Matthew Lang

Effective communication isn't about how your message gets to your audience, it's about the message itself.

I rely on an business to keep me up to date with events and updates happening within that business. I pay this business for services that I use on a monthly basis. I'd rather not name and shame them as that doesn't benefit anyone, so if you don't mind I'll leave them as anonymous. They have a website that supports both an email newsletter and a RSS feed. They also have accounts with both Twitter and Facebook. You would think that with all these outlets there would be a steady stream of information being sent out. Well, there isn't. I don't have the exact reason why this business isn't using these more frequently, but what I do know is that they're ignoring a chance to communicate effectively with their customers and potential customers.

Effective communication means communicating clearly and frequently. It's such a simple rule to follow but is ignored in a lot of cases.

Be Clear

Effective communication means communicating clearly. It's not hard to do. Don't use 50 words when 25 will do, avoid technical jargon and business speak and outline summaries using lists. These are just some of the things you can do for long form communication. For shorter forms of communication it can be more difficult. Twitter only allows 140 characters in each tweet, so even if it something quick you want to say, you need to be sure that what you want to say can be conveyed using this limit. It just takes time, but keeping it simple is the first step, and if you follow this then you're already winning.

Be Frequent

When communicating, being frequent with your messages is the best way to keep your audience up to date and informed. It's not rocket science. Agile software methodologies promote frequent communication between customers and programmers. The reason this is encouraged is because when we programmers keep our customers in the loop, we are keeping them involved and they can see what's happening from day to day. This limits the chances of the programmers going in the wrong direction building an application that the customer doesn't want or need.

The same goes for communicating. When we communicate frequently we keep our recipients informed and up to date. If we maintain this we foster interest from our audience and then we can expect a decent return of interest and participation from this audience when events or meetings are announced.

The Mistake

A common mistake for many businesses today is that they have more than one outlet for their outgoing messages and therefore think they already are communicating effectively. Unless you frequently use these different outlets though, you're not going to reach anyone. Having a website with an email based newsletter that is sent out regularly can be just as effective as a website that has multiple social network accounts. In order to be effective we just need to ensure that we are communicating clearly and frequently.

All the social networks under the sun aren't going to get your message across to your audience unless you're clear about your message and those messages get sent out on a regular basis.

This business in question might not be aware of it, but they're already lagging behind other competing businesses in the area who are doing a much better job of keeping their customers involved and up to date. As a paying customer my loyalty is waning. I just want to be kept up informed. Is that too much to ask?

In what must be my longest period of habitual change, I'm still in the process of rebooting. It is changing me for the better though. Here's a few changes that have come out of this period of rebooting.

1. I've cemented a habit of reading a chapter from a non-fiction book every weekday. By reading from a variety of books I keep things from getting stale.
2. I'm capturing everything in Todoist, and I mean everything. I'm using it to keep a track of errands, notes and even urls to check out.
3. I've made the jump to a new text editor and I'm learning new shortcuts about it everyday. It's taken me a few tries to make a successful transition but this I worked through the days of frustration and now I'm working quite well versed with the comamnds that I need to use daily.

I've got a few changes coming over the next few weeks that are more career orientated, but I'll report on these when the reboot process for these is complete. There's still room for improvement which is why the reboot process is still ongoing. Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Inspired by Mike Vardy's series on using Todoist, I thought I would share how I use Todoist and the benefits I get from using it. In this post we're going to look at the projects feature of Todoist.

Todoist's projects are a fairly standard feature. It's a place where you can bring together related tasks. However that's where the similarity to projects ends. Where you might be expecting a start date and an end date for the project, there aren't fields for this in Todoist. A project is just the name and the colour that you've chosen to assign to it.

