Chris Bowler @chrisbowler - Tumblr Blog

Collaborate with kindness: Consider these etiquette tips in Slack

Matt Haughey shares some tips on how to use Slack in a manner more respectful of your team members. Things like:

Use emoji, bulleted lists, and bold and italic text styling to make your titles and key points stand out in longer messages. This is especially useful for announcements or meeting recaps.

That applies to any kind of digital communication, but sure. However, the more I read the article, the more it made something obvious: Slack, and other instant chat tools like it, are not the best way to communicate as a team by default.

Consider this suggestion:

You can also use DND to carve out focus time during your workday. Click the bell icon atop your channel menu and select a time. Your status in Slack will then communicate to colleagues that you’re heads-down working and they shouldn’t expect an immediate response.

This begs the question: why are most work environments defaulting to expect an immediate response? We’ve gotten so used to this behaviour that it’s expected and teams building tools like Slack have to build in features to combat the expectation.

Again:

Imagine you sent an email to your team with a new product idea. First you’re met with total silence, then later a reply or two. You have to guess how the rest of the team feels, or you can ask at your next team meeting. What if that idea were posted in a team Slack channel instead? You’d likely see emoji reactions soon after posting. They might show support, indicate that the team wants to think about it, or note an approval.

A brand new product idea needs more than emoji reactions. Perhaps live chat is not the place for nuanced discussion.

At any rate, I like Slack — as far as instant chat tools go, it’s the best. But this post left me feeling like they have to explain away some of the functionality of the product. Many of the included tips just sounded like the practice of writing an effective email, the very thing Slack was created to replace.

Whimsical: my app of the week

In the past, I’ve used Sketch a lot to illustrate concepts for my team, or create user journeys, or onboarding flows. Although it’s a full design tool for making mockups or full product designs, I found it also worked well for conceptual models.

Here’s an example I made for showing the ideal user journey for a Beanstalk customer.

Over the past couple of years, I haven’t needed to make this type of thing as often and I discovered at some point that I never installed Sketch on my newest laptop. And when the time came to create something new, I found that the version of Sketch was so far behind, I’d have to purchase an upgrade.

I like to pay for good software, but I hesitate when it’s not a tool I use regularly. And somewhere in the past months, I came across Whimsical. I think this is a service that could replace something like Sketch for me.

I won’t produce artifacts like the example above with Whimsical, but it does provide the ability to quickly create mockups, mind maps, flowcharts, and “walls of sticky notes”.

These are all lower fidelity, but that’s most often all I need in my role.

Check it out.

One month with a dumbed down phone

It’s been one month since I turned my phone into a device that, for the most part, does not give me any new content. No email, no social media, no RSS, and not even any work communication. A few people have asked how it’s going.

In a word, lovely. Absolutely lovely.

Since iOS debuted Screen Time, our family has reviewed the numbers for anyone who owns a device (4 out of 6 of us). I’ve been tracking this since October and we mostly use it for talking about screen usage and addiction, not telling our kids how they have to use their devices.

Looking at my own numbers since dumbing down, there is a small shift. The 4 weeks before starting this exercise, I was averaging 96 minutes of usage, 64 pickups, and 25 notifications per day. Since the change, the numbers have reduced to 83 minutes of usage, 44 pickups, and 17 notifications per day. Not a huge reduction at first glance.

But there is more to these numbers than what you see on the surface. First, those numbers are probably not that high compared to a lot of folks. Second, picking up my phone 20 less times in a day means there are 20 times when I choose to put my attention into something else. Last, my book reading comes into play. I tend to switch back and forth between paper and digital books and I happened to start a new digital book that bumped up my averages over the past couple of weeks.

And I’m definitely ok with reading books on my phone.

But the more important aspect of this entire exercise is not necessarily made obvious by the numbers. It’s the feeling. After the first week of getting used to the change, the compulsion to pick up the device to check something, anything, starts to fade. I've had plenty of moments where I realized I'm not sure where my phone is.

And so the number of pickups drops, yes. But the feeling of not needing to constantly find stimulus far outweighs the change in statistics. That change started to dribble into my work day. But the distractions are still present in that space (or habit field, as Jack Cheng called it) so I still have to fight the urge to shift screens and check something when I bump into uncertainty or switch between tasks.

So the changes are positive. But there is still room to grow.

Related, Isaac Smith posted an update about how his own experience has been going.

