There is a rich curriculum of life advice compilations out there. From the classics like Life's Litte Instruction Book, Kevin Kelly's 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known which turned into a book, to 100 Tips for a better life. They are often fascinating reads. But they are also often more entertaining than driving actual change. Yet, they do become educational once you have the experience that brings the wisdom home. "The large print giveth and the small print taketh […]
I’ve recently come across the Operator’s Manual, a post by Ian McAllister. It’s a compilation of tips for communicating data, dates and deliverables. Basically, how to live up to "be bright, be brief, be gone". Taking inspiration from that post, below are some tips that I frequently share when it comes to OKRs. My standard line is “OKRs are deceptively simple, but tricky to get right” or as I just recently heard from Isaac “a […]
A few months ago I tried out ChromeFlex. This is a version of ChromeOS that's easy to install on traditional laptops. I had an old Surface Pro 3 machine which was collecting dust. It just waited for me to carry it to electronics recycling. As it turns out, ChromeFlex gave it another lease on life. The installation was easy. You create a bootable USB drive via a Chrome browser extension. Then you can choose whether […]
The older generation might remember Microsoft PowerToys. Microsoft released it first for Windows 95 and then later for Windows XP as well. Back in the day, they gave us a few extra settings to customize Windows and a few tools like an image resizer. Two years ago Microsoft decided to resurrect PowerToys. Even better, it made it a open source utility collection for Windows 10. I find FancyZones indispensable as it fixes one of the […]
Scott Hanselman gave a talk in 2012 called "Scaling Yourself " about personal productivity and not burning out.<footnote>As I learned today, he since has given a variant of that talk dozens of times and it probably has improved. However, I saw the 2012 version.</footnote> I would say it's more relevant today than it has been then. A lot of us have been working from home since early 2020. We've had to re-arrange childcare, supervise remote […]
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 […]
OneNote is one of those underappreciated apps within Office 365. To be honest, I've only used it for the last two years despite my wife having praised it for her work as a teacher for a long time. But it really has grown on me and I enjoy taking notes, working on outlines and reviewing documents with OneNote. Its integration with Teams makes it a no-brainer to share notes among a project team. I recently […]