Keeping this simple means that projects can be used in different ways. I try not to think of them as projects and instead think of them as lists. Lists can expire, be completed or be allowed to run on forever. The idea of a list triggers a more flexible collection of tasks than a project, which is why I always think of projects in Todoist as lists. I have a number of projects that behave more like lists then projects:

• Reading - All books that I plan on reading in the future. Fiction, programming and career and some others as well.
• Writing - A list of writing ideas for my website. It starts with scheduled ideas planned for the near future and graudally moves down to ideas that I might one day use.
  Home - I have a list for everything related to family life. Golf coaching, birthday parties, shool activies, days out. They all go here.
• Sharpen The Saw - Recently I started capturing things I didn't know about the tools I was using. Everyday I pick one of these off and find out more about it. It's a quick way of learning more about the tools I'm using.

Todoist has a feature where you can indent projects under one another. I try to avoid doing this. In the past I did indent a number of projects but quickly I ended up with three level deep projects and it made getting a top down view of my list more difficult to read. I try to use the indentation of projects as a last resort and even then it's only a temporary measure until I can find a better place for a group of tasks.

I use Nicholas Bate's idea of a personal compass as a basic grouping for tasks. Six compass points that represent six aspects of my life. It's a fairly easy way to ensure that you can group things sensibly and that you're not allowing one part of your life to have an adverse affect on the others. Using this I give each compass point a colour. When a project is created it is assigned the colour of the compass it closely relates too. This makes tracking my progress on different compass points easy to do since I can only ever see six colours of my compass points in the productivity trend window of Todoist.

That's it for how I use projects in Todoist. Nothing should surprise anyone here as most people must use similar ideas. Projects in Todoists are simple but flexible and can be used to group your tasks accordingly. Next week I'll discuss labels in Todoists and their use.

Update - You might want to read my thoughts on deciding if a project is in fact a context.

My blog has been hosted with Heroku for sometime. My requirements for my blog were not complicated. It's a simple static site that is generated locally on my computer and then pushed to the server. My performance needs aren't complicated as well but one thing that irked me on Heroku was the extra cost in going from one dyno to two dynos. A dyno is a computing unit they use to allow applications to scale from their free single dyno to hundreds should you require them. At just over $35US per month for two dynos, I felt that I just wasn't getting value for money. Heroku does do a lot of the lifting for you when it comes to deploying and hosting but how much of it is necessary for what is a simple static site? After hearing good things about Linode I decided to make plans to move my blog away from Heroku.

At first I was slightly daunted by the fact that I would be setting up the server myself. I've never been a fan of system administration. If there's easier ways of setting things up I'll always opt for them but if i was going to move my blog I had to give the sysadmin part of it a chance. I spent a day setting up the server with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and getting all the necessary dependencies installed. Thanks to some similar steps for a previous version of Ubuntu I was able to get the site up and running by the end of the day.

My blog runs on the Linode 2048 plan which is $20US per month. This isn't the cheapest plan available but it does give me a fair size of memory for my site. I am able to downgrade the server to the new Linode 1024 plan, but I'm happy with my plan for the moment. The server is probably capable of hosting a few more other sites if needed but I don't see that being necessary anytime soon although it is good to have the option there.

To this day I haven't had to do much to the server. I've setup notifications when certain thresholds are reached in terms of size and there's backups of the server taken on a daily basis. You know, just in case. It just runs. And that's the beauty of services like Linode. Yes you could argue that Heroku just runs as well but the setup I have with Linode is just as simple as it was with Heroku. I still keep my blog in a Git repository on BitBucket just as a backup but all that's needs to be done to update my site is run a Rake task. It probably could be simpler if I installed Dropbox on the server and let it continually update each hour through synchronisation, but I prefer to have a little bit of control when it comes to publishing, so the Rake task suits me fine.

After three months I couldn't be happier with Linode's service. Having a hosting solution that just works, requires little maintenance and is relatively cheap are all good benefits. I might even start hosting some Rails applications on them soon!

An essential guide to leading a healthy life as a freelancer. It's not all work you know.

