Chris J Wilson

Reading Getting Things Done as a recent university leaver was highly influential on my life.

One of the ideas that really struck me was “break down large projects into smaller tasks.” It’s so obvious once you know it but for adolescent me, this was groundbreaking.

Instead of chipping away at this glacier of a task, all I had to do was one small thing. Adding in the idea of “if you don’t know the first task, ask someone who might.” Killed most of my procrastination overnight.

Even though it’s obvious, looking at my task list from the last few days and I can see a few large projects that aren’t actionable tasks.

Time to go through my inbox.

We’ve all face it. When there’s something to write but you stare and stare at the blank page with no words coming. Sometimes, it’s something you don’t really want to write, but have to. Other times it’s a topic that is really important to you, but the words don’t come. The mistake, is starting writing with the blank page. Instead, we should give ourselves a helping hand by starting our writing before in the form of notes, outlines and ideas. Following this approach, we have a framework which we can fill in wiith ideas and writing we’ve already done, rather than a terrifying blank page.

Idea adapted from How to Take Smart Notes

I was looking at my list of recurring debates this morning and added a new time. This list contains questions and problems that I frequently face. I want to track the things that catch my attention and cause me to stay up at night. Most of them aren’t really topic focused but more look at discussions that cross topics. The latest addition is … “Should I focus on the activity that is

• most fun
• most meaningful
• or most likely to make me money?”

It frequently comes up and this weekend was no exception.

For the most part, I tend to focus on the first two for my decisions. Perhaps I would have been able to go freelance/earn a lot more money if I tended towards the third option, but I’m happy with my choices.

I’ve decided that I generally prefer monthly subscriptions over annual ones.

The benefit of an annual is it’s cheaper over the year, but that can mean you get hit by a single big payment. I am very bad at spreading these payments out and you never know what next year will look like.

The larger monthly payments are easier to track and buget for.

Probably the best solution is to spread my annual payments across the year.

I don’t know if I missed it but did the original HomePod not get an update (or maybe they snuck in a processor bump in a press release somewhere) and what about the Apple silicon Macs? I’m really interested in getting a Mac again but definitely not an intel one. I really don’t like splitting the iPhone 12 camera features further, a larger sensor is a really interesting change, as is LiDar and 10 bit hdr video recording. I’m interested to see the final details but it’s more impressive than I thought. But I think I thought that last year. Marketing eh.

I’ve struggled with…well, a lot recently. I suspect that the general malaise has been one of the key reasons that I haven’t been able to write or publish anything longer than a tweet-length post for a while. It also doesn’t help that my daughter has been ill for about a month, waking up early, crying frequently, and going to bed later removing the little previous creative writing time. And now it looks likely that I have COVID while work has been steadily ramping up. But the other factor is a feeling that I have nothing worth saying. I know that this is partially a lack of inspiration (as Austin Kleon says, problems of output are usually problems of input) but it’s also caused by a growing self-censorship. I will get to the end of writing a post and then delete the whole thing because it feels stupid, or I am the wrong person to write this, or perhaps there will be negative repercussions to me sharing this post. The only way out is to act bravely and publish anyway, slowly building confidence and a sense of what is good to publish. So this is the first, probably terrible, step.

At work we have a tool that allows for collaboration and transparancy, so we can all see what everyone is up to and the changes we log. It’s also part of the ideas and values we preach… and yet I keep finding that different teams set their privacy to full so no other team can access files (and when they grant access, they do it on a case by case basis often leading to multiple requests) plus instead of using the collaborative tool, people will download their own copy, make their edits, and then reshare…often missing edits other people have made.

I really wonder why on earth we use these expensive solutions if no one is going to use them to do what they were designed for.

I really hate the culture of shaming newbies and amatures who try to copy something they see online but don’t do it as well.

• Everyone sucks when they start.
• If they enjoy it, what does it matter if it’s “good”
• It’s very easy to be the cynic who critiques everyone else (and does nothing)
• okay, if they are pretending to be a pro/guru and they have just started…you can roll your eyes a little.