Angelo Stavrow [dot] Blog

I rarely get sick, and when I do, it seldom lasts more than 72 hours. Having just recently gotten over a nasty cold, however, I have a couple of thoughts on the matter of working through cold and flu season.

Inevitably, there will always be someone who feels that they can't, for whatever reason, afford to take a sick day. So they load up on decongestants, fight their way in to the office, where they basically fill a seat with their butt, a trashcan with their snotty tissues, and their workplace with their germs.

Now, in many cases, our patient zero may legitimately feel that their paycheck is threatened by them taking a sick day. This is a failure of their corporate culture: if you're going to get fired for catching a cold, you're going to get fired for myriad other reasons. Resign yourself to that fact, stay home, and maybe start looking for something new.

For some others, it's a point of pride to show how responsible and diligent they are by coming in and struggling through the day. Look at how hard they try. Poor thing. They should be home resting, but instead they came in because they've got work to do. What a team player. What a hero.

What a jackass.

Because no matter how careful they are keep the environment hygienic, they become a transmission vector for whatever they're carrying. Which means their coworkers will get sick. Got a coworker with a depressed immune system? Welp, they're screwed.

There's a saying about the fine line between heroism and stupidity. This is a fine example.

Stay home. Get well.

If you have the energy for it, maybe keep up with some email just to stay abreast of what to expect when you get back.

But energy is probably in short supply. You simply can't be productive, efficient, and creative when your head is packed full of mucus. Don't try; you'll frustrate and stress yourself out even more.

So: Netflix and sleep. Plenty of fluids. NyQuil is my personal weapon of choice in the battle for my sinuses.

As you start feeling better—and if the work you do allows for it—maybe do some work from home. Maybe crank out some of the tasks that are more like project overhead. Or take advantage of a quiet home to concentrate on some strategic or creative work.

Of course, this isn't possible for everyone. Point is, stay home until you're ready—and you're no longer contagious.

Then, come back and catch up.

There's almost never anything so urgent that the business will go bankrupt if it doesn't have your constant attention. This fact is diametrically opposed to the point of view that some managers have. Again, this is a failure of corporate culture.

But I digress: the point is, you're back, you're well-rested, and you're ready to tackle your inbox. You're operating at peak levels. You can plow through that backlog.

Yes, I know that I can say these things because I'm lucky to have a pretty generous (if unspoken) sick-day policy. Our team works hard and we're evaluated on what we get done, not the hours we put in. As a result, my stress levels don't go through the roof at the first sign of a sore throat because I might be getting sick—I just deal with getting better, then get back to work, rather than letting the stress make it worse.

More businesses should follow suit.

Discuss...

The January 28^th episode of Under The Radar, Apps With Personality, left me thinking about just why software from bigger software publishers tend to be more… well, bland.

A lot of it surely comes down to the design-by-committee (or, in the worst case, design-by-accountants/lawyers) way of working that David and Marco alluded to, but I think there's something else worth considering.

Every business-school student has heard the (actually false) Chevy Nova “legend”, whereby GM execs scratched their heads in trying to figure out why sales of the car were so poor in Latin America. It serves as a warning against moving your business into foreign markets without doing your homework first. In 2016 parlance, it speaks to the importance of inclusivity.

While words that are homonyms across tongues may be the low-hanging fruit of localization, “personality” may be one of the most difficult. The personality created for an inanimate object often comes from cultural significance that may not be universally understood. Some of the animism described in the KonMari method—thanking your shoes for a long day of supporting you, for example—just doesn't translate well in Western consumer/capitalist society, where race-to-the-bottom market economics has associated the shoe with a thing to be disposed of, not thanked.

In the podcast, Carrot Weather was rolled out as an example of an app with strong personality.

And it is. That maniacal AI/robot has a charm a that keeps some users (myself included) coming back.

But how easily can that be localized? Even with good translations for the spoken quips, things like the secret-location Easter eggs are hard. Some might be universally understood, like the Moon, and some pop-culture references (see: Star Wars) might be almost universal, but is Mount Doom meaningful to someone in Ulaanbataar?

And therein lies the rub. An indie developer that wants to inject strong personality in an app often doesn't have the resources to localize said personality to all regions in which it will sell, and a large company will probably want to invest those resources elsewhere—especially with profitability on the App Store being what it is these days.

So, the former designs something as a result of their cultural context, with whatever lack of universality that may result. The latter “blands down” their design, in an effort to find some lowest common denominator.

