Weeknote 48/2020
This week has been better than last week, although I did have issues on Monday and Thursday with irregular sleep patterns. Thankfully, I figured out the culprit: whisky. I tend to have a couple of doubles on a Sunday night while playing PS4 with Adam and Sean, and, well, another double on what my wife and I have come to call ‘Whisky Wednesday’.
I started off November with intermittent fasting and swearing off refined sugar and alcohol for the month. The alcohol abstinence lasted a week, and I kept off sugar a week longer. I’ve been better with the intermittent fasting, most days consuming my calories between 10:00 and 18:00.
As I pointed out in a post entitled What’s your favourite month? I kind of collapse like a flan in a cupboard during the second half of November. Thankfully, I have almost complete control over my working patterns, so this is somewhat manageable. I’d love to just completely sack off the year from mid-November and return in January, to be fair.
Other things I wrote here this week:
- (A)synchronous project updates within organisations
- Convenience, UX, and ethics
- Define your audience or your product will (probably) fail
- Give and you shall receive
- The self-cannibalisation of ideas and experience
…and on Thought Shrapnel:
- What kind of world do we want? (or, why regulation matters)
- He that overvalues himself will undervalue others, and he that undervalues others will oppress them
- A world without apps?
I’m reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden at the moment. I’m (very) late to Steinbeck’s work, having never read him at school, but this year have read Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. He really was an amazing writer, and I’d put East of Eden in the same bracket as The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Recommended!
Other things I’ve enjoyed this week include a Q&A session by Jocelyn K. Glei on the topic of what she calls Tender Discipline. I’ve been listening to a Spotify playlist called Jazz in the Background a lot, although I’m still most productive when using Brain.fm.
Prompted by buying and then deciding to cancel the order on a Fairphone 3+ I’ve been deleting a bunch of apps that I don’t really use that much. In addition, I’ve deleted the Amazon shopping and YouTube apps from my phone. When I treat these things as websites instead of apps, I find I have a different relationship with them.
I’ve split my work this week between Outlandish, business development for Dynamic Skillset, and a little bit of Greenpeace work for We Are Open Co-op. I’ve been trying, mostly successfully, to wrangle collaboration across CoTech for collaborations around Catalyst Open Project briefs. I’ve also been working on a couple of proposals for the Mozilla Festival.
Next week, more Catalyst briefs are coming out, and I’ve got to finish off the ones we’ve already started. That will take up much of my time, along with other Outlandish work.
Photo taken during a run during sunrise on Tuesday morning near Morpeth, England.
