly worthwhile use for it. I definitely underuse Bear, but I really like it. For the emotional response, Iām keeping it in my list. But there is still a nagging feeling that between Apple Notes, Ulysses and DevonThink Pro, I really shouldnāt need this app. But it is really nice.
My key authoring application in which I write blog posts, work reports and other bits and pieces. For report writing as part of my day job Ulysses has this year supplanted Scrivener. For my blogging, Ulysses has withstood challenges from Bear and MarsEdit. It is a wonderful writing app and I enjoy that I have access to it through my Setapp subscription. If I didnāt have Setapp, I would subscribe to Ulysses directly without a momentās hesitation.
The archive. The place I keep all my reference, research and archival material. I donāt use it for all that it can do; for instance I donāt create documents in DEVONthink despite it having the ability to do so. But for archiving, storing and searching, nothing beats it.
This is a cross-platform Java app, so itās ugly as sin. Itās also about the only share market application available for Mac. Fortunately it works well and gives me all the information I need to track my portfolio.
I have never given up on RSS, even through the dark days after the Google Reader shutdown. I love the independent web and follow a range of sites religiously. On the Mac Reeder is the best way to do this.
PDF Expert has replaced Preview for PDF viewing and editing. Previewās editing toolbars have always been inscrutable to me whereas PDF Expert makes sense. The bugginess that was introduced to the PDF engine in MacOS Sierra was the final nail in the coffin and ensured my switch to PDF Expert.
While the native Mac calendar app has improved, I still prefer having more power and flexibility to manage my calendars. While Fantastical always gets the glory as the sexy third party calendar option, BusyCal blends in and does the job quietly and effectively. I use this app daily. Its ability to save and restore different calendar sets give me helpful insights into my scheduled life.
I am writing this post in MarsEdit. MarsEdit is an app that I have alwaysĀ wanted to use, but never really have found a place for it. Now, with the new version released I thought Iād download it and give it a spin as part of the 14-day trial developer Daniel Jakult offers.
Recently I have been writing blog entries in Ulysses, which is great in that it uses iCloud for syncing and has clients for the Mac and iOS. So writing can be done anywhere. It also has a Wordpress publishing engine so I donāt need to mess around to get my words on the web. Finally, Ulysses uses a flavour of Markdown which I am becoming much more proficient in using. Of course, I also already have a licence for Ulysses as part of my Setapp subscription.
MarsEdit is a much more traditional blogging platform. It defaults to rich text, it is Mac only, and it is more āfeature richā than Ulysses. It offers a two-way connection to Wordpress, meaning it can download an archive blog posts in addition to simply publishing which is the limit of the Ulysses offering. With my current workflow, if I need to make an edit to a published post I have to go to Wordpress on the web and make the change. From that point on, my local copy on Ulysses is out of date; there is no concept of syncing - it just publishes. MarsEdit is fully sync-compliant so I can fix those pesky mistakes and maintain a single source of truth.
I do wish it had an iOS application, though. I imagine its code base is too entrenched in the Mac world to easily transition it to iOS, but it would be great to have a synced solution. This is where Ulysses excels - I can pick up the writing from where I left off from any device.
The other thing is typing in rich text. While ānormalā people prefer this (think users of Microsoft Word, which is rich text throughout) for blogging I do tend to prefer using plain text and Markdown. The code is apparent, I know what is happening, and it is easy to read. My experience with rich text transitions to HTML is that things go wonky. Of course, MarsEdit can edit in plain text and apply a Markdown filter, but it doesnāt seem like its natural mode of operation.
As I write this, I have been stumped as to how to add a footnote without resorting to pure HTML. In Ulysses with Markdown, this is an easy thing to do. In MarsEdit, itās not apparent.
Using MarsEdit for this post has been an interesting adventure, but at this stage and for the type of blogging I do, I donāt think this app is for me.
I listen to a lot of podcasts. Iāve been listening to podcasts for more than 10 years, way before they were mainstream. I used to load podcasts onto my work-supplied IBM ThinkPad1 and drive to work with it open on the passenger seat, playing podcasts. This was before I owned an iPod, let alone an iPhone. I think I may have been listening to Adam Curry at the time - there werenāt that many podcasts out there, and his was one of the first.
Since that time, Iāve never given up my podcasts habit. In fact, itās gotten worse. Overcast, my current podcast player of choice says that Iāve saved 197 hours with Smart Speed (a setting that eliminates small pauses within normal speech). Thatās 8.2 days saved via a very small tweak. So how many days worth of my life have I dedicated to podcast listening? I am glad I canāt find out!
My podcast listening trends have changed over the years. I had a multi-year phase with Leo Laporteās network, listening to MacBreak Weekly, The Daily Giz Wiz and This Week in Tech. Now I donāt listen to any of them. The āindiā podcasts I replaced the Laporte shows with have now themselves grown to be pretty big businesses in their own right.
Listening to podcasts is really a continuation of something I have done since I was little. Since I was about 5 years old I have fallen asleep listening to spoken word. Initially it was books on tape. Then I spent years listening to Graham Mayberryās show on Perth local radio. Then I graduated to falling asleep to BBC World Service. Listening to speech has been a huge part of my life, and now podcasts provide an awesome delivery method far better than radio or cassette tape!
