Matthew Lang

The EU referendum debate has been nothing short of a fear factory in the last few weeks. Politicians have highlighting doom and gloom scenarios for both sides of the debate. There is a side of the debate I haven't heard until now and that's the side of the experts.

If you're still on the fence about the vote then I suggest you take time out your day for a quick education. In his brief talk Professor Michael Dougan covers all the facts and figures of the EU and the UK. Well worth your time.

I'll be voting to remain in the EU on Thursday. I believe as a nation we're in a better position being part of the EU.

Hat tip to Ian Dick for posting this and bringing it to my attention.

A shame you can't get these for UK light switches. They would have been a great addition to the boys rooms.

A little reminder that people are awesome.

via Kottke.org

This has been something of a let down this season of Game of Thrones. There has been some great moments but largely the episodes have plodded on.

Arya’s storyline in "No One" is pretty well proof positive of that. It deflates like a punctured balloon, setting up a big confrontation between Arya and the Waif, then completely failing to follow through.

— Game of Thrones' bungled Arya plot explains why George R.R. Martin’s taking so long to finish the books by Todd VanDerWerff for Vox

Facebook is touting video as the next big thing for their platform. However, Tim Carmody points to a number of benefits of the written word.

Text is surprisingly resilient. It's cheap, it's flexible, it's discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it's endlessly computable -- you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things.

— Facebook is wrong, text is deathless by Tim Carmody for Kottke.org

Gyro anyone?

Back when my blog was running on Jekyll, I found solace in the amazing Hyde theme by Mark Otto. Simple, flexible and with a strong focus on the content of your blog.

Due to limitations with Jekyll I switched to Ghost a few months ago. So far everything is going great. The only problem is that many of the themes for Ghost focus on banner sized header and post images.

I ran with the Casper theme from Ghost for a few months. I like the typographical elements of the theme but I dislike the massive banner images for it. I needed a change.

Using Mark Otto's Poole base theme for Jekyll as a starting point, I started building a theme for my blog. The one constraint to the theme I wanted is that it shouldn't use any banner images for any part of the theme.

A few hours later and I have the beginning of a new theme for Ghost.

It's been a while since I flexed my creative cogs. Even though this was just a few hours work, it's still a great feeling being able to ship something. Even if it is just aa theme for my own blog.

The Daring theme for Ghost is available on Github.

I've been faced with this problem over the last couple of weeks. Read on for the answer.

When you are wondering what to do, when you are stuck, caught between a rock and a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea...

— What to Do? by Nicholas Bate

This has to be the definitive list of books on running a successful business.

There is room for a few more but starting with the recommendations from Curtis is a great starting point.

Great advice given my recent "never finishing anything" run.

... readings of non-fiction books with your own summary of learnings.

— Finish More 7 by Nicholas Bate

Give me a project any day of the week.

Projects are open-ended, chosen and ours. Working on a project opens the door to possibility. Projects are about better, about new frontiers, about making change happen. When in doubt, dare.

Your job vs your project by Seth Godin

There are no shortcuts.

There’s no substitute for hours put in. Good work requires commitment and emotional investment. You can try to make shortcuts, but your audience will know. More importantly, you will know.

Do the Work by Project Exponential

Now that we know the basics of a Trello board we can start to dig deeper into the other parts of the board that can help us.

Teams

Teams are a way of organising boards so that they can belong to different groups of people. Teams are helpful for larger organisations so that boards can belong to different departments. The benefit is clear for large organisations but what about individuals like freelancers? Can they benefit from using teams? Of course they can.

When I first started using Trello I lumped all my boards into a single collection. Boards for reading lists, client work, development work and home projects. I needed to organise these boards in a better way so I set up two teams. One for my freelance work and one for personal. Using these teams, I have my boards assigned to the right team and it makes finding boards a lot easier.

Labels

Trello’s labels are a way of categorising cards. Labels consist of an editable name and a colour. When you add a label to a card a small block of that label’s colour appears on the front of the card. Opening the back of the card will show the labels and their names.

Due to the number of boards I am working with at any given time, I find the labels on the front of the cards not informative. To help I use this Safari extension that adds the label names to the front of the card as well. There’s also CSS you can add to your browser through a CSS style extension like Stylebot or Stylish.

Cards by Email

Creating cards in Trello is straight forward. What if you need to create cards for your board without being in Trello?

Each Trello board comes with it's own unique email address. When you send an email to this address it adds a card to the list specified and in the desired position. In the menu of reach board you'll find the Email-to-board settings.

Select the the list you want to append cards to. Then you can select whether you want the cards to appear at the top or bottom of the list. The formatting of the email is simple. The subject becomes the title of the card and the body becomes the description of the card.

During initial meetings with clients, I will use this feature to send cards to the board for that client. Emailing cards to the board saves me having to write up the cards later. Using email also means that once the card is away, I can keep focused on talking with the customer.

These are just some of the ways in which you can get more from your Trello boards.

A question prompted by Nicholas Bate in his Jagged Thoughts for Jagged Times series.

In the New World of Work the relentless quest to get us to communicate and communicate now, most forcefully illustrated with the increasing provision and use of so-called productivity tools such as instant messanging means there is no time to think.

And therefore there is little of worth to communicate.

I've highlighted that last section as it's got me thinking again about the value of Twitter.

I'm finding it difficult to warrant my time spent on Twitter. I rarely do anything on Twitter these days. My biggest gripe is that to gain any kind of audience you need to take part more. Which in turn means tweeting on a more frequent basis. Yet I don't like just throwing anything out there unless it has some thought to it. I could tweet more often but is it worth it? Am I just adding more noise?

of Dreams.

Trello is a great tool for managing projects and products. Before we dig deep into Trello though I'm going to do a quick overview of what Trello is and how it works.

Trello revolves around three concepts. Boards, lists and cards. Before we move on further we need to understand what a board is. If we think of a board as a physical object then it's best to think of a Trello board as a drawing pin board. You know those boards you see in schools and universities that display announcements? That's exactly what a Trello board is. It's a place for a collection of related information. This sounds a bit vague but Trello isn't a tool used for a specific purpose.

On the board we can create lists that span the board. You can create as many lists as you need but it helps to keep the number of lists to a handful. By doing this you can fit the whole board in most of the screen sizes you use. Too many lists results in some lists being off-screen and you need to scroll to get to these. Call me lazy but that just seems like such a chore.

Finally there are cards.

These represent individual items of work. It could be a task, a feature, a todo list or a prompt of some kind. The card themselves contain a title and a description. They can also contain checklists, attachments and comments.

This is the basics of the Trello board. We didn't touch on features like calendars, email settings and labels, that's for tomorrow. It helps to have an understanding of the basic building blocks of Trello. It's just three concepts but it helps to understand these before going deeper into Trello.

I love this mountain bike build. Period correct components from the 90s really make this bike special.

via Cycle EXIF (photo by Jeff Frane)

With our business health guide Nicholas Bate.

I think I've found myself a new set of labels for categorising my tasks in Todoist.

Think of your tasks in categories called the "three Cs," he says: creative, collaborative, and connecting. Schedule your creative work—when you’re thinking, making decisions, writing, and planning—when you’re mentally strongest. For many, that’s early in the day, he says. Block out times for collaborative work, such as meetings, phone calls, and other work tasks where you need to interact with others. Then, plan your connect time, when you recharge with family and friends.

— 8 Productivity Habits Of The Most Successful Freelancers by Gwen Moran for Fast Company

Love the artwork on the front wheel.

via Javi Ballestero

On a side note, Fixie Friday has been scaled back to the first Friday of each month. It's been hard finding new fixie builds lately. It still hasn't diminished my love for fixed gear bikes though.

This is it. The last part of the Grass Roots Productivity process. Doing the work. Unfortunately there’s no quick fixes or hacks to this one. You either do the work or you don’t.

It doesn’t need to be as black and white as that though. There are things you can do to help you have a productive day. I always come back to Peter Bregman’s book, 18 minutes. He has a simple rule for getting something done.

If you really want to get something done, decide when and where you are going to do it.

— 18 minutes by Peter Bregman

When you decide where and when you’re going to do something you add structure to your day. This structure leads to a plan day for the day is more manageable. If you’re like me then the location will rarely change for most of your work. Time though is one thing that's a big impact on our day. So decide when you want to do a task so that you can split your day into more manageable chunks.

I’ve tried in the past to pick off items from the top of the list at the start of the day. This is the wrong thing to do. It often leads to confusion and the wrong things getting done at the wrong time. I’ve learned now that scheduling actions into my calendar ahead of time is a better way to get things done.

Doing the work is all about self discipline and honesty.

Discipline yourself so that you do the work set before you. Schedule in your calendar the tasks that matter. For every one task that needs to be done, there's four other that could be done. Never mind the other four and focus on the one.

And when it comes to reviewing your progress, be honest with yourself. If you could have done better then aim to improve your work and your progress on the next block of work.

This is the step where many people falter when it comes to using a process, but only you can make it work. So do yourself a favour and do the work.