There’s this common idea that “it’s the action/skill not the tools that matters.” As with all good pithy statements, it applies in most situations, it has a great deal of truth in it, but it is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And so help me God I’ll prove it to you.

A few weeks back I put a new curtain rail up. To do so, I had to drill a couple of holes into our walls. The first was easy, but the second set was impossible. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t do it. In the end we borrowed a drill from a friend who does smart home installation.

It finished the job in seconds.

My skill didn’t matter, I needed the right tool.

Admittedly, if I didn’t know how to drill straight or what size drill bit I’d need then the right tool would make no difference (here’s that kernel of truth again). At the same time, even if one can achieve an outcome with any tool (such as making sweet sounding music on a “bad” guitar), it can be easier and far more enjoyable with a high-quality and correctly setup tool.

And when it is more enjoyable, you often want to do it more.

So investing in a good tool can lead to you improving your skills more than a bad tool.

Professional vs good tools

Professional tools don’t always meet this criteria.

They can be enjoyable to use and help beginners, but often a professional tool requires more skill than a beginners tool. If a beginner tries to pick up a pro level camera and just snap a picture, they may be confused by the controls and options causing them to accidentally set their auto focus point to a different subject.

In contrast a beginner tool might abstract the process too much and leave them to enjoy the process too little.

So while “cheap” usually means bad, expensive doesn’t always mean good and certainly not good for you.

The best tool, is the tool you’ll use

I believe this is what Chase Jarvis was getting at when he said “The best camera is the one you have with you.”

There might be a “superior” tool out there, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have it with you or choose to use it. I still regret selling my fuji x100t, not because it was the best camera, but it was the camera I took the most photos with.

Yes, part of that was due to the quality and style of images it produced, but it was also the experience of shooting with it and its size and portability.

And while many people have this same experience with smartphones, I preferred a dedicated device that I didn’t have to worry about draining my battery with.

There are plenty of good reason not to buy new gear, but you shouldn’t not buy gear just because someone on the internet shamed you into thinking that the pros all could make. something better with rubbish gear.

It’s probably true. There was a great series on YouTube called ProTog Cheap camera which featured just that.

But those pros didn’t stick with their terrible cameras. They went back to the cameras they enjoyed using.

Find the tools you like and you use and enjoy them!

Yesterday I was stuck driving home behind a car who had the audacity to stick to the speed limit (I know. The nerve of it!).

At first I tried to spy moments to overtake and thought ahead to the prime spots on the road for overtaking. Then something changed. My perspective.

I realised I was in no rush. We were returning home after a bbq to celebrate my daughter’s birthday and practically the whole family was fed and having a nap. We had no pressing deadline to make.

Suddenly I realised this could be an invitation from God to practice patience and to slow down.

So I sat back in the driving seat, stopped straining my eyes ahead, and appreciated the time I had.

There are many moments like this every day which I pass over in my rush to Getting Things Done™️. And while I could still take action to alleviate my impatience and boredom, I wonder if it’s better to see them as a gift. As if each moment were an invitation to slow down, appreciate what is around us and maybe even accept the boredom that comes with it.

Now excuse me while I get back to being frustrated at a website taking more than a second to load! (outrageous I know!)

It was my daughter’s 5 birthday yesterday.

We did all her favourite thing:

• opened presents
• went to the local softplay
• had curry for lunch
• went to the playground
• had ice cream in the park
• made a plastercast unicorn she got from her uncle.
• watch a couple of episodes of Paw patrol
• had pizza for dinner

It was a real feast day.

Funnily enough, there’s a lot that we do often, but the combination of it all together really makes it stand apart. One of the challenges I wonder about, as a parent, is helping to keep things special.

There are things my kids can have every week (or even every day) that I only had a couple of times a year. On the one hand it’s great they live in this abundance, on the other hand I wonder if they don’t appreciate things in the same way.

It make me wonder about abstinence: not indulging often so we can appreciate things more when we do have them.

It requires patience (refusing cartoons can start a family civil war) and planning (having other activities and alternatives ready to go is a must) that make it far more work for us parents. But it helps to keep things more special.

And often the alternatives are better anyway.

This isn’t just true for parenting of course.

Last week I made a shocking discovery.

Fruit is great in hot weather.

I know, revolutionary insight but if you looked at my habits, this idea was a real shock.

I don’t have anything against fruit and eat it when offered, but I just don’t choose fruit or go for it. Instead I’m more likely to snack on a piece of chocolate or sandwich. But during this heatwave I realised that fruit was clearly the more refreshing choice.

And that made me think about my habits.

I know it’s not great, but …

There are a lot of my habits which don’t match my intentions or goals.

The fruit one is one small example.

It’s such a small thing that could be corrected with a minor lifestyle change (buy more fruit in the shop, keep sweets at home, choose fruit at snack time) and yet I wasn’t doing it. Why?

Well I wasn’t really thinking about that habit.

So I decided to make a list of the bad habits I have (in obsidian of course). Here’s a sample:

• not flossing every day
• drinking more coffee than I’d like
• snacking on chocolate during the day

And once I made that list, the alternatives were pretty obvious:

• Floss when after brushing your teeth
• drink water
• Eat fruits instead of chocolate

Not every bad habit is so simple or unentrenched, but some are.

And guess what, just making the list has helped me change these habits.

I’m still not perfect, but they’ve far lesser.