My subscriptions today
My podcast subscriptions today are a straight representation of my interests. I have a lot of technology subscriptions, a few basketball ones, politics and world news and some light entertainment. Looking at the overall list, Iām not sure how I manage to listen to them all. But I carve out time. Mainly itās when Iām driving or doing some menial task around the house.
On micro.blog I saw recently that others had shared their podcast lists, including:
In Depth - Trialling this one, a couple of dudes talking Apple technology.
Mac Power Users - Not quite sure why I still persist with this; I never learn anything new and Katie Floydās really strong US accent is a struggle to listen to, but I havenāt unsubscribed yet.
Nerds on Draft - I skip the bit where they talk American beer, but I stay for the interesting take on technology. Is it just me who thinks that Gabe Weatherhead sounds like Kermit the Frog (no offence intended!)?
The Omni Show - Not sure this will stick around, as it is a podcast talking to employees at The Omni Group.
Release Notes - Two software developers talk about the business of software.
The Talk Show - John Gruber talks about Apple and other things.
Welcome to Macintosh - a produced podcast that details interesting historical facts about the Apple ecosystem.
Reply All - Some great journalism occurs here, covering the world of internet culture.
Revisionist History - Malcolm Gladwell delves into historical episodes and challenges assumptions.
The Unmade Podcast - A funny show featuring crazy ideas for podcasts that never get made.
You Need A Budget - A short one to keep me abreast of whatās going on the world of the SaaS app, You Need a Budget.
Sports
Aussie Hoopla - Features interviews with Australian basketballers.
The Bill Simmons Podcast - Not as good as it was years ago, as it has become too āHollywoodā focused for my liking. I used to love it for the sports coverage.
The Dribble Podcast - My local news outlet has a weekly show with Greg Hire, a player for my team, the Perth Wildcats.
Ozhoops Radio - a rundown of results in the National Basketball League.
The Ringer NBA Show - A very annoying show with annoying hosts, but there is the occasional bit of good coverage.
Yes, an IBM Thinkpad - even before Lenovo bought the brand and IBM got out of the hardware game. It was a long time ago. ↩
A few months ago I was unfortunate enough to contract Glandular fever and I am still suffering the effects of it now. The virus started out as what appeared to be the flu, but after I couldnāt shake the feeling of fatigue and general malaise for weeks after the flu symptoms ended I decided to go the doctor. Subsequent blood tests confirmed the glandular fever diagnosis. Normally this is a virus associated more with teenagers, so I am surprised to have contracted it at the ripe old age of 40.
The impact this illness has had on my ability to work effectively has been significant. Beyond the physical problems it has been a struggle to establish mental focus and remain concentrated on a task. I have had periods of forgetfulness and an incoherent mind. Making this worse from a working perspective is that there are not any external symptoms of the problem. This can make it hard for others to appreciate the truth that I am struggling to function. In a consulting environment, it becomes hard to step away from work when there arenāt any visible health problems.
Managing customer expectations
The client-focused consulting work that I do is not particularly conducive to long periods of leave linked to sickness. My work is a conduit for the success of other peopleās goals and I need to fit in with their operational timelines. I engage with companies on the premise that our work will be done in a timely fashion. Often I am fitting my work around other projects they have on the go so any delays I create can have other knock-on effects. To suddenly need to take a lengthy break because of an illness that is not visibly apparent - but is impacting my mental state considerably - is a difficult thing.
Managing expectations in these circumstances is a challenge, because I donāt even know what I can promise in terms of timelines. The best I have found I can do is to be upfront and honest about the situation, and trust there will be a level of empathy from the client I am working with.
Managing self-imposed pressures
Even harder than managing the expectations of others are managing the expectations I place on myself. Iām self-motivated and I structure my projects and set deadlines to ensure I stay on track and maintain momentum. Having an illness that impacts my ability to meet these deadlines is a frustration that can tend to eat away at me.
I worry that Iām letting others down, and the feeling of āfalling behindā is not one I like. I have to take time to remind myself that I canāt always work with maximum efficiency; that Iām a living being who will have ups and downs. I need to let go, give myself time to recover and be assured that I will be able to catch up at a later point.
Ultimately, I just need to accept that stuff will just have to wait, and sometimes there is nothing that can be done about that.
Phone messages
Finally, a note on voicemail. They are the bane of my existence even in normal circumstances. When Iām sick, and a number of them bank up, itās even worse. Seriously, voicemail is terrible, and it should be banished. With so many other options for communication, why is voicemail still a thing?
Tonight Iāve sketched out my basic IT storage system and the cloud services I use on a regular basis.
Ensuring that my storage network all hangs together with everything accessible from multiple devices and platforms while also maintaining redundancy through an appropriate backup strategy is not easy. I think I have my bases covered but itās not particularly simple.
Despite the complexity it remains a problem worth worrying about. I donāt ever want to stress about losing data. Photos especially are memories that cannot be recreated so I really want to make sure Iāve got them secured in multiple locations, while also ensuring that an accidental deletion in one location will not replicate that deletion across the entire network.
Cloud sync services
My cloud sync services; iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive, all provide mechanisms to make data available across multiple devices. iCloud of course also offers additional photo sync services, and sync of device settings.
My work lives in OneDrive because corporations and Microsoft.
