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Well here we are, halfway through the year! I’m composing this at lunchtime on Monday, as Hannah and I went away last night after our son’s debut for his new basketball team. They absolutely destroyed the other team in a friendly, and he scored a 3-pointer on the final buzzer, which was pretty special.
The reason we went away was ostensibly it being 21 years tomorrow since I proposed to her on Prince Edward Island in Canada. That was half a lifetime ago for both of us, and we have fond memories. It’s also two years tomorrow since her mum died, so there’s sadness mixed in there too.
The kids stayed with my parents for the first time in a year. Our son doesn’t really need babysitting as he’s 16, but it’s only fair that he goes along with our 12 year-old daughter. It seems they had a good time. Hannah and I certainly did, basically replicating what we did last time we went away: getting an upgrade at the Crowne Plaza and going for dinner and cocktails at Khai Khai.
Last week, my son started doing some work for WAO, ensuring that we have transcripts for all of our podcast episodes. He’s doing a good job so far. We’re recording another couple of episodes today for Season 7, with Laura currently releasing episodes of Season 6 we recorded over the last couple of months.
I started doing some user research for the workers.coop around Member Learning group. We’re following-up on responses to a survey which asked people for their learning preferences, etc. so that we can create targeted, relevant offerings. In related news, I updated a consent form for Bonfire user research, taking into account Hannah’s feedback (she’s a user researcher for NHS England).
WEAll, one of our clients, decided against using Hylo after testing it in May. This was mainly based on our recommendation due to the lack of effective moderation tools. Now, they’re planning to test Discourse, which is a much better option. So John and I were scoping that out.
Anne’s still finishing off her dissertation and final year of uni work, but she’s rejoined us for a couple of days per week. This is good as she’s very organised (not that the rest of us aren’t!) and brings a different angle and energy to our work, particularly with Participate.
In other news, we’ve had more house viewings but no offers yet. Everyone’s expressed how lovely they think it is, but I guess the housing market is a little slow at the moment. I just hope we don’t miss out on the place we want to move to.
This week is the last one of a crazy few weeks of football trials for my daughter. She was offered a place at Sunderland’s ETC with the final trial for Newcastle’s ETC being on Friday. It’s her choice, but I’m keen for her to join the former as she’ll be mixed with girls a year up, and it’s a more established setup. She was in Newcastle’s ETC this last season, and if she’s offered a place and opts to stay there it’s no bad thing.
So this week I’ll be continuing with client work, doing a bit of business development for September, and considering whether to respond to UNESCO’s call for contributions r.e. the definition of algorithm literacy and data literacy. It’s a tight deadline, but Ian O’Byrne and Tom Salmon have expressed an interest in collaborating, so we’ll see. Ideally, I would have read Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI this weekend, but… I didn’t.
The post Weeknote 26/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.Group issues 12-point plan calling for stricter immigration rules for care workers, students and refugees
Rishi Sunak is facing demands from “red wall” Conservative MPs to slash the number of overseas care workers, foreign students and refugees allowed into the UK in time for the next election.
The MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, who call themselves the New Conservatives, have issued a 12-point plan to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 226,000 before the end of 2024.
A cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees accepted for resettlement in the UK.
Caps on future humanitarian schemes such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.
Implementation of the provisions of the illegal migration bill, which it is claimed would lead to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.
A raise in the minimum combined income threshold to £26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raising the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM, the MPs claim.
Making the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by putting future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.
A 5% cap on the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals.
Raising the immigration health surcharge to £2,700 per person a year.
Continue reading...I feel a bit behind the curve in writing about Reclaim Open, but I suppose it’s better late than never. We’re still technically in June, meaning the in-person event was just earlier this month, and we still have the online recap coming throughout the month of July, so perhaps my tardiness may be forgiven!
Reclaim Open is Reclaim Hosting’s 4th biennial conference following Domains17, Domains19, and OERxDomains21. It can be easy to compare each conference to those preceding it, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned while hosting these through the years, it’s that each event captures a moment in time and creates a space for connection– however it may be needed or defined in that moment by each participant– and they’re all uniquely special. In some ways these conferences snowball and build over time; we take the lessons that we learn from one and embed them into the next one. In other ways, each conference is its own entity where a distinctive group of folks will converge, share ideas and inspire, and then part ways again. The conversations are always different, but the goal (at least for me when planning) is always the same: to create a space where folks feel comfortable to share, challenge, and build alongside each other.
OERxDomains21 came at a time during covid where connection and professional support felt more difficult to come by. That event was collaborative, powerful, and pushed boundaries – all while being completely online. Domains 17 & 19 were equally powerful, and reinforced art & creativity by taking place in various museum hotels (penguins & tv stack installations included).
