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My favourite posts of 2020

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Every December I update the Start here page on this blog with the five most popular posts from that year. In 2020, I haven’t been gathering stats as much, as part of a drive to ensure I’m my authentic self.

So what to do? Stop the tradition, which dates back to 2006? I don’t want to do that, so, instead, I’m going to share my favourite posts from this year. These are the ones that have meant to the most to me and I’ll share 10 here and to five, as usual, on my Start here page.

Without further ado…

  1. Letting go of my pre-pandemic self — the pandemic, coupled with the therapy I’ve undertaken, and reflections on my undergraduate Philosophy days, made me realise that I don’t need to be the same person I used to be.
  2. 3 advantages of consent-based decision making — Outlandish, a co-operative I worked with during the latter half of this year, use consent-based decision making. Here’s why it’s so useful.
  3. The auto-suggested life is not worth living — this year in particular has seen a rise in products and services prompting us with responses. As humans, we shouldn’t be aiming for full rationality.
  4. Remaining unmanaged — I’ve always had an anti-authoritarian streak, and that’s only increased as I’ve matured. Working with, but outside, regular organisations seems to suit me best.
  5. What I do when I don’t know what to do — I don’t find myself in this position often, but when I do, here’s the three steps I take to get back on track.
  6. Practice what you preach — this year I switched theme on this blog to one that is much lighter and less resource-intensive. The stimulus to this was a realisation that, while I personally use a bunch of browser plugins to block trackers, I’d been subjecting others to tracking via the WordPress plugins I had installed.
  7. Slow down or I’ll do it for you — through migraines, my body (quite rightly) protects me from my latent desire to work at 100% all of the time.
  8. The cash value of truth — I’m a ‘Pragmatist’ (big ‘P’). Here’s what that means, ontologically and epistemologically-speaking.
  9. Herd immunity for privacy — I wonder whether functional privacy is ever possible without changing the practices of those around you?
  10. What do we mean by ‘the economy’? — as I quote Chenjerai Kumanyika as saying, talk of ‘the economy’ is just another way of referencing the preferences of concerns of rich people.

I’ll do a separate roundup for Thought Shrapnel, but just to round things off hereI think it’s also worth pointing to three other posts I wrote elsewhere:

This post is Day 76 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.

Weeknote 43/2020

Posted on by Doug Belshaw
Eroded cliff face (Cresswell, Northumberland,)

This has been a good week. Among other things both at work and outside it, the highlight perhaps came on Friday morning when I went for a run.

Picture the scene: I get my running gear on, head downstairs, pick up my phone and open the Spotify app. It notifies me there’s a new album out by Faithless. I stretch, and start my run just as the sun is beginning to rise.

As I run the bypass route around Morpeth, the sky changes from purple to pink to orange to yellow, while a magnificent sonic landscape emerges, and my endorphins surge. Perfect.

In parenting news this week, we confiscated my son’s smartphone for a week due to his consistent, albeit reasonably low-level, flouting of family rules. When he persisted a bit, I banned him from the PlayStation for the weekend as well.

The above isn’t usually something I’d share here, but I watched The Social Dilemma this week, and thought it was so good that I watched it with my son at the weekend. Although the whole thing is a warning about the dystopian mess we’ve got ourselves into, it was nevertheless gratifying to see my own position vindicated.

Not only have I retreated from mainstream social media, but I’ve also insisted that our children go nowhere near it either. Their screen time is limited, especially compared to other kids their age. I wasn’t surprised to learn via The Social Dilemma that the those involved in Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. do likewise. I remember reading that Steve Jobs was particularly zealous in that regard.

I wrote a rare post on my literaci.es blog about this after watching the film, which I entitled Notification literacy? Being very intentional and strict about notifications is, I think, the single most important thing you can do to improve your (and your children’s) relationship with their devices.

The funny thing is that, after a few days away from his phone, my son (as usual) finds other things to do, and is generally just a much nice teenager to be around. Funny, that.

On this blog I wrote:

Meanwhile, on Thought Shrapnel, I published:

On the work front, this was the final week collaborating with a cohort of nine charities as part of the Catalyst Discovery programme we’ve been funded to work with over the last month. It’s been great, and they’ve all really enjoyed it too, giving us fantastic feedback and all rating We Are Open Co-op as either a 9 or a 10 out of 10 in terms of an NPS score.

Other work has included a bit of work on a new Greenpeace project, mainly reading and suggesting ideas while Laura is away. She’s leading the project, but is currently away for a couple of weeks, sailing around the Mediterranean with her husband and scuba diving. Not that I’m in any way jealous.

The third bit of work I’ve been doing is to continue helping Outlandish with productisation and their new Building OUT programme. The sweet spot between the two is the playbook I’ve started helping them with, demonstrating how they add value to organisations by sharing the resources they use internally and with clients.

It’s half-term for our kids now, and we’ve booked a couple of nights away next weekend just over the border in Scotland. We’re on the verge of a Tier 3 lockdown in the North East of England due to the pandemic and numbers rising in certain areas. If those restrictions are introduced, we won’t be able to go, so fingers crossed!

If we do get to go, I’ll be taking Friday off, but either way I’ll be taking it a bit easier next week to hang out with my family and decompress after a reasonably-intense few weeks.

Image from the cliffs near Cresswell, Northumberland, where I took my laptop to work on Wednesday morning. There’s a lot of fossils around there!

Just write.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I almost entitled this post ‘nobody cares’. Because, mostly, they don’t. When you write, you should write for yourself, as a way of setting down what you think, sharing your knowledge, and connecting together your experiences.

There have been times in my life when I’ve blogged every day. Any time you see me doing that, it’s probably because I’m having a tough time at home, work, or trying to chew through a knotty problem.

Another title for this post could be ‘write like nobody is reading’. Because, mostly, they aren’t. Even if you’ve got a lot of followers, most people don’t click through, and attention is a valuable commodity. Just because people are looking doesn’t mean they’re reading. And even if they are reading, what you’ve written almost certainly won’t have as much resonance as it does for you.

So just write. Say what’s on your mind and tell the world about it. Not because it’s going to get retweeted, boosted, or liked. But just as an expression of who you are, where you stand, and what you think.

This post is Day 11 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

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