Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Category: Opinion

  • Clarity

    Productivity isn’t the challenge; it’s a red herring. The true unlock is in clarity. Without it, we are just checking off tasks – busywork. Real productivity comes from clear view on where you want to go which will drive focus. It’s not about long lists. It’s about meaningful work.

    Ignore the siren call of social media; it’s a trap that drains energy and blurs your focus. Strive instead for those days where you are so engrossed in your task that time stands still and flies at the same time. Those are your best days. And they need clarity on what is meaningful and makes a difference.

  • Companies are not families

    Good New York Times interview with the new Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy. Near the end he dropped a nice nugget:

    And I say you’ll never hear me say we’re a family. We’re a sports team, and we’re trying to win the Super Bowl. And so we’re going to put the best players on the field we can. And if you go down the field, and we throw you the ball, and you drop it a bunch, we’re going to cut you.

    We spend the majority of our waking hours at work and with the people at work. But I always die a little inside when I hear teams talk about being a family. While it might be an alluring thought, it is neither realistic nor appealing. Family is about being bound together and in the best of cases about shared values and unconditional love.

    Work ultimately is always at the base level a transactional relationship. You work and get compensated for it. At work, you are replaceable. Everyone is. To your family, you are not. A workplace is replaceable. A family is not.

    In that regard, I’d rather aspire to establishing a community at work. One that promotes values like caring, love, a sense of belonging, respect, empathy, joy, and fairness. These might all be attributes shared with families, but there should be a clear line separating work and family.

    High functioning teams add layers on top of it like shared values, growing together and standing up for one another. But ultimately, it’s a loose band that last for a few years until it doesn’t. And that’s OK.

  • There is something in the air

    There is something in the air

    Ever since the whole web3 conversation gained momentum it feels like a renaissance of blogs is coming. I don’t know whether it is the explanation of web3 within the context of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, or the discussion of decentralization away from the big platforms, or something else. In his State of the Word, Matt mentioned that one of the most web3 things one can do is registering their own domain. He also recently asked people to write more. Others like former Blogger product manager Rick Klau picked up his blog again and Hunter Walk seems to be blogging more frequently these days. And OGs like rands, MG Siegler, Gruber and Kottke continue to blog like it has never gone out of style. It is just a gut feel, but like Vinyl picking up again, it feels like there is an underlying current of people rediscovering their love of blogs.

    Make no mistake, I don’t think that blogs (and its many derivatives like Tumblr) will challenge current or future social media. At the same time, the number of internet users is one or two orders of magnitude bigger than ten or 15 years ago. And a small portion of a large number tends to be a large number. And that is awesome. Maybe we are even in for better tools for reading and commenting on blogs – RSS for blogs seems to be in stasis ever since Google Reader shut down.

    I’m fascinated by looking at personal blogs from way back when. Florian, a friend of mine, started writing a blog back in 2005 when he moved to Ireland. He still posts a few times a year. That doesn’t seem much, but over the course of 17 years it adds up. Isaac started his blog in 2002, but unfortunately stopped writing in 2015. It is still wonderful to browse through his archive as moments in time. I even resurrected and went through my own old blog archive – I even found an old Blogger blog going way back to 2004. Nothing deep and earth shattering, but that’s not the point. Blogs document moments in time. Nothing more, nothing less.

    My point is: Blogging might get another moment, it might not. Both are fine. There is intrinsic value of blogging in terms of sharpening one’s thinking, sharing ideas and documenting moments for my future self. None of that requires an audience, engagement or virality. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? If I blog and no one reads it, does it matter? Who cares! By the time I hit publish, I’ve already gotten a positive return on investment. And as long as I use open source software that runs on my own domain, that’s a pretty future proof investment.

  • Staying clear of Nazis and Sharks – Reflecting on my News Diet

    Staying clear of Nazis and Sharks – Reflecting on my News Diet

    I’ve always been an avid reader of some kind of news. I spent most of my pocket money on PC magazines. When the internet came along, I discovered slashdot.org and heise.de as good sources to keep abreast with tech news. Over the last 25 years, news has become much more available, abundant and seductive. Over time the barriers for news creators lowered. At the same time, growth hacking and click-baiting made it easier to get away with low quality content.

    Kara Swisher once told the story of John Hendricks. He is the founder of the Discovery Channel and in their early days needed to get onto cable networks. So he put episodes on air that drew people in with their sensational nature. His one-line summary was: “Nazis and sharks, that’s what got ratings up”. That was in the 80ies.

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