While there were no penguins this go around, Reclaim Open was no different in how it carved out space for a community to join forces. In many ways, this conference felt like a reunion, celebration, and call to action all in one. The conference themes were perfect for this:
In April 1993, Tim Berners Lee open sourced the World Wide Web, and the ensuing decades of internet technologies bears the mark of that historic moment. Thirty years later, open source still remains central to building and providing an open web. For our 4th biennial conference, Reclaim Hosting plans to not only celebrate the history of the open web, but take stock of the present moment while exploring the future of Open. To this end we established 3 distinct, though always related, tracks wherein we asked folks to share their work around the past, present, and future of the open web. It was so fun to head back where it all began, and we had a blast welcoming web historians, creative tinkerers, digital humanists, instructional technologists, project admins, and open source advocates to Fredericksburg, Virginia on June 5-7, 2023.
Excerpt on reclaimopen.com
The past, the present, the future: going back to where it all began in Fredericksburg, VA and sharing stories with old and new friends; a celebration of how far we’ve come, marking Reclaim’s 10th year in business and the anniversary of the open web; dreaming up where we want to be and how the future of the web will shape that path.
Each time we dream up, plan for, and host an event like this, I always re-learn just how much work goes into hosting a conference and I have so much respect and admiration for folks that do this more regularly. Coordination for the logistics alone are no joke, and we added a bit of complexity this year by recording sessions, live-streaming and experimenting with Hybrid, and producing an on-the-fly documentary. These extra elements would not have been possible without the amazing Dream Team, and it was such an honor to work alongside them these past few weeks/months (years!) to make it happen.
In no particular order, here’s a list of some of my Reclaim Open highlights:
The Reclaim team dinner after the event where we talked about the future of green web hosting, inspired by Bryan Alexander‘s keynote, What might the web become in its next generation?
Unveiling the documentary, and hearing the impromptu, round-robin experiences from conference goers at the end of day 3.
Checking out Reclaim Arcade. Still so in awe with how that space has transformed, and that evening was a blast!
The way that Rajiv Jhangiani used storytelling and visual/audio aids in his keynote, Accept all cookies and continue: The many presents of the web.
I was really interested in juxtaposing elements of “old” with our techy, future-driven web conference as a way of thinking about how the past and future can intersect. It was fun to loosely play with this using color on the website, which was black & white until the week of the conference.
I also really enjoyed creating the conference programs, which ended up sitting somewhere between a newspaper and a zine.
The programs were created using Newspaper Club and their provided Canva template for the Digital Mini Magazine. I really love how these came together in the end, along with the other stickers and t-shirts we had on hand to showcase Bryan Mathers‘ fantastic artwork:
And because I’m always curious what folks use for other conferences… the name tags were created and printed using Conference Badge and the lanyards were purchased in bulk on Amazon. Stickers were printed through Sticker Mule, which we’ve used for years, and our collection of Reclaim Open t-shirts were designed and printed through Spreadshop on shop.reclaimhosting.com.
Back to the list of highlights– I loved the casual nature of the Unconference. The slower pace on day 1 felt like a great way to kick off the event.
Hanging in downtown Fredericksburg again and eating all the Benny’s pizza I could manage.
The power of A.I. Levine
And last, but certainly not least, I really loved witnessing other Reclaimers run the show. This was a true team effort and I’m so glad to have been a part of it.
“Get yourself a little studietto where no one will bother you at all.”
—Cennino Cennini, Book of Art, c. 1400s
A delightful bit from Tom Stammers’ review of David Hall’s The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History:
it’s helpful to know that the term ‘studio’ derives from a verb as well as a noun. Studiolo denoted the scholar’s study or cabinet, but there was also studiare, linked to a certain kind of diligent or pleasurable work, which could take place anywhere.
Another interesting bit on the difference between a “studio” and a “workshop”:
The idea that the artist’s studio was somehow different from the artisan’s workshop took off in the 15th century. In Hall’s phrase, ‘the Renaissance concept of the studio involved a literal and symbolic turning away from the street.’ The most skilful and profitable craftsman of the Middle Ages was the goldsmith, whose reputation for honest dealing was predicated on the transparency of his working practices. Goldsmiths’ shops were open to the street, and to watching customers. By contrast, the 15th-century artist’s studio was premised on a measure of secrecy.
I like this tension between “studio” and “workshop.” I would like to think of my space as serving both functions, occupying a place somewhere in the middle — a place I go to be, by myself, but also a place where the people are free to visit me. (I love a good visit.)
But even before I built my current studio, I knew that a great deal of my work “could take place anywhere,” and indeed, a great deal of it takes place, as it did before, in the morning at the kitchen table.
