Month: January 2015

Build, Maintain, Rest  →

On today’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I talk about how there is more than one way to help us keep on track with doing our most important work day in and day out. And it goes beyond just white-knuckle focus and ripping our internet cable out of the wall.

It can be helpful to know what our high-level goals/values are for each day. And then we have a plumb line to see if the tasks we are doing fit into the big picture.

Sponsored by:

Build, Maintain, Rest

Sponsorship Opportunities  →

If you’ve got something awesome you’d like to promote to the readerships here on shawnblanc.net and on Tools & Toys, then I’ve got some sponsorship openings available for you. And since February is still a bit open, I’m discounting the sponsorship rate by $100.

And speaking of… over on The Sweet Setup, we’re also running a discount for sponsorships in the month of February.

If you’re interested in a spot here or there (or both!), please do send me an email.

Sponsorship Opportunities

Obsidian  →

Speaking of typefaces, Obsidian is a new one from Hoefler & Co., and it’s pretty ingenious. The typeface itself has its own set of logic and rules for how the decorative shading is drawn, how the swash caps are rendered, and more.

Margaret Rhodes has more details about Obsidian over on Wired.

Obsidian

Typographer’s Typefaces  →

From the 8 Faces blog:

Over four years and across eight issues we interviewed 64 world-renowned designers1, including; Erik Spiekermann, Jessica Hische, Michael Bierut, Nina Stössinger, Mark Simonson & Seb Lester, plus owners of respected type foundries such as, Font Smith, Type Together and Process Type.

We’ve counted the number of times each typeface was selected and found consensus with the top 25. The top 10 designers’ favourite fonts will be quite familiar to many but hopefully the full list will provide a useful stepping stone to exploring many more.

Typographer’s Typefaces

Outlook for iOS  →

So this morning Microsoft shipped what looks like a pretty great email app for the iPhone and iPad.

It works with Exchange, Outlook.com, iCloud, Google, and Yahoo emails. And you can also connect to your Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, and/or Box accounts for sending attachments, etc.

In classical Outlook fashion, email, calendars, and contacts are in the same app. Which I’m not sure about. But there are definitely some is cool things going on:

  • A quick filter button that shows you only flagged emails, unread email, or only emails with attachments.

  • A “Focused” inbox view that is supposed to be Microsoft’s way of auto-filtering your inbox to only show you the most important emails in your inbox.

  • Scheduling of email messages. Which is the Mailbox-style of “remove this message from my inbox and hide it for the next hour/day/week/whatever”.

  • A files tab that shows you a list of all the files that are buried in attachments within your emails, and that lets you browse your OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox folders.

Outlook is certainly taking a lot of cues from a other successful iOS email apps, but also is very Microsoft-y in that there is a lot going on here. But honestly, my first impressions are good. Over on The Sweet Setup we picked Dispatch as the best iPhone email app for power users, but Outlook may give Dispatch a run for its money.

Outlook for iOS

Review of the Tom Bihn Parental Unit  →

Over on Tools & Toys, Erin Brooks wrote a review of the Tom Bihn Parental Unit. It’s a diaper bag that doesn’t suck:

The market for diaper bags is pretty flooded — there are trendy diaper bags, designer fashion diaper bags, tiny diaper bags, giant diaper bags, giant purses people try to make “work” for diaper bags, and totes. Some people don’t want a “diaper bag” and opt for a regular messenger bag or a good old backpack instead. After trying numerous bags, the Tom Bihn Parental Unit ($140) has become my family’s go-to bag.

Erin’s review of the Parental Unit is the latest in our series of reviews of awesome bags.

Review of the Tom Bihn Parental Unit

HipChat (Sponsor)  →

For much too long email has been the main medium for communication at work. While email isn’t going away, team communication platforms like HipChat are allowing for more collaborative and productive communication experiences between co-workers.

HipChat combines every communication method you’d ever need — IM, group chat, screen sharing, file sharing, link sharing, video and voice calling — into a single solution. Working remotely, working across time zones, and working with the person right next to you becomes infinitely simpler and more efficient.

Create a chat room for your team or project so you can brainstorm, discuss work, or share files all in one place. Everything in HipChat is archived and searchable by keyword so you go back to a conversation whenever you want. @mentions allow you to bring your co-workers instantly into a conversation so you can get all of the right people involved in the discussion.

Best of all, HipChat is completely free for unlimited users. The Basic plan offers everything you need to get your team started: group chat, IM, file sharing, unlimited users and integrations. And if you’re interested in video chat and screen sharing, HipChat Plus is just $2/user per month.

Get your team on HipChat, sign up for a free account.

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My thanks to HipChat for sponsoring the site feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

HipChat (Sponsor)

Your Best Creative Work, Part II  →

Last week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly was about technology. And, more specifically, how technology helps us to do our best creative work.

This week’s show is about another aspect of doing our best creative work: our inner work life.

When we have a healthy inner work life then we are poised to be at are our best in terms productivity and creativity. And so, how do we stay happy and motivated so we can be productive and creative? That’s what today’s show is all about.

Sponsored by:

Your Best Creative Work, Part II

Celebrate Progress

How would you define a successful creative career?

There are two important elements: creative freedom and financial stability.

So let’s define success as having the ability to do creative work we’re proud of and to keep doing that work.

Now, there is no recipe for this stuff. It’s different for each person and changes with all sorts of factors like skills, passion, and even geographic location. It important to define creative success in such a way that it doesn’t require a particular location, vocation, or paycheck.

However, there is more to it than creative freedom and financial stability. Something else is also critical to our long-term journey of doing our best creative work.

We need a healthy inner work life.

Our emotional and motivated state is just as important (if not more important) as our finances, tools, work environment, and overall creative freedom.

Teresa Amabile is a professor at Harvard Business School. In 2012 she gave an excellent talk at the 99U conference. In that talk she shares about how our inner work life is what lays the foundation for being our most productive and our most creative.

When our emotional and motivated state — our inner work life — is strong and positive then we are most likely to be at our best in terms of creativity and productivity.

What drives our inner work life? Well, a lot of things. But one of the most important is making progress on meaningful work.

When we see that we are making progress — even small victories — then it strengthens our emotional and motivated state. We are happier and more motivated at work. And therfore, we are more likely to be productive and creative.

Consider the inverse. When we feel like cogs in a machine then we see our time as being spent just doing meaningless busy work and not contributing to anything worthwhile. And so we slowly lose our desire to be productive and efficient. We don’t care about coming up with creative solutions or fresh ideas. We just do what’s required of us in order to get our paycheck so we can go home to our television.

This is one reason why having an annual review for yourself (and your team / company) can be so beneficial. It reminds everyone of the goals accomplished and the projects completed. It shows that the oftentimes mundane and difficult work we do every day is actually adding up to something of value.

Coming back to Teresa Amabile, she calls this the Progress Principle. In short, making progress on meaningful work is critical to being happy, motivated, productive, and creative in our work.

And so, if progress is so important, why do we seem to celebrate only the big victories and only once or twice per year?

One of the greatest ways to recognince our progress is to celebrate all victories — big and small. And one of the best ways to celebrate and chronicle the small victories is with our own daily journal.

We often forget about our small wins after a few days or weeks. Or they quickly get buried under our never ending to-do lists. Or, if we don’t recognize and celebrate them, then they stop being “small wins” and start just being “what we should be doing anyway”.

By cataloging and celebrating our small wins each day then we can be reminded that we are making meaningful progress. And, in truth, it’s the small wins which all add up to actually complete the big projects and big goals. As Benjamin Franklin said, it’s little strokes that fell great oaks. And so, to celebrate a big victory is actually to celebrate the summation of a thousand small victories.

Celebrate Progress

Macminicolo (Sponsor)  →

Macminicolo has been hosting mac minis for ten years, and they’d love for you to join them. To celebrate the milestone, the Decades Promo is just $10/mo for ten months.

Low cost. High performance. The perfect Mac server.

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My thanks to Macminicolo for sponsoring the site this week. These guys are the industry leader in providing world-class hosting and data center services exclusively for your Mac mini server. They host a ton of Macs minis, they’re located at one of the most advanced data centers in the world, and their Decades Promo is one heck of a deal to help you get up and running.

Macminicolo (Sponsor)

Our Favorite App for Shared Lists is Wunderlist  →

Over on The Sweet Setup we just posted our latest app review, and it’s for shared lists.

We chose Wunderlist as our favorite because it has great apps for every major platform (so you can share your lists with folks who aren’t as Apple-nerdy as you are), it has great and reliable sync, and a lot of extra features to make collaborating with others very simple.

Or if you want something more basic (like just one, maybe two, lists that you and your spouse share), then Apple’s Reminders may be the way to go.

Our Favorite App for Shared Lists is Wunderlist

Write for Yourself, Edit for Your Reader

At the root of most bad writing, Stephen King says you’ll find fear. It’s fear — or timidity — that holds a writer back from doing her best creative work.

Ray Bradbury admitted this outright: “I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eyes.”

You’ll also find fear at the root of most non-writing. Shame, doubt, worry, second-guessing, and all their cousins stand guard against us when we sit down to deal with the blank page.

As someone who writes for a living, I can tell you this: anything that keeps me from writing is public enemy number one. And the one thing that most keeps me from writing is fear.

Fear works against me more than my lack of time, focus, ideas, and talent combined. Time, focus, ideas, talent — these are all quantifiable. But fear? Fear is completely irrational. You can’t argue with it, you can’t tell it to go away, you can’t schedule around it, and you can’t bribe it or distract it.

But you know what else about fear? It’s universal.

We all feel afraid and timid when facing that blank page. Look around at some of your favorite writers and creators. They are more than talented and hard working. They are brave. They’ve found a way to keep writing in the midst of their fear.

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To pull the curtain back just a little, oftentimes the thing which most keeps me from writing is a fear of putting my own narcissism out on display for all to see. So often my first draft is little more than my own self-centered view of the world — a world where I sit at the center. This is not the world I am trying to build up, but when writing, how can any of us write about anything else but what we know and what we have heard? We write about what we know and what we feel. We write from our own soul and our own heart and we share what we’ve seen through our own eyes and what we’ve heard through our own ears. We write from the inside out.

Here is how I deal with my own fear, doubt, worry. When writing that first draft, it’s allowed to be as horrible and ugly and awkward and egocentric as it needs to be.

This first draft is the personal draft. It’s the crappy draft. Nothing is off limits. I can write whatever I want and say it however I want. Everything is fair game so long as it keeps the cursor moving.

When the first draft is done, then the work of editing begins. It’s time to edit not just for flow and grammar and clarity, but edit for the reader. It is time to take this story that was once built with the author at the center and to instead put the reader at the center.

When you are writing, write however you must. Don’t let fear or timidity keep you from being honest and exciting. And when you are editing, improve your words so they serve the reader. Write for yourself, but edit for your reader.

Write for Yourself, Edit for Your Reader

The Levenger Circa System  →

In response to yesterday’s article about The Core Curriculum, a few people asked me how I intend to put together my notebook. Well, I don’t know yet. But, I have a pretty good idea.

The first question is the most important: should your Core Curriculum be digital or physical? Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

What’s great about a digital notebook is that you can add to it at any time. You can edit it, rearrange it, and tweak it. What’s bad about digital is that, well, you can add to it at any time. I fear that a digital notebook could be the enemy of the necessary brevity that would make the Core Curriculum manageable.

What’s great about a physical notebook is that you’re removed from the distractions of a glowing screen. You can write in the margins, make notes and highlights, and add your own insights as you go. But the disadvantage is that if you lose your notebook or you’re in trouble. And if you want to add to it or rearrange it, it could be difficult.

All that to say, I’m leaning towards a physical notebook. I’m going to put together my core curriculum as a Pages document and then print it out like an old fart. And to solve the issue of being able to rearrange pages and add new pages if I need to, I’m going to use the Levenger Circa System.

And, speaking of Levenger Circa…

The Levenger Circa System