Discuss...

I've been thinking about adding a second kind of post to this site every week: a selection links that I found to be an interesting read during the week.

More specifically, I'm thinking about maybe three to five links, with a few words of my own commentary. Those links might be to freshly-published items, or they may be an interesting article from an archive somewhere. I don't really know.

What I do know, is that I come across a lot of thought-provoking, inspiring, or fascinating pieces of writing, and I want a more permanent place to share them than the Twitter firehose, or the Facebook walled garden.

To that end, I'll be moving my own writing to a Monday post, and a link post on Fridays.

More to come…

Discuss...

I've been allowing myself to get too distracted by random projects. It's time to cull that list and redouble my efforts on the key projects.

— Angelo Stavrow (@AngeloStavrow) January 23, 2016

Years ago, as part of an engineering internship prep course, I had to do a Myers-Briggs personality test. The results indicated that I'm an ENFP type.

While the MBTI was proven to be mostly malarky, one thing that keeps coming up about ENFP types is that they have trouble with follow-through. From the profile I received as a result of the test:

“An ENFP needs to focus on following through with their projects. This can be a problem area for some of these individuals. Unlike other extraverted types, ENFPs need time alone to center themselves, and make sure they are moving in a direction which is in sync with their values. ENFPs who remain centered will usually be quite successful at their endeavours. Others may fall into the habit of dropping a project when they become excited about a new possibility, and thus they never achieve the great accomplishments which they are capable of achieving.” [emphasis mine]

Regardless of whether the test is BS or not, there's some truth to what they're saying.

It's not that I can't focus. I can sit and hack away at a problem for hours, unconsciously suppressing signals from my body telling me to eat or go to the bathroom. If the task at hand is interesting enough, I will become fully engrossed in doing it.

However—

I've identified some impediments to my own ability to focus and follow-through.

There's a lot of cool stuff to try out there. Off the top of my head, I have at least four app ideas in various stages of completion sitting in my Developer folder, and at least a couple more in a Someday/Maybe category in OmniFocus. Given that it can be a lot more fun to start a new project than to udpate and maintain an old one, a certain level of discipline—saying no, specifically—is important to keep things on track.

Not all projects are engrossing. Maybe the challenge isn't quite right for my level of competence, so rather than entering a state of flow, I end up either discouraged or bored. Maybe it's a clerical kind of task that I just don't feel like doing, even if the end goal would improve my life

Maybe the end goal just feels insurmountable.

Maybe I'm just trying to start a new habit, and I just don't remember to act on it because it's foreign to my daily routine.

For those kinds of projects, it helps me to keep my head in the game, and my eye on the prize, so to speak.

There's something satisfying about seeing yourself chip away a goal. Here, automation can actually be a source of failure, if it prevents you from getting the kind of feedback that keeps you moving in the right direction.

Instead, I try to use the dopamine hit of checking off a to-do item, and I like to provide myself with progress reports. That way, my focus is driven by the motivation to keep a streak going, which is infinitely more effective for me than just doing what I gotta do.

The GTD system uses the weekly review as one such measure, although sometimes that feels more like you're just making sure nothing's slipping through the cracks, rather than checking how far along you've gotten towards completing the project. I find it useful to track some numbers (but only when appropriate—be careful of the McNamara fallacy here) as a more quantitative measure of progress:

• How many issues have I closed towards that milestone?
• How am I doing on funding my Christmas expense budget?
• How's my pace improving when I go jogging?

Periodic reminders are another good tool, especially for things like starting a new habit. I use a daily reminder to get myself to work on blog posts, and another to make sure I write in my journal.

(I really like Balanced for iOS as a way to track this, by the way.)

Setting tools aside, at the end of the day, getting to focus is about managing time and attention. Even with Someday/Maybe lists and reminders and weekly reviews, the one immutable law is that you'll only ever get 24 hours in a day. If you try to cram too many things into too little time, there's no opportunity to focus, because you're forcing yourself to switch contexts too often, or you're cutting back on sleep, or you're probably feeling too overwhelmed to stay on target.

One of the best things about a good task management system is that you don't have to feel committed to anything you throw in your inbox. It's just a staging area where you can try on an idea, let it percolate, and—if it doesn't fit—flush it down the toilet. Stop wasting mental bandwidth on it.

And if it does fit, and it's just on of a select few, then it's easier to keep on top it and follow through.

Discuss...

A short break from the usual posts for a bit of site news: by the end of February, I'm hoping to have completed the move of this site over to a static-site generator called Hugo.

There are a few reasons for this.

First, I'm ready to leave Squarespace. It's not that there's anything really wrong with their service. It's pretty reliable, their customer service is great, and it's generally pretty easy to use. It's just that it's overkill for what I need (a simple blog), and while they're constantly bringing out new features, those features aren't really of interest to me—the features I would be interested in paying for just don't seem to be rolling out.

Second, while some basic customization is available to base-plan users, it just can't compare to the level of customization available to a roll-your-own, hackable, static-site generator.

Third, Hugo will be the basis for another project I'm slowly putting together, so this will be good practice.

While I will probably be re-architecting the way URLs are set up, Hugo has an awesome built-in feature for handling redirects, so all the old links should continue working. Comment will probably go away, which is fine, because there really aren't many. Going back to Disqus is an option, but I'm really interested in Civil Comments too.

I'll follow up when the move is complete.

Discuss...

Two weeks ago, I wrote that I wanted to write more—primarily by posting to the blog once a week, and by writing in a journal daily.

So far, the journal has been a success. I haven't missed a day, because it's easy: I launch Day One on a device, and just write. I don't limit myself to certain topics, I don't use any tags, I don't add photos, and I certainly don't worry about length. Four words, four sentences, four paragraphs—it doesn't matter.

Easy wins. Much happy.

Writing here on a regular basis, however, has been more stress than success. It's not for a lack of things to say: as it stands, I've got four files in various stages of completion sitting in my drafts folder.

So what's making it so hard for me to get those done and uploaded?

Sure, part of it is that it's a bit more involved to write and post to the blog. I do it from my computer, at my desk, rather than from wherever I might have a web-connected device.

But more importantly, I think I feel more pressure to write for an audience, rather than just for me. And that imagined audience has expectations.

And so I try to push myself to meet those imagined expectations. Because THINKPIECES.

And then there's that weekly deadline.

Which means that by 6:30AM Friday morning, I found myself posting something that just didn't feel quite done. I mean, it was okay, and it meant that I could check off the task as completed, but I wasn't really satisfied with it.

Side note: I've been using Balanced as a motivator for new habits that I want to cultivate. It's been working well for me, and I like that those little habits live outside of my GTD workflow.

I haven't set any kind of length objective for these posts, so I'm going to start pushing back against the feeling that I need to get 500+ words out every week. The longer drafts that I have, I'll work on periodically, and post them when they're ready, rather than forcing them to be done.

And while they're getting ready, I'll write short(er)-but-sweet posts on something I've been thinking about, or that take the place of a tweetstorm.

Because quality over quantity is more than just a platitude, but showing up every week is important too.

Discuss...

We're now a week in to the new year. As I've mentioned before, I'm not really one for resolutions, but here's something that's been on my mind lately. A proposal, of sorts, in two parts.

1. Be the person that makes you happy.
2. Be the person that makes other people happy.

Here's the how and why of it, as I see it.

Part 1	Part 2	Situation
❌	❌	This is the worst-case scenario. You're not happy. You're surrounded by people who aren't happy, which can perpetuate a downward spiral. It gets dark here, but on the bright side, there's lots of room for improvement too.
❌	✔️	You're making others happy at the expense of your own happiness. Maybe even acting as an enabler. Who knows? Alternatively, your friends may be jerks. One way or the other, this is a huge energy sink. It's a bit clichéd and simplistic, I know, but ultimately, you have to be okay with who you are before you can really make things better for others.
✔️	❌	You're happy, but no one else is. You might be a jerk, but probably you're caught up in something and you're maybe a little less mindful than you want to be. Alternatively, you may be surrounded by people who need your help. A word of caution here, though: it's possible that you're just not equipped for this task. Take care that this situation doesn't change into the one described above.
✔️	✔️	This is the best place to be. You're making strides towards being the person you want to be, and you're helping others win too. Good on ya.

The tricky part is that these scenarios are fluid. Some days everyone's happy, and some days no one's happy; on most days, though, it's one of those mutually-exclusive-happiness situations.

---

Things always come back to centre, but it's important to keep in mind that we define where that centre is. And when we're having a hard time in a tough situation, centre can feel like the worst of these scenarios.

Screw it all, I don't give a crap.

Or: I'm burning out, but at least I'm making other people happy, and they probably appreciate that, right?