None of these should be considered a true backup because deletions replicate and there is limited version management. I see these as a sync platform only, and never rely on them as a backup.
I am annoyed by the number of cloud services I am having to use. It would be great to have a single sync service to rule them all. Unfortunately I donāt think itās going to be happening anytime soon.
Other cloud services
OmniPresence is a service that keeps documents made by OmniGroup synced between macOS and iOS. I wish I could ditch it, but Iām not entirely confident that moving these files to iCloud will work, so I continue to have it running.
Adobe Creative Cloud is a service Iām not taking full advantage of because I still prefer the Lightroom Classic and managing photos from local storage.
Local storage
I have a Network Attached Storage for mass storage of data, which is primarily photos and video. This is necessary because my local Mac hard drive is a relatively tiny SSD which almost always seems on the verge of filling up.
Local backups
I maintain a few local backups:
a Time Machine backup that is stored on my NAS.
a SuperDuper! clone of my MacBookās drive. If something goes wrong I can boot from this clone and run from that external drive, or recover files as necessary.
a USB hard drive that connects to my Mac, and with the help of Chronosync, ensures that photos are copied from my NAS to this storage that is seen as a drive locally connected to my Mac1.
The last resort
Backblaze is my backup of last resort. If anything goes horribly wrong, I should be able to retrieve data from this location. Backblaze operates to ensure that my MacBook, and any locally attached drives, are backed up to their cloud storage, which includes all the data that is also stored across the cloud services such as Dropbox and OneDrive.
All this might seem like overkill but there is no way that I want to risk losing data that I canāt get back. The little bit of effort, and the little bit of money to pay for the software and services I consider a worthwhile exchange for peace of mind.
This enables me to essentially achieve a backup of my NAS to Backblaze, a hack made necessary as they donāt support the backup of network attached storage. ↩
Over the past five years Iāve spent a lot of time learning the fundamental philosophies of a production system known as lean. Iāve read books and articles, Iāve taken a study tour to see lean in action in Japan. Iāve developed lean guides for business, and coached companies in the theory and implementation. Yet despite all of this, I still consider myself a beginner1.
Most of my lean work has been in relation to the manufacturing sector but the principles can also be applied to healthcare, food preparation, administration, and software development, to name a few. IT has even created further derivations such as kanban and agile.
Lean origins
Toyota is the company that can be credited for originally demonstrating the value of lean through their own Toyota Production System. Implemented with the help of Edward Deming after World War II, the company has embraced the lean philosophy of continuous improvement ever since. The company is now the gold standard with respect to lean implementation.
The theory of lean is much like an onion: there are many layers to it (and implementing it might sometimes make you cry!) Trying to emulate the Toyota Production System at the outset is an effort not worth taking, but any company can do implement some simple elements without too much trouble if they commit.
The best way to start
To get started I recommend following the exact same advice my Grandma used to give:
āa place for everything and everything in its placeā
Yes, itās as easy as that.
This concept represents one of the basic tenets of 5S. 5S is all about keeping things neat and orderly within the context of a lean workplace. Make sure if you take something, use something, or move something, that it gets put back once it has served its purpose. This approach will make it easier for your future self or somebody else to find a thing in the future. It will prevent the need to buy another thing because you couldnāt find the original thing. It will reduce stress and anger when you canāt find the thing you need at the time you need it.āØ
Simply make sure everything has a home and that it always lives at home when not in use. Good tip, Grandma.
In lean of course, maintaining a ābeginnerās mindā is a good thing as it keeps you open to new ideas and opportunities for improvement. ↩
Twitter continues to descend into a morass of bad behaviour while simultaneously floundering in search of a viable business model that might deliver a return for the billions in capital it has consumed1. The future of Twitter does not look bright, either socially or financially. As a result, I am experimenting with other platforms for expressing my random and (inconsequential?) thoughts.
Facebook, while having a more profitable and successful business model, is still yucky for a bunch of other reasons. These are predominantly centred around the fact that all of the content is just grist for their sales model. Facebook is a classic walled garden, and the business depends on keeping you active and contained within their domain.
One of the things that got me interested in the internet in the early-to-mid 1990ās was the open-ness of it all. Anybody could publish anything, and it was all equally accessible. The Internet removed the barriers created by Bulletin Board Systems and Compuserve and delivered an open, level playing field. Since then, we have gone full circle, and now we are providing our content free of charge, directly to private companies like Twitter and Facebook (including Instagram) which they are then able to monetise for their own benefit.
Micro.blog
Manton Reece has built an interesting alternative to these closed systems. With the help of Kickstarter funding, he created micro.blog. This is a system designed to allow the publishing of short posts, in the same style as tweets, but built upon a foundation of open access. In my instance, I can post an entry at micro.blog. Through the magic of RSS, micro.blog makes available a content feed but the material is actually being published and hosted via my own Wordpress blog. For the time being, I have set up a separate page from this blog to display my micro.blog entries.
Of course, this is far from a mainstream approach. Itās not nearly as easy as setting up a new Twitter account. There is only a relatively small, pretty nerdy community using micro.blog at the moment. Of course, thatās also how Twitter started, back when it was good.