James Shelley has an important insight into the importance of journaling:

Writing a journal feels juvenile. That is the beauty of it. Even as you write the words, you cringe in anticipation of how an older, wiser version of yourself will probably ridicule you later. You can almost hear the self-criticism, faintly echoing in from the future. That’s why the thoughts seem childish as soon as you transcribe them into alphabetic forms.

— Journaling Feels Juvenile by Jame Shelley

This gorgeous fixie gets this week vote for it being as old as I am. Glad to see that even older bikes can still be pleasing to look at. Unlike me!

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I've been following the tips from this post in the last week and I'm already starting to see the benefits.

It's one of the first big technologies to emerge from the early days of the Internet, it's still a preferred form of chatting online for many people and yet I've never used it. I'm taking about Internet Relay Chat or IRC for short. I wouldn't expect many people to have used it with the abundance of free chat apps that are now available for mobile devices, but what I think is unusual about me is that I've been using the Internet for over 20 years, well before the age of mobile devices and apps and to this day I've never used IRC.

The first time I heard about IRC was during a tutorial class at univeristy. We were supposed to be learning about using multimedia to put together an interactive article but with the teaching assistant only able to focus on one quarter of the room at a time, many students were in fact using the time to chat with friends on IRC. When one of my class mates showed me what it was I was intrigued but it quickly slipped my mind and for a few years I never looked at it again.

In the early years of my career I then discovered that many of the programming languages and topics I was interested in at the time had matching channels where like minded developers could meet to help each other out. Even then though I didn't see the point in using it. What might have been a major road block for me was that I wasn't an active computer user outside of work. Work was work and it started at 9am and finished at 5pm. Since then I'm glad to say that my attitude to my career has changed and I've taken it a bit more seriously and invested in reading and learning programming languages in my spare time. Still to this day though I've not used IRC.

A few years ago when the Ruby on Rails framework was in its early years, there might have been an active channel or two for developers to chat about the framework and help each other out but social networks are gradually replacing old technologies like IRC. It won't be long before just the die hards are left using IRC. I've no doubt that it is a good way of communicating online, I just think that people that know about IRC look for something a bit more shiny in terms of a user interface while many new users to the Internet immediately turn to social networks rathen than the protocols that existed in the early days of the Internet.

Even though I've never used IRC, I think it's a shame that a key technology such as IRC is overlooked and frequently never considered as an option when looking for places to chat with like minded people. IRC numbers might be dwindling but I am going to download an IRC client and open up a few channels to see what all the fuss is about. With just one dedicated social network under my belt, I think I can afford sometime exploring other ways of chatting online. Besides, I might actually get to like it. I know I usually hold off when it comes to adopting new technologies and apps but I think 20 years is too long a time to wait to see if something takes off. IRC is still here so why not give it a try?

Chad Fowler's book, The Passionate Programmer has a chapter entitled 'Mind Reader'. In it Chad talks about a colleague who was always turning in work ahead of it being asked for.

That's where Rao's magic trick came in. He didn't talk much in those conversations, but he was anything but disengaged. He was listening carefully. And, giving away his secret as no magician would, he later told me the trick was that he was only doing the things that I had already said I wanted. I had just said them in ways that were subtle enough that even I didn't realize I had said them.

I think we both agree on the fact this is no trick. It's better than that. It's someone listening intently, capturing ideas and suggestions no matter how small they are.

Based on experience this is a task in itself. I've been in many a meeting where suggestions have been banded about, but never followed up. Then months later when the team did get some time to implement these ideas, they were almost forgotten and so needed another meeting just to remind everyone about them. Despite this happening several times, there was little motivation from the team to record each of these ideas, let alone try these ideas out on their own.

The other day I refactored a bit of code that was duplicated across the code base a number of times. It was one of those little jobs that had been mentioned in the past by the client but never written down on the board as something we would like to have. As I was already working on changes in a nearby section of the code, I decided to refactor out the duplication. It took me just over a half hour to do. Happy that it was working correctly, I pushed my changes up for testing and moved onto the next card. The client might not spot it right away, but it's there. A small improvement to the code that just took me an extra half hour to do. A duplication removed that means that any changes to those parts of the code can now be done in one place rather than four.

