Work on the Weekends Only If You’re Learning Something Useful
You should only work on the weekends if you’re learning something that supports your future or puts you on a path to enjoying your work.
How to Stop Overcommitting at Work: A Summary of Unplanned Work in The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project is a fictional story covering how an IT team leads its company, slogging through technological and organizational transformation. It’s an exciting way to learn more about software operations. It’s a business fable, not dissimilar from The Goal, The Wealthy Barber, or The Grumpy Accountant. I want to summarize one of the key […]
How to Break a Creative Block in 24 Hours
Creative blocks are the bane of every person’s existence. These ruts could go on for a week, a month, a year, or even decades. After all, life happens, time gets thin, and expectations get higher. The most consistent solution is simple: to set a tight deadline, and to deliver something by that time. And possibly […]
What It’s Like to Write Articles with Artificial Intelligence
I see GPT-3 both as a threat to the conventional notion of writing, but also as a great new tool for authors. Perhaps an analogy is useful here: I’m a calligrapher, and I learn about the Gutenberg press. It makes sense to learn how to work together with GPT-3 as a collaborator, especially when cost […]
When Stress Is the Problem, This Is the Solution: A Summary of Slack by Tom DeMarco
I first recommended Tom DeMarco’s Slack a few months ago in my Best of Books newsletter (and also mentioned it in this blog post). Here’s my original description of it, edited slightly with some line breaks: Slack is “the degree of freedom required to effect change.” This concept is key as more businesses and managers […]
A Bias for Action: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on How to Stop Overthinking
At Twitter, Dan Rose tells a story about working at Amazon on the team that was incubating the Kindle. He recalls a meeting with Jeff Bezos, and his boss Steve Kessel: Steve brought me + 2 other people from the team, we got on Jeff’s plane in Seattle. Jeff was fired up from the start, […]
The Discipline of Joy
If you’re one of the millions of self-employed, you might know this saying all too well: When you work for yourself your boss is probably an asshole. Susan Piver writes at The Open Heart Project, which I found via Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist: I’ve spent a lot of time in my life trying to force […]
How to Make Art Without Worrying About Money
In Toronto Life, Steve Kupferman writes of surviving an illegal rooming house in Kensington Market. I’ll leave the descriptive bits to him, but what’s notable is how he actually got out of that situation [emphasis added]: My landlord patched up the bathroom, but he never fixed the roof. The leak spread to my bedroom, forcing […]
Shopify’s Founder Tobias Lütke on Creativity and Constraints
I recently dug up an archive of Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lütke’s old blog, which linked to this interview with Signal v. Noise. Given Shopify’s impact, if you’re an entrepreneur, founder, or programmer, the whole thing is worth the read, particularly how well Shopify—at 28 people in Ottawa—adapted to constraints. For example, Shopify was […]
Without a Word: How Kanye West Launched His Album Donda to His Church
On Thursday, July 22, 2021, Kanye West set up his sanctuary at Mercedes Benz stadium, a listening party for his upcoming album Donda. The event sold out a few days prior, with a capacity of 42,000. Trapital’s Dan Runcie does some napkin math and sums it up well, “Very few artists can pull that off.” […]