Cross-posting
Discoverability of content becomes the challenge when working outside the established networks. For the moment, I still have my micro-blog entries cross-posting to Facebook and Twitter. If I didnāt do that, itās likely that nobody2 would be able to enjoy my witty repartee. While cross-posting is not ideal, at least Iām only providing those sites with links that track back to my own content - Iām not just feeding their machines. If I quit the service, or if they fail, I will still have my content in my possession, at my own hosted site.
The Open Web
This concept of my content being mine, and to have it accessible outside the walled gardens created by the Internet behemoths that are private companies with their duty to act in the interests of shareholders - not users, is the essence of the open web.
Being able to link to content with direct URLs, and to have that content able to be indexed by search engines, is part of the open web also.
Of course there are still financial transactions and business relationships involved but they are apparent. I pay a hosting company money. In exchange they provide me with storage space, access to a web server and a connection to the Internet. There is no middle-man, no other services are trying to monetise or advertise against my content. Itās pure and straightforward. The content remains mine, to do with as I wish.
Finally, of course, noodling around with all of this is also a really great hobby.
On 26 December 2013, Twitter was valued at US$39.9 billion. On 20 October 2017, itās valued at US$13.2 billion. ↩
This is the final of a three-part series focused on explaining my business philosophy. Parts One and Two are also available.
On my home page I call out my personal business philosophy:
Andrew's business philosophy is built upon the value of mutual respect, the skill to leverage process for continuous improvement, and the ability to ultimately achieve self-actualisation.
Self-Actualisation
My philosophical statement finishes with the rather grand sounding ambition of achieving self-actualisation. I will elucidate what self-actualisation is and why I consider it so important that I place it as the anchoring element of my philosophy.
Etymology
The concept of self-actualisation was brought into broad awareness when it was presented as the pinnacle of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Maslow’s rationale was based upon the understanding that only after the more immediate human needs are taken care of, is there capacity to focus effort on what brings us satisfaction and joy.
Maslow explicitly defines self-actualisation to be "the desire for self-fulfilment, namely the tendency for the individual to become actualised in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.ā1
Fortunately, in my country and its society there is a reasonable (but not guaranteed) chance to achieve the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy. This unlocks the potential to aim for and potentially achieve that final goal of self-actualisation.
Building a framework
I don’t see self-actualisation as an end-point; as the win achieved at the conclusion of a life-long progression up the hierarchy of needs. I believe we can reach the point of self-actualisation early and often, but what it is represented by will change over time. As we move through the stages of our life, commencing with childhood, then into the teens, marriage, career building, parenting, middle age and senior citizenship, different experiences will facilitate the goal.
The degree to which we are realising self-actualisation is likely to ebb and flow over time. Building a framework for our life that supports personal growth and improvement will help ensure a reasonable chance of reaching periods of self-actualisation even as we deal with the trials and tribulations thrown at as by life.
Without a structure and a consistent philosophical and ethical approach to life to fall back upon in challenging times it is less likely that consistent self-actualisation will be achievable.
Measuring success
Society has a tendency to measure success by outward facing and tangible measures such as wealth, fame and status. I prefer to think about success as the achievement of oneās potential and the personal joy imbued from doing what makes us happy. Precisely what the activity is that delivers said joy will vary as we grow and change. Exactly what it is matters less than the feeling it provides.
At one point of my life, playing basketball delivered a feeling of self-actualisation. Then later it was finding flow in a work assignment. Now it is linked to experiences of successful parenting. I am sure it will be other things later. None of these achievements are important to others2 but that doesn’t mean I am not being successful in my own right. If we are seeking external validation it will a frustrating and largely unrewarding experience, because that’s not delivered with any regularity.
The journey is the reward
There is no prize for ‘winning life’. External plaudits cannot be the arbiter of a life well-lived. We have been gifted a single life which even at the most optimistic is probably going to span less than 100 years. Against the timeline of humanity we are but granted a short window of opportunity. To bring meaning and purpose to our time on the planet we may as well participate with an aim of achieving joy and self-satisfaction.
It doesn’t matter how many symbols of success we collect along lifeās journey. The true measure should be our own happiness and fulfilment. Recognising each day as a gift to be enjoyed and maximised is a path towards self-actualisation. Find your joy, wherever it may be.
Bringing the philosophy together
So, ultimately, I like to think that in respect of my business philosophy:
Mutual respect will help avoid many worries, anger and pettiness that can derail us as we build a career and/or a business.
Establishing a process for continuous improvement will free our mind to focus on truly meaningful work, rather than busy work.
By adopting a respectful approach to others and having a focus on always getting better, a person can grow self-confidence, self-satisfaction and their enjoyment of life in its entirety, which will form a pathway towards achieving self-actualisation.
This is the second of a three-part series focused on explaining my business philosophy. Part One is also available.
On my home page I call out my personal business philosophy:
Andrew's business philosophy is built upon the value of mutual respect, the skill to leverage process for continuous improvement, and the ability to ultimately achieve self-actualisation.
Leverage Process for Continuous Improvement
I am a big believer in the value of process. This can be the big, organisational processes that dictate how companies do things, like build a component, or undertake customer service, or issue a refund. Or process can be an individualās personal to-do list that helps them to get things done on a daily basis. Ideally the latter should represent a subset of the former but I think we are probably some way from that ideal being standard practice.