My problem isn't that I don't listen, it's that I don't capture enough during those meetings and what I don't capture I end up forgetting. I don't record the small things in favour of the big picture and while many might see that as a good thing, the small things give us small wins that contribute to the bigger picture.

From now on I'm going to make a point of capturing more details during my meetings with the clients and keep a list of minor changes that have been recognized but not formally requested. As long as these changes are small, tested and don't impact the code base in a negative way then I say it's fair game to be implemented.

There's been a lot of talk over the last couple of years that RSS is dead and it certainly didn't look good when Google closed their RSS reading service, Google Reader. Since the news that it was closing though there has been a number of new RSS services that aim to fill the gap. Having tried a couple I evetually choose Feedbin. It looked promising from the start and I'm glad to see that today it has grown into an amazing application and makes managing and reading your RSS feeds easy.

Over the course of the last year or two, Feedbin has added a number of great features to the service. I thought I would round up some of my favourite features that I use daily to manage my RSS feeds.

Time To Unsubscribe?

One of the problems I had with Google Reader was that it was difficult to see when a feed was last updated and how active it was. Overtime people lose interest in keeping their site updated so eventually feeds start to stagnate. It was hard to see this in Google Reader. Unless you were aware of the decline in posts, which is easy if you only follow so many accounts, there wasn't a way to check your feeds to see which were active and in-active.

Feedbin solves this problem on the feeds page of your account. Not only can you search and unsubscribe from feeds, you can also sort them according to when they were last updated and also how active the feed is. This makes it easy to spot the sites that are slowing down in posting and might be worth unsubscribing from.

Take A Shortcut

Google Reader had a great set of keyboard shortcuts. I even created a mind map for the shortcuts to help me memorise them. They were essential in allowing me to quickly scan through all my feeds and mark those that were worth reading later on in the day. You'll be glad to hear then that Feedbin also has a great collection of keyboard shortcuts at your disposal. With these you can navigate around your feeds, search, action articles and even share them to your own connected services such as App.net and Twitter.

If you're not a software developer then you might be more familiar with using the mouse when it comes to navigating your applications. For applications such as Feedbin, I say give the keyboard a try. While you might hit a few stumbling blocks at the start, trying to remember what key does what, keep at it. Using the keyboard is a much faster way of interacting with the computer and the keyboard shortcuts for Feedbin are minimal. There are only 20 sets of shortcuts to remember with most of them being a single key, but even learning just a quarter of these will make such a difference. And the best part, just press '?' on your keyboard while using Feedbin and it will display all the shortcuts you need.

Action!

One of my early gripes with Google Reader was the lack of automation. Some feeds I subscribed too always needed a specific action or used for logging purposes. For these feeds I wanted them starred or marked as read as soon as they came in. In Google Reader this wasn't possible, but it can be in Feedbin.

Feedbin has a section in the setting page called Actions. Here you can define actions that meet one or multiple feeds. The two actions available are starring an article or marking an article as read. There might be more in the future but for now these make automating the management of your feeds a lot easier. Why would you do this though?

Some feeds are always interesting. I subscribe to the Caesura Letters newsletter through an RSS feed. I star the article every day so that I can find it at lunchtime for further reading. It's one less action to do on a daily basis but it still saves a bit of time.

Save Time, Save That Search

Searching your RSS feeds is a routine thing for me. Maybe I'm looking for a specific set of articles or articles that feature a specific keyword. What happens though when you want to do that search over and over again? Well you save it!

Feedbin has a great feature called saved searches that lets you save the searches you carry out over your feeds. These appear in your sidebar with the search icon beside them so that you can differentiate them from the rest of your feeds. One saved search I have is my 'Recently Mentioned' search.