I was in Amsterdam from Monday to Friday this week, for MozFest House and a WAO meetup. We ran a session entitled ‘Fostering Transparency and Building a Cooperative Economy’. I also lied about my personal details and preferences to get free iced coffee, hung out on a boat, and melted in the heat.
Our house went on the market while I was away, as things moved more quickly than I envisaged. This is a good thing, as we had five viewings booked in yesterday. I was out with my daughter, who was at a Future Lioness event and then represented East Northumberland in the discus at the area athletics championships. She had to run from that even to take part in the relay, and then pretty much kept on running to do the first leg!
I’m keeping this short as we’re about to go and view a house that would potentially be a backup plan to the one we really want. I published a single blog post this week, other than this one, which I called On the paucity of ‘raising awareness’.
Next week it’s back to work in my home office. I hope it’s not too hot, as the lack of sleep from late nights and being in a really hot room with no openable windows while in Amsterdam really took it out of me.
The post Weeknote 25/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.Most university students supporting themselves say it is negatively affecting their studies, survey finds
The cost of living crisis is forcing more university students to take on more hours in their part-time jobs, with most saying that supporting themselves is affecting their studies, according to a new study.
More than half of the 10,000 students surveyed by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) said they did paid work during term time, with most saying they were using their wages to support their studies.
Continue reading...
Productivity training has matured significantly over the past 15 years.
We began with an emphasis on efficiency. Then, we began to ask the question about how to use that efficiency to free up time in our day. Now we are realizing that using that extra time to do meaningful work is a skill in and of itself.
In short, third-wave productivity has nothing to do with artisanal to-do list apps.
A little while back, I had the honor of interviewing Cal Newport about his book, Deep Work. While there is a lot in our conversation that I’d love to get into, it will have to wait for another time. Today, I wanted to pull out one segment where Cal and I talked about the Three Waves of Productivity.
Side Note: I put together all my book notes from Deep Work and also combined those notes with all the key takeaways and highlights from my interview with Cal Newport. You can download the in-depth notes here.
This first wave focused heavily on systems, methodologies, and tools. It touted efficiency as the ultimate form of productivity, stating that you need to capture and organize all your tasks and projects and other areas of responsibility. To do this you need smarter lists and more powerful tools.
(Note that there are many ways to be efficient with your time and your tasks beyond a specific or complex methodology. I for one am a huge fan of the Ivy Lee method.)
This second wave built on the first. Saying that organizing your tasks is not the height of productivity. Rather, it’s about making room to do the real work. This second wave was more of a mindset shift than a skill.
In other words, it was the realization that when you are efficient with all the incoming stuff and your ideas and time, then you are able to create space in your day to do the important work. (Note that another way to create space in your day is to say ‘no’ to certain incoming things and create some margin for yourself.)
This intentionality of choosing to do meaningful work exposed a truth that to merely free up your time isn’t enough.
Once people had time available to do the “real work,” they often didn’t even know what it was — nor did they have the skills needed to take advantage of that time.
Doing the real work is, in itself, a craft that takes time and practice, and this is what the third wave is all about…
Wave three is about defining what to do in the time that you’re fighting to clear out and taking advantage of that “real work” time.
We have had to reengage with what it means to concentrate and do focused, meaningful work. We are now giving our attention to what it means to do deep work.
These three waves serve one another. You need all three to get the true benefits, and it’s not until you get to the third wave that you start to see all the benefits.
It is in the third wave where you start to produce more valuable work and you find your work more meaningful.
However, the challenge here is that many people do not have clarity about what it means to be productive and valuable. They cannot define what important, deep work is. As a result, that lack of clarity leads to unfocused busy work such as checking email, social media, news, etc.
In his book, Deep Work, Cal warns against using busyness as a proxy for productivity:
In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
Clarity about what matters also gives clarity about what does not. Clarity is vital if you want to do deep work on a regular basis over the long run.
Next, we’ll talk about the most common issues that will threaten your efficiency, intentionality, and deep work. We’ll also get into the most common pitfalls to productivity.
In the meantime, I’ve put together all my book notes from Deep Work and combined it with all the key takeaways and highlights from my interview with Cal Newport. You can download the in-depth notes here.
Margot Bergman’s studio. Photograph courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago.
Do cups have souls? If you look at Margot Bergman’s portfolio in our Summer issue, you might be tempted to say yes: the cups she has painted, from various vantage points and in bright colors, seem filled with life. Bergman, who was born in 1934, has been painting for nearly her whole life. She is best known for her series Other Reveries, which features collaborative portraits painted over artworks she has saved from flea markets and thrift stores. Each painting is layered with decisive, bold paint strokes, revealing a face latent with layers of emotions. They are at once beautiful, frightening, humorous, and welcoming. Who knew that cups could contain similarly human emotion? We talked about the joys of painting, the female form, and of course, what drew her to cups in the first place.
