Matthew Lang

Gather is a modular desk organiser that is being funded via Kickstarter.

My inner-nerd says yes but as lovely as this organiser is I'm going to pass on it.

A lot colder tonight than last week, but glad to get out for a hit with Ethan.

... are what we should always come back too.

I often fall into the trap of complicated systems.

A simple rule works because I can have one of those completely mindless days and still stick to it. And let’s be real: I have as many mindless days as I have mindful days. Complicated systems ruin both, actually. On mindless days, when it’s a struggle to focus and my head feels like its on backward, following a complicated system requires more concentration and willpower than I can muster.

— Simple rules, again by Annie Mueller

Enjoyed a few holes with Ethan out on the course tonight.

The morning routine of reading, writing and planning is nothing more than a distant memory these days. I once used to start the day with some writing, some articles from my reading list and a last check that everything was in it's place for the day.

These days I'm sitting down at my desk with a coffee, opening Slack and Trello and picking up the next card of work for the client. Before I know it, it's 5pm and the troops are walking in the door hankering for their door.

It's time reboot the morning routine and get back a sense a of order in the morning.

Execupundit reminds us to slow down.

I find that I get more work done by slowing down. "Mindfulness" becomes a signpost. Taking pleasure in small achievements provides a flow of motivation.

— Slow Down by Execupundit

... and other essential reading basics from NB.

Over the weekend I closed my Highrise account.

In case your not familiar with the name, Highrise is a CRM product for small businesses. It started life as part of the 37signals range of products, but has since branched out onto it's own.

The initial pull to using a CRM tool like Highrise is that I wanted to a tool that allowed me to store important emails from clients as well as track projects and work I was chasing with prospective clients. Highrise has great email integration that allows you to forward emails from clients to Highrise and it will store them for you. It also allows you to track deals which in my case represented prospective work with clients and creating proposals to win work.

I should mention that while Highrise is a great product, my decision to cancel my account with it isn't anything to do with the performance and features of Highrise. It is a great product and under the right circumstances it is worth looking at if you need a CRM for your small business.

My main reason for moving away from Highrise was more to do with how I wasn't using it to it's full potential.

In the time that I've had to use Highrise, I've used the deals section rarely. It's nothing to do with Highrise, it's just that in the time that I have been freelancing, most correspondence takes place over email and I've rarely had to pitch for work. Most prospective clients like to discuss the work that they would like me to do and discuss my background and experience. After a few emails, most of these prospective clients then decide to exchange contracts to begin the work. I've rarely had to pitch for work and so the deals feature of Highrise has been left untouched.

The email integration with Highrise on the other hand though was used on a daily basis. Client emails went straight to Highrise as well as my replies to them. Although I used this feature daily, there were only a handful of different clients to deal with at anyone time so while the archiving of these emails in Highrise was nice to have, most of the emails involved discussions before work began. My email provider already offers a large amount of space to store emails and they're filed away in a folder. I was starting to wonder if I needed Highrise to manage the storage of emails.

Finally there was the managing of contacts. Yes I do have all my clients contact details, but I rarely have to refer to them. I speak with clients daily when working with them, I use email to send weekly updates and invoices and for all other daily correspondence with clients I recommend Slack. All my clients details are saved on the appropriate devices I need to have them on and aside from that there's no other special requirement to managing this data.

It was starting to look like I didn't need Highrise at all.

After deliberating for a few days I finally decided to export all my data from Highrise and delete my account. Without a CRM though I needed something else. All my client details are already stored in my address book but I needed something else that acted as a more detailed version of their details and allowed me to find and filter contacts based on information I have recorded against each of them.

The answer lay in a document type that I rarely use. The spreadsheet.

After getting the contact columns in the spreadsheet in the right order, I imported the contact details in and started adding the necessary changes I need so that I could filter those contacts.

Right, so the spreadsheet doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Highrise, but for the moment it will do. I've got all my contacts in one place. I can filter them based on the next date with which I need to contact them for a catch up and there's enough flexibility in Numbers in that I can add more information if I need for each client.

If my client base was to increase over the next 12 months and work started to change on a monthly basis then I would definitely consider Highrise again. It is a great product, but I couldn't justify it's use as a simple address book and email archive.

For the moment though, the spreadsheet is enough for me.

It's come to my attention that I am hardly the good faring blogging citizen I was a couple of years ago. This is going to change this week with a set of single topics. Today's is what to look for in a blog.
When it comes to looking for other blogs to follow, it can be a bit hit and miss of subscribing to that blog is going to be worth it or not. There are a number of things that you can do though that can increase the success rate of the blogs that you subscribe to or regularly read.

A generalist or a specialist

Blogs tend to fall into one of two types when in comes to content. There’s the specialist who focuses on a single topic and there’s the generalist who post regularly but across a wide range of topics.

The specialists have the inside knowledge on the topic that I like to read about. I like reading blogs of this type as the topics often align with what is going to be of benefit to me.

Take the blog of Curtis McHale from British Columbia.

I have read this blog for a few years now and his blog has been a continual benefit to myself as I traverse the world of freelancing. Curtis McHale's blog is about being a business owner and everything that it entails. This is his specialty but the his field of knowledge on this isn't restricted to what happens during office hours, it also includes the other 18 or so hours of the day when he's not working for clients. This includes balancing family life with running a business, the books you should read as a business owner and the tools and services that can help you as a business owner.

A generalists blogs focuses on a greater range of topics. I find that most blogs I follow of this kind are people’s own personal blogs. They post what interests them.

