Weeknote 44/2016

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #235 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity. It featured, among other things, monsters of edtech, legacy ports, and daybook journaling. Many thanks to Makers Academy for sponsorship!
• Recording and releasing Episode 67 (‘Working open’) of Today In Digital Education, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes.  This week we discussed working ‘open’ (main topic) as well as our experiences of the 2016 Mozilla Festival, my new writing, the new MacBook Pro, the inevitability of being hacked, hypernormalisation, and working remotely. You can join the community to discuss this episode of TIDE in our Slack channel!
• Recovering from a combination of MozFest and the clocks going back to GMT. I have to say that the period between now and Christmas is my least favourite of the year. This year it’s worse because we haven’t taken our usual holiday in Malta/Gozo to get some sunshine.
• Cancelling my gym membership after they hiked the price up 50%. It’s not so much that the actual price is so high in comparison with other gyms, it’s just the lack of investment means I don’t think it’s necessarily good value. I guess it’s a protest. My wife has joined a different gym, I’m just going to do weights at home and run more (as I found the problem was actually around raising my heart rate too high, not running per se)
•  Composing a batch of NewCo Shift GSD posts which will be published over the next week or so.
• Researching, recording, editing, and releasing Chapter 2 of #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity. This update was all about nutrition which I’ve mostly got nailed, although the day before recording I actually managed to eat three egg custards in a row…
• Debriefing MozFest with my We Are Open co-operators, Bryan Mathers and John Bevan.
• Running (with Bryan) a Thinkathon for Sunderland City Council around some plans they’ve got to build a consortium to design and deliver a badge-based skills passport.
• Writing:
  • Chapter 2 of my new audiobook on productivity is now available! (Open Educational Thinkering, 3rd November 2016)
  • Sleep, fortune, and friendship (Discours.es, 3rd November 2016)
  • How I’m Getting Shift Done (Open Educational Thinkering, 2nd November 2016)
  • Appearing to be what we are not (Discours.es, 2nd November 2016)
  • The Importance of Working ‘Open’ in Education (DML Central, 31st October 2016)
  • How to Productively Stalk your Co-Workers using Dropbox Paper (NewCo Shift, 31st October 2016)
  • Regret is a wasted emotion (Discours.es, 31st October 2016)

Next week I’m working from home on Monday, attending VentureFest on Tuesday, travelling on Wednesday, and then working with Victoria College in Jersey on Thursday/Friday.

Image CC BY-NC Jeff Wallace