—Na Kim
INTERVIEWER
Much of your work revolves around faces, and especially female figures. When did start painting these?
MARGOT BERGMAN
In the fifties. The artist R. B. Kitaj was painting very flat paintings. I was attracted to his style. I began to paint like that. I still have some of those paintings in the basement of my home, left over from the fifties—a series of flat paintings of naked women. They were very flat, very unsexual, though the women were butt naked, with their backs turned to the viewer. At one point, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wanted some of my paintings for the hallway of a government building. They were these Kitaj-like paintings of women, all naked, their backs turned, with what look like bits of collage randomly placed in the paintings. There was a controversy, and the paintings made it in to the newspaper in Milwaukee, because some women’s group had demanded for them to be taken down.
INTERVIEWER
What happened?
BERGMAN
They were taken down. It was the fifties. I thought it was so funny. And kind of outrageous, but mostly I thought it was funny. Strange, funny, and uninformed.
INTERVIEWER
These women with their backs turned, were they all the same woman, or different women? Who were they?
BERGMAN
I have no idea. But they did not represent me. They were very planiform. There was no voluptuousness to them. There was no shading. They really revealed form. They had shapes, but no real substance. And they were looking out into a courtyard, and the coloring was a bit Impressionist. They were really not expressionistic in any way. I would say that I was influenced by Pierre Bonnard at this time—that was probably my first true love of an artist’s work.
Margot Bergman’s studio. Photograph courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago.
INTERVIEWER
What about Bonnard was particularly inspiring to you?
BERGMAN
I thought his work was beautiful. I thought it was intimate. Later in life, what I’ve come to know is that there was an intimacy to his work that I was not seeing in the work of other artists. And that’s probably what drew me to him.
INTERVIEWER
What led you to start painting the cups that are featured in our Summer issue?
BERGMAN
I had started another body of work that wasn’t working. I was disappointed in it. It had to do with bricks, both rigid urethane ones and children’s building blocks. They were three-dimensional, and I was trying to do paintings of the bricks so that the works on paper were geometric forms. I just could not make them work. So I tore one of them up. I tore up a piece of paper in my frustration, and then I just made a painting of a cup on one of the scraps. God knows. God knows why.
Perhaps now I can look at it and say that the original work had so much geometry, so many hard lines, that I needed a circle. But that really did not go through my mind. My process is very intuitive. I just found myself making a circular form, and the form that came out was a cup. Then the cups came in a rush—I’ve now done seventy of them. It was one after another, after another, after another, just pouring out of me.
INTERVIEWER
I wanted to talk about another important body of your work—your found collaborative paintings, which are portraits overpainted on paintings you often find in flea markets and thrift stores. There’s something so haunting about them. The faces really stare back at you. Do you ever think of real people when you’re painting them, or are they people who come from your mind?
BERGMAN
No, I do not think of them as real people. But when they come out, they frequently have names. There is something in my subconscious that finds a name. I don’t analyze it. Almost always, after a portrait is done, I know the figure’s name. It’s like the painting itself: it just is.
Margot Bergman’s studio. Photograph courtesy of Margot Bergman.
INTERVIEWER
What led you to begin painting over the works of others?
BERGMAN
Before I started making those paintings, I was embedded in the world of art. I was in the galleries. I had lived in New York. I walked the walk and did the talking, and I realized that I was uninspired by the things I was making and didn’t like what I was seeing on the walls either. These works had no heart for me. And when I would go to a flea market, it was all heart. There were these inexperienced artists who were giving everything to make something that they truly cared about. I was drawn to that, so I would bring their work back to the studio. At first, I felt it was a no-no to paint on them, so I didn’t, but I kept collecting them. And then, one day, I just saw a face in one of them, and I painted it on top. That was very satisfying. For about ten years, I worked on that body of work. I had to go out and hunt down these kinds of paintings, which is not an easy thing to do. And nobody wanted the paintings I did with them. I tried in Chicago to have them be seen. Until John Corbett came along, many years later, nobody would show them. I had pulled myself away from whatever I thought was the art world, and I was making strictly for myself. I love them. I love doing it.
INTERVIEWER
You talked a little bit about the difficulties of being an artist. What would you say were some major roadblocks for you?
