Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

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.

How I Use Projects in Todoist

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.

Three Months With Linode

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!

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

Confession: I've never used IRC

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?