That’s definitely the case of the blog of Kurt Harden from Ohio.

Here you find a blog that covers not just one topic but links, quotes, and many pictures of what's on the grill that evening. I like this type of scrapbook though and it's worth having a few blogs like this to follow. The reason being is that while Kurt's blog doesn't focus on a particular topic, it does include content that is relevant and interesting. And that's a good thing. I've never met Kurt, but I've read his blog for so long that I've come to understand what makes him tick.

Whether you’re looking for a generalist or a specialist is down to you. If you’re looking to learn about a particular topic then I suggest you look for specialist blogs. For anything else a generalist blog is just fine.

Consistent posting

A consistently published blog is a great blog. It doesn't need to be daily. It doesn't need to be a number posts a day or even a single post a day. As long as that person keeps a schedule going that doesn't involve weeks without a post then it's a blog worth reading.

The single exception to this rule is when the person behind the blog announces a period of time in which they'll be unavailable. Patrick Rhone's blog is essential reading for me, but in March of this year Patrick announced that he would be stepping back from his blog to focus on a project of his own.

We can’t always post regularly and there are times where we need to step back for a bit and they say so on their blog. This is the exception to posting consistently. It's not because you're being lazy, it's because you have something more important to do and that's a good thing. I know that when Patrick comes back he'll have garnered enough new insights for his blog for another year at least.

An RSS feed

An RSS feed is the easiest way to follow a particular blog. Using an RSS reader like Feedbin or Minimal Reader you’ll be able to follow all the blogs you're interested in. Some of you might be thinking that with a blog an RSS feed might be a given these days. Sadly that isn't so. I've noticed a number of websites that have blogs on them but lack an RSS feed to subscribe too.

In this case I would skip over subscribing to a "blog" like this. They've made a decision to not include an RSS feed so that they have more traffic to their blog or they just have a bad CMS that lacks an RSS feed. Regardless of the content that the blog includes I would skip over blogs like this.

Looking for blogs to follow can be a bit of a hit and a miss but if you know the type of blog you want to follow, they're a consistent blogger and they have an RSS feed to subscribe to then you should be onto a winner.

You can even follow this one if you're not already doing so!

Just when I think we're out of the woods with winter, Drew gets a nasty cold. We skipped his Taekwondo this weekend as he was loaded. Thankfully he started to get better on Monday and he's back to his usual cheeky self.

The weather is finally taking a turn for the better which means there's normally plenty of work to do in the garden. This year its less work than usual to thanks to Victory Gardens & Landscaping who came out last week and did a big chunk of work to tidy the place up. Just got the new BBQ to assemble and we should be ready for plenty of outdoor grilling.

Sunday was another day on the road for me and Ethan as he was playing in the second round of his junior flag challenge at East Kilbride Golf Club. Conditions were great and he really looked a lot more settled than he did last week. Highlight of the day was his eagle on the 7th. He finished the nine hold round with a score of 44 which he was delighted with despite a couple of putts that just lipped out. Next round is in a couple of weeks, so Ethan gets to play in the medal next Sunday at his local club which means I can put my feet up for the day!

Major gains.

This week I finally got my invite to Micro.blog.

A few months ago Manton Reece wrote about a project he was working on to bring together micro-blogging using the format of RSS. He started a Kickstarter around it which went successfully. This week, I'm finally getting round to getting my account set up and following a few people.

The idea is simple. You can host your own micro-blog on Micro.blog or you can import an RSS feed from somewhere else so that it becomes your timeline. Rather than fencing people into the product, you can bring your own RSS feed and use that for your timeline. Neat idea.

First Impressions

At first the service looks pretty basic. Your own timeline is a simple list of recent posts from the people you are following. There's options to reply, delete and favourite to posts on your timeline. So far so good.

While your timeline is a minimal affair in the styling department, your own feed can be tarted up with one of six designs that can pick from in your account preferences. There's also the option to add some CSS styling of your own.

There's also an app for the iPhone as well as the ability to post to it from the MarsEdit text editor should that be your preference.

Let's not forget this is a bootstrapped product that began life on Kickstarter. I'm certainly not going to compare it in anyway to Twitter or Facebook, but compared the to launch of App.net it feels slower. It's early days though and it's live which more than can be said of what others have promised when it comes to challenging the establishment.

Using Micro.blog

I considered streaming a tagged feed from this blog as my main feed for Micro.blog but there were was one problem with this. The Ghost theme's feed isn't customisable, so there's no way for me to omit these posts from my main feed. The reason I wanted to omit them is that I might be posting three or more times a day and I didn't want to change the frequency of my blog's posting for this.

So instead I think I might just post from the Micro.blog site and then map my timeline to a sub-domain of this site.

So where does that leave other social media outlets that I am a part of?

Well from here on in I'll be largely using IFTTT to posting to Twitter. It will largely be an automated feed from my blog, my Micro.blog posts, Instagram and any other platforms that I use. Twitter has it's uses and I'm not ready to bow out from it yet, but the for the foreseeable future it will be a "write only" environment for me.

After being burned by App.net, I'm aware that Micro.blog is still in the early days of its service life so I'm not going to invest too much time on it. A couple of posts a day should be sufficient.

I'm keen to see how this service grows over the next few months. I'm not expecting drastic changes overnight, but a gradual roll out of new features between now and the end of the year shouldn't be out of the question.

You can find me on Micro.blog here.

A bike for all occassions. And it looks menacing as hell!