Category: Writing

There are times when we get so engrossed in something that all sense of time disappears. Flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it.  The humidity, the hunger, none of them matter – just the task at hand. And a sense of satisfaction, joy at the end of it.

It was wonderful today to be in that zone. Learning how to use Notion, while building a structure of all the radio station requirements that I see at varying levels of grain, sometimes getting into the hairy details that most of my fellow volunteers won’t have a clue how to even think about but the kind of stuff that gets me all excited 🙂

I have had – and will continue to have – people scoff at the effort I put into these things. Why bother, they ask, why do you do the work?

I like how Seth Godin calls it “The way we make things better is by caring enough about how we serve to imagine the story that they need to hear.” In the meanwhile, I’m also building skills that I don’t often get to stretch and develop at work. I think it’s worth the effort.

Second-hand bookstores are a goldmine. Besides suiting my thrifty nature, they offer a haven for my meandering reading tastes. Libraries do that too, of course, and for the last decade or so, libraries have been the mainstay of supply for my physical medium reading urges.

Today, finally, I managed to make my <10th trip to our local second-hand bookstore. The store has moved from the last time I visited them over 3 years ago – business is clearly booming. I overheard the owner tell another customer they’ve opened up another store in a nearby suburb too, and that too is getting busier. The smell of books, piled up to the ceiling, in shelves that groaned under the weight of the books yet stood tall, fellow readers who were happy to chat – the half hour flew by so quickly that I was almost late for my next appointment.

And of course, I found a few books that I want on my bookshelf- Richard Feynman’s lectures, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I’ve borrowed and read these books multiple times over the last few years, and I have been encouraging the kids to read them too, now available on Dad’s bookshelf 🙂

* The title was stolen: it was the name of an used bookstore that I would frequent on my commute when that was the thing to do!

I reflected at a team meeting on the dramatic change that 4 weeks of Omicron tearing through the country has had on the outlook for many of us. Everyone was looking forward to the Christmas break, looking forward to spending time with loved ones locally or within the country or traveling overseas.We were all secretly anticipating that 2022 would bring an end to the madness of the last two years, and we could start working on those plans we made.

In the span of days, despite the cajoling by optimistic politicians to the populace to take ‘personal responsibility’ and go spend to revive the economy, anxiety levels have reached stratospheric levels. People (leaders and plebs alike) have fallen ill, have family who’ve fallen ill, have had to isolate because they were close contacts of friends. Others are worried about kids going to school unvaccinated when number of active yet untested cases are sky-high, getting infected, bringing it home to immunocompromised family. Still others having travelled overseas are hoping to high heavens that the borders don’t close and they get stranded.

It is indeed a clusterfuck, and it is what it is.

My plea was to just be mindful that we are all in this together (we always were), that people are scared and anxious, to accept that we don’t have to accomplish all those goals we wrote down, to be kind to each other and to ourselves, and take each day as it comes. Corporate bigwigs, themselves people, seem to have forgotten that illness can (and will) strike – if not them, their loved ones, and the brutal, senseless drive towards ‘goals’ will be meaningless. It is up to every one of us to take care of ourselves and each other.

pic: the NSW Premier Dominic Perottet as the #Domicron virus after his Let It Rip approach to CoVID. Elections are around the corner.

The drone finally arrived today – along with a lesson in customer experience journey. The unboxing was done to great fanfare. I was impressed with the extent of research the young fellow had done on the spectacularly engineered piece of equipment.

It should really have been a fun evening of flying the drone. It didn’t, and it had nothing to do with the equipment, and everything to do with behaviour, both his and mine.

A long conversation is necessary, after I’ve had a chance to collect my own thoughts and reflect on my own response to his outbursts.

It’s challenging to be a parent, to know when to draw the line between wit and disrespect without destroying self-esteem, confidence, and openness.  We learn every day.

Booster-ed!  Unlike the first appointment, this one was all done in about 20 minutes at most, including the 15 minute observation wait. The machinery seemed to be in better working condition despite a distinct lack of nursing presence at the local hospital.

The attending nurse had a wonderful sense of humor too, which made the waiting go by pretty quickly. One particular older gentleman, when asked how he was feeling, replied “Effervescent”.  “I don’t even know how to spell it, let alone know what it means, so you should be good to go”, she said to laughter from the whole room.  A cheerful, fun disposition, despite the gravity of the hospital waiting room, made the entire experience for everyone there a bearable one (or at least that’s how I saw it).

I was also mindful today of how, and who I had conversations with. I always learn much from the people I deliberately have in my inner circle, and the time I get from them all is precious. It was no different today, the first day back at work, along with many a confidential conversation with several people.

