Shawn Blanc

A few days ago I announced a new email newsletter I’ll be sending out every week. On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly — my apologies that it’s a few days late — I answer the question as to why I’m doing an email newsletter when I already have a blog to publish to.

Thou Shalt Hustle is about overcoming obstacles and breaking down barriers. Pursue a more meaningful and fulfilling life by focusing not only on doing things right doing but also doing the right things.

The book looks at productivity through a Biblical lens and establishes clear, orderly steps you can follow to discover your “YES!” By helping you find your purpose, this book will equip you to say “no” to the things that aren’t essential and help you take action towards accomplishing your goals — even if you don’t know what they are yet or even where to begin.

Thou Shalt Hustle is available on Amazon Kindle for just $6.99 and includes a link to download a free audiobook version.

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My thanks to Mike Schmitz for sponsoring the site this week to promote his new book, Thou Shalt Hustle.

This has got to be one of the best issues of Offscreen Magazine to date. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I say that about every issue. Well if so, it’s only because the quality of Offscreen magazine has been getting better and better with every issue. Especially lately.

Issue 10 is Offscreen’s anniversary issue. It comes with a beautiful black dust jacket. And, as if written just for me, most of the interviews, essays, and featurettes center around writing, creativity, and business. This is my jam.

The articles from issue 10 that I really enjoyed in particular were: the interview with Om Malik about the journey of his writing career; Rachel Nabors’ essay about (not) doing what you love; Stewart Butterfield’s rules of business; Nick Crocker’s lessons learned as an entrepreneur; and, most of all, the interview with Scott Belsky.

Belsky’s interview hit me like a gospel sermon — I felt so encouraged and inspired after reading it. Scott is someone I admire because of his pursuit to help creative people grow in their ability to be organized and to develop a bias toward action. This quote from the interview especially stood out to me:

It is sad when design and business are seen as so distant from one another — or worse, at opposition. ‘Good business’ is about sustainability, scalability, and restraint — all forces that help the design process. […]

[M]ost people in business discount the value of design, and understand only the surface (literally). But designers are no better, often failing to embrace the principles of business to empower their careers and make their creations accessible for consumption.

The potential of creativity — and your ability to sustain yourself and serve others through your creativity — is more about business than it is about ideas. The impact of your creativity boils down to execution, distribution, packaging, marketing, messaging, strategy, leadership… in short, business.

Big news: I’m writing another book.

I’ve been hinting at this on the site since last summer, and site members who’ve been listening to Shawn Today have heard quite a bit about it as well. The book has now reached the point where I’m ready to announce it.

In short, The Power of a Focused Life is about living without regret in the Age of Distraction. I’ll admit, it sounds a bit melodramatic — but I’m serious. I’ve been working on this book for over a year. I’ve spent hundreds of hours reading and doing research (with much more to do still). And I’ve been applying these principles and ideas to my own life for over a decade.

All that said, there’s an awesome book trailer you should definitely check out.

And if you want to follow along with the book’s progress and get an email when it comes out, I’m kicking off a new weekly email newsletter. You can sign up for the newsletter via the book page, or there’s a link here on the site’s sidebar.

Patrick Clark and Connie Zhou put together a pretty great photo essay on SubTropolis, the giant and mostly unknown underground business complex we have here in Kansas City. It’s a 55 million square-foot space, and it represents about 10-percent of KC’s commercial real estate.

Tyler Hays (with help from Chris Gonzales and John Carey) wrote an awesome primer to getting started with vinyl — from turntables to preamps to speakers to where to still buy vinyl records.

The point of vinyl, here in 2015, is comprised of two main aspects. The first is the sound, which is remarkably different from the digital pointedness of CDs or audio files. It’s warmer, more visceral. You don’t have to be an audiophile to hear it. I liken it to hearing a recorded live album versus being at the concert — they’re the same on paper, yet totally different experiences.

The second reason vinyl is valuable is its potential for deeper enjoyment of the music.

I’ve been completely oblivious to the vinyl scene, but after working with Tyler on this article I realized that it’s actually alive and thriving. In fact (surprise, surprise?), even Amazon has a Vinyl Store on their site.

Helena Price:

What if we made more active decisions about how we spent our Internet time? If we weren’t bogged down maintaining our inboxes and social networks, who would we set out to meet or get to know better? If we weren’t so busy clicking links or browsing photos in our feeds, what would we choose to study or learn more about? If we spent these hours differently, what would happen?

I was curious to find out for myself.

So, one night while I was sitting in bed, I un-followed everyone on the Internet.

Helena’s considerations about how she spends her time and her desire to be more focused and intentional are just fantastic. Perhaps it just because we’re at the beginning of the year or perhaps because I’m nearing the finished first draft of my book about focus, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this stuff as well. And just a few days ago I even recorded a podcast episode about it.

P.S. Helena will be speaking at the Circles Conference later this year. You should come.

I was recently a guest on Robert McGinley Myers’ podcast, Anxious Machine. We talked about connecting with people, finding meaning in our tools, and a bit about how I got into my career as a full-time writer.

Rob is an incredibly thoughtful maker. He has written several excellent articles for us on The Sweet Setup. If you haven’t heard an episode of Rob’s show yet, you’ll be impressed. The production value is incredibly high — the shows are more than just back-and-forth conversation, but they weave storytelling and music and additional information to give context to the things being discussed.

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:

• HipChat: Group chat, IM, file sharing, and integrations. Free to use.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

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.

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.

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.