Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Category: Asides

  • Categories for journaling

    Over the past few years, long-hand journaling helped me reflect and think through many personal and professional topics. Ofir Sharony offers a nice framework to establish a journaling routine.

    “Start by shutting down all interruptions: disable Slack mentions and email notifications, place your phone out of sight, and enter your flow by wearing your noise-canceling headset. Once you feel focused, go over today’s calendar, skim through your to-do list, and reflect [on one or more of] on the following:

    1. Creations: What did you create today?

    2. Decisions: What were the top decisions you made today?

    3. Insights: What interesting ideas did you or others raise today?

    4. Challenges: What were the main challenges you faced today?

    5. Tomorrow: How do you make the most of tomorrow?”

    Leadership journal: become an inspiring leader | Medium

    It’s a nice structure and allows us to process what happened today to learn and improve for tomorrow. Little by little.

  • Adam Grant – How to stop languishing

    Earlier this year, Adam Grant hit the Zeitgeist with the word “languishing” (There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing). The word describes the feeling of being joyless and aimless that most of have been experiencing over the past 18 months. I remember receiving links to the article from all over the world – typically with all caps and exclamation marks (“THAT!!!”, “ME!”, “Must read!”).

    From zero to 100 in one New York Times column

    I’m glad that he followed his discovery up with a TED Talk on how to deal with that feeling. The short version is:

    • Master something: Find something that you like where you can make tangible progress.
    • Be mindful: Dedicate your time and attention to one activity, rather than playing time confetti and spreading it across multiple things.
    • Do stuff that matters to others: Don’t just do it for yourself, but make a difference for somebody else. This can be as little as spending time with somebody.

    Spending time at the intersection of these three will help you address the feeling of languishing. This very much resonated with my own experience. Over the past winter I got back into chess, which addressed the first two buckets. But chess became a lot more meaningful when I started playing with a friend every Tuesday. It suddenly became a lot more meaningful as it helped us maintain and nurture our friendship despite him being on the other side of the US.

    But have a look at the entire TED Talk. It’s 16 minutes well spent:

  • 24 hours

    The blog of a wealth management firms is an unlikely place to find a meditation on the wonders of parenthood. It’s not always obvious and being in the phase of “terrible twos/ threes” provides plenty of growth opportunities on both sides of the parenting equation. I read it a few months ago and it’s still stuck in my head.

    They say the “days go slow but the years fly,” and as I sit here stewing in my worries, I can’t help but reflect on just how fast my life is going. 

    My 20s were a blur. I met my wife and we got married.  As we entered our 30s, we knew we wanted to start a family.  After that period of time, it seems like someone pushed fast forward. 

    If I could map my life from the moment my son was born to its end and compress it into one 24-hour period, it would probably look like this. […]

    24 Hours (rwbaird.com)

    I get easily caught up in the day-to-day exhaustion of parenting and forget to take a step back to see the beauty of kids right in front of me. That being said: I have to go and play with my kids.

  • Collaborative Fund: Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

    Lots of wisdom in this post on the Collaborative Fund blog (which seems like an excellent collection of interesting posts).

    The post focuses on two core tenants:

    1. It is impossible to feel wealthy if your expectations grow faster than your income.

    2. Few things fuel denial and ignorance like luck, randomness, and change.

    Each is backed up by fun facts and anecdotes like this one about Stephen Hawking:

    In 2004 the New York Times interviewed Stephen Hawking, the late scientist whose incurable motor-neuron disease left him paralyzed and unable to talk since age 21.

    “Are you always this cheerful?” the Times asked.

    “My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21,” Hawking said. “Everything since then has been a bonus,” he replied.

    A useful financial skill, too.

    https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/obvious-things/

    The whole thing is well worth a read: Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

    As always, the important question is: What does it mean for you and what will you change?

  • Hard to discover tips for macOS

    These days I spend little time on macOS, but I’m still a sucker for tips on how to use it better. Tristan Hume collected quite a few of them:

    Inspired by a few different conversations with friends who’ve switched to macOS where I give them a whole bunch of tips and recommendations I’ve learned about over many years which are super important to how I use my computer, but often quite hard to find out about, I decided to write them all down:

    Hard to discover tips and apps for making macOS pleasant

    The list features one of my favorite macOS features: “You can drag the little file/folder icons at the top of many windows.” Might sound unimpressive, but it is one of those things that I dearly miss in Windows. Have a look:

  • Nike ad: You Can’t Stop Us

    We are finally watching The Last Dance. In the nineties, while it was impressive to watch Michael Jordan from Germany and New Zealand, it must have been amazing being immersed in the frenzy up close in the US.

    Nike’s brand machinery was a big part. I was surprised to learn that it only kicked into gear with Michael Jordan. Good to see that they still got it:

  • The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

    What seemed like a goofy post turned out informative. I learned a lot about principles of interface design, in particular about differentiating and organizing interfaces.

    What could cause 400 WWII pilots to raise the landing gear on their B-17 bomber just before touchdown? Catastrophic pilot error, or something more fundamental?

    It was the psychologist Alphonsis Chapanis who first suggested that the high rate of crash landings might be the fault of poor interface design. The adjacent landing gear and flap control knobs were identically shaped. The pilots never stood a chance.

    His temporary solution was to glue differently shaped strips of rubber to each switch, enabling blind operation by touch alone. This gave rise to the idea of shape coding and a system of differentiation still being followed in aircraft cockpits today.

    The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

  • The Curse of Knowledge

    Matthias Ott with a great story that starts with him trying to guess songs that his kid claps (spoiler: it’s a losing proposition).

    When you have an advance in knowledge over someone else, it can be difficult to recognize this gap and act accordingly. This phenomenon – that we falsely assume that others have the background to understand – is called the curse of knowledge.

    The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that can be observed whenever people want to convey information. The readers of your article, the students in your class, the participants of your workshop, the listeners of your podcast, the people at your next meetup, the clients in your conference call, the users of your interface – they all don’t know what you know and are therefore missing context. Always. And while you are confidently talking and explaining like a pro, people actually don’t understand you as well as you would hope.

    The Curse of Knowledge · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

    Even if you know your audience intimately, each conversation should start with setting context. This can take many forms, but it is necessary to establish a foundation from which you make your point. If you don’t start from a shared understanding everything else will be an unnecessarily hard attempt to be understood.

  • Timely advice from the Wu Tang Clan

    W – Wash hands

    U – Use masks properly

    T –Touch nothing

    A – Avoid crowds

    N – Never touch your face with unwashed hands

    G – Go to the hospital if you have severe symptoms

    Wu Tang Clan on Instagram

  • The case of the missing hit

    Such a great podcast episode about a song that seems to have vanished from the internet. Totally amazed by the lengths to which the team has gone to solve the mystery:

    A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case.

    Reply All #158 The Case of the Missing Hit

    Best quote:

    “The only way to cure an earworm is to listen to it. But what do you do when that song no longer seems to exist?”