I’ve already made a formal announcement on my portfolio site, but I wanted to share it here as well. I’m speaking on a panel about Promotion through Digital and Traditional Media at the first annual “Pride in Business” Business Forum and Trade Show on June 21st.
There are more details about the panel on my portfolio blog, but if you’re in or around downtown Toronto on the 21st, I’d love to see you there and hang out. You can get free tickets for the panel on Eventbrite.
There aren’t many people who frequent this site, but if you’re one of them, you may have noticed some changes around here:
All this amounts to a bit of spit and polish. This site looks more active than it’s been in some time, and it’s got a new, modern look and feel to it that I really dig.
One of the client projects I’m working on right now is, among other things, focused on establishing transparency. The client is in a field known for disreputable people, and they want it to be clear from their branding and their website that they’re different. That you can trust them. That’s a great goal to have, and it’s the essence of proper branding. But it’s hard to measure.
I’ve been working through what that means for a while now. If it’s not a measurable goal, how do you track it?
I was chatting with a colleague about content strategy recently, and somebody said that it’s not about what we say — it’s what we do.
Transparency, like so many other things online, is hard to demonstrate without action. Our actions are the determiner of our values.
One of my goals this year is to be more transparent about what I’m working on and what I’m doing. To begin with, I’ll update my Now page more. I haven’t updated it in a year. That’s next on my todo list today.
But it also means sharing more of what I learn with my colleagues, and becoming a more active part of the community. For me, it means a return to more regular blogging.
If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that social media isn’t working. It’s an empty vacuum. If we want to contribute — if we want to be visible — we need to own the space we’re publishing in. We need to learn together.
The most transparent, honest thing we could admit to is this: none of us know anything. But we’re always learning. As Samuel L. Jackson says, “I’m trying, Ringo. I’m trying real hard.”And that’s all any of us can do.
I recently returned from two weeks away, in a different continent, with Airplane Mode on the majority of the time. When I opened my inbox yesterday, I felt slight horror — and fascination.
I couldn’t believe the number of emails I had from brands and organizations. Year-end retrospectives, dozens of “editor’s pick” articles to read, LinkedIn emails I never asked for, and well over a dozen “weekly article” emails that I never read to begin with.
I unsubscribed from almost all of it.
Newsletters are in vogue right now. I’ve told organizations to write them for over a year. I’m part of this problem. But before we send more of them, let’s ask if we deserve the attention we get from being in somebody’s most private and important digital space.
We should all unsubscribe.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about quantity and quality. “Quality is better than quantity,” they always say. But is that true in practice?
Are the perfectionists really doing better work than the people who launch things frequently?
Michael Jackson wrote hundreds of songs — some counts go over 500 — before selecting the handful that appeared on Thriller. Stephen King has written dozens of books, but we only ignore his lesser material in favour of his classics. It took Edison over 1,000 attempts to invent the lightbulb.
At some point, experience breeds perfectionism.
Yesterday, I didn’t get my newsletter out in time. I’m a day late writing than this. I was waiting for the perfect idea, and had been stumped for days. But if I had a habit of writing more frequently, the ideas would have flowed more freely, and I would have made my own self-imposed deadline.
Would it have been perfect? No.
But that’s okay.
Nothing is.
From Marco Arment’s blog, writing about the 15” 2012 – 2015 MacBook Pros:
It was the debut of high-DPI Macs, starting down the long road (which we still haven’t finished) to an all-Retina lineup. And with all-SSD storage, quad-core i7 processors, and a healthy amount of RAM all standard, every configuration was fast, capable, and pleasant to use. At its introduction, it was criticized only for ditching the optical drive and Ethernet port, but these were defensible, well-timed removals: neither could’ve even come close to physically fitting in the new design, very few MacBook Pro users were still using either on a regular basis, and almost none of us needed to buy external optical drives or Ethernet adapters to fit the new laptop into our lives. In exchange for those removals, we got substantial reductions in thickness and weight, and a huge new battery. There were no other downsides. Everything else about this machine was an upgrade: thinner, lighter, faster, better battery life, quieter fans, better speakers, better microphones, a second Thunderbolt port, and a convenient new HDMI port.
Two thoughts.
First, this is a brilliant essay, and a year in to using my 13” MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, I almost entirely agree. The Touch Bar is a bad idea, poorly implemented. I’m almost certain it won’t make it to the desktop line.
The new keyboard feels wonderful to me, but I completely understand why many people say it’s a bad keyboard. It’s too opinionated. I’d be happier if it had a bit more travel, too. I miss all the ports. Basically, I want the old machine with Thunderbolt 3 (USB‑C) ports where the Thunderbolt 2 ones were before. That was a great port arrangement and layout.
I do, however, strongly disagree with him about the trackpad. Using the old models makes my fingers feel cramped. That was a good move, in retrospect.
Finally, my second thought: Marco’s post felt like something Stephen Hackett would write.
I’ve been sitting on this story for a while. Google partnered with Toronto in an effort to build a futuristic city.
