Organization
-
High Throughput, Low Completion
→: High Throughput, Low CompletionI have never been someone who organises things. I have a great memory and a high tolerance for ambiguity, and I evolved to match the era of the internet where searching things by keyword was sufficient. I documented, extensively. But I did not really organize. Not myself, nor – despite my job – other people.…
-
Who’s the Admin, Me or Claude?
→: Who’s the Admin, Me or Claude?There’s a lot of conversation right now about “context engineering” for dev work; structuring what you feed an LLM so it can do useful things. It’s fantastic, we use this approach for DRI Your Career – to the point where we moved our course development out of Google Docs and into GitHub. But – Jean…
-
The Spreadsheet: Using AI to Understand How I Spend My Time
→: The Spreadsheet: Using AI to Understand How I Spend My TimeFor years, I’ve known intellectually that my best days aren’t my busiest days. That sustainable productivity requires balancing multiple priorities. That beating myself up about not accomplishing “enough” is counterproductive. But knowing something intellectually and remembering it when you need to are very different things. So a couple of months ago I started trying something…
-
Spring Cleaning in December
→: Spring Cleaning in DecemberI used to have a habit of refreshing my website at the end of each year, but I missed a couple and then it became in my head a bigger project that was a discouraging combination of feeling both pointless and overwhelming. But on a productive tear (with Claude) during the winter break, I finally…
-
Three Core Ideas to Make Remote Work, Work
→: Three Core Ideas to Make Remote Work, WorkI have been working for distributed companies for over 5 years – long before this pandemic malarkey and everyone becoming a “remote work expert”. The reality of the past 18 months for many people has been a lot of terrible remote work. Including for me at times – I love remote work in “normal times”,…
-
2021: Habit
→: 2021: HabitWe are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. ~Will Durant, paraphrasing Aristotle I used to be a fan of setting a word as an intention for the year. I fell off it at some point, or at least off documenting it, I think around the time that my…
-
How I Offloaded My Anxiety to Trello
→: How I Offloaded My Anxiety to TrelloI’ve never been good at what you might call “life admin”, but I used to keep track of it through having a high level of 1) recall, 2) guilt and anxiety. I can’t say this system was working well, I was pretty behind on this stuff (such as… still having an Australian bank account five…
-
Process Design
→: Process Design(or: be careful what you incentivise) When we design processes, we are heavily biased to design processes that we would be successful in. We see this with hiring processes, and we see this with promotion processes. You might think having multiple people would help with this but this seems just as likely to create the…
-
Bi-Monthly Rituals: The State of All the Things
→: Bi-Monthly Rituals: The State of All the ThingsAt the end of last year, I somehow found myself as the lead of a team that was 4x as big as my previous one. Many things were different, but one of the big ones was changing from having one person on each platform who really knew everything that was going on… to having some…