BERGMAN
It’s trite to say it, because everybody knows it. But let’s start with being a woman. I had children. I was married. I lived in the suburbs of Chicago in the fifties and I had a husband who could support me. I was attractive. I had no network because I didn’t finish my degree at the Art Institute—I got married when I was twenty-one, and my husband was in service and I followed him. How many things worked against me there? I was not part of anything, and I was different, then. But it didn’t stop me from painting, ever, ever, ever, ever. I worked like hell. I was always working. I think we’re working even when we’re not working. I think when we walk in our space and we sweep the floor, we are working. It is something that’s inexplicable.
INTERVIEWER
What part of the painting process would you say is your favorite, if you have one?
BERGMAN
I like pencils. I like paint. I love paint. I love paint. I love mark-making. I love the end, when one can see something that one could say is complete.
INTERVIEWER
How do you know when a painting is done?
BERGMAN
Sometimes I’ve been right and sometimes I’ve been wrong. I’ve often thought, Can I make it better if I keep going? It’s a well-known fact that artists can leave their studio or workspace, think they have completed a painting and are satisfied with it, and come back the next day and say, “Oh my gosh, that’s not nearly what I thought it was.” So, how do we know? We don’t always.
INTERVIEWER
Is painting intuitive to you? Do you find it difficult?
BERGMAN
I don’t take myself too seriously until I need to be serious. I like playing. I don’t mean that I am not working seriously. I am looking hard, but I’m also having a very good time. Painting is a very joyful process for me. And even though it can have dark undertones, for me, painting is the unearthing of whatever is there for me to find. That’s just intuitive.
INTERVIEWER
Where do you think this curiosity and urge to create comes from?
BERGMAN
When someone comes to me and says, “I just traveled to India, and I did this, and I did that,” I think to myself, I just traveled on my own adventure. I love adventure, and I equate what’s happening to me on the canvas with a journey. My journey has no map.
Na Kim is the art director of the Review.
I’m composing this from Newcastle Airport on Monday morning. It’s been a busy weekend, so let’s get that out of the way first.
Saturday morning, I went for a run and then spent most of the day with my wife and daughter at a football tournament for the latter’s new team. They expected to win it, and almost did, had it not been for a penalty given against them during extra time in the final. Back home, shower and change. Out to Wagamama, a family favourite, before our son’s football presentation evening at St James Park, home of Newcastle United. He won Player of the Season, which was not at all expected, although he is awesome (even if I do say so myself).
We were tired enough after the events of Saturday, but on Sunday we had to get the house ready for the estate agent’s photographer, who is coming today (Monday). As anyone who has sold a house in the age of Rightmove will know, the photos are effectively what sell it. So it was a bit of a mission to get everything ready. I was dripping with sweat after gardening, cleaning, painting, etc. So much so that I was thankful for the torrential rain that started in the evening.
It was Fathers Day in the UK yesterday, so we went over to my parents. I’d taken my dad and two kids to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse on Friday evening (amazing!) but also bought him a book I’d heard being recommended on a podcast. When I left the family this morning, with my son now finished his GCSE exams, my daughter still recovering from the tournament (she picked up a slight injury), and my wife preparing for a potentially tricky week of user research interviews at work, everyone looked knackered.
I almost can’t remember what I did before this last weekend. Laura’s been away, so it’s been a weird week at work. I published a couple of blog posts in different places:
Other than that, the majority of my work seemed to revolve around community platforms and setting up user research. For example:
I realised this week need to write a post about the difference between social networks, chat apps, and forums. People tend to conflate them, which is unhelpful, as they serve different purposes.
There’s plenty of other things I did this week, including deciding not to respond to an RfP after attending the Q&A, preparing for an interview for some other potential work, and just generally getting ready for my upcoming trip.
This coming week, I’ll be in Amsterdam to meet up with my WAO colleagues and for us to run a session at MozFest House. I’m back on Thursday afternoon and will almost immediately take my daughter to her second trial for Sunderland’s academy. She’s also going to the Newcastle trials, but being a Sunderland fan, and knowing it’s a better setup, I’m rooting for her switching from one to the other.
Photo of new temperature and humidity sensor in my home office. It ended up going up to 28.8 C so I bought an evaporative cooler, which increased the humidity but meant I could work in there! The awesome TRYING patch is bright orange in real life and came via Dan Sinker.
The post Weeknote 24/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
Lasting labor victories depend on coordinating diverse strategies and building the relationships to sustain them.
The ‘photo’ above was generated using a new tool from Secta Labs. Yes, I paid money to feed in 25 real photos and get back 300+ images that it generated. Some looked like my weird American cousin, as in they kind of looked like me, but not really. There were 15 I was happy enough with, so I asked friends and family which ones they liked and then… ended up using a different one! 😂
To be honest, I’m not sure why I’m using scare quotes for ‘photo’ given that most people use their smartphones to take photographs these days, and those have ton of AI processing going on. As far as I’m concerned, the image above represents how I think I look better than any photos that have been taken of me recently.
