Matthew Lang

Realise your own energy distribution with Nicholas Bate.

Great analogy on deadlines for engineers.

Similar to a soccer game when your opponent leads 0:1 and there are only 5 minutes left on the clock. The team will try everything to score asap. But outside of such pressured situations the team simply focuses on ball possession and making good plays. There is nobody asking the players at what time they will score the first goal. Not before the game and especially not during it.

— It Ships When It Ships by Bjoern Zinssmeister

Over the weekend I was looking for a replacement for Google calendars. I was sure that I would be at least using Apple’s Calendar service and iCloud, but I wasn’t sure what other tools would be great to support this. So I asked my ADN friends for their recommendations. Within minutes I got a few from people with their favourite scheduling apps and tools. There was a clear favourite but I wanted to wait for more responses. I left it to the next day for more people to reply. The next morning I reviewed all the responses that people had sent to me.

As a thank you, I composed a single post the next day just saying thanks to all of the people that replied to my question. They didn’t need to reply to my question, but they did and I’m thankful for the responses they gave me. Trawling through the responses was a bit of a chore but I managed to get everyone’s name in one post and sent it. It would be nice if you automate this kind of thing.

It gave me an idea. An question and answer management tool for App.net. It’s probably not on the priority list for many users on App.net, but for those that are looking to streamline the question and answer process and make it easier I had a vision for a small service that would do the following.

1. It would allow you to compose #askadn questions with optional hash tags for preferred answers that people should give.
2. It would aggregate the results and keep totals for each response by looking for preferred hash tags in replies or by looking for recurring words in the replies that are given.
3. It would compose thank you posts for all the people that took part. If all the respondants don’t fit in a single post, the thank you post could be split into a number of posts to thank groups of respondants.

It’s just an idea, but the reason I am putting it here is that someone else might already be in the process of building something similar to this idea. Maybe no one is building it, but perhaps someone will. If no one builds it, then I will.

I’m just throwing this out there.

Amazing account of the moving of these spy planes from the Lockheed plant to Area 51.

Dorsey Kammerer was appointed to head up the activity to build and use the transportation carriage system. An early-on step was to equip a pickup truck with a set of extension poles sized to the width, height of the main transport carriage trailer. An initial plan was to drive the best estimate route of travel, noting the obstacles to easy movement of the carriage boxes. Several photos show this arrangement and its use along the roads.

— Transporting the A-12 by Roadrunners Internationale

Great timeline animating.

When I worked for an ERP consultancy, I would frequently no sooner get my backside at my desk in the morning before the phone would start to ring. Customers looking for support, developers asking for tests to be done and the managing director looking for that new feature for the high profile client of the week. Some days I would simply keep working right from the moment I got to my desk through to home time without a thought about working on the right things. Then I would realize that the day has completely passed by and I’m not even sure if I had done what I originally set out to do that day.

It was at this point that I started giving myself 5 minutes each day of breathing space. At the start of each day I would block out some time to get my day into order. Just a chance to ask myself a couple of questions:

• Did I leave anything undone from the previous day?
• Are there any high priority issues that I need to resolve today?

Once I got into the habit of doing this I started to see where my day was going and the progress (or lack of) that I was making. Updates for customers were taking too long, support calls were being left for too long and most days I wasn’t doing the work that I wanted to do.

Once I spotted these recurring issues, I started to clear them off my backlog of work one at a time. Each day I was making this list smaller and smaller. I was starting to see some real progress.

I do this little routine every day now. It’s just a few minutes of my time, but the benefits are worth it. I’ll sit down with my notebook and review the previous day’s work and pull forward any outstanding tasks to today. I’ll then check my master list on TaskPaper and include any work that is scheduled for today or the current week.

Now that I am freelancing and working from home, it’s important that I continually measure my progress and ensure that I am always making progress on projects and products but more importantly on client work. I need to deliver good results for my clients and ensure they are getting value for money.

Having this little moment of breathing space is a great way to start the day. It’s just a few minutes of time reflecting on what you need to get done today, but it is time well spent.

Don't be.

Owen Williams covers the reasons why your opinion matters and you should write about it:

Yes, there are probably a few thousand other content creators out there airing their own opinions on whatever topic you're talking about, but if your opinion is sound, quality and unique then a community will eventually gather around you.

— Too busy consuming to create by Owen Williams

Ever since the news that Google was sunsetting it's Reader service, I've been looking at alternatives for the Google services I'm already using. I've started using Path as a replacement for Google Chat, and I'm using Apache OpenOffice instead of Google Drive. I'm not against Google as a service provider, but depending one company for a number of services is not a good move.

Two areas where I haven't found alternatives though is email and calendar. The calendar functionality I'm not too bothered about as there are plenty of options for scheduling apps and services.

The big decision I need to make is whether to move my email from Google to anything else. Gmail remains one of Google's key products that continues to work well. I'm looking at a couple of services for email, but the switch and migration of data will be a key consideration.

For the moment the cull of Google services will continue.

Spectacular paint job on this

via FGGT

Last night our oldest son gave us a bit of a scare. He started to run a very high temperature after dinner and through the night he was sick a couple of times. This morning he was shivering and still had a fever. No school for him then.

Why am I telling you this?

It sets the background for one of the key benefits to working from home. In the rare occurrence that your children are ill, it makes child care a lot easier.

Depending on your child's illness you can still look after them and get some work done. I said some work because of course your child's health comes first. Do some work while they are napping or watching a movie. You're never going to get a full days work in on these days, but being a freelancer it is great to have this option.