There are only 2 workplace distractions you need to worry about

The Wildbit team focused on focus for the month of June. We went through the exercise of being super mindful of our time with the goal of getting in 4 very focused hours of work each day.

Before we started, I spent some time tweaking RescueTime so that it would automatically show my overall productivity and how much focus time I was getting. As part of that process, I subscribed to their email newsletter and quite enjoyed some of the articles they referred to. This was one of them.

In this piece, they outline the difference between internal and external distractions. The ones listed in the title above are the external, but it’s the internal issues that are hardest to overcome.

It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds.

This was good to read while I was going through the exercise of dumbing down my phone (more on that below). And while that exercise is focused on the removal of external input (email, social media, Slack etc), it’s actually just making it harder to act on the inner impulse (I’m bored or unsure of how to move forward on the problem at hand).

What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble

Dan Cederhom recently announced that he is leaving Dribbble, the company he started over 10 years ago. It’s one of those 20-things-I-learned kind of posts, but hang in until the end where he makes a great point that hits close to home.

Under point 19, aptly named Take care of yourself first, he shares a little about his experience with anxiety.

Anxiety is a medical condition—it’s biological. A chemical imbalance where our primitive “fight or flight” response kicks in at times it shouldn’t. It’s also a condition that’s often misunderstood by those that don’t experience it. But it needs to lose its stigma. It should be talked about more. Millions suffer from it.

This is why I’ve shared about the struggles in our family. If someone breaks their leg or comes down with cancer, we extend our sympathy. We need to keep talking about mental health issues so we stop thinking about these kinds of issues in the wrong way.

I like Dan’s focus here on the biology. A lot of mental health issues requires changes in thinking on the part of the person who is ill (and that is damn hard work). But it often just comes down the body not working correctly — just like cancer.

Our bodies are amazing chemical factories and, unfortunately, the end result doesn’t isn’t always good health. So the more we can talk about it, the better we can understand it, the better we can recognize that medication is often the appropriate treatment (or at least a part of the treatment along with CBT or related techniques).

Confessions of a 40-something default skin

I must confess that I’ve finally succumbed to the world of Fortnite.

Two summers back, we finally brought video games back to our home (I’d given them up in my mid-to-late 20s) as our boys were showing increased interest. We started with a used Wii to see how things would go, then picked up a Nintendo Switch last year. My thinking was that if they were going to have this be a part of their lives, I would join them in it so it was something we did together. And Nintendo tends to have games that are less “adult” themed.

It wasn’t long before our eldest son started asking about Fortnite. We held back for quite a few months in our usual Amish fashion (take a wait-and-see approach to new things, albeit with a much shorter timeline than the horse-and-buggy crowd). As our son showed maturity on the topic (i.e. disciplined himself enough to stop asking about it multiple times per day), we let him start playing over the Christmas break. Season 7 for you Fornite aficionados.

Me? I tried it once after his first few weeks. But the chaos and fast game play seemed like a lot of stress I didn’t need. And things stayed that way for months. Until the boys lost the cartridge to FIFA 19 🙄

Once that happened, I slowly started to get into Fortnite. And to enjoy it. Well, some aspects of it at least. A few thoughts that have come to mind in playing the game.

We try to limit the exposure to violence in our home. But Fortnite is not bad in this regard. It’s a shooter, yes — but when you eliminate a player, there is no blood or gore. Instead, some flying robot-type-thing pops out and the player’s “projection” is sucked up. I’m not sure if that is correct depiction, but that’s what it feels like. Fortnite is the Candy Crush of first person shooters

If there is a danger with this game, it’s addiction. Epic Games is employing a lot of the same tactics services like Facebook and Twitter use. And based on their revenue, they’re benefitting a lot from those tactics

There’s an entire culture around the game. The more my two boys played the game, the less I understood what they were talking about. Defaults, sweaty try-hards, mats… there’s an entire vernacular to learn (although it really chaps my backside when they claim a term that has been around for decades came from Fortnite users)

And there’s a real sense of community here. My boys will play with friends from school — often in creative mode where you can build a lot and play against only the people invited — but have also made friends with people from all over the place. It’s something to be careful of, but also something that reminds me a little of the early days of Twitter

It’s not an easy game. Since I grew up playing games, I’ve tended to be able to beat my kids whenever we play. They could play Mario Kart for two weeks straight, then I’d play one grand prix and blow them away. But that ended with Fortnite — maybe it’s my age and declining faculties, but I find it hard to aim on the move and stressful overall

