Matthew Lang

However, if you haven’t yet made plans and wish to take a stand, there is one activity that you can do alone at home that will help you and the planet. It ensures that ever-so-briefly you are not contributing to climate change, and are doing what you can to save endangered species. Don’t drive or fly. Don’t buy anything. Do no laundry. Turn off the lights. Avoid going online. Depending on where on Earth you are, shut down the air-conditioning or heaters (unless you’ve got solar panels!).

— The best thing you can do on Earth Day is sit perfectly still

I appreciate that doing nothing can help climate change, but I’m reading this article on the day of Earth Day and if sharing it means I can get a few more people to increase their time offline, then it’s worth that little burst of me being online today.

I don’t really follow the football in the UK, but it surpises me how often managers are held accountable for a team’s performance. I get that as a manager they are responsible for the team as a collection, but is there no argument against the team itself as well as the manager?

McLeish was under pressure from day one and didn’t have the capacity to deal with it. It was painful to watch at times. It’s now over, but the old problems remain at Hampden. It’s not just about who the next manager should be, it’s about who can be trusted to appoint that new manager.

— Scotland: Alex McLeish exits after poor start to Euro 2020 qualifying

22 years without a major tournament appearance. With a record like this, I’d say it’s less about who can be trusted and more about who would want such a position.

Last night I shipped the ability to search your bookmarks in Markcase. With over 1800 bookmarks in my collection, finding anything was beginning to get a bit frustrating.

The search query will match any term in a bookmark’s title, description or URL and will only search through your own bookmarks.

I want to be able to search over URLs as well, but the results for your search may yield more results than you would like depending on the term. URLs can be quite lengthy and therefore can be included in the search results when you might not expect them to be there. For now, I am going to leave searching over URLs in. I haven’t used it enough to see whether it will be useful in the long term or not.

The next step is the importing and exporting of bookmarks. I’ve put this off long enough, but it’s the next best feature to implement to entice a few more subscribers to the service.

Once importing and exporting is in place, then it’s on to billing. I’ve always said that Markcase will be a paid service, but for just now I’m happy to let people use it for free. I’m hoping to have billing in place by the summer which will then let me focus on performance and usability improvements for a few months.

A study commissioned by Microsoft found that since the year 2000 – or about when the mobile revolution began – the average human attention span dropped from 12 to 8 seconds, which places us just below a goldfish, which tends to stay focused for an entire 9 seconds at a time.

— Slack Is Not Where ‘Deep Work’ Happens

Wow. In almost 20 years we’ve become less focused than a goldfish.

I get ticked off by Slack as a platform, but not for what it is, but how it’s used. Instead of restricting channels to specific actions or topics, Slack allows any channel to be openly used and abused without user’s even knowing that they are distracting others. Why have one firehose channel when you can have ten?

I do miss the days of freelancing where I could get in a few hours of deep work in the morning and then catch up with clients and meetings in the afternoon.