I haven’t posted anything about it because there’s been no further stories about it. I was hoping Google’s intentions would get clearer, but this is what I’m left with (from the Inc. article linked above):
While the company scouted locations for the project last year, Doctoroff wrote that he envisioned the city of the future offering free Wi-Fi throughout, relying on sustainable energy, having automated trash systems, and being outfitted with self-driving cars in mind. These innovations, he said, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds and save the average resident an hour each day, thanks largely to transportation improvements.
And:
The project will take place in an area southeast of downtown Toronto. Doctoroff says the the hope is to over time extend it across the city’s eastern waterfront.
The thing is, I live in downtown Toronto. Most of the waterfront was re-finished over the past couple years. It looks really nice now. There are fewer lanes for cars, more bike lanes, and a lot of green space. Apart from the lack of wifi, most of this is already done. And I don’t think installing wifi across downtown Toronto requires Google’s involvement.
I also don’t necessarily want a company with Google’s privacy stances managing the technological infrastructure of my neighbourhood.
I was hoping deeper articles would clarify what Google and Toronto’s long-term plans are. But in lieu of that, I’m left to consider this based only on my existing knowledge of the city. But based on what I know, I don’t think there’s any real benefit to a partnership of this nature.
Casey Johnston has an article at The Outline about how bad the MacBook Pro keyboard is, which is an issue that has plagued many people I know — including myself.
In March of this year, a scant five months after I bought my 2016 13” MacBook Pro With Touch Bar (Apple could stand to shorten the name too), my space bar got stuck.
At first, I thought it was me. In my ten+ years of owning Apple equipment, I couldn’t accept that the fault was the laptop. I actively thought I was hitting the key wrong. This was before there was a ton of hubbub about these keyboards, or at least before I was aware of the hubbub.
About a week after I first noticed the issue, it was to the point where the space bar never worked. No matter how I hit it. So I brought it to an Apple Store tout suite. First, they told me I was hitting it wrong.
I’m not joking. The Apple Store Genius told me I was typing wrong.
Then, after trying it himself, he agreed this was a real problem. He set out to fix the issue, and told me they were going to replace the space bar on my keyboard.
He came out about an hour later and told me the problem was solved, and that they had removed and replaced the space bar. There was a piece of dust, I was told, and they had removed it. This “fixed” my issue, he claimed.
But the keyboard still didn’t work.
I tested it before I left the store, and promptly returned the laptop to the Genius’ hands. First, he assured me (again) that I was typing wrong. Then, he tried it, and agreed there was still a problem.
Keep in mind, this was the same Genius who helped me before.
He took my laptop away and told me they’d “let me know” when they identified the issue. I was told they’d keep my computer overnight to run some diagnostics and take a look at it, since they had “never encountered” this issue before.
Twenty-four hours later, they called me mid-afternoon to ask if I had a recent backup of my hard drive. They took my space bar off, but they couldn’t get the space bar back on because they key had snapped. So they needed to replace the entire bottom case on my laptop, and that part order and replacement would take three days or less. They were going to rush it because they knew my business relied on my laptop. It should go fine, they said, but they wanted to make sure I had a backup in case something happened.
Two days and twenty-three hours later, they called me with good news and bad news. The good news was that my part had arrived. The bad news was that the keyboard was somehow associated with the Touch Bar, and the connection there had gone faulty, which meant they had to replace the Touch Bar. They said that all of my keys were mis-aligned, because the keyboard wasn’t properly set in the factory to begin with, and that was when the problem started. I was lucky to have made it five months into my usage.
But Touch ID is connected to the Touch Bar, so they had to replace that too. And Touch ID is connected to the logic board, so that was getting replaced. And the hard drive and the RAM were both soldered to the logic board, so…
Well, you get the picture.
Then, instead of replacing the laptop, which would have made more sense at that point, they replaced the logic board, SSD, RAM, Touch Bar with Touch ID, and external casing on my MacBook Pro. I got it back eight days after I handed it to the Genius Bar.
Just the other day, I realized that my warranty was coming up to a close on this MacBook Pro. I’m approaching my first full year of ownership. So I spent $375 (Canadian), including taxes, on AppleCare for my $3,000 laptop. Because for the first time since I started buying Apple products, I absolutely do not trust this machine.
But it’s my daily driver. What can I do?
I really like typing on this keyboard, but I hate this keyboard.
FastCompany asked a data scientist to see how much he could learn about two individuals using their “anonymized” geo data from Google Maps. The short answer? A lot.
With more digging online, Lotan filled out the rest of his profile, which included an enthusiasm for hiking, cafes, and the Vista Ridge Community Center in Erie. “On Facebook, you can see everything else, like their kids and a puppy.” By now, Lotan wasn’t just keeping track of the places this person frequently visited using anonymous smartphone location data: He had managed to crack their entire identity. If a malicious actor were to obtain this GPS data – collected by any number of smartphone apps, and collected by big companies and startups, advertisers, and law enforcement, with little oversight – they could use it to manipulate or harass that person, or worse.