When processes are documented they provide an anchor point as to the way things are done now. Thatās not to say that it is the way things will always be done. In fact, changes to processes should be welcomed. However, a documented process enables everybody involved to have a shared understanding of how things should be done. If something goes wrong it should be evident where the process broke down. That can enable improvements to improve efficiency and simplify things for those involved.
Embrace change
A process should never be considered a finalised product. Stagnation is the enemy of improvement. No way of work should be considered beyond reproach. No process should be sacrosanct.
A current process is merely the way in which one group of people at one point in time thought would be the best way to achieve an outcome. With new information, new technology, changed inputs, or changes in customer demand, there might be a need to change the process to achieve a better ā or just different ā outcome. Go ahead, make the change. The only way to drive improvement is to change stuff. Otherwise, you already know what youāre going to get before even starting. Repeating this approach of making and trialling small changes, over and over again, is how to achieve better outcomes.
Trial and error and small incremental improvements are the crux of continuous improvement.
Once a process of documenting processes and updating this documentation upon each change is established a traceable (and reversible) process history is created. In software development, this is standard practice - managing versions and being able to compare code differences is a key element of development and debugging.
More generalised process management can benefit from a similar approach. Make a change and see if it works. If things get better after the change, stick with it. If things get worse, revert the changes and try something different.
Process at a personal level
At a personal level I implement process management for my own work. I rely primarily on OmniFocus to manage standard operating procedures for projects that are repetitive in nature. I use project templates that enable a framework to guide work that is similar in nature. As I learn and discover better ways of doing things I refine and improve my templates.
This makes my work more effective in the short-term because I donāt have to think about the how/when/whereās of the repetitive work elements. Instead I can focus my energy on doing great work on the value-adding elements of the project that matter to my clients.
Facilitating creativity
At first blush, the concept of defined processes can seem staid and boring. In actuality it is freeing. Defined and documented processes allows people to forget about thinking about the steps to achieve a goal and instead allows them to focus on using their skills and expertise to add value to create a better end product.
Process doesnāt restrain creativity; it unleashes it. For this reason it forms the key middle component of my personal business philosophy.
This is the first of a three-part series focused on explaining my business philosophy.
On my home page I call out my personal business philosophy:
Andrew's business philosophy is built upon the value of mutual respect, the skill to leverage process for continuous improvement, and the ability to ultimately achieve self-actualisation.
Mutual Respect
To make progress in this world we need teamwork and co-operation. High performing teams are built around trust and respect for one another.
Even in a competitive environment there can be mutual respect. If you are beaten by a better performer, there is value in recognising their success and then using that as motivation to improve your own performance. Winners should stay humble and respect the competition that may not have succeeded this time, but might get the better of them next time around. Staying humble helps build respect.
Managerial respect
If a manager wants to get the most out of their employees, I believe they need to demonstrate respect and understanding for those they are asking to undertake the work. Acting with respect will build trust in leadership. Without trust it is difficult to achieve anything great. Time and and focus will be lost to people questioning what ulterior motives are in play, what forces might be working against them, and how to move into a position to win. More time is spent focused on self-preservation than on achieving team success. In such an environment it is unlikely that the team will be high-performing.
A manager who respects their employees is likely to create a team with better camaraderie, better stability and a desire to deliver great outcomes.
Employee respect
Employees need to understand that their managers may be seeing the situation from a different vantage point. After climbing the organisational tree, the view from that altitude often looks very different. Much like a general might take to an elevated vantage point to survey the field, a manager may have a perspective on things that can’t be perceived at ground level.
An employee needs to appreciate and understand that the manager is likely to be balancing multiple competing pressures, and have respect for that challenge confronting their manager. This respect through understanding will help both parties.
Respectful reciprocity
A manager and an employee; co-workers and colleagues; buyers and sellers; all of these relationships rely on mutual respect to operate effectively. Each is a participant in a process chain. Mutual respect is about working to make the life of others a little easier, and a little better. This establishes a positive reciprocal relationship. If somebody is respectful towards me it is likely I will treat them with respect in return. Everybody enjoys a better experience.
I believe that demonstrating respect for colleagues is the foundation for all other elements of business. If you donāt treat others with respect, itās unlikely you will go far. Others aren’t likely to be willing to go out of the way to provide help and support if you haven’t been respectful on the way through. Nobody gets to wherever they are alone. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before. Acting with respect offers a chance for others to stand on ours.
I love the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Iāve never seen the stage play, but the movie seems to be a faithful translation and its actors are all top shelf, so Iām willing to accept it as canonical1.
Despite the dated nature of the filmās setting, much continues to ring true about the circumstances in which the protagonists find themselves. Desperate times, leading to desperate measures, with each character dealing with the same adversity in their own varied ways.
This could be considered an accurate reflection of the human condition when people are put within an organisational structure that is essentially a manufactured construct with appointed ‘leaders’ and abstracted hierarchy. Each person has their own motivation and varying degrees to which they will go to get what they want. At some point, teamwork will collapse as individuals strive to assert themselves and ‘win’, putting self before team. It becomes a case of the prisoner’s dilemma.