(Pro tip: you can use DALL-E to generate more of the area around your head if you get something that’s too closely-cropped on one side, as I did.)
Anyway, enough of the narcissism! Back to the introspection.
This week has been in which a lot of things have happened. Some of them have been work-related, so let’s get those out of the way first. I’ve been:
Laura remembered on Thursday lunchtime that she’s not working next week and had booked it off in our calendar towards the beginning of the year. She doesn’t work Fridays, so it was a slightly abrupt “see you in Amsterdam!” 😅
I mentioned last week that my daughter is going to seemingly a million football trials in the month of June. We found out this week that she got into what is the best team in the north east of England for her age group, which she’s delighted about. She also went to an England development pathway event and got a callback, and to a mixed team trial.
About the latter: anyone who’s been a teacher or coach can often tell what’s about to happen next in certain situations. The decision is only whether or not to intervene. And so it was on a unseasonably cool evening that my wife and I, both former teachers, watched someone in charge of 30+ twelve year-olds. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that, despite them offering our daughter a place in their best team, she won’t be going back. I don’t have a lot of time for poor organisational skills.
My son is continuing with his GCSE exams, and will enter his final week of them next week. I think he’s doing alright, but I am a bit concerned about his on again – off again relationship with revision. You can lead 16 year-olds to the waters of study, but you can’t make them drink (as it were).
Just to add more things into the mix, we’re doing a second viewing of a house next week and taking the kids along. Our house isn’t on the market yet, as we said we’d wait until the GCSE exams to be finished.
We’re also thinking of leasing a car to replace our 10 year-old Volvo V60, which has served us really well and I really like. The rear passenger side suspension snapped this week and, although we got it fixed quickly, it just reminded us that we’re in the realms of Serious Things Going Wrong. I took our daughter for a test drive of a Volvo XC40 today, but I’m leaning towards the lovely-looking Cupra Formentor.
Exercise-wise, I’m back to running properly after my ankle injury. I also went swimming for the first time in ages with my son, as he’s doing a lifeguard course next month and needs to get his water fitness back. Both of us used to swim competitively, but that doesn’t mean much as you lose anaerobic stamina super-quickly. Anyway, it was fine, we’ve both got new prescription goggles, and the pool at the new leisure centre is great.
I took my daughter to the gym, ran on the treadmill, did weights, my first 10k outside for a while, and generally started pushing myself a bit more. Weirdly, the thing I found hardest this week was a 20-minute Pilates for Runners routine I did via YouTube. Oh. My. Days.
Next week, as I mentioned, Laura’s away and so I’ve got to prepare for our meetup and MozFest House session in Amsterdam. I’ve also got a list of small things I need to do, writing I need to start / get finished, and things to tidy up. My daughter’s got more trials, my son’s got his last week of exams, so I need to find something that’s acceptable to everyone as a way of celebrating the latter being over.
Busy times, but not overwhelming. I get bored easily, so it’s it’s all good, I guess 🤘
The post Weeknote 23/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.Having worked closely with dozens of people’s transformative journeys, I’ve come to recognize a handful of mindset shifts that make an incredible impact.
Those who’ve worked to shift in these ways have remarkable transformations.
I’m going to share them here with you in hopes that they might inspire your own transformation. If you take these on fully, they could be life-changing. This isn’t all there is, but these are a huge, huge foundation.
How do you work with these? I would love to work with you as a coach, because it’s often impossible to do this work without support. We just can’t see what we can’t see. That said, here are some keys to working with these mindset shifts.
First, notice when you have the opposite mindset. Notice when you’re stuck in the old mindset, as often as possible. Notice the impact of the old mindset — what effect is it having on you, on other, on your life? Have grace for yourself, and love, when you notice. Breathe.
Second, practice the new mindset. What if the new mindset were absolutely true? Empower it. Be it.
Third, when you get trapped in the old mindset — you’ll revert to it often — get support. From a coach, from a therapist, from a meditation teacher, from someone outside of yourself. Someone who can help you see it, help you bring love to it, help you practice outside of it.
And then keep practicing! This takes a lot of practice, a lot of messing up the practice, a lot of getting yourself back into it. It’s all a part of the practice. It’s not easy work, but I promise, it’s transformative.
The post 6 Powerful Mindset Shifts appeared first on zen habits.
If you’ve been around here at all, it’s no surprise to you that I am excited about Notion’s newest update to the button feature. As soon as it came out, I was already trying to figure out how to create Notion buttons to help automate my workflow and the workflow of my teammates.
