Weeknotes #231

Admin on 01/01/2021

This week I did:

Annual Review 2020

I looked back over the year and wrote a bit about the things that went well and that didn’t. It helped me focus on my goals for next year.

900 Digital Tools

The Ultimate Digital Tools List now has 900 products and tools. Next target is one thousand.

Panta Rhei

I wrote and sent my second Digital Nomad Newsletter, and this one was actually read by my three subscribers. I’m getting a better idea about how I want to use the newsletter. It’ll be a bit about my experiences of being a digital nomad, places I’ve visited, etc., but mostly it’ll be about the underpinning thinking for the lifestyle and mindset of digital nomads, remote and flexible workers

Message me

Added smallchat to my website. Its a cool integration with Slack so when anyone messages me on my website I can chat back from my phone. It’s especially cool because no one is going to message me, so I can play with things like this without being bothered.

And thought about:

Meetings

I was thinking about how much we complain about meetings, but other than some ideas on asynchronous communication, we don’t really have any good ideas for replacing them. I wonder if it’s because meetings tackle different problems for different people in different situations, but we don’t call out what any particular meeting is meant to achieve. I don’t mean that each meeting should have an agenda, and that that would fix it all. I mean that when people started working in offices meetings solved a communication and coordination problem because getting people in a room together was the only way to do it, there was no technology that could solve those problems. Then, there was a period where we did have the technology but continued to put people in a room together, and now we put people in virtual meetings together. I wonder if we think meetings are still solving the coordination challenge that work ultimately is, when maybe they are solving other problems, possibly social connection problems. Do we have meetings because we want to be in the in crowd, don’t want to feel like we’re missing out on anything, don’t want to feel lonely at work. Perhaps understanding and decoupling those problems could lead to solving them in different ways.

Repetitions

I thought about Craig Burgess’, “Make the focus tighter and the repetitions more frequent”. It works as a solution to a particular problem, but it isn’t a starting point. Intuitively it make sense, especially if you have any pre-existing agile conditions. Feedback loops are really important. Just doing the same thing more isn’t going to achieve very much if you’re doing the wrong thing. How you build feedback mechanisms into the things you do, and use those to course correct seems far less understood. It also made me think about how so many wisdom-tweets are at a point in time, for a particular person, in a particular context, with a particular history, and with particular prerequisites.

One hundred innovation ideas

I was wondering if I’ve learnt enough about innovation, from an academic perspective and in practice, to write one hundred short blog posts. I thought it might be an interesting and challenge-ified way to revise and recap my knowledge. I wonder if I’ll ever have time to do.

And read:

Remote work

I read Exploring the opportunities of asynchronous communication and the (conscientiously) written word and Did A Virus Just Bring About The End Of The Office? as part of my interest in WFA

Midweek nudge

I read the Midweek Nudge Compilation by Deepansh Khurana from his newsletter. It’s interesting to me for a number of things, a) how useful the knowledge (expressed as information) is in all of these kinds of things, and as a side-project

Reading list

I put together my reading list for the module I’ll be studying this term on Digital Creativity and New Media Management. It’s about art and creativity and the use digital technology, so it should be really interesting.

Tweets read:

Liquid employment

I tweeted that “Liquid employment is going to revolutionise knowledge transfer“. Liquid employment is the idea that as employees don’t need to be in an office for eight hours a day it frees them up to work multiple part-time jobs for multiple employers. If employers are smart about this they’ll encourage the knowledge transfer between themselves and other firms and utilise it in competitive ways.

GDPR

Oikos Digital tweeted about the “changes for me and my clients regarding data protection when the UK leaves the EU“. It’s a really useful primer to make you think about the impact Brexit is going to have on data protection.

Indie economics for good

Traf tweeted, “A few things I’ve learned this year from building a small, profitable internet business from zero to $100k ARR in 8 months.” Apart from my interest in the indie maker economy, I’m keen to figure out some ideas about how charities can learn from this kind of thing, and where the overlaps are in the economics of what charities provide and how makers make money.

Limiting work in progress

Admin on 21/05/2020

Meetings. What are they good for?

Admin on 14/10/2018

Generally speaking, meetings suck, we all agree about that. But there is one thing meetings are great for. Meetings reveal what kind of people you are dealing with.

Some people turn up without much of a clue. They sit there passively with very little to contribute. And they don’t get much out of the meeting. They could have just as easily have not gone and just read an email about it afterwards.

Some people use a meeting purely to push their own agenda. They may or may not have something to contribute, but their first priority is to ensure they get out of the meeting what they want.

Some people only want to derail or disrupt meetings. They distract from the discussion with misleading questions, statements and jokes.

Some people show up informed and interested. They have prepared for the meeting, thought about what is going to be discussed ahead of time, figured out what questions to ask and what they want to get out of it, and what they want to say and how they are going to contribute.

Optimising for production

Admin on 21/09/2018

There’s nothing wrong with meetings. They have their place. Meetings are fine for talking about things but meetings aren’t the right format for producing things. If the expected outcome of getting a group of people together is to produce something then a workshop is a better format. An assumption for meetings should be that no production will be attempted in the meeting. The discussion will most likely generate the need for work to be done but it should be done outside the meeting.

Why are meetings so bad for production? Meetings are usually for a short period of time, an hour say, and may be at regular intervals, maybe weakly or monthly. So, that’s two things that make meetings bad for production; such a small amount of time to work in, and such a large amount of time between the sessions. Meetings are like trying to write a book by writing one sentence a week. Obviously it’s going to take ages. Writing a chapter in one go will get the book written far more quickly, but that requires a workshop.