I follow a number of blogs that are part of an relaxed circle of bloggers. We link to each other's posts for other people to see. It's not a traffic building thing, we just link the stuff we find interesting from each other on our blogs. I was getting mentioned a few times when I thought about having a search for this. With my saved search now, I can see when I was last mentioned. You might call it an ego thing, but I prefer to think of it as a validation tool to see what people find interesting. It helps to find out what people link to on my blog and whether I should publish similar content.

Use Your Favourite Reading App

Feedbin also has an API that allows other apps to connect to Feedbin. While Feedbin excels as a great application on the big screen of a desktop, laptop and tablet, I find the mobile interface not that easy to use for scanning feeds. My app of choice for checking my feeds on my iPhone is the wonderful Unread by Jared Sinclair. With simple gestures for quickly scanning and actioning articles, it is by far the best app I have found yet that connects to my Feedbin account.

Feedbin is a great RSS reader and I use it daily, often multiple times a day. The best part of Feedbin though is the automation. The actions and sharing to your favourite services are the best time savers for me. With feeds handled automatically in the background and one key press to share to other services like Instapaper, I can breeze through hundreds of articles on a daily basis.

Michael Wade has the best advice for getting that first draft done.

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Twitter and Facebook are huge in terms of the number of users they have, but is this always a good thing?

Not a week goes by where I'm reminded of the popularity of social networks. Whenever there's a global event happening, you can be sure that there will be lots of updates about it. Not only that but when you turn on the television now every company and brand has a related Facebook page or a Twitter account. Twitter and Facebook are everywhere. It seems that everyone is on one or the other. Well okay, not quite everyone but it's safe to say that most are.

Last night was the opening night of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Aside from the first part of the opening ceremony with the giant dancing Tunnocks teacakes, it went fairly well. Like most big events I wondered if anyone was talking about it on App.net. I fired open my App.net client to check. No one had mentioned it. Not one post. Up until the first hour I don't think there was a single post about it. I breathed a sigh relief.

Why the relief? Well there was no negative comments, bitching or snide remarks. You didn't have to cut through the negativity. In this case you didn't have to cut through anything at all. It was refreshing to not have to filter through people's views, posts, pictures and other stuff.

And that's what I love about App.net. It's a small community of people. Okay it might not have the millions of users that other social networks has but if the people in your timeline are not sharing in the same event as yourself then it's okay. They might just be doing something else that matters to them. It's a nice reminder that despite what happening around your part of the world, there's other things happening around the rest of the world too.

If App.net continues to gain users at a slower rate than other networks then that's okay. As long as it remains profitable and continues to serve it's users I'll keep on calling it my little part of the social internet.

Dazzled by the lights of new task management app? Before switching, make sure you're switching for the right reasons. Productivity isn't about the apps.

Read any productivity book and you'll find a common observation among them. Rarely is a specific tool mentioned that makes that specific productivity method work better.

I spent a good couple of years hopping from app to app in search of a task management app that met my requirements. It wasn't a wasted journey, I did get to try out a number of different apps but I didn't have a productivity method in mind that I would use with the app. I was simply trying some apps out. I was going about this the wrong way, you see it should be the other way around. Productivity is about processes not tools. The tools we use should compliment our preferred productivity method.

Look at any productivity method and it's about the processes and workflows involved. Capturing, reviewing, planning and executing are the most common processes involved in most methods. I use all four of these processes in my own method which centers around a single list of actions. I then use projects and tags to group actions, filters to review and a calendar for scheduling those actions.

The processes I use means that I could use just about any task management app, but it's in the details where you can find great task management apps. Here's a list of requirements that I finally settled on.

• I need to be able to capture anywhere.
• I need to group related actions into projects.
• I need to group actions by tags.
• I need to see different views of my list.
• I need my list available to me wherever I go.

Looking at these requirements I can think of a number of task management apps that could meet all these requirements. After reviewing a number of apps that I've tried in the past I found a couple that worked for me. I choose TaskPaper as it gave me the ability to keep my master list in one location in raw text. After a few months though my list became difficult to manage. I started looking for a replacement.