Previously, Notion’s button feature was, well, pretty lame. I didn’t even bother using them. They weren’t worth the effort. But now with their latest update, you can add new tasks to your task database, change properties on different pages, create an actually helpful quick capture feature and more with just the click of a button.
At first glance, the configuration for the new buttons can be a bit confusing and daunting. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to create Notion buttons for everything.
To create a button in Notion, just type /button and hit enter. You will see these options:
Start by giving the button a name and an icon. Then you have to decide what you actually want the button to do. Here’s a brief description of all the options:
Insert blocks: You can create a block (full of whatever you want) and have it be added to the page when you click it. All the formatting options are available in this block, i.e. toggles, headings, lists, etc.
Add page to: You can choose a database and add a new page to it. So you could hit the button and have a page added to your Task List Database.
Edit pages in: This allows you to edit properties in pages that already exist. So you can change the assignee or status on a specific page.
Show confirmation: This will add a confirmation step when you hit the button like “you sure you want to do this?”
Open page: Pretty self explanatory. You push this button and it opens any page you want.
The real gold about these new buttons? You can add multiple steps to each button. You can change the order of the steps. You can even duplicate different steps.
For example, you can create a Notion page, edit the page you just created, have a confirmation page, and have the newly created page open in a side-peek. Or you can add 20 tasks to your task list at once. Legitness.
Let’s look at some specific use cases.
I wrote about using buttons for quick capture a few weeks ago. One of my complaints about Notion has been its lack of quick capture options. If I ever want to just jot something down, it takes a few steps to actually get where I want to go. Buttons speed up this process.
I created a quick capture button on my personal dashboard (along with a few others).
With this button, I can easily add an idea or note to my personal Note’s Database. Here’s how I configured it:
I chose Add a page and selected my notes database. Then I added a step to open the newly created page in a side-peek so I can add my note or idea right then and there.
When I first found out about this new feature, I was most excited to figure out how to quickly add tasks. Once I figured it out, I added the button in a few different places, then created one for everyone on our team. Cause you know, why not.
For this button I selected Add a page and chose our master task database. But what help would that be if it’s not assigned to anyone? You can edit properties and assign it to a specific person (in this case, me) and change the status. Or whatever property you want to change.
I also added a step to open the task in a side-peek so I can add all the relevant information quickly.
I also created a synced block with four more buttons. A button adding a task for each member of our team and dropped the synced block into our meeting notes template. So every time we have a meeting and a task comes up, we can quickly assign it to someone.
Notion has a lot of things going for it. One of those things is templates. They have literally saved me hours of work. We use them in our editorial calendar, meeting notes, projects, and many other places.
But there was always a frustrating component. It was a bit of a headache to add any default tasks to any database template. This was a bummer for us. We have a lot of projects that we do multiple iterations of (like Focus Academy, Digital Planner, or Plan Your Year), and we already know some of the tasks required.
We had to either add them manually each time or create a to-do list of basic tasks and drag them into the task database once the project was created.
But not anymore. Muhahaha (maniacal laugh).
For our most common projects, we created a button in the project template so we can add a bunch of tasks (and update their properties) with the push of a button.
One of our recurring projects is Focus Academy. We also know most of the tasks required to pull it off, so we added them to a button in our Focus Academy project template.
Isaac (the Director of Focus Academy) and I added the main and already known tasks to the button. Oh, and you can create tasks using the parent-task and sub-task feature 😎
So now when we start working on Academy, we already know most of the tasks that need to be done to knock it out of the park.
Our articles and newsletter go through a lot of hands before they get published. Once an article has been finished, it gets passed to our editor. Once an email is ready to go out, it gets passed to Marcela to schedule it.
So why not automate this process?
I added a button on our Newsletter template that automatically changes the assignee to Marcela and changes the status to Review. All I had to do was choose Edit a page and choose This page. The This page setting is dynamic, so it changes whatever page the button is on.
Once I hit this button, it notifies Marcela. I also then leave a comment letting her know it’s ready to be scheduled. I do wish buttons could automatically post comments, because that would be amazing.
I created a similar button for our article template. When everything is done, we just smash the button and it gets assigned to our editor-extraordinaire Jeff, and changes the status to Review.
There are a lot of little things you can do with buttons. You can create a button to simply open another page. I do this for my Learning Dashboard. I click the button from my personal dashboard and it opens my Learning Dashboard. There are other ways to do this, but buttons are more fun.
You can add confirmation steps to your buttons. Although not always necessary, it’s helpful when you’re wanting to do something major.
I showed you how to add a page to a task database already, but you can add a page to any database. You could create a button called Bug Report that would add an entry to a software bug report database. The possibilities are endless.
