Today we published a fantastically written and photographed review of the GORUCK GR2 by Álvaro Serrano. When we were working on the redesign of Tools & Toys last fall, articles like this were exactly what we had in mind: equal parts helpful, informative, entertaining, and visually rich.
Dash (Sponsor) →
Dash is a web app for building and sharing realtime dashboards. They look great in a browser tab, on your phone, or on a wall-mounted TV through Chromecast.
To help you get started quickly, Dash has pre-built dashboard widgets for all kinds of services like Google Analytics, appFigures, GitHub, Google News, and Twitter. There’s also an API to display data from Dropbox or the web with custom widgets like speedometers, charts, tables, and leaderboards.
In a couple minutes you can set up a Dashboard to monitor your web servers with widgets for Pingdom, Chartbeat, and realtime Google Analytics. Or, you can track your fitness New Year’s resolution with pre-built widgets for Fitbit, Strava, and Withings Scale. You can even keep an eye on your online mentions with Twitter and Google News widgets showing the search results of several different phrases.
Dash’s pricing model was designed to encourage data sharing within the community. It’s a lot like GitHub. If you make your data public, Dash is completely free. If you want to keep your dashboard private, you’ll need a pro account for $10 per month.
Dash is currently running a limited time promotion. If you sign up for a free account now, you’ll also get one private dashboard free forever. No credit card required.
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My thanks to Dash for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I spent some time this morning setting up my own custom Dashboard for Tools & Toys and it’s awesome. There are a lot of drag-and-drop widgets, and you can write your own data to power any custom widgets (like charts, lists, etc.) The Dashboard I set up acts as a one-stop-page for me to see incoming tweets, current traffic numbers, and more. Dash is giving folks one private dashboard for free forever — definitely worth checking out.
Perpetual Neglect
“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
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Like many of you, no doubt, I spent some time thinking about personal goals and ideas for this upcoming year. The new year is always a good time to reflect, take stock of where we are, and make sure we’re still on course for where we want to be.
In a few months I will begin my 5th year of working from home and working for myself (thanks in no small part to you, dear readers). One of the most empowering lessons I have learned over these past 4 years has been regarding my own limitations. Not merely my limitations of time, but also of energy.
In any given day I have 2 maybe 3 hours of good writing time in me. A couple hours of reading. Hopefully an hour or two of researching, thinking, or decision making. And maybe an hour of admin and other busywork.
If I push my day to include more than that, I often find myself not making much progress. There is a point when the responsible and productive thing for me to do is leave my office and stop working altogether.
The workaholic in me wants to squeeze in a few more tasks. I have friends who can crank out hours upon hours of productive, creative work. Alas, I’m not one of those types. And so I’m trying to let myself quit while I’m ahead and go upstairs to be with my family, or go run errands, or just lie down and stare at the ceiling while I listen to what is going on in my imagination.
Albert Einstein:
Although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.
I’m an advocate of productivity as much as the next guy with a blog, but over my years of working from home, I feel that too much focus on productivity is to miss the forest for the trees.
Being productive is not what’s ultimately important. I want to do my best creative work and I want to have thriving relationships.
Time management, GTD, focus, diligence — these can help keep me on track. But they are not the end goal in and of themselves. I want to focus first on creativity. What do I need to do my best creative work?
Have I written today? Have I daydreamed? Have I been contemplative? Have I had an inspiring and encouraging conversation? Have I helped somebody? These acts are far more important than the progress I make against my to-do list.
When you work for yourself, there is an oceanic undercurrent that pulls you into the details of your job. The thousand responsibilities of administration and communication and infrastructure. These are important, to be sure, because without them your business would cease to be. But (at least in my case) these are the support structures at best. The foundation of my business is not the ancillary administration; it is the muse.
In The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, there’s this great line: “Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject…”
Mann’s line carries the same truth as the quote by Robert Louis Stevenson which is at the beginning of this article. Our devotion to a subject can only be sustained by the neglect of many others. Finding something we want to do is the easy part. Now we must decide what we will neglect — we must simplify where we spend our energy.
In this new year, as our thoughts are on what we can do and what we want to do, perhaps we should first think about what we will not do. What tasks and pursuits will we give up or entrust to others?
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“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” — Henry Thoreau
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule →
Speaking of uninterrupted work time, Paul Graham’s essay about how makers and managers use and schedule their time differently is always worth a read.
Your Best Work →
Michael Lopp:
Who understands the compounding productivity interest earned with each consecutive uninterrupted minute of work? It is there in those hard to capture collective minutes where your best work is happening.
It’s not just a challenge to get uninterrupted work time when in an office environment. It’s also a challenge in the most isolated of work spaces. Because our minutes are interrupted from without (co-workers, incoming phone calls, and other notifications) as well as from within (our tendency to check twitter real quick or to keep our email app open in the background).
Tripling the Traffic and Income on Tools & Toys →
It’s been 90 days since the re-design of Tools & Toys went live, and when comparing the most recent numbers to the same quarter last year we saw a 3x growth in pageviews, unique visitors, and site revenue.
And so, on today’s episode of The Weekly Briefly I wanted to share more about why we decided to redesign the site, what our goals were, and what we think has contributed to the site’s growth (beyond just the new look).
Sponsored By:
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Harvest Forecast: A whole new way to plan your team’s time.
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Artisanal Software Festival: No bundles, no gimmicks: just great prices on some of the most interesting and innovative software for working with ideas.
Gumroad Introduces Scheduled and Automated Email Campaigns →
Wow. This is a brilliant and fantastic new feature to Gumroad.
I use Gumroad to sell Delight is in the Details, and I couldn’t be happier with the service. As a seller, Gumroad is extremely affordable and very easy to set up. And the user experience for the buyer is just as great — I wouldn’t be selling with them if I thought otherwise.
With their new email workflow stuff, you can set up scheduled emails and automated email campaigns that go out to your customers. It can be as simple as a thank-you email after someone has bought your product, or a whole series of communications.
I’ve been use Zapier to connect Gumroad with Mailchimp to do something similar, but I’m paying $785/year for those two services. Gumroad now includes it for free. Though with Mailchimp I do get quite a bit more control of my email designs and flexibility as my email list grows with folks who are interested in my book but who haven’t yet bought it.
AT&T Introduces Rollover Data →
Sounds great, but… rollover data only carries over to the next billing cycle, and it’s only for those on the Mobile Share Value plans. And the Mobile Share Value plans only get their discounted pricing if you pay full price for your smart phone or have AT&T Next (where you “lease” your smartphone).
But it does sound like an awesome step in the right direction. Remember when mobile phone plans were all about how many minutes and how many text messages you got and data was unlimited (because who uses data?) Now that’s basically flip flopped.
And speaking of AT&T data usage, last week I was logging in to my AT&T account to update my billing info. Before making it to my account settings page, I was asked if I wanted to upgrade my plan from 10GBs of shared data/month to 30GBs. Below, in smaller print, was a link to see my average monthly data usage. So I clicked that only to discover that my wife and I use about 1.5 GBs of data per month. So instead I downgraded from our 10GB/month plan to the 3GB/month plan and we’re now saving $40 (!) a month.
Something we didn’t put to our 2015 Tech Resolutions article was to check in on and evaluate our cell phone plans. Mobile carriers are changing and reconfiguring their plans all the time; how many of us are on older plans that are charging us more than we need, but don’t know any different?
The Best RSS Reader for OS X is Reeder →
We just posted our latest app review over on The Sweet Setup, and it’s for desktop RSS readers. We tried out literally a dozen different apps and Reeder was clearly the best. It’s fast, it’s well-designed, it’s awesome.
Harvest Forecast (Sponsor) →
Managing teams is hard. Imagine it’s Monday morning and your team doesn’t know what they’re working on for the week. Plans change and schedules change with them. Spreadsheets weren’t built for this.
Harvest Forecast is a tool designed to plan your team’s time. Visualize schedules in Forecast and easily adjust them as needed. Forecast keeps your team’s expectations on the same page and helps you move projects forward.
As new projects come in, you’ll know who’s available, and when to hire. Leave behind bloated spreadsheets and begin scheduling in Harvest Forecast with a free 30-day trial.
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My thanks to Harvest Forecast for sponsoring the site this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.
Sebastian Green’s Sweet Mac Setup →
Great setup interview with Sebastian Green. And I love that The Sweet Setup now has its first Hackintosh featured:
When in my home office, I use what I call a Hackintosh Pro (Yes, you did read that correctly). Before I got bitten by the Apple bug about 10 years ago I used to build my own PCs, and for the past 3 or so years I have been itching to build one again. I had an old PowerMac G5 that finally died, so I decided to strip the case, convert it to fit an ATX motherboard, and build my own machine inside it. Building the machine was the easy part. Getting it to run OS X was the tricky part
Setting Up and Maintaining a Paperless Home and Office →
Once you go “paperless” you can never go back. It’s great. For one, the lack of clutter is wonderful. Secondly, it’s ridiculously easy to set up some Hazel rules that will automagically sort your incoming document scans for you — making it a nearly-mindless task to file away all your paperwork, instead of sitting in front of your filing cabinet putting one piece of paper away at a time in different hanging file folders. Moreover, with all your documents scanned, it’s very very easy to find what you’re looking for.
All that to say, over on Tools & Toys we just put together a big update to our guide to going paperless. If you want to know which scanner to get, which shredder to get, and how to go about organizing your scans, check it out.
Curbi →
I want to thank curbi for sponsoring all three sites this week.
Curbi offers parental controls for iOS devices, and it’s pretty incredible — especially if you’ve got a family of devices you’d like to help safeguard. Curbi is a way to monitor and restrict the apps and websites your kids use on their iOS devices.
You can flat-out block certain content content (such as porn), and you can set time-based restrictions on other content (like no Facebook during study-time hours), etc.
And curbi can be more than just for kids — you can set it up on your own device as well. Use curbi as an internet content blocker that actually works so you don’t accidentally get slimed with stuff you don’t want to see, and so you’re not constantly entering in a PIN to visit regular sites that iOS doesn’t need to block.
Curbi is free to use for 14 days, and then a monthly subscription is just $6.99 no matter how many devices are in your home.
The “Best” →
On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I talk about the pursuit of “the best”.
Who doesn’t love finding the best tools, the best coffee, the best food, the best experiences? I know I do. But I realize that this can, at times, be an unhealthy pursuit. Too much focus on only ever doing and experiencing “the best” of something can lead to disappointment and complaining when we don’t have “the best”. Which is why being content — and making each unique experience “the best” — is a choice.
Sponsored by:
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Curbi: Amazing parental controls for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
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The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.