One task management application that I hadn't tried up to this point was Todoist. I started moving my master list over to Todoist. That was eight months ago. Today I'm still using Todoist. It meets all my requirements and also provides a number of other features that I didn't look for before in a task management app.

With a crowded marketplace of task management apps it can be easy to be dazzled by the new kid on the block, but productivity isn't about those apps. It's about the processes. If you're on the market for a new task management app or you're simply looking for a change, make sure you are looking for an app that fits your processes.

The Senior VPs get all the cool toys these days.

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Yesterday I mentioned I was embarking on a last attempt to master a different text editor. If I'm to succeed at this, then one truth I must face is that this will take time, just like mastering any new skill does.

I always find that learning something new starts out to be fun. I have a clear goal in mind of what I want the end goal to be and with that in mind I start. Whether it's a new programming language or an application, those first few days are where my positiveness is at a high. After a few days though, the stumbling blocks kick in. I don't feel as productive as I did before. Even though I know I'm in unfamilair terroritory, I start to wonder if this is in fact the right time to be learning something new. A few days further on and I've only mastered a small subset of this new topic or skill. Questioning myself again, I throw in the towel and abandon the learning process. I've done this so many times in the past.

The recurring mistake I've made in the past is forgetting that learning takes time. Mastery takes even longer.

For the moment I'm content to simply learn Vim. This means getting to a stage where for most of my day I can write and manipulate code without resorting to looking up keyboard shortcuts. Finding files, finding text in files, managing files in different panes, navigating a file, search and replacing within a file and basic text manipulation represent groups of keyboard shortcuts that I need to learn in order to use Vim effectively. I've given myself a month to learn most of these shortcuts. After a month I should be able to assess what I can and can't do in Vim. For all the things I can't do, these will become the focus for the next month of using Vim. Repeating this process for six months will evenutally get me to the place where I want to be. To have mastered Vim.

Learning can take hours or days, but true mastery can take weeks, months, even years depending on what you want to master. This is the key to successful learning and mastery, you need to put the time in.

I'm trying it again. I've made a number of these attempts over the years with my longest attempt lasting just a couple of weeks. Now though I think the time is right for a final go. You're probably wondering what the hell I'm talking about. My fellow programmers might have an idea.

I'm talking about making the transition to Vim as my preferred text editor for writing code.

For years now Sublime Text has been my only text editor. Its flexibility, plugins and stability make it such a great editor to use. It made my job easier since I first started using it and continues to do so. So why would I want to upset my workflow and change to something else? Curiosity. For a long time I've watched other developers wield Vim with such ease and fluency. I'm fluent with Sublime Text but there's something about Vim that makes me think I could be more fluent.

I've tried to make the move permanent so many times over the last few years but it's never successfully happened. The main problem with each attempt to use Vim has been the initial stumbling blocks that make an impact on your typical work day. Sublime Text has worked for me so well since I first started using it and switching to Vim will take a while but my patience always takes a battering and then I move back to Sublime Text.

This time it feels different though. After a couple of days using Vim I'm making headway with the basic actions of managing panes, buffers and basic text manipulation. I'm taking notes as I'm using it and I'm practing some of the shortcut keys that I discover each day. There's still a few teething problems with the setup I have but I'm prepared to see it out for another month at least.

We'll see how it goes.

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There's a new age of celebrity available now. They offer more in the way of entertainment and you can even find celebrities who aligned with your own interests. Who are these new celebrities?

For years I've seen the activities of celebrities reported in newspapers and magazines. Every week it seems there's some fashion faux pas made, another check into rehab, or just opening their mouths to say something loud but clearly wrong. I see it as a depressing form of entertainment to follow and one that doesn't give any actual value. With reality television programmes providing an steady stream of new celebrities to add, it seems like there's no end in sight. Well actually there is.

We often class a celebrity as a well known famous person in the public media. Actors and actresses, sports people, singers and even business people are all classed as celebrities. It's been this way for years now, but where else can find celebrities that offer more in the form of entertainment and value? The Internet of course. A platform consisting of millions of celebrities. Through blogs and publications, there are millions of celebrities out there for you to follow, and they're just a click away.

A few of these celebrities I follow are Patrick Rhone, Nicholas Bate, Curtis McHale, Michael Wade, Kurt Harden and many others. You might recgonise some of the celebrities I follow, you might not. For me though they trump anything that any celebrity magazine can offer. Every day my RSS reader fills with their latest activities and drama. They publish on an open platform for the world to see and yet they are often ignored in favour of more conventional celebrities. If people choose to ignore these new celebrities then it's their loss.

This is just the tip of the iceberg though, there are millions of celebrities out there in different circles just waititng to be discovered and followed. You just have to look in the right places. Start with blogs that fall into your interests, there's always someone posting great content in any topic you can find. Search your favourite social network for interesting people in your field or look to mailing lists that offer a condensed form of entertainment straight to your inbox.

There are millions out there waiting to be discovered.

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Many of you will notice that my daily posts have tailed off somewhat in the last few weeks. Despite recent attempts to scale back on the frequency of posts, I'm still not finding that sweet spot that lets me write and publish. I had it last year, but this year it seems to have vanished.

I've got a holiday starting next week for two weeks. It's a clean break and a chance to kickstart the writing process again. I'm hoping to come back with a list of ideas, drafts in progress and hopefully by then I'll have published a few more posts to get me back on track again.

Let's see where it goes. See you on the other side.

Mike Vardy has been writing about his experiences with Todoist recently. If you're a fellow user of Todoist then I definitely recommend reading his recent posts on labels and conducting weekly reviews in Todoist.

Nicholas Bate is on the ball again with advice on true productivity.

Trade-offs are hard, very hard because they are rarely perfectly resolved. To be comfortable with them we need to have time to have thought about them and time to communicate such thinking to those who are important in our lives.

— On Productivity and Life in the Gaps by Nicholas Bate

Yesterday I wrote about coasting along. Good for when you're driving and taking in the good views, but when you're coasting for everything you do, you're just ticking the boxes. Today marks the first day of a reboot to purge this nasty habit.

If only everything was as easy to fix as a reboot. Got problems with your computer? Reboot and try again. It's amazing how often this works. I'm not technical support person, but the amount of times I've given technical support to family and it was simply a matter of rebooting their PC is astounding. It's not this easy for everything though.

Rebooting yourself takes a bit more thought, a bit more time. Let's face it, we're complicated entities. Our brains have the accrued knowledge and memories of a whole lifetime. We have habits, whether good or bad, engrained in us. How we approach problems and solve them is different for others. This rebooting lark then is going to take some time then. I'm not expecting a change overnight, but I am expecting to see good results as each day comes. I'm not trying to achieve everything on day one, just making sure that for each day, I've made a positive change to how I work and what I do.

This is the first day of the reboot. So where do I begin? Well, this morning I decided to ditch the MacBook and went out for a cycle. I haven't done this as much as I would like to, as I like to use the Friday to catch up on a few things. Those things can wait though. This morning I just wanted to clear my head and start again. I put on my bike gear, grabbed the bike, walked my oldest son to school and then headed out.

The west of Scotland is having a period of sunny weather so it could not be a better time to head out. As it was the morning, the heat hadn't reached it peak and the trails were great. Dry hardpacked roads mixed with some dry grassy paths further up. The descent back down was even better.

The bike ride was good. It gives me a chance to clear my head which is something I wasn't doing often enough. Using the Friday morning for a bike ride, even if it's just 90 minutes is a good use of time. Everyone knows that exercise is important but what's also important is the chance to leave a few things behind. The feeds, the timelines, the inboxes, the emails, the messages, the tasks. They can wait. They'll still be there when we get back. The difference now is that with a clear head I might be in a better frame of mind to take a few of these on. And that's a good starting point I think for the rebooting process to begin.