More tricky habits

There are a couple of bad habits in my list that are more sticky.

Not least of which is “being impatient with people”.

While it’s not something that just magically changes, I’m glad it’s on this list. Unless I acknowledge this is an issue, I won’t be willing to change it. And now it’s there, I can plan for change.

Not magic, but maybe worth a go

A lot of good coaching and therapy starts with awareness.

Sometimes, that’s enough.

And sometimes we need to do more. But either way, maybe making a bad habit list will help you with some of your bad habits that you know about, but do nothing over, or even ones you are less aware of.

If you give it a go, let me know what you think.

My kids are almost 2 and 5.

Both of them are going through a period of temper tantrums.

It’s annoying and frustrating. Especially when the elder one turns around and sets off the younger one, usually with a punch or a poke after being asked not to.

On my better days I stay calm and manage to get through the conflict.

But most days aren’t my better days.

Instead I can lose my cool and try to physically or vocally stop the conflict: It always increases it.

Doing the same negative behaviour

The irony is I’m often doing the exact thing I’m annoyed at my children for.

• They act out because they are tired — I act out of tiredness
• They shout at each other — I shout at them
• They aren’t patient — I lose my patience.

I fail the same measure I evaluate them by.

On being the adult in the room

I realised this all about three months back.

My child was acting like a child (as should be expected) but I, the adult, was also acting like a child.

How did I expect my children to learn the values I wanted if I didn’t embody them myself as an adult?

So I made a change and used this mantra:

I am the adult in the room.

Any time I face these kinds of situations, I say those words to myself and force myself to respond like an adult.

I wish I could say this has been a magical panacea — it hasn’t — but it has helped. A lot.

I don’t know if this will help you, but as a parent, I know I could use all the help I can get.

It’s the end of my Friday workday so I’m doing my simple weekly reflection. It’s called plus, minus, next and I heard about it from Anne-Laure Le Cunff of Ness Labs.

I like using the symbols

• / - / ➡

• Plus is for the good things from the week
• Minus is for the bad things from the week
• And next is for the things I want to do differently next week.

So simple, but that’s its power. By being so low effort, I can almost always do it; it’s just 5 mins at the end of the day. Now I have a record of what I’ve struggled with and what was easy and good.

You can do it on paper or digitally and I have templates for both Obsidian and DayOne.

One last thing to note, this isn’t a full weekly review in the GTD sense. Instead, I split that onto Sunday evening when I plan for the week ahead.

There’s a movie going around that’s getting some major press. It presents an anti-trafficking group as the saviours of children caught in the child sex trade.

The only problem?

It’s a fantasy.

Sure, there’s elements of a real story — organisation, people, even rescue missions — but the truly effective work of anti-trafficking is less glamourous. Instead of sting operations, it’s more about policy changes and resources for local groups to provide effective assistance.

Heroes need not apply

By seeking to be heroes some groups are harming efforts more than helping.

Conducting a sting on a human trafficking group might help arrest some low level members, but if there isn’t a support system in place, the kids freed won’t go back to their families. And even if they do, they need help to recover from their trauma and protection from the people who sold them in the first place.

You see while there are gangs who snatch children, most people end up in trafficking situations due to a person they, or their family knows.

So why aren’t we doing more for anti-trafficking support?

Anti-trafficking is tough.

It involves many parts to make sure we can catch the perpetrators, help the abused recover, and ensure they aren’t trafficked again. That typically means

• intelligence and surveillance to identify networks
• educating communities to spot the signs of traffickers and trafficked people
• policy which allows trafficked people safe haven
• support structures for their long-term recovery.

That costs a lot more than taking down a few local crooks and patting yourself on the back saying job well done. It also doesn’t help that safe haven policies are anathema for right of centre parties (and some left of centre ones too).

And finally, it’s a global challenge.

To prevent trafficking of people from developing to developed countries we need the right structures in place in both countries and coordination between each. With budgets stretched and a lack of political appetites for cooperation, that makes it extremely challenging.

It’s far easier for a group to claim they are the heroes doing what governments won’t, all the while merely putting people back into the same situations that lead to them being trafficked in the first place.

How to actually take a stand against human trafficking.

There are many long standing human trafficking groups such as Stop the Traffik who are making meaningful, long-term changes to help end human slavery.

Look for groups such as these rather than wannabe soldiers.

I used to be a massive defender of the Oxford comma, now I think most examples where it adds clarity are usually the result of poor writing.

For example, “He met with his parents, the Pope and Barak Obama.” Is this a list of three people or are the Pope and Obama his parents?

All that needs to be done is to put his parents at the end. “He met with the Pope, Barak Obama and his parents.”

There are perhaps a few situations where it can add more clarity (a list of groups) but it’s hardly the saviour of English grammar some writers make it to be.

For the last few years I’ve felt like tech companies and tech journalists are all trying to tell me I shouldn’t be happy with the “amazing revolutions” that came out only a year ago (but of course these new ones will all fix my problems). It’s things like the iPad which was finally a pro device when the iPad pro came out, or maybe when it got the m1 chip, or perhaps stage manager? No, sorry. It was when final cut pro and logic came out last month.

There’s nothing wrong with improvement (and sometimes “improvements” are steps backwards.) but maybe we could drop the technology gaslighting where we’re told that we’re not happy with the things we loved and they are clearly terrible now.