Micro.blog has introduced me to a number of new bloggers I would never have otherwise discovered. These are smart, intelligent people going about their lives in another part of the world, completely unrelated to me. Yet the way they think, communicate and share ideas online is very familiar.
A recent connect is Sameer Vasta — Vasta on micro.blog — a resident of Ontario, Canada. He claims to overuse the discretionary comma, a problem that I too, face on a regular basis.
Just over a month ago, Sameer celebrated 20 years(!) of blogging. His post to recognise this milestone was great. I’ve picked out a couple of comments that resonated with me. Of course, I encourage you to read the entire post.
For me, blogging has always been about thinking out loud, and about allowing my thoughts and ideas to evolve and grow, through time, out in a public sphere where I’m connected to others who are thinking out loud and growing, too. For me, blogging has always had a small b.
This approach to blogging throws down the gauntlet before me. I have a tendency to want my blog posts to be ‘fully baked’ before publishing. Sameer’s construction is to present blogging as a continuous process - not an end product.
I’ve begun talking about my blog as my “thought space,” as well, after reading a short reflection by Om a few weeks ago
As this canion.me site is new, I don’t have a defined purpose for it yet. I started it to satisfy a hobbiest’s itch. Perhaps encapsulating it as my ‘thought space’ might be a good use of the domain.
If someone asks me what my blog is about, now, I’m going to tell them it is my thought place, it is a conversation with myself and with others, and that it is my way of getting better at writing the truth. That’s what it has been for twenty years, and that’s what I hope for it to be for at least another twenty.
I’ve blogged in the past, previously for a number of years at twosittingducks.com (no longer up, and rest in peace Movable Type). Now I have blogs at blog.andrewcanion.com and here at canion.me plus a micro.blog.
Despite my renewed enthusiasm for the medium, I can only dream of blogging consistently for 20 years. However, I would like to think that the blogging I do from this point forward is how Sameer describes it; an opportunity to think and ruminate publicly and thus be open to discourse with others. That will ideally allow my thoughts to grow and develop, without being stuck inside an echo chamber. If that can occur, my blogging will be a more successful enterprise than present-day social media offers.
This is where mental models can help. As in any other area of your life, developing some principles or models that help you see how the world works will give you options for relevant and useful solutions. Mental models are amazing tools that can be applied across our lives. Here are five principle-based models you can apply to almost any family, situation, or child. These are ones I use often, but don’t let this limit you—so many more apply!
From The Farnham Street Blog, a thoughtful look at how the use of mental models can provide a more strategic approach to wrangling those children.
I know Ulysses is the markdown darling but the way it handles markdown links is a pain in the butt. I just want a simple inline view that is compatible with Terpstraās SearchLink service. Iāve had to fall back to Byword to make it work.
@jack Quick question if I may: how do you get YouTube video embeds to work on Blot.im? I see youāve done it - I must be missing something obvious…
Iāve just had a cortisone injection into my hip. After suffering a labral tear and having pain for a few months I really hope this will help. After the doctor finished the injection he told me āit was one of the more difficult onesā. He was also using an iPad for MRI - amazing!
I am incredibly grateful that my Mum ensured I had financial literacy at a young age. We were poor but that didn’t stop me from learning the value of money. I’ve always been hyper-aware of money management, to the point of risk aversion.
I was also fortunate enough that I didn’t grow up in an era of intangible in-app purchases.
I created a new domain, canion.me and now I’ve scratched another curiosity itch by setting up a Blot instance.
Blogging by putting stuff into a Dropbox folder? Sounds like fun.
Iām not a gamer by any means but I just got hooked playing Marvel Strike Force on iOS for far too long.
After listening to the latest episode of The Omni Show, Iām now researching every tiki bar in Perth. Iāve only ever been to one and that was about 9 years ago.
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.
Just found this archived screenshot from my Google Reader account before it shut down.
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.
