Category: Life

The title is more aspirational than real, especially over the past twenty minutes I just spent surfing my timeline (eek!).  However, it is also true that this past month of blogging has been primarily made possible by leaving Mr. Zuckerberg’s network for my little deserted island.  I’m not sure how things will play out over the long run, but it has been a good so far, enough to feel comfortable making a general recommendation that everyone should give daily blogging an extended try.

Since playing with the kids, eating, sleeping, and employment are all top priorities, there really isn’t much free time in my world.  Time is indeed a limited commodity!  So when I started this current run, I knew this was going to be a trade, and the only available activity was my morning devotional on social media.

At a conceptual level, the trade has been giving up the audience on an established network in order to engage with a medium that encourages longer form posts.  It’s not just the length, but the rigor that comes with writing self contained essays on an archived platform.  Facebook is great for sharing and consuming fun ephemeral content, but it is not a place for me to force myself to think.  I’m not so humble to say I’m satisfied with just shouting in the wind for myself, but for this little audience of 1 so far, it has been the right trade to take the time to talk to myself.

I was into podcasts before there was the internet.  We used to buy tapes of sermons and listen to them on little portable cassette players.  I’d listen to them while doing chores, walking around, or doing pretty much anything.  If it wasn’t sermons, it was talk radio, sports and politics, and the occasional audiobook.  In any case, there was always noise going on.  So for me, the transition to podcasts was beyond easy, it was natural.

While I’ve read all those articles and books that claims you can’t multitask, I think they ignore the fact that many times a task won’t require your full brain power.  And during those times, I find myself getting extremely anxious if I don’t have an audio distraction to keep me from being distracted by all the other self-chatter in my noggin.

Maybe it’s because of the kids, or because I’m moving into lower middle management, but all the sudden I’ve found myself enjoying silence.  I still want noise during long stretches in brainless tasks (such as my commute), but I have surprised myself at times with how little chatter I’m throwing in my ears.  Don’t get me wrong, I still listen to plenty of podcasts, but given how much I used to listen, it’s quite a sudden drop.

Twenty years ago, my first boss (who was most likely younger at the time than I am now) warned me this would be coming at some point.  He was right.  Silence does have a way of suddenly catching up to you. Even me.

After listening more to the Cortex Podcast, I’ve been playing with Toggl, the time tracking website.  I’ve been flailing around with it and have given up being able to really gather any data from it this week, but I’d like to get Toggl set up so I enter the weekend with a good system in place.  As such, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how I want to track my time.

Deciding whether something is worth tracking is to make a judgement of its value.  Making value judgements means designing. But design is done in a bounded space.  While your life is technically a limited space, it’s a big sprawling thing to keep track off.

Toggle provides three levels of categorization.  So the first thing I did was split Work versus Home.

The second level is called Projects.  Work was pretty straightforward, I just split out all the projects.  In order to track activities (meetings, emails, etc) I’ll need to start adding tags. Life at home is a little more complicated.  Ideally it would be sliced into Good, Chores, and Wasted.  But that’s a bit too blunt of an instrument, so right now I have it split up between a few pet projects, eat, sleep, drive, chores, and a generic life in general section.

The third level are the Tasks within each projects. For the last couple days I had been trying to keep a tight eye on this, but I’ve decided to just let it sprawl for a bit and then before reining it in, after I feel like I have a handle on things.

I know my wife is rolling her eyes at this ridiculously nerdy timewasting exercise (especially so soon after my shortcuts exercise), but dude it’s totally gonna be worth it!

I was listening to the Cortex podcast 75 and CGP Grey was excitedly selling the new feature Apple Shortcuts (previously called Workflows when it was an independent company). I have to admit his home screen looked pretty cool with all custom icons so I broke my personal rule of never downloading an OS until the .01 release and got iOS 12 as well as the separate Shortcuts app.

 

My work phone was the first one to emerge out of the exercise.  Over the past couple years I’ve developed a basic layout with my Notes app in the top left corner and Maps in the top right corner. At my new job, I’ve adopted OneNote for this function because it plays well with Windows (duh), and this shortcut automatically asks for text input before opening the file.  On the phone, I use the app primarily to quickly jot things down, so I believe this will be a much better flow (as does CGP Grey, who brought up the idea).  At the top right, I can open up Google Maps, but it also has a few extra items on the menu, such as automatically giving pulling up directions to my next meeting appointment.

Next to OneNote are a couple ways to automate texting / email, and next to that is a couple ways to get into the web. The basic premise of these shortcuts are to ask for what you want to do, then ask for input, then open up the appropriate app with the information prefilled from the input.

The middle row starts with a speed dial for a lot of in-house numbers in the Division, including a couple ways to call home quickly.  Next, all the apps have to live somewhere and this was pleasant a location for the folder.  And finally, all the remaining icons are speed dials for each of my projects, including the Agency, Architects and Contractors.  Because I am pretty religious about ignoring work related emails at home, I haven’t been using the work phone much, but I suspect this will completely change the game.  It will now be way more convenient to pick up the cell and make a call than using the landline at the office.

The dock has Microsoft Outlook, which plays much nicer with our state Outlook server than Apple Mail.  In the middle is the Calculator and Camera. Yeah I could swipe up, but I often find myself needing these items at a moments notice when convenience is at a premium. And finally the phone app, which is also a convenient way to get to my contacts.  Unlike a lot of Internet personalities, my job is being the ultimate middleman, so I do use my phone a ton as a talking device.