Besides the deep conflict that propel the movie, there are some other scenes that also neatly capture smaller elements of working life. When Iām talking to somebody on the phone to schedule a meeting, Iām sometimes ever so tempted to pause and say, āOh Grace, would you mind checking my scheduleā, just to proffer the illusion that itās more than just me and BusyCal managing the load.
Alec Baldwinās performance as the slick sales consultant rings true, and as much as it is a comedic moment, the enjoyment is almost excruciating given the truth behind the message. It is one that sticks with me and even does help from time to time in reality. That lesson, āA. B. C. - Always Be Closingā. Sometimes this forms part of my internal monologue when I’m talking to people!
The Glengarry Leads
Ultimately, what everybody in the movie wants is possession of the Glengarry leads. The good leads. In my work, I also want the Glengarry leads. I want introductions to the firms that are going to understand what my offer is, sign up, and work in a positive way through to conclusion.
It would be great for management to dish out some of those good leads. Donāt hold them back, share them out! This is where I think reality diverges from the plot of the movie. More often than not, I think reality is that management doesnāt actually have any Glengarry leads. They might have a nice stack of cards that look like they’re going to be great leads but if you were to examine them there may be a good chance they are more Glen Ross than Glengarry. Really, the promise of the Glengarry leads is simply a motivational method to drive sales of whatever dreck does exist. “Deal with what we’ve got, and then you will get something better”, is a fairly basic motivational ploy.
The problem is that better doesnāt necessarily exist; at least not in the hands of management. If you really want the Glengarry leads, youād best go out and find them yourself.
Despite the addition of the non-theatrical Alec Baldwin scene. ↩
On the Internet there is a weird user expectation that everything should be free. Over the past couple of years I’ve been bucking this trend and have determined that spending a bit of money on what is both a hobby and an integral part of my existence in our modern, connected world is something I’m willing to throw a bit of money towards.
I don’t want to be the product; I want to be the customer. Paying money for a service to avoid my usage being a vector to sell advertising is a trade-off I am happy to make.
The other nice thing about paying for services is that it facilitates access to genuinely useful customer support. As a paying customer companies tend to care a little more about ensuring satisfaction. Having problems solved by a system administrator instead of wasting my own time futzing about can make a subscription worthwhile. I value my time, and where money can buy time, I’m in.
I thought I’d take a quick audit and look at the areas online where I am willingly paying money in favour of a free option.
Ciao Google
The biggest change was a move away from many Google services. While Google offers its GSuite as a paid option (and a pretty good one at that), I elected to go a different route.
I’ve always preferred native apps and have never loved the Gmail web interface. As a free service it’s fine but if I’m paying real money I don’t want to be spending it on something I don’t enjoy using.
If I were an Android user, the Google situation might be more compelling. On iOS, however, there always seems to be a little friction between what Google wants and what Apple is prepared to give.
So I bid adieu to Google, and took my business elsewhere.
My Paid Providers
Mail & Calendars: Fastmail. I evaluated Office 365, GSuite and Zoho when making the choice. I only wanted really good email and calendars; I didn't need online storage, office applications, and other bolt-on services. I like that Fastmail is an Australian firm and that it has a focus on standards compliance.
Domain registration: Zuver. The little brother of VentraIP. It is a great no-frills option, and they were having a product sale when I signed up.
Web hosting: VentraIP. Another Australian company that offers great support service. Their servers are fast and I am provided a web hosting solution that is perfect for my needs.
Personal finance: YNAB. Our family is in the best financial position of all time thanks largely to YNAB. No arguments about money in our home! The cost of this service is a pittance compared with the value (both monetary and stress relief) it has delivered.
Password security: 1Password for Families. The best security is not even knowing your own passwords. I am totally willing to pay to ensure all my online accounts (plus credit card details, etc.) are unique, random and locked down. It's peace of mind.
Entertainment: Netflix and Spotify. I'm hardly a special snowflake here, right? Broadcast media is dead to me.
Photo Storage: iCloud 50Gb. Apple has me over a barrel here. Despite maintaining local backups, the ubiquity of photos being available to all my devices is too good not to take up.
Bits and Bobs
I also pay for a few other subscription apps and online services but I don’t consider them to be part of my “infrastructure” so am not going to list them all here.
The Customer is the One Who Pays
Money makes the world go around. It pays employee wages, funds infrastructure acquisition and incentivises the implementation of new ideas. I’d rather be a direct customer paying my own way, and helping companies do good work than rely on the largesse of search and banner advertising to underwrite my online activity.
While I pay the bills, I call the shots. This is true in all business, and online services shouldn’t be seen any differently.
The internet relies on DNS servers that do the dirty work of translating human readable domain names to something that makes sense to a device on a network, which is where you see four sequences of numbers separated by a period.
I have been updating my homepage at andrewcanion.com such that it displays the three latest blog posts I have published by leveraging the RSS feed generated by Wordpress. RSS feeds provide a method for other sites and services to subscribe to the work of the site offering the feed. Each new entry is included in the RSS feed, and for my homepage, I grab the latest three entries for prominent display.
What should have worked, didnāt
I had assumed that this would all work well until I stumbled across a strange problem. My site would only occasionally load and display the article entries contained within the feed. Other times the articles would not display, instead pausing in a state of permanent loading. I tried the site across a number of devices, and a number of browsers to eliminate a problem existing at the device level. As they all exhibited the same issue I presumed the problem must be occurring at a deeper level of the network.
I examined the source code of my site and it appeared to be fine. I checked to make sure the Yahoo API that grabbed the RSS feed and translated it for use on my home page was still active, and it was.
Next I tried connecting to the site through a VPN, which makes it appear that my point of origin was somewhere other than through my own internet connection. When using a VPN the site loaded every time. This was great to discover, as it moved me another step closer to the identifying the problem.
That problem had to be related to my ISP (or in the new nomenclature of Australiaās NBN, my RSP). Somehow, that provider must have been causing a problem because when I routed around them with the VPN (on any device) my site loaded completely. Yet when I visited the site on any of my devices that didnāt connect through the VPN there was a problem.
My theory is that my RSP is aggressively caching content to attempt to reduce global bandwidth consumption and that this is preventing my RSS feed from updating correctly. If my caching theory isnāt correct, then it must be some other shenanigans they are up to at the network level, no doubt to reduce their bandwidth bill.
Applying the fix
To resolve the problem I needed to reduce my reliance on my providerās infrastructure. That meant transitioning to a different DNS provider rather than using the default, which is the DNS server of my RSP. I chose to connect to OpenDNS. Basically this means I have traded in the internet lookup tables that came with my broadband subscription in favour of an offering from a third party whose primary business it is to provide good DNS. Through the nature of their product and their business model they are incentivised to provide excellent DNS services. It is their core business. For my RSP, however, the provision of DNS services is a necessary sideline and their key driver is not to deliver excellent routing, but rather to use it as a point of leverage to reduce their own bandwidth costs to improve the profitability of their company.
As soon as I switched to OpenDNS my site loaded perfectly in every browser, on every device. My detective work had paid off and my willingness to not accept the defaults has improved the situation.
The only potential downside I was worried about was that OpenDNS might be a little slower to resolve sites simply because the distance to their server might be further than the default DNS server. I neednāt have worried though, because if anything, I think it might be a little bit faster.
The lesson
Companies all share an incentive to maximise profitability. How they go about achieving this can vary greatly depending on their product and their business model. My internet provider only needs to provide a service that is āgood enoughā for the majority of normal customers that want to browse the web and check Facebook. If they can deliver that to satisfaction and save some money on the back-end with caching and other network tricks, theyāll do it, even if it creates some edge-case problems.
Iām an edge-case and I wanted excellent DNS services. To get these I had to go to a company that is incentivised to provide quality DNS management. For them, only by delivering on that promise can the business generate revenue and grow its own profitability.
The character of Lester Freeman sums this up in this slightly NSFW scene from The Wire.
Iām not one for new yearās resolutions but at the beginning of this year I decided to try incorporating mindfulness meditation into my life. This was an idea brought about by a feeling that I was living life in a semi-permanent state of anxiety; feeling the pressure of the now and the next thing to be done that was sneaking up behind that. I figured that some mindful meditation might offer a way in which I could carve out some time to intentionally slow myself down and try to alleviate some of that perceived stress.
To facilitate the practice of meditation, I found Headspace. After enjoying the free trial I subscribed to an annual plan. Since my purchase, Iāve also discovered (but havenāt tried) a free, Australian equivalent, Smiling Mind.
As somebody who had never traversed the path of mindfulness and meditation, I had no idea what to do, how to do it, nor what to expect from it. The great thing about Headspace is that it assumes this is the case for its new users. The app provides a helpful introductory course that helps guide one into the technique and its potential benefits.
For the first few months, I was intentional about carving out 10-15 minutes each day for the exercise. Within a couple of weeks I found it had a positive impact on my state of mind, and each day I looked forward to the time where I could intentionally sit and do nothing. However, life being what it is, after about five months I found I was going days without meditating, and the habit that had been forming once again dissipated.
In the last few weeks, Iāve made another conscious effort to undertake a session of meditation each day and once again I am enjoying the benefits it confers. Now, heading towards the end of August, my total meditation time recorded in the Headspace app is at about 1,000 minutes1 which equates to a bit less than 17 hours.
In these days of hyper-connectivity and a constant barrage of (often self-inflicted) interruptions, we are lacking quality time for ourselves. Itās hard to āunplugā from the world. In response, taking a few minutes out of each day to dedicate to my own peace of mind seems a sensible investment. The greater sense of calm I feel after a mindfulness meditation session helps with focus thereafter and so the time ālostā to the meditation activity is quickly made up through increased productivity. Plus, nobody is so important that they canāt be incommunicado for 15 minutes, especially me!
although some of those minutes belong to my kid who enjoyed listening to a session as he fell asleep at night. ↩
While Iāve grown up on the Internet, I also remember the pre-internet era well and spent most of my formative years there. I was a kid who was able to get a modem and connect it to the text-only world of Bulletin Board Systems and Usenet (when Usenet was a service for discussion, not just binaries). I spent hours exploring these worlds, finding like-minded people, and expanding my horizons as to what computers could enable by way of communication and engagement.
I was so excited on the day I got my own internet-based email address, until I realised I had nobody to email.1 Nevertheless, it was still a thrill to have the possibility of contacting anybody else in the world who may also have happened to have an email address. The open nature of email was really the first indicator of the power of the open internet.
As time went by, I kept up with the technology of the time. I remember skipping accounting classes at university because I was having more fun in the Unix labs browsing the web with Lynx. Later in my uni career, I would be skipping classes and browsing the web with an early version of Netscape Navigator. It was slow, but it was the future and I wanted a piece of it. The only web sites that were around at that point were really published by other geeks and there was a real sense of open exploration of what could be achieved. I still have memories of the early IMDB site, and even then the amount of information available was astounding.
The next port of call for me on my journey through the open web was blogging. I operated a since-departed (photo)blog that managed to gain a bit of traction and traffic over the few years that I ran it. This was back when hand-coding and CSS tweaking was a necessity, and there was no thought of, or need for, responsive design. Eventually though, I got tired of the whole thing and shut it down. I kept a text archive of the posts which I still have somewhere, and little bits of it remain at the Internet Archive. Sometimes, though, I wish I had been a better archivist of my own work even if just so I could look back on it from time to time.
After this time the web became āsocialisedā, in that all the action was on various social media platforms, be it MySpace(!), Facebook, Twitter, Instagramā¦ the list goes on. The problem with all of these sites, though, is they are not open. Far from it; their motivation is to keep both you and your content captive to their walled garden so they can sell advertising based on your eyeballs.
These sites do not reflect the open web that Iāve always loved. I miss the days of easily-shareable content, where all that was required was a URL. I really wish that content wasnāt so reliant on companies as content platforms and that so much of the content wasn’t published simply as a means of monetising the attention of others.
This is why I am particularly interested in the currently-in-development micro.blog service. This appears to have the potential of offering the best of both worlds: the ease of use of social media, but with the open web philosophy that I so appreciate. Unfortunately I wasnāt part of the original Kickstarter project, so I donāt have any early access. I have, however, signed up to be notified and am following the developers RSS feed closely to watch itās development. I really hope that it gets some genuine traction, and that this can lead to real-world success.
I know that we can’t go back to the way things were. The internet will never again be the Wild West, inhabited only by the zealot explorers. Now it’s a platform for everybody, and the commercial money isn’t going away anytime soon. Yet I will keep my RSS reader and maintain the search for those independent voices that I can follow who create and deliver interesting, independent content.
Even before social media, the network effect was still relevant. ↩
I am not an American, but my father and my siblings were born and lived in the USA. I have visited the country a number of times. I have spent time in Virginia, notably Lexington, which is about 70 miles away from Charlottesville, the town that has been tragically in the news this past week. While I donāt have the level of connection to the place that a United States citizen has, I do watch with interest and feel that I have at least some level of understanding of the American psyche.
From my perspective, what I saw in Charlottesville was a collection of white men who have been radicalised to the point of fanaticism and enabled by political leadership to intimidate and strike fear in others to their own ends. In a modern country it should never be reasonable for civilians to put on body armour and walk the streets with automatic machine guns. Carrying Nazi flags, performing Nazi salutes, and walking with burning torches1 echoes many sad and inglorious historical moments, from Hitler and WW2 to the KKK and acceptance of slavery (and the power imbalance in favour of white people that that confers).
I can only imagine what would have happened if non-white people had walked the streets similarly armed and garbed. I think there would have been an even more extreme response; which in itself highlights a level of underlying, unspoken racism that permeates the culture. I can’t help but think that if roles were reversed, and it were black people carrying machine guns in the street, that it would be seen as an uprising. Based on recent US police behaviour it might also have been possible the police would have been willing to shoot to kill.
Next we have the horrible situation of a young man driving a car at speed into a laneway filled with people. Such behaviour cannot be condoned and the fact that some are attempting to mount excuses and justifications is frightening in itself, particularly if they believe their own professions. That was an act of terrorism, fuelled by hate, which i assume was itself fuelled by the fear of losing power and relevance in society. As far as I can tell, that man, and his equivalents, are fearful that their position in the world is being disrupted and their reactionary response is to imbibe hate and act with extreme prejudice.
As for the President, I am of the view that he has incited and encouraged this vein of hate, then turned a blind eye to the subsequent despicable actions of his acolytes. It took him three days to speak out against the actions (via a prepared speech), and then a day later he couldnāt live with that being his official position so he backtracked, showing his true colours. That he should be President of the USA is an entirely strange and sad situation.
A key reason (but not the root cause) for this uprising is said to be in honour and respect of General Lee, a man of regard for Southerners. Yet times change, and who we should and do venerate must also change. The problem is, enacting that change means rebalancing the power relationship amongst the citizens of the United States, and particularly the South. As a result those threatened most by such change2 and who are most at risk of ‘losing’ as a result of any rebalancing are lashing out with extreme aggression in a sad and sorry attempt to maintain the status quo.
Change will happen. The clock cannot be turned back. Time and culture moves ever forward, even though this Charlottesville incident represents a step back. In the end I believe the tide of change will win out. I genuinely hope that tide brings equivalency to all citizens of the United States, irrespective of the colour of their skin, and that peace wins out.
Albeit tiki torches that look like they were bought at Lowe's and probably made in China. ↩
Signal to noise heatmap with two Apple Airports[/caption]
Signal to noise heatmap with Google Wifi[/caption]
Tonight Iāve sketched out my basic IT storage system and the cloud services I use on a regular basis.