And then there’s this:
In 2013, researchers at MIT and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium published a paper reporting on 15 months of study of human mobility data for over 1.5 million individuals. What they found is that only four spatio-temporal points are required to “uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.” The researchers concluded that there was very little privacy even in raw location data. Four years later, their calls for policies rectifying concerns about location tracking have fallen largely on deaf ears.
Clearly, there’s some legislation work that needs to be done about this. But more importantly, the article lists a few easy ways you can protect yourself from being found online, whether you’re using an iPhone or Android device.
I also don’t want to be the boy who shouted wolf — at least, not yet. Much of this is about protecting your data from advertisers, much of whom have obvious intent. But the real problem here is protecting yourself from hackers and other malicious actors who would be interested in obtaining your geo-location for more nefarious reasons.
Nobody is saying that these location-based features aren’t useful (at least, I’m not). But there’s a lot to be said about being careful about who you trust with this data.
Designer Mike Rundle put together an incredibly detailed blog post about a potential iPhone XX in 2027. I don’t normally bet on patents, but Mike is a smart guy and has done some terrific (and plausible) research here.
After going through The Sweet Setup’s new Learn Ulysses Course twice, I’ve mulled it over and moved all my writing to Ulysses. Ulysses is a delightful plain text editor with its own built in library for your documents. It’s probably the best writing app for macOS and iOS. For professional writers and busy people alike, it’s well worth the coin.
I’ve been using Ulysses for just shy of a year now. I’m the sort of person that likes instruction manuals, so I read through all the support docs shortly after I got the app. I think of myself as a power user. But this new course from The Sweet Setup (an awesome website if, if they’re new to you) is something else entirely. Whether you’re new to the app or a complete expert, you’ll learn something from their brief lessons. I still learned a lot from the course — particularly about searching for files and keywords across all your documents.
The course was so useful that it helped me re-organize my entire writing system and structure. Previously, some of my writing was in Apple’s Notes app, some was in OmniOutliner, and some was in Ulysses. All these apps are great, but there are serious productivity benefits to having all your writing in one place. Now, using the wealth of keyboard shortcuts and speedy tricks I learned from Learn Ulysses, I’ve migrated everything into Ulysses. This move’s completely removed the cruft from my setup.
Finally, the course has been invaluable in creating a perfect writing environment. I knew all about Ulysses’ customizable themes, but the Learn Ulysses course taught me how to enhance custom themes with settings I didn’t know existed in the app. After some minor tweaking to my setup, I’m able to combine the environments of my two all-time favourite writing apps: Bear and iA Writer. I’ve never been more productive in a writing app before.
Learn Ulysses transformed its titular app from a utility to a dream workstation. The app looks exactly how I want it to look, and the course made me more productive than I’ve ever been in a text editor.
I couldn’t be happier with both Ulysses the app and Learn Ulysses, the course. If you’re a writer, I highly recommend both. It’s among the best business investments I’ve made all year.
If you work in a services business, you know how difficult it can be to communicate with clients. They need to know what’s going on, but email is the actual worst. Searching through email is slow. Email makes it too hard to view a list of received deliverables in reverse chronological order. This is especially true if you’re working on the project with a team of people.
I’ve tried every collaboration tool out there to fix this. They’re probably all tools you know, and maybe even use already. I’ve tried Slack, Asana, and even Kanban tools like Trello. I’d create projects or teams for each client in the system, and invite them in to collaborate with me.
The closest I’ve come to success is Basecamp, which all my clients at least like. And while all of these remain exceptional tools, none of them are the right tool for the job.
The thing is, collaboration tools require buy-in from entire organizations if they’re going to be useful. Communication tools are great for service providers like you and me, but we can’t push those apps on our clients and expect the same results.
But today, after years of experimenting, I think I’ve got it. I finally have what might be the best way to keep your clients up to date.
Over the past few days, I’ve been carefully considering Project Hubs, originally coined such by Brad Frost. The trick with a Project Hub is that they remove collaboration completely, and treat projects as timelines. As soon as you see what a Project Hub looks like, you get it. It just makes sense.
This is Brad’s demo Project Hub. For clients, this is a godsend. And for people like me, it’s easy to keep it updated. It’s just another part of process.
Brad explains in a little more depth why this works in his blog post, but simply put: using consistent URLs for all your work means that clients know exactly where to go to find the latest version of that thing you’re making for them. No need to create multiple versions — just update your single “source of truth”. If they need the latest design file, they can just visit www.projecthub.yourcompanyname.com/web-design-mockup and get the latest version there — every time.
I started whipping up Project Hubs for my clients this morning, and I’m excited about keeping them more closely updated. If you’re of a technical leaning, you can download the sample project on GitHub and install it on the server of your choice.
If you work in client services and want to integrate something like this into your website, get in touch and I’ll see if I can lend you a hand.
When I was a teenager, I was a voracious guitar player. After school, I came home and practiced guitar. I have no memories of doing my home work, but I do remember plugging in and practicing. At one point, I realized I was playing, on average, about six hours a day.
Every Wednesday, I went to a guitar lesson with a private instructor. (I was fortunate to have parents who could afford that luxury.) Once a week, I went to band practice. