What I learned last week (#1)

  • I read Personal Kanban and started using Trello recently (thanks Marcus) and it’s really helped me to be more intentional and focused in my work and life. I have a Work Board and a Personal Board and also one for Project Red Lorry that my wife and I can both use. Is it working because it’s something new or because it’s a fundamental shift? Time will tell.
     
  • I need to try using Calm. Apparently it has a timer that will chime at certain intervals during unguided meditation sessions, which is my biggest gripe with unguided meditations on Headspace. Headspace is still my go-to (and apparently the reason Bill Gates is into meditation) but I’m curious to see how this works.
     
  • I finished The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawandeand thought it was an easy, engaging and thought-provoking read. Reflecting on it, one of the things that sticks with me is the chapter on The End of the Master Builder and the example of the “submittal schedule” in construction that serves as a checklist for communication tasks. This schedule checklist serves as framework for getting the experts together and figuring out problems together, agreeing on a path forward and documenting (“submitting”) what they decided. This got me thinking about similar frameworks in technology work and how important it is to be rigorously collaborative and decentralize decision making.
     
  • “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” – Louis L’Amour. This one was timely. My Dad just retired a couple weeks ago (and my Mom a few months before that) and this comes close to expressing how I relate to the idea of retirement



I started this blog…

Let’s start at the beginning.

I started this blog because I enjoy writing about and sharing ideas. I started it not because I presume to have a wealth of original things to say, but because I am constantly learning new things that are useful to me in the context of my life and there’s something about documenting and rehashing those things  that’s helping them to stick.

I started this blog because I want to be a better writer and the only way to get better at something is to DO IT.

I also started this blog because my wife and I are moving with our two kiddos (age 2 and 5) to another country and I we’ll have a hell of a lot to talk about over the coming year that, at a minimum, will be cool to document and just maybe there will be some things that will also be useful to others. I started this blog to rope my wife and kiddos into contributing to a creative project with me and seeing what happens as a result.

I started this blog and now we write!