The confidence and trust I have earned from those around me is very precious to me, and reminds me of my parents warning to me at age 9 or 10 “If wealth is lost, little is lost. If health is lost, something is lost. If trust is lost, everything is lost”. It also reminded me that I health has not gotten the importance it deserves by that epithet too. The heat and humidity drove us all to the beach for a long walk that both calmed and reinvigorated me, and let me put together an Ikea shelf in my daughter’s room.

And just like that, the Christmas break comes to an end. About 20 days of rest and recovery from what was a year of nightmares, and reflections on some wonderful memories too. It has been cathartic to be able to sleep in, wake rested, go to bed late, work on things that matter deeply to me, to help with the community that I live in, and to generally be away from much of the humdrum of “work” demands.

Tomorrow begins the work routine, checkered this time with a renewed covid strain floating around. Some folks will be back tomorrow, and many others on the Monday following. Some won’t be back – a sign of the times with redundancies, resignations, and contract expiries.  I will miss them a lot too.

I’m getting my booster shot tomorrow, after the ATAGI recommended a reduction of interval between the second dose and the booster to 3 months. My 11-year old will also get his first shot in the next week or so, relieving somewhat the anxiety we have had.

I discovered through a painful lesson today that I have a complicated reading setup.

Feedbro is wonderful because I have discovered the joy, constraints, and workflow of reading on one device. It forces me to time box the reading, and act on things I can while discarding everything else.

I have three machines (not including my work machine!) that I have suddenly accumulated in the last three months. A Macbook Pro that I resurrected over the holidays, a very basic Windows PC that I use for specific applications that don’t run on Mac, and an emotional purchase of a Windows Surface tablet that I thought I’d use exclusively for reading (in bed!)

I’ve been using Microsoft’s Edge browser on the Surface and on the PC. I had signed in using my MS account which means the extensions are synchronised on both machines. I don’t use Feedbro on the PC, so I removed the extension without thinking too much about it, and continued to read my feeds on the Surface.

About 15 minutes or so later, Feedbro disappeared on the Surface as I was reading. I realised in a few moments what happened. Edge helpfully removed the extension on all browsers I was signed in to. Feedbro only stores the feeds locally on the machine I was reading, and when the extension is removed, all feeds went with it (I must validate that extensions delete all data).

In any case, it took me a while to recreate the feed list. Two hours that could have been invested in something else, but I won’t do that mistake ever again 🙂

Oh, it was also MT’s wedding today that I decided not to attend, thanks to my recurring cough. I missed meeting many old friends too.

I deeply appreciate the ideas that Rob Walker of “The Art of Noticing” shares in this weekly newsletter.  To be able to do meaningful work, I have found myself taking the time to notice or observe people, the circumstances, the problems, etc a little more mindfully than I have been used to.

Edition 82 featured user-research expert Ximena Vengoechea, author of “Listen Like You Mean It”.  There’s one particular idea that she suggests tuning into that has been on my mind: “Know your default listening mode”.

Are you a natural problem-solver, always scanning for the problem (and solution) in a conversation? Do you tend to be an identifier, prone to offering your version of a situation unprompted (Me too! That’s just like my experience with…). Maybe you are more the defuser, ready to crack a joke and lighten the mood whenever things get heavy.

No mode is better than the rest, but it’s useful to know your own mode so that you can adapt it as needed, since sometimes our instinct about how to listen is wrong.

There are particular people in my life that I need to adapt my listening style to. They have grown/ changed, and I seem to not have changed how I listen to them.  By default, with them I am a natural problem-solver, even when they don’t need my help. It’s unhelpful, to both of us.

I’m grateful that I have the the opportunity to set that right. It will take effort and pain, but what good things don’t take effort?

It’s been a few weeks since I started volunteering at the local volunteer-run radio station.  I’ve thought of it as an opportunity to contribute to the local community, while also learning some skills I am interested in.

In the last two weeks or so, I found some time to give the website a facelift, or at least a little foundation makeup 🙂 I learnt how Elementor works (and how it’s been used to hack together the site), the various plug-ins that slow down work by an order of magnitude (I literally spent over a day waiting for the site to load!) and how to disable them while I work. Integrating a payment method to reduce payment friction for memberships, reviewing the 5-year strategy and cash flows, creating website features that didn’t exist weeks ago – a wide range of skills being reused or learnt along the way. The micro-skills I’m learning are improving the speed (not necessarily the quality) with which I’m getting things done.

Because most people I’m working alongside seem to have either not the skills required or the willingness to do what’s required, I get the opportunity to speak up, roll up my sleeves, and do the work. Someone commented that I might be doing all the work (I don’t really care because there are no ‘accountability goals’).  If I’m having fun and learning while I’m doing this, rather than wasting time on things that are either meaningless or non-contributing, I don’t think of it as work.