In that vein, I think Epic would do well to make it a little easier for new players. Programmatically get groups of players in similar tiers/levels against each other so someone who’s played less than 10 times does wait 2 minutes for the game to load only to last 30 seconds before getting two pumped from behind by some person who's played since season 2… totally speaking from experience here

But it is a lot of fun. As someone who spent a lot of evenings play 4-on-4 Goldeneye with friends, I appreciate a good group shooter. A team rumble can be a little chaotic, a solo match just stresses me out, but overall, it’s still a lot of fun and I find myself wanting to improve my skills

Since I made the decision to be involved with my kids in gaming, I’m glad I got started on this. We have some good times competing to see who can last the longest or get the most eliminations in a match. I'm curious to see how long it sticks.

Well, that turned into a longer list than I had intended. I guess I’m still in the honeymoon phase of the game. But if you're a parent who has been wondering about this game, here's a vote of approval from a fairly cautious dad.

The dumb phone I already own

The act of replacing one’s smart phone with a less capable version is a growing trend. As digital decluttering and internet detoxes become more popular, so too is making the more permanent change of having less capability in your pocket at all times. Some people will pull out an old Nokia from their drawer, some will pick up the latest flip phone (they still make these?), and some will try one of few new options available in this category (i.e. the Light phone).

Me? I’ve kicked the idea around a few times. I gave it serious consideration once again when I saw that Isaac Smith made the switch recently. But there was an aspect of my job that required me to be on call for periods of time where a smartphone and some specific apps were needed — this had stopped me from truly considering the idea.

That requirement changed suddenly a couple weeks back and I no longer have to be available after hours. So I once again thought about getting rid of my iPhone and getting something less functional, and therefore less distracting.

My requirements

Truthfully, social media and a lot of the things Cal Newport talks about in Digital Minimalism are not an issue for me. I don’t use Instagram and apps of that sort. I don’t have a Twitter app on my phone. The most common “entertainment” activity I perform on my phone was reading books.

Yet I still feel the need to use my phone less. I still suffer from the “just checks”. It’s just that what I check on is all work related. And, in a house of 6 where screentime is a common point of discussion and focus, I want to lead by example.

So I looked at my phone and thought about all the things I like to do with it. These are activities that are either necessary or something I consider enjoyable and a good use of my time. The only question is when I should take the time to do them.

write in my journal (including adding photos)

documenting and reviewing my personal and professional goals

completing my weekly reviews, which includes those goals and my calendar

reading books

logging my habits

memorizing Scripture

recording and reviewing my runs

reading RSS and email newsletters

taking photos

looking at our photos

reviewing maps when on trail runs

reading my Bible during a church service or when travelling (I use my hard cover Bible at home, but it’s big enough I don’t want to lug it around)

paying for items when on a run

transferring funds when out and about

scanning documents and receipts

work related items (checking Slack, Basecamp, Help Scout, Intercom, and email)

I’m sure there are some other items I haven’t thought of yet. I considered how to approach all of these if I was to move to a dumb phone. I’d probably want to get a Kindle. Some activities I could switch to doing on my laptop (but with less frequency). Some might be dropped completely (reading a digital Bible, paying for items with Apple Pay). And the purpose of this exercise was to do the work related items during my workday from my computer.

But when discussing this with my wife, she had a really great suggestion:

Why not turn the phone you already have into a dumb phone?

Great idea. And I did just that.

I removed all apps that get me picking up the phone to “check”. Slack, Basecamp, email, RSS, and Strava. I reviewed the Notifications panel in Settings — things were pretty clean already, but I removed a few more. I also disabled vibrations and reduced the number of apps that could post items on the Lock screen.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out. Early returns are looking good — my phone has not been in my hand much the past week.

One other benefit of the dumb phone is not having to pay a ridiculous price for your data plan. I get a bit frustrated that we have very few options here in Canada and they’re all spendy (we pay around $200 CAD/month for 3 phones and data). So I’m still considering the dumb phone as a possibility at some point.

But for now, I appreciate the supercomputer in my pocket that lets me do most of the items I listed above. But with far less distraction now.

I'm Walking Away From the Product I Spent a Year Building

Derrick Reimer shares the story of his last year. He had left Drip and started working on Level, an alternative to Slack (reminds me a lot of Twist), before choosing to walk away. His desire to build a calmer chat tool is laudable and the story is interesting.

But one point leapt off the (web)page and grabbed my attention. After building an early prototype and sharing with interested users, the results were not what he had hoped:

The response did not live up to my expectations. Only a subset of people who paid booked an onboarding session. Of those who did, some never touched the product. Some who did poke around the product never gave it a real go with their team (and didn’t show much interest in following up with me). A handful did convert. Every conversion funnel leaks, but I was admittedly disheartened. There seemed to be a curious mismatch between the sentiments I gathered early on and the actions people were taking. If people were ravenous for a solution, why weren’t most people even attempting to pilot Level?

He decided that he needed a larger sample size and invited another 1,000 people to try his product. To similar results:

I observed how people were using it for about a week. There was a lot of poking around and, once again, virtually zero evidence of anyone piloting it with their team. I reached out directly to everyone who made it into the product: are you planning to test Level out? What can I do to help? It became clear pretty quickly that the gap between interest and implementation was of canyon-like proportions… Small teams (who have a much easier time making the jump due to their size) didn’t seem that compelled by Level. In follow-up conversations, I discovered that Slack was at most a minor annoyance for them. Suboptimal? Yes. Worth going through the trouble of switching? Probably not.

It turns out that his message resonated with people. But the pain they experienced in their current toolset was not enough to prompt change. This is where the forces behind the jobs-to-be-done framework are so key.

Our work with Conveyor feels similar to what Derrick experienced. We’ve had multiple rounds of user testing and I’ve learned to not trust the exact words people say to you. Their actions speak much more loudly.

Building a successful product is no easy feat.

Independent Publishing

My thoughts have turned back to independent publishing on the web of late. It’s something I think about a lot (obviously), but sometimes other people bring it front and centre when sharing their own related thoughts. Alan Jacobs lamented getting plain text into Wordpress. Cal Newport wrote about indie social media. Craig Mod walked hundreds of kilometres across Japan and published a daily entry over SMS — and shared a strangely enjoyable podcast of sounds to boot.

All not merely about blogging, some maybe even a little weird, but all tangentially related to publishing on the web. And owning your stuff.

Most important, my pal Rian Van Der Merwe finally (finally!) started up his newsletter once again and launched his own site membership after 10 years of writing. We’ve talked about this frequently over the past months and I’m super excited to see him finalize a direction and run with it. Please consider joining — he writes mostly about product management, but also a lot about how technology affects us. If you enjoy this newsletter, chances are you’ll enjoy his as well.

So this is all top of mind for me. But the reality is, I don’t really have time for much publishing these days. We’ve been having some hard times in our home and the mental health of my family comes before hobbies such as this (more on that some other time).

But when I’m short on time for writing, I’m thankful for the work of others providing good reading!

Back to Craig Mod and his walking+publishing experiment. Not everyone is into walking; I can get that. But good writing? I think we can appreciate it even when the topic is not normally of interest.

For 25 days I woke up to this kind of thing waiting in Messages:

Day 18. Thirty-seven asphalt slammin’ kilometers. What are pinkie toes anyway? Not necessary, right? Mine have become meta-pinkies, shadows of pinkies, mere charcoal sketches of pinkies. Somewhere, below the blisters, there are pinky toes and they are fully ready to bow to evolutionary desires and leave this material world. I write to you from Denny’s. The most popular place in the known universe. I have left the forest and reentered Pachinko Road.

There’s a lot of negativity about what the internet turned out to be after 25 years. But it’s not all bad … some people are still having fun.

Digital Nomads Are Not the Future

This was a featured story on Medium last summer, but I stumbled across a few posts recently that brought this to my mind. Paris Marx makes gives astute commentary on our current obsession with a nomadic lifestyle, opening with the allure:

In an era of increasingly precarious jobs, ever-longer working hours, and declining social mobility, it’s no surprise that digital nomads are gaining a sizable following. Office dwellers lack happiness or hope in the daily grind. They know there must be something better. After enough time spent in an office chair, it’s easy to aspire to become one of those people with a MacBook on a beach in a foreign locale.

And who among us hasn’t spent a 15 minute session scrolling through some “van life” Instagram feed? But he quickly hints at the darker reality:

Many digital nomads had significant privilege before pursuing such a lifestyle, privilege that allows them to avoid the potentially negative aspects of location independence.

Later in the article, he states his case — and the problem with this movement — more clearly:

The fierce individualism embedded in the culture of digital nomadism ignores (and can damage) communities, both at home and abroad. People who feel “liberated” from space have no stake in improving the space around them. To them, local communities are as valuable as co-working space. Digital nomads are far less likely to work toward positive local change, fight for the rights of disadvantaged peoples, or halt the gentrification that displaces long-term residents — to which they usually contribute — because those issues don’t affect them.

I’ve been making my way through A Field Guide For Everyday Mission with other members of our local church. It’s been a good read and I recognize changes I need to make in my thinking. This post resonates in a similar way.

Marx finishes the article with a scathing judgement (understandably so), but sadly doesn’t offer any solutions.

Privilege allows digital nomads to ignore all these things. It allows them to live in a fantasy world where they need only worry about themselves. They take full advantage of their positions, increasing their satisfaction while avoiding their responsibility to contribute to the society that granted them their privilege in the first place. Their lifestyle actively augments the forces displacing locals. Digital nomads evidently do not care about the places where they happen to live and, for that reason, they have no place in the future.

That’s where the book I mentioned above comes in. It encourages followers of Christ to open our eyes, see the mission field right where we are, and to start to make changes by serving others and sharing the Good News of Christ.

This is one I’ll read through, then go back and go through it again. The second time making notes and picking practical changes to make in my daily life.

Wondrous Creatures

Sam Hernandez doesn’t write all that often for his site. But when he does, he does it so very well. This time he’s sharing about his dog, his next dog, and becoming a dog lover.

I used to say goodnight to Bear every night. I’d hold his face in my hand and say in my best Texan accent, “Quite a wondrous creature you are, Bear, made by the hand of God himself, I swear. Go to sleep pretty boy.”

Sam does a great job of sharing his experiences, but he has a knack for dropping dollops of wisdom along the way. Like this one:

I’m fond of saying that you love what you love. I mean that you feel love for what you love on purpose, and you become a better person because you love on purpose rather than by some serendipitous accident.

Amen. Thanks for writing, Sam!

Long conversations

Our church recently held a seminar with a guest speaker who specializes in a few topics dear to my heart. Specifically, parenting in our digital age, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It was an intense weekend that covered a lot of ground. And it was time well spent.

These kinds of topics can be hard to address — and can be hot button topics for a lot of people. But we need to talk about them, constantly, for our kids are growing up in a world far, far different than the one we grew up in.

I wanted to share a few of the key ideas that I took away from the sessions.

God is still in control

God is for us

God has called us

We don’t have to fear these things. While culture is changing greatly — good in some ways, bad in others — he is still a sovereign God. And he has called us to such a time as this.

It’s crucial to remember these points on any issue where we feel passionate as it’s far too easy to focus on our own efforts. Or worse, to feel like things are “going to hell in a hand basket”. And when it comes to facing how our culture is changing in regards to technology and sexual orientation and identity, the seminar speaker (Sid Coop) put it well:

There were no good ol’ days. They’re a myth!

It’s easy to look back and think, “Things were so much better when I was a kid.” But culture is not wrestling control away from God. Everything happens under his sovereign eye.

Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might. He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding

Our session covered a lot of material and some good discussions. Our take-home was the following list:

Think about technology in a Christian way

Evaluate our (adults) personal use of technology

Create and re-create boundaries for your family

Delay smart phone / social media use (don’t get them phones before grade 9/10)

Where appropriate, engage your kids in their digital world (text them)

Teach discernment

Invest in shared experiences and activities

Make character development a priority

Remember, relationships win

Pray, like crazy

Some of my thoughts on this list:

2 D’uh. Remove the speck in your own eye first, right? Of course, you don’t have to be perfect with your own usage before you set limits.

You’re not going to get this right the first time. Or the second or third time. So it’s a good habit to talk about our screens and our habits using them over and over. And, as your kids grow and circumstances change, so too should your boundaries.

There’s likely no perfect time as kids are all different. But grade 9/10 (14–15 years old) feels good to me. Our daughter was slightly younger and our son even more so. Looking back now, we’ll be waiting a little longer for the next (and precedent can be thrown out the window — again, the kids are all different).

I can’t recommend this enough. We preach the value of face-to-face interaction as the best form of communication, but it’s important to interact with our kids with the tools they love as well. Example: my wife follows our daughter on Instagram and checks on her content regularly. We refrain from commenting though — we save that for IRL.