Most of the time, we define where we live, emotionally-speaking, without even thinking about it. We fixate on an argument we had with a loved one, or a project we really can't be arsed about at work, and the feelings we have about that particular thing spread to other areas of our life.

---

Happiness is a fleeting thing, and always will be.

Turns out, though, that if you listen hard enough, there's always a little voice that's providing real-time metrics on your progress towards becoming the person that makes you happy. That internal director's commentary takes the form of a great night's sleep, or a bout of heart palpitations, or a morning of inexplicable crankiness, or even a day of insufferable boredom.

This is mindfulness. It lets us step in and interrupt the signal chain between what's happening to us and how we feel about it, and make the appropriate course corrections. It's the compass you need, to guide you back to a centre that makes you feel like the person you want to be.

I struggle with this, but the more thought I put into these goals—the more mindful I am of them—the better I do.

Discuss...

A lot of people seem to think that New Year's resolutions are a waste of time. While I agree that any day is a good day to make changes, I also know that I like things in neat and tidy little parcels, and a year is a very nice little short- to medium-term period of time for setting goals, and revisiting them to see how you did.

I didn't try anything like that for 2015. While I feel the year was pretty good on the whole, this year I'd like to make it a little more official, make some of those goals (and their results) public record here.

So, in no particular order, here are some goals for this year:

1. Post something here every Friday. I'm not setting any kind of length for now—it'll be hard enough to get back into the habit of writing regularly.
2. Post to a journal at least once every day. Again, no stated length; even a sentence will do. Thankfully, DayOne makes this really easy.
3. Make real progress towards my Mac app. I've been kicking around an idea for years now, and by year end I'd really like to have at least a first beta available.
4. Contribute to open-source projects. Without setting a goal for a number or frequency of pull requests, I'd like to participate more in some OSS projects.
5. Get in better shape. I'm not overweight, I'm not underweight, and I'm generally in good shape, but there's always room for improvement—in my case, that'll come from discipline in getting to the gym. To that end, I'm really thinking about making some of my fitness-tracker profiles public.

This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, as I have some personal and private goals that I'd also like to aim for, but it's a good start. I'll revisit this list every quarter and see how I'm doing.

That said, I hope that the next 366 days are happy, healthy, and fruitful for you. On with the show.

Discuss...

I'm a firm believer in automation.

Computers are great environments for this—scripting languages (and convenient utilities that leverage them, like Hazel, TextExpander, or If This Then That) make it trivial to organize, queue, and execute all kinds of tasks that otherwise time away from more enjoyable things.

• • •

Life can be a bit harder to automate. It can get expensive, too, because automating real-life tasks tends to require both hardware and software, working in concert, to manipulate the physical world.

On top of that, a lot of the automation we look at isn't really something that saves us any significant amount of time, because what's being automated isn't real work. Probably the most obvious example of this are home-automation tasks like lighting schemes, motorized blinds, and auto-adjusting thermostats. Sure, they're convenient, but they're luxuries. They don't have a meaningful impact in the quality of our lives.

I love my universal remote, but it's not a time- or work-saver. Not really.

• • •

There are automation technologies, however, that do provide real savings on time and work. Here, however, it's easy to fall into the trap of automating work that would otherwise be beneficial to do manually.

As an example: I own a Roomba, but not a dishwasher.

We've got a long-haired cat whose contributions to the household mainly consists of bundles of fur that roll down hallways like tumbleweed in the desert. My wife is pretty allergic to it, so we need to keep on top of the vacuuming or things go south quickly for her. Given that it's an otherwise hated chore, we got ourselves a Roomba to patrol our flat for dander and dust bunnies on a daily basis.

On the other hand, doing dishes—while not exactly pleasant—is a chore that allows me to settle into my thoughts, and has been shown to reduce stress levels in studies. I'll concede that it's not that hard to deal with, as we're only two people, but nonetheless this feels like work that's worth making time for. It's not uncommon for me to come up with ideas, or solve problems that I've been working on, while wrist-deep in suds.

It's sort of a mandated creative-thinking time, if you will. Given how hectic our lives can be, why would you want to automate that away?

Discuss...

“Make haste slowly.”

Or, if we forsake brevity for clarity: get it done quickly, but not so urgently that thoroughness is sacrificed for speed.

Once committed to action, it is desirable to move swiftly, decisively; but to do so without having completed one's due diligence¹ is foolhardy at best, and dangerous at worst.

Discuss...