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It's been nearly four years since I started the journey of understanding how my attention & focus work. Along the way I've learned several things that have been key factors in developing tools to modify my behaviors to perform better. Most importantly any tools/habits you use or create are ephemeral. The tool may or may not work for you. Maybe the tool works for you for a couple months but then it becomes a hinderance. Possibly even the tool feels like it has always worked but something lets you understand it never really did help. The key thing to realize is your toolbox will and should continually change with you over time. No matter what people say you're a continually changing person - even old dogs learn new tricks. It's okay to throw things out and to try new things. Don't try to change too much too quickly. This is probably just as important as the first key but it's not very obvious until you start trying new things. If you try to change too many things or switch a habit drastically it's much easier to abandon when you don't feel immediate successes. Instead try to incrementally change towards something longer term. I've always wanted to have a meditation practice and make it part of my daily regimen. I felt it was the one missing piece to my daily routine with exercise that could help curb some of the ADHD symptoms. The problem was I didn't know where to get started and was really afraid of being a failure. I've always had a very open heart and mind when it comes to spirituality - if I couldn't "get" meditation then that would make me question a lot of things. I realized that my biggest fear was based upon my perception of how meditation can work and look. Mindfulness meditation is one of the many ways you can practice meditation. Specifically it focuses your mind on being present in the moment - to be aware of what you're doing but not getting overwhelmed or misdirected by emotions, memories, and other inputs. My husband started meditating with the Calm iOS app to help with his challenges with anxiety. I learned that meditation doesn't require hours of effort every day and having an app on my phone made the barrier to entry super low. It also helped that he broke the ice by starting the practice and the two of us support each other with motivation to try to get a session in every day. ...

A coworker posted about how one of her children caught her in the act of being the Tooth Fairy. I gave her a great response to share: The Toothy Fairy™ is a 100% remote/distributed workforce dedicated to the childhood dental successes around the world. In some cases TF may subcontract work to a local resource when constraints arise from any number of influencers. Please explain to your children that this outlier instance does not prove the non-existence of TF employees or their founder, The Fairy Herself.Of course it's a remote job!

Every year at Automattic's Grand Meetup we're required to give a flash talk of up to four minutes on any topic. This past year I gave mine on a subject related to my post "How Working Remote (Probably) Saved My Life". I'm actually developing a much longer talk to dive deeper into what's been involved with my successes and failures. Until then, here's my flash talk for your enjoyment. [wpvideo M5HpGRy1]

Well, it's possible you're doing it properly ... but likely not. At CocoaConf Chicago Rob Napier gave a presentation on iOS security and highlighted his cross-platform AES encrypt/decrypt library, RNCryptor. You'll find implementations for Swift, Objective-C, Java, PHP, C, JavaScript, Haskell, Go, and many more. Do you know what password stretching, CBC, PBKDF2, and IVs are? If you've said no to any of these, you should probably look at RNCryptor. Check it out! ...

Open windows. ☀️🎐🎏

I recently went down the rabbit hole of figuring out if I am using the right solution for offsite storage of my photo library. I've been using iCloud Photos for over a year and am not totally happy with the solution. I decided to try out both Amazon Prime Photos and Google Photos. My home Internet connection has a 5Mb/s upload speed which feels pathetically slow. I wanted to test each solution with a good chunk of my photo library uploaded which made this a time-consuming experience. Here's what I came up with after about two weeks of futzing. ...

My friends Tammy Coron and Tim Mitra invited me onto their podcast, Roundabout: Creative Chaos, to talk about my work, life, and Star Trek. Check it out! http://roundaboutfm.com/episode-80-aaron-douglas/ Also hosted on: Stitcher | iTunes

Weather Underground Radio StreamsWeather Underground provided a free service to host all of these streams so you could listen into important weather bulletins over the Internet. Weather Underground was purchased by the Weather.com parent company The Weather Company in 2012 and then IBM purchased The Weather Company in 2016. Weather Underground moved all of their services over to Amazon Web Services and canned a few legacy products including the NOAA Weather Radio streams. ...

Today is one of those days. What kind of day is that? It's one where I feel like I completely failed today despite all my best efforts to control my focus and attention. I look back at my notes and I see I ticked off some things but left some completely untouched and forgot about. I know I'm certainly more critical on myself about these things than most. Feeling like a failure ultimately leads me failing so I try to not even get in this mood or direction. ...

~ Aaron Douglas, sometime this week I've been a team lead for a couple years now at Automattic - a little over a year of that with the larger team (Go Slytherin!!). I've made several discoveries of what being a lead (team, project, technical) means. I've realized one thing I have to do is to put myself into a higher state of awareness and embrace fears. AwarenessLeads have to see the business landscape with different eyes. My main goal as a team and project lead is to unblock the pathways for my teammates to succeed. I'm required to involve myself in conversations that are out-of-band from what the team is connected to. These conversations get summarized in my head and become part of discussions with project leads and individual 1:1 meetings. I have to pick out the important things that relate to the team and bring that into conversations to establish insight amongst everyone. ...