#effective

Whoever speaks badly, thinks badly and lives badly. We must find the right words: words are important! —Nanni Moretti A reader reached out to me the other day to talk about the future of tech writing as a profession. They asked me a pretty good question: What skills would you prioritize in this age of constant change and uncertainty? Is it AI? Maybe coding? Well, not really.

Danger This is the first (and probably only) guest post in the history of this here blog. It is written by someone you know and have strong feelings about, claude . I grabbed a copy of all the…

As men we’re often taught to chase lives defined by vanity and hollow expressions. But genuine decency lasts far longer than any name on a building

AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!

'Apocalyptic optimism' is out, 'doomism' is in.

Goals don't always work, but these four steps will change your life.

1FacebookEmail2PinterestRedditShare3SHARESThis post is intended for a certain segment of the population, and after a few paragraphs you’ll know if it’s you (or someone you know). Historically, I’ve had spectacular trouble getting normal, everyday things done: homework, chores, work projects, household […]

25FacebookEmailPinterestRedditShare25SHARESI’ve been reading Lord of the Rings for two months and I’m just at the end of the first part. It’s not because I’m not enjoying it. It’s one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I can remember. From the […]

The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger.  We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.  We're hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies. We're hungry and we don't have words to articulate why. We're hungry, and we're lacking and we're wanting. We are

I was fed up with discussing the weather, so I started to ask unexpected questions. The conversations that resulted were revelatory

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

A lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion for remote teams.

I had been conditioned to agree without questioning since I was a child but by pausing to consider I now have more time, energy and autonomy

It’s safe to assume that you have, at some point in your life, complained about something or someone. I certainly did, more than once. I used to …

I have been recently contemplating the intricate relationship between my personal life and the work I do, particularly how these domains inevitably get intertwined and influence one another....

“That cannot be done.” Is rarely true, but it’s a phrase I’ve heard more and more from technical people without offering any rationale or further explanation...

The daring leaders we’ve interviewed are never empty-handed in the arena. In addition to rumble skills and tools, they always carry with them clarity of values.

I didn’t leave the attention economy because I hated it. I left because I understood it, because once you see the system for what it is—a parasitic loop that rewards noise over nuance, metrics over meaning, reaction over reflection—you have two choices. Keep optimizing for reach, or

My personal Obsidian vault template. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in.

A weekly review is an opportunity to direct your life with intention – reflect on the past week, plan for the week ahead, and ensure your to-do list is aligned with your bigger goals.

Managing your time can be hard, particularly when occupying leadership positions. This is exacerbated by remote work, where the importance of owning your calendar is paramount both for you, and the people working with you. A departure from my usual technical content, this post covers my lessons learned in managing my time, and my calendar while working remotely at Canonical over the past 4 years.

These last few months have been a whirlwind, haven't they?

Learn how to achieve flow state and defeat digital distractions through environment design, mindful breaks, and deep work practices for a more focused life.

Thoughts on being in my head

When I discussed quitting Google to do a Phd, my manager, Steve Cheng, gave me the advice of "6 shots": Doing something meaningful usually takes about 5 years and we are productive for roughly 30 years. That gives you 6 attempts. So pick each one carefully and give it your best.

I’ve noticed a recurring theme in much of the best productivity advice, the kind that seems to make life more meaningful, as well as merely more productive: it’s that you should think about your work, and life-projects in general, in terms of concrete physical actions and artifacts in the material world. Of course the Master himself, David Allen, makes the point in Getting Things Done: a good to-do list consists of physical next actions, things you can do with your limbs. (So not “get the car fixed”, which is a multi-step project, but “call Jim the mechanic”, which is the next action you can actually take.) It’s also implicit, I think, in Jordan Peterson’s repeated insistence on tiny, difference-making tasks – most famously, “tidying your room” – as the path out of misery and meaninglessness. And in a recent episode of his podcast, Cal Newport makes the excellent suggestion (also explored in his book Deep Work) to set targets for focused work in terms of tangible products. If you aim to spend the morning planning a given project, aim to produce, say, a two-page strategic plan which you can print out and hold in your hands. Then print it out, and hold it in your hands. This isn’t the place for a long rant about the pitfalls of the immaterial online world in which we increasingly spend our days. But it’s clearly one of the hazards of “knowledge work” – supercharged by the great pandemic-induced digital migration of 2020 – that it leaves people feeling disembodied, unrooted, “floating”, out of touch with their physical surroundings, perhaps also mildly depressed. And more prone to procrastination, distraction, and focusing on things other than what matters to them the most. A big part of the problem is that in the purely mental realm of ideas, and the immaterial realm of the internet, it feels as though no limits apply. You get to pretend you’re a god. There’s always another initiative you could launch, another piece of preparatory research you could do, another message you could send or reply to. Plus you never quite have to confront the question of whether there’s enough time for all you plan to accomplish – because in a purely immaterial world, you can always squeeze more in. But it’s a fantasy: since you won’t ever accomplish anything except in collaboration with the realm of the physical and limited, you feel a growing sense of dissonance, of having less purchase on life, and you lose the sense of having some effect on reality that’s central to wellbeing. Defining your work in terms of physical actions and outcomes slices through all that, because it forces a confrontation with limitation. When you replace “do some preparatory research” with “create a physical research summary document of up to five pages”, you make things more specific, which never hurts. But you also make them more concrete – a subtly different point, and which leads naturally to performing the work in a more discerning, outcome-focused way. (Even “making decisions”, which can feel like the ultimate non-physical task, can be usefully re-expressed in physical terms, although you might have to risk feeling a bit silly: for example, you might aim to produce a one-page memo to yourself, expressing the decision you’ve made.) There are vast philosophical dimensions to this topic that I’m avoiding here, partly because I don’t understand them. But in short: less Descartes, please, with his insistence on the mind and body as utterly distinct realms; and more Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French existentialist who saw that we could never flee the physical for the mental, because “the body is our general means of having a world”. Meaning gets made in the interactions between you, a physical thing, and the finite world in which you find yourself. Start by making sure that your to-do list isn’t full of things it wouldn’t ever be possible to physically, concretely do in the first place. • I'd love to hear from you – just hit reply. (I read all messages, and try to respond, but not always in a timely fashion: sorry!) If you enjoyed this email, you'd be doing me a big favour by forwarding it to someone else who might like it, or mentioning it wherever you emit opinions online; the "View in a browser" link above will take you to a web version. And if you got this from a friend and would like to subscribe yourself, please do so here.

South Island, New Zealand, a.k.a. Middle-Earth If you were to make a list of what you want to get done this week, it would mostly consist of things you have to do. Get groceries. Book a hair appointment. Get back […]

One estimate finds that about 117 billion anatomically modern humans have ever been born; I don't know how accurate the "117 billion" number really is, but it seems reasonable enough, and about 8 billion people live now; in other words, around 7% of the humans who have ever lived are living now. I've had the…

It might be time to log off, or at least to drastically reduce your information intake.

This post is aimed at people who meet their basic needs but still don’t feel “happy”, aka most people following me on Twitter and my immediate family.

You’re working on the most complex problem in computer science: fixing permissions on a deployment pipeline. It’s been 4 days you started on that simple task...

The website of Robin Rendle, a designer and writer from the UK.

I came across this recent video from Vicky Zhao last week and loved her brief summary of how she grew in her ability to clearly articulate ideas on the spot by getting to the point, using story str…

Learning from Entrepreneurs, Rickshaw Drivers and Poker-PlayersThe two founders of WhatsApp applied for a job at Facebook back in 2009, but their applications were rejected. Instead they went on t…

Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.

A framework for putting advice into action. Use your Memorized Rules to remember rules of thumb for better everyday decision-making.

A man passes away without a word in the mountains of North Carolina, and his grandson sets out to write about the importance of a seemingly unimportant life.

We’re all familiar with processes like “write a weekly status update” that start strong and eventually fade out to low participation, engineers automating their updates, and gibberish. When you ask…

An easy way to do more things you love.