 

My personal phone is also set up very similar at the top and bottom.  In the dock, I’ve replaced email with my most used app, Overcast for podcasts.  The top row has all the same functions, but each of the shortcut folders are a bit more complex since this phone is a true personal computer in a way the work device isn’t.  For example, my Notes shortcut now ties into both OneNote for work as well as Apple notes for home.

The coolest thing I did this weekend is buried in the web shortcut with the venn-diagram.  I programed a shortcut to let me take a photo, add a date stamp to it, and then open it up in Notes where I can dump it into a log for my boardgame playing (I have to believe that at some point Notes will let me just directly dump it into a preselected file and thus be completely automated).  I also did a similar shortcut for text-only logging of my meals, but I might have to consider transitioning it an image log as well.

In the second row is my WordPress shortcuts, including a couple functions to directly take a photo and then open it up as a draft.  Next is the app folder; I’ve combined all the apps in part to train myself to use the swipe and search function. And the last two are basically glorified folders for video entertainment, and music which also includes direct links to play several favorite albums, beyond opening up iTunes or Spotify.

The first couple items in the final row are quite aspirational.  The first is for reading materials, which will be primarily populated with direct links to favorite books in iBooks once I figure out how how to do so with Siri Shortcuts.  The second is reviving Apple Health from disuse; I’m hoping to use metrics as a way to motivate myself to be healthier.  The third is currently a direct link to taking videos, but I am finding it redundant with the camera app, so it may be soon replaced with Toggl Timer shortcuts (if this next new productivity kick sticks).  And finally, a bunch of autodial items for the phone.

In all, as promised by CGP Grey, this has been quite an interesting exercise to rethink how I relate to the phone in terms of actual actions instead of applications.  With the older 6s, there is a touch of lag when the shortcut opens up the Shortcut app to then run its function.  So it’s not perfectly seamless, but I believe the payoff may be worth it, though it’s much too early to tell if I won’t just revert to the previous paradigm.

I was thinking about sending an email to a colleague.  It was going to be about how distinctly short a time we have with our babies so we should try to make the most of it.

And then I spent the evening working and surfing the political drama of the day. Drama that is way, way, way out of my circle of influence.

I then woke up early this morning, and then got derailed for an hour, catching up on the all the nothing that has happened over the short night.

Work and the internet is one helluva drug.  Can’t live without either, but both can really take you out of the present.

Being present is really hard.  Who knows, with all its current hotness, maybe it’s overrated.  But it’s gotta be better than this.

I looked at my daughter in the rearview mirror.  It was a ghosted image, a secondary reflection.  She was momentarily quiet, looking down towards the right.  I could only see the top of her head, the two pigtails bound with fluorescent pink ties.  What is she thinking?  Where were we headed?

A couple nights ago, we gave our boy a haircut.  He was born with a full head of hair, and it was the first thing anyone mentions when they saw a photo of him.  But the hair has been starting to cover his eyes for a couple weeks. It was well overdue, even though we’ve been loathe to cut it.

Like all good parents, we googled “how to cut infant hair”, parked our daughter in front of the Peppa Pig Show, and took a bunch of photos.  After the preliminaries were completed, we took the little guy to the bathroom, and my wife wet his hair as I held him up.  Then we started hacking away. As a baby, he kept twisting and turning, which made clean cuts difficult.  He soon got tired of the situation and started fussing, making clean cuts impossible.

Soon there wasn’t much else to do.  We had obliterated the lovely hairdo that he’s unknowingly flaunted his entire life.  My wife and I giggled at how badly we did.  For a moment we were young lovers again, who just finished a new adventure.

The five month old has been happily gumming on anything in arms reach, his hands, his toys, the blanket, our hands.  Even if she didn’t display the same enthusiasm, our daughter went through a similar phase, but we were new parents and I generally refrained from letting her chew on my fingers.

A few weeks later a tooth had broken out, and I found out it was no joke.  The first time she bit my finger, I immediately regretted that I had missed out on something pretty cool and exceedingly rare.  In this modern professional age, we only have a kid  once or twice in our lifetimes, and lord knows when or if the grandkids will be following up.  How often will you get to have an infant comfortably chew on your hand?

But life was kind enough to give me a rare second chance, and I’m not passing this one up.  I’ll wash my hands extra, and for damn sure I’m going to let him gnaw away.

I just received a very kind note from a friend who I contacted on Facebook Messenger.  Following up on yesterday’s post, it energized me on pushing forward with this project, but it also cemented my decision to stop trying to use the Facebook timeline for conversations.

Earlier in the week, I had posted an item on the public timeline, tagging several people hoping to start a conversation, but got minimal response. It was a relatively benign subject about some changes on the AIA code of ethics, but I think the overwhelmingly public nature of social media makes difficult for people to have a conversation, aside from yelling about politics.

Furthermore, the timeline is too perfectly engineered for passive consumption.  Like an ipad, the timeline is great for viewing but not conducive for producing – hell FB even pre-manufactures posts for you.  Over the past year, I’ve taken several abortive attempts to deactivate my timeline because the addiction was just too much, but I keep coming back.  I’d like to find a balance for using this product since I enjoy seeing news and links from old friends, but if the opportunity cost is fewer true conversations, maybe I’ll have to quit cold turkey.

So yes, another post adding to the chorus of social media self haters.  Stealing from an insight by Bomani Jones, we all have a Facebook account but who actually loves the service?