This is so well said. Sid made the point that we can’t just take things away — like it or not, our kids social lives will run though these devices. If you choose to withhold, you have to replace it with something. Shared experiences are key.

It was reassuring to see from an expert that we’re already on a good track in our home. And back to the title of this section, it’s all about conversations. Lots, many of them long. I often have to battle my desire to just head to be and instead engage in listening.

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction

Mairead Small Staid shares a brilliant piece of writing all about reading and its apparent demise. She frames the problem well:

The diminishment of literature—of sustained reading, of writing as the product of a single focused mind—would diminish the self in turn, rendering us less and less able to grasp both the breadth of our world and the depth of our own consciousness.

So, what we write and what we read helps shape our thinking and our very being? I like that. But Staid goes further — a lot further — and claims that the attack on reading is tied to topics like democracy and the environment:

And perhaps the greatest danger posed to literature is not any newfangled technology or whiz-bang rearrangement of our synapses, but plain old human greed in its latest, greatest iteration: an online retailer incorporated in the same year The Gutenberg Elegies was published. In the last twenty-five years, Amazon has gorged on late capitalism’s values of ease and cheapness, threatening to monopolize not only the book world, but the world-world. In the face of such an insidious, omnivorous menace—not merely the tech giant, but the culture that created and sustains it—I find it difficult to disentangle my own fear about the future of books from my fear about the futures of small-town economies, of American democracy, of the earth and its rising seas.

The remainder of the essay describes the experience of reading books, the immersive act that it can be when done rightly.

The heightened state brought on by a book—in which one is “actively present at every moment, scripting and constructing”—is what readers seek, Birkerts argues: “They want plot and character, sure, but what they really want is a vehicle that will bear them off to the reading state.” This state is threatened by the ever-sprawling internet—can the book’s promise of deeper presence entice us away from the instant gratification of likes and shares?

The alternatives like Twitter and news sites and talk radio (aka podcasts) cannot give this depth. They were not designed with this intention.

Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment. It’s a way to pass the time, not to live in it. Reading—real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned case for—draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and “where it does not assume depth, it creates it.”

I could quote this entire article (and nearly did). Please stop here and go read it in full. This is a repeated message in my space, but this message bears repetition. It’s crucial to remind ourselves that depth is important and worth fighting for.

Digital Minimalism and God (Or, is Social Media Undermining Religion?)

If you follow Cal Newport’s blog, you’ll know he writes often about the trends in our culture and the shift towards all things shallow. In this post, he addresses a chief concern of mine. He shares an example from the life of Martin Luther King Jr’s life to get to his point:

I’m bringing this all up because it provides background for a surprising claim that’s been growing online in recent years, and which seems self-evidently worthy of unpacking: social media might be accidentally undermining religion.

He began to notice a lot of the traffic for his newest book, Digital Minimalism, was coming from certain religious circles. After some thought, he recognizes this should not be a surprise.

Though there are many ways in which tools like Twitter or Instagram might work against (or in some cases with) the traditional objectives of religion, the issue that kept arising is the way in which the ubiquitous distraction they provide corrodes the contemplative life.

Courage, reassurance, revelation: these require a quiet mind capable of apophatic insight. One of the unintentional consequences of innovating an algorithmically-optimized, always-present source of attention-snagging noise is that this quiet disappears.

From my own experience, it’s tough to hear a still small voice amidst the mighty winds of social media and other tools that call for my attention.

How to create Idea Babies: A Knowledge Processing System for Marketers, Creators, and Knowledge Workers

I can’t recall how I came across this article. But it sure got me thinking long and hard about my set up for storing notes and information related to all the things I do. Andre Chaperon absolutely nailed the description of a problem I still experience from time to time:

The inefficiencies of a system (or lack of a system) don’t become apparent until we need to retrieve the information we’ve previously been exposed to; information we’ve already deemed important. … and then can’t find the info or recall where you saw it.

Despite efforts to ensure this doesn’t happen, I still find myself having these moments. And so this article inspired me.

In short, Chaperon is making a case for the Zettelkasten method of notekeeping. And he goes into great detail about the entire system and how one can implement it digitally. And while he ends up in a different place than I picture, it sounds fantastic. I can picture this set up with Sublime Text. But I feel like it makes the most sense to use Ulysses in this fashion.

My issue on this topic is that the Zettelkasten method feels a little like overkill for me. I could make better use of keywords (tags) and smart filters in Ulysses to ensure I can find the things I need.

However, if one was to implement the Zettelkasten system, I recommend reading why one would want to use it. In his post Create a Zettelkasten to Improve Thinking and Writing, Christian Tietze from Zettelkasten.de goes into detail on the benefits of this method. At its heart, he talks about how taking notes is good for a knowledge worker; the Zettelkasten method is the method to do so that allows related notes to be more interconnected.

Doing it right, you can move way beyond input/output-based note-taking. You can interact with and communicate with your system of notes. As holds true for every communication, you’ll learn something new when you interact with your Zettelkasten.

Anyway, as you can see, I’m a little infatuated with this idea right now.

A sucker for a new bag

Jory Raphael recently tweeted about a new bag he’d picked up. And I must say, nothing piques my clicky finger interest like bags. Messenger bags, duffel bags, backpacks — this is an area of temptation for me and I can never resist scrolling through pictures of people sharing their own.

This last fall I was needing a new bag as I’d given my daughter my old Tom Bihn Smart Alec for school. This time I didn’t jump to a decision immediatly. Instead, I did a lot of research and spent way too much time watching Chase Reeves talking about bags… (seriously though, the next time you’re in the market, Chase has you covered with his BagWorks review site).

Here are a few of the bags I considered:

Baron Fig Canvas Slimline Backpack $85 USD

Bellroy Classic Backpack $149 CAD

Aer Fit Pack 2 $135 USD and Flight pack 2 $160 USD

Tom Bihn Synapse 25 $200 USD

Minaal Daily bag $249 USD

Better Backpack Kickstarter $129 USD

In the end, I went with the Day Pack from Aer.

What's nice about the Aer

There are quite a few things I like about this bag. First, it's a great mixture of form and function. Tom Bihn bags work very well, but they're just not nice to look at. Other bags look great but aren't laid out well.

The Aer is the best of both. It looks sharp. I wasn't sure about the glossy aspect of the front, but this makes it super easy to clean.

As for the design, this one has been well thought out. The top pouch is perfect for AirPods, sunglasses, or your passport. It's easily accessible even when the bag is over your shoulder.

The two main compartments also work well. The front one is perfect for your gadgets and tech dopps. You can also easily fit a light jacket in there.

The rear most compartment (closest to your back) has a nice section for your laptop. In front of that go your notebooks (and an iPad or alternate tablet would also fit easily). In his video, Chase talks about “papers”, but notebooks and novels work perfectly in that space.

This compartment also has a nice water bottle sleeve. The only issue is I think this would be more appropriate in the front pocket. A leak in the back would be an issue with all your electronic gear.

Last, build quality is something to think about with bags. Cheap bags from Walmart feel like you'd expect: they won't last much longer than a school semester. A good bag has a solidity to it. And you know it when you feel it. Zipper and pocket linings are the place to look first. Next are the straps. And the Aer passes the test!

Overall, I'm a big fan of this bag and would recommend it. I would also assume the Fit or Flight bags are excellent options as well.

Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters

My favourite writer writing about email newsletters. This is the epitome of my reading experience. About the burgeoning popularity of the age old technology, Craig Mod has this to say:

Newsletters and newsletter startups these days are like mushrooms in an open field after a good spring rain. I don’t know a single writer who isn’t newslettering or newsletter-curious, and for many, the newsletter is where they’re doing their finest public work.

And while we often discuss this topic in terms of the readership experience, Craig shares a sharp ovbservation about creating a newsletter:

Here’s another, more subtle, point about the grace of email and newsletters: Creation and consumption don’t happen in the same space. When I go to send a missive in Campaign Monitor the world of my laptop screen is as silent as a midnight Tokyo suburb.9 I think we’ve inured ourselves to the (false) truth that in order to post something, in order to contribute something to the stream, we must look at the stream itself, “Bird Box”-esque, and woe be the person in a productive creative jag, wanting to publish, who can resist those hot political tweets.

And best of all:

And of all of my publishing online — either through this site or publications, on social networks, in blips or blops or bloops or 10,000 word digressions on the sublimity of Japanese pizza — almost nothing has surpassed the intimacy and joy and depth of conversation I’ve found from publishing Roden.

There is a connection between the newsletter writer and newsletter reader that should not be ignored.

Speaking of which, you can’t go wrong supporting your favourite writers. So please consider joining Craig’s membership.

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Chris Bowler