The goal of buttons is to automate your workflow, and so far it’s doing just that for me.
Notion just announced some new Project Management features. Their new project home base template includes some updated features such as an improved timeline view, Sprint databases, and Wikis.
They are also coming out with more automations. It seems that this new button feature is just the beginning. The new automation update is rumored to be able to do if/then statements, which would take workflow automations to a whole other level. Pretty exciting!
Although the new automations update is still TBD, the new button feature is a huge step towards automated workflows. Once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to create Notion buttons. There are countless ways to use them to streamline your workflow.
Your imagination is the limit. Well there are a few limitations. But you get my point.
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You’ve probably heard that everyone is “paid what they’re worth.” Don’t buy it.
According to this mythology, workers at the bottom are “unskilled” and don’t deserve more than what they currently earn.
Minimum wage workers at McDonald’s are paid what they are worth in the so-called “free market.” If they were worth more, they’d earn more.
By the same logic, the CEO of McDonald’s is worth his multi-million dollar compensation package.
The notion that people are paid what they’re “worth” is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it’s their own fault that they don’t earn more. That they simply lack the skills they need to be paid more.
But there’s no such thing as unskilled workers. Only underpaid workers. Their productivity — that is the value of what they produce — has been growing for decades. The problem is that their wages haven’t kept pace with their productivity.
The “paid what you’re worth” mythology also lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing can be done to change what people are paid. It’s simply the way the market works.
Meanwhile, according to this same view, CEOs who rake in tens of millions and Wall Street traders who rake in hundreds of millions, are simply being paid what they’re “worth” because that’s what the market has dictated.
Rubbish. The “paid what you’re worth” fairytale ignores power and disregards policies that have made inequality skyrocket. Like the demise of antitrust enforcement, which has given big corporations the power to set prices, make record profits, and reward their CEOs unprecedented compensation. This fairytale ignores the attacks on labor unions that have reduced union membership from over a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to just 6 percent today. All of this resulting in a massive shift in power and wealth from workers to owners.
Those at the top justify their staggering wealth, and they’re “worth,” three ways:
The first is trickle-down economics. They claim that their wealth trickles down to everyone else as they invest it and create jobs. Just wait for it… But as we know, wealth at the top has soared for decades and nothing has trickled down.
The second is the “free market.” They talk about market forces beyond their control. But remember, markets are created by rules. These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. The political power of the wealthy has let them change the rules for their own benefit — busting unions, monopolizing industries, and reaping big tax cuts.
The third is the idea that they’re superior human beings. Sure, they may be talented but this doesn’t justify the staggering amount of wealth they are now taking home. Nor does it justify the amount of wealth they will pass down to heirs. The biggest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history will occur over the next 25 years as the richest 1.5% of Americans hand down roughly some $36 trillion dollars to their children and grandchildren. That doesn’t make those heirs superior. It makes them lucky.
The reality is there’s no justification for today’s extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top. Or for how little people are paid at the bottom.
The “paid what you’re worth” myth has proven to be a cruelly effective way to put the blame on workers for not getting ahead — while giving the rich and powerful cover to rig the game for their own benefit.
It is distorting our politics, rigging our markets, and granting unprecedented power to a handful of people while millions of Americans struggle to get by.
Don’t fall for it.
This week has been half-term for the kids. Hannah took the week off as it contained a Bank Holiday and she doesn’t work Fridays; so she got 10 days off in a row by only taking three holiday days.
I’m not sure why I bothered even trying to work, to be honest, especially as I took Monday and Friday off and attended a funeral for an elderly neighbour on Wednesday. All of this explains why I managed a total of 12.5 hours of work this week…
There was a lot of admin (invoicing, paying corporation tax, claiming back expenses, etc.) this week as we crossed the end of May / start of June boundary. I did get to do a bit of work on client projects, though, including launching the free How to set up a worker co-op email course over at workers.coop.
I also did a bit with Laura for Participate relating to their new platform, with John for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance relating to testing their new community platform, and with Ivan on some Bonfire UX stuff. I’ve also been working on transcripts for Season 6 of The Tao of WAO podcast, the first episode of which has just been released.
We’re into football trials month. Except, because it’s junior football, you have to call them ‘open sessions’. Our daughter is going to approximately a million of them, whereas our son switched basketball teams last week but is staying put for his football team. What with it being the middle of GCSE exams, I feel like parenting is my full-time job at the moment and I just work around it.
Next week is back to a bit of normality. Except, I suppose, my son is now on study leave so I’ll have to make sure he’s got some sort of routine…
Photo of Public Enemy #1: a Common Horse Chestnut tree near our house which seems to have a pollen machine-gun.
The post Weeknote 22/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.
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