I've been trying to brainstorm ideas on paper lately before committing to an approach on how to solve a problem. For some reason I wasn't getting a ton of satisfaction switching back to pen & paper - it wasn't helping my focus. Then I realized something from my days in school. I used to prefer pencil over pen because of the feel of the graphite on the paper and the non-permanence it implies. ...
I'm nearly four years into my challenge of hacking my brain to be successful at working remote with Attention Deficit Disorder. I've struggled with trying to understand my behaviors and challenge myself to change incrementely over time. There's one repeated concept that always comes up in my practice - my past experiences both help and hinder my progress. The key is being able to experience life as a beginner. Beginners have a great platform to learn knew things. First off they realize they have a set of things they need and want to learn. There is motivation to better yourself and usually a fairly well defined place to gain the knowledge from. Beginners have (or will quickly) admit they don't have all the answers. Those of us with experience trying to learn new things may think we understand things well enough. We're not open to seeing things as a whole. ...
Back in the mid 1980s there was a kids' TV Game Show called "Double Dare" on the Nickelodeon channel. We didn't have cable TV but at some point it started to air on regular television. Our local TV station even aired an episode early in the morning before school at 6:30am. The show format was fairly simple. One part were standard panel-type questions with answers gaining you points. Sometimes your team would have to perform "physical challenges" which usually involved something messy - like digging through a small pool of pizza sauce looking for a flag. The team with the most points at the end got to go through an obstacle course for sixty seconds. Collecting flags throughout the course got you more money and prizes to take home. ...
My friend Tim Mitra hosts the weekly "The More Than Just Code" podcast which is all about mobile software development. This past week he put out a call for people to tell the listeners what the iPhone has meant to them. This coincides roughly with the 10 year anniversary of the first iPhone launch. https://twitter.com/mtjc_podcast/status/819412969754939394 I decided to submit a clip of my own and made it onto the show! You can listen to the whole podcast to find it (around the 19 minute mark) or via this handy dandy link to that exact spot. ...
We all do it - look back at the previous year somewhere around January 1st. We total up what we've accomplished in that one year and determine if it was a success or it sucked. Variables like births, deaths, accidents, career changes, friendships, personal health, and travel all seem to be popular indicators of success or suck. The reality is you should really stop looking at your past as increments of one year advances. ...
This week Michael Lopp (VP Engineering @ Slack) posted a summary of Tweets responding to the question "Regardless of seniority every good manager will...". I took that list and tried to correlate the responses into several buckets. I used Trello to visualize this. https://trello.com/b/Wr78Mx6k/good-managers I came up with five buckets: Compassion/Empathy - Feel like a human and realize others feel too.Give/Take Feedback - Listen to others, tell them what's going right & wrong, and do the same for yourself.Filter/Map/Reduce - Take in the world above and turn it into smaller things that are important for your people to know.Unblock - Don't be an obstacle for your people to succeed - and help remove obstacles from their paths.Trust - Everyone is an adult and was hired for a reason - trust them in their decisions and make sure to gain your people's trust.
I spend all day tapping on glass trying to make it do stuff. I tap harder when stuff doesn't work. Then I clean fingerprints off of the glass. Finally I swear at the glass.
A lot of my friends on Instagram are also my friends on Facebook. They, like myself, tend to cross-post photos from Instagram onto Facebook and Twitter. I noticed a funny effect from that cross-posting - you end up missing a lot of posts from your friends. Mindless scrolling. We all do it. Facebook was made for it as well as Instagram. Your brain is bored so you grab your phone and start scrolling through posts. I think we're sort of zombies when this mode clicks in. I usually end up snapping out of that zombie scrolling mode when I see posts I've already remember seeing. Semi-conciously I feel I've reached the end of any content that I may want to read or view. ...
I'm an awful singer but decided to help out the RayWenderlich.com team with the annual Christmas video. Check out our excellent work. Original Post at RayWenderlich.com