Tag: productivity

Less, More & None (2021)

Less

  • allowing my task list to build up1
  • looking at my mobile phone when people are talking to me
  • reading doomscrolling the news2

More

  • exercise
  • reading3
  • saving money
  • seeking opportunities for personal growth
  • writing

None

  • making excuses when it comes to exercise4
  • skipping my ‘morning reading'5
  1. Do, defer, delegate or delete.[↩]
  2. Once per day is more than enough[↩]
  3. After reading 41 books in 2020, I want to challenge myself to read 50 in 2021.[↩]
  4. I will get outside and run even if it is icy cold or teeming down with rain. And if I really can’t get outside to run then I will work out at home. There are no excuses. There is always enough time, enough ways to keep to fit, and enough tools (apps/videos/guides) to be able to exercise every day.[↩]
  5. One of my daily rituals is to read from a selection of philosophical and theological texts. It helps focus my mind at the start of the day.[↩]

Less, More and None (2020) – Review

Less

  • (cont.) spending time on ‘urgent but unimportant’ tasks
    • I did a much better job of this in 2020. I was able to be more strategic and to delegate tasks more willingly. Something I have always struggled with.
  • tinkering with apps and organisational tools (I need to pick a system and stick to it)
    • I broke this down into three areas (notes/schedule/projects) and settled on one app to manage each of them:
      • Drafts for writing: ideas, notes, lists, blog posts and reference material.
      • Fantastical to organise my day: lessons, meetings, calls and events.
      • OmniFocus for task and project management.
    • I also made some changes to my daily and weekly reviews that kept me better organised.
  • avoiding difficult / time-consuming tasks
    • I did well with this as well, in part due to the improvements I made to my organisation as noted above. In particular, I started using the ‘forecast tag’ in OmniFocus for these tasks and also scheduled time in my calendar for when I would work on them. This meant that they were always visible and would not be missed in my daily review. Scheduling time in my calendar meant that progress was made on them each day until they were done. Incremental progress FTW!

More

  • trying new foods and recipes
    • Jennifer and I are always exploring new recipes but we did even better this year building a wide range of new meals into each month. And like 2019, we struck a healthy balance between meat-based dishes and vegetarian ones.
  • rediscovering old music
    • I immersed myself in Jazz, exploring a wide range of styles (hard-bop, modal, avant-garde…) and musicians. I improved my knowledge of the genre’s development and discovered a number pieces that entered into regular rotation. My top three tunes for the year are:
    • Having spent a lot of time over the years listening to the more avant-garde and challenging work of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, I was surprised to see how much I leaned toward smooth and modal Jazz over the course of the year. Red Garland, Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner (all pianists) featured prominently. Maybe I am mellowing out!?
    • In addition to this, I also revisited a lot of music from my youth (80s/90s). According to Spotify, my most listened to artists this year were: Queen, Radiohead and Nick Cave.
    • I spent some time listening to classical music too; mostly Beethoven, Chopin, and Fauré, so the piano featured prominently there as well. Maybe I should learn to play the piano in 2021?
    • I made a number of new playlists in Spotify and updated some of my existing ones. They can all be found via my Spotify profile.
  • visiting new places
    • This did not happen for obvious reasons. Instead we made the most of our local area while doing all that we could to keep ourselves and other safe. The time spent here at home was not wasted though, I read more books than I have done in a long time.
  • mobility exercises and yoga
    • I failed miserably with this one unfortunately, and I haven’t done as well with my running over the last three months of the year either. Exercise has to be a habit and requires commitment. I will be re-committing to this in 2021 and ensuring that I can forge good habits to get back on track.
  • (cont.) writing
    • In terms of writing, I never truly found my mojo. That said, I did publish 24 full blog posts (20 more than 2019 ). Two blog posts per month is not what I was aiming for at the start of the year. As with exercise, writing has to become a habit. I will be committing to working towards this in 2021 as well.

None

  • (cont.) looking at my mobile phone when people are talking to me (still trying to make this stick!)
    • I finally made some headway with this in 2020. I took to leaving my phone on the coffee table or even in a different room and this helped. Still, I can do even better so this item will graduate to the ‘Less’ section for 2021.
  • saying yes to projects or ideas that will only have short-term or limited impact (aiming for a year of quality not quantity)
    • When faced with a pandemic, partial school closures and a constantly changing set of guidelines and rules, it has been hard not to have to work on projects that were about ‘short-term’ impact. Sometimes you simply have to adapt to the needs in front of you and I feel that alongside my colleagues, I did a good job in helping to keep the school going under very challenging circumstances.

Scratching an itch…

I have long admired the way some bloggers are able to include an image when auto-posting to Twitter. Looking at the IFTTT applet I was using to auto-post from my own blog, there did not appear to be an option to do this, and a web search did not yield any useful results.

I turned to Twitter and asked Warren Ellis what service or plugin he uses1. Having asked the question, I received a couple of suggestions from Doug Belshaw:

Looking into both of these I could see that they would achieve what I wanted but I was not satisfied with either implementation. Blog2Social requires you to create a Twitter application. This is not a big deal (I’ve done it before) but I did not believe this was necessary to achieve my goal. Furthermore, it is heavy-handed on the promotion of its paid features in the WordPress backend. The other option, Jetpack, is too feature rich and its footprint on the back end of your blog is quite intrusive. Furthermore, to access all of the auto-tweet features a paid plan is required. This does not sit right with me given the open source origins of WordPress.

Returning to IFTTT, I could not shake off the feeling that there was a way to do it. The search function in IFTTT is a bit hit and miss with a high noise to signal ratio. However, there were several recipes that indicated images could be posted natively to Twitter from other sources. This lead to me taking a fresh look at the Twitter channel in IFTTT. I saw that they have added a range of options and this indeed included the option to tweet with an image.

So, to relieve the proverbial itch, I started from scratch (😉) and created a new applet to share my WordPress posts to Twitter with an image.

dr amp shovel

This was a definite case that proved it is always worth digging a little deeper! Dr. Amp would approve.

  1. I subsequently found out that Warren uses the Jetpack plugin. However, he has recently written in his newsletter about issues he has had with this feature not working correctly. And I do believe he has since found a solution.[↩]

Drafts and Marked sitting in a tree…

Thor Happy

Just found out, via Brett Terpstra, that Drafts, my favourite writing app1, works with Marked, allowing real time rendering of Markdown and HTML. And there’s an action that can be installed to open Marked from Drafts directly.

This makes me very happy! 🤘

  1. Drafts, by Greg Pierce is the Swiss Army knife of writing apps. I use it for capturing ideas, notes, lists and drafting blog posts. Best of all, the built in actions allow me to act on my drafts right in the app.[↩]

It’s game on in the Michie household…

Scrabble

As Covid-19 continues its spread across the land, we are embracing our new existence; only going out when necessary; supporting friends and family in any way we can; doing our part to stay safe and save lives.

Jennifer has spent the last few days cooking meals to freeze; ensuring we will continue to eat healthy nutritious food over the coming weeks.

With schools closing (or, in my case, remaining open for vulnerable pupils and children of key workers) I’ve been editing my calendar for the next four weeks. It is now relatively blank, save for the days that I will be in school. It’s amazing how so many things that were deemed so important have been put on hold or cancelled out right. Now is not the time, but the ‘merits of using external exams as a way to measure learning’ debate should definitely be given its due when things return to normal1

I have set my self a daily schedule for the days I will be working from home and taken the opportunity to reorganise my OmniFocus projects. I have promoted a number of tasks that were on pause until the next school holiday came around.

Also, with a bit of extra time on my hands, I am going to take the opportunity to:

Most importantly, I am going to use this opportunity to spend time with my wife… cooking and breaking bread together; drinking lots of tea and putting the world to rights; listening to music and playing Scrabble; watching old films; and appreciating how lucky we are to have each other.

  1. What is normal? Will things ever be the same again? Given the current state of things, these questions seem alarmingly prescient yet seemingly trivial at the same time. As Nick Cave put it yesterday: “Eventually these questions will become of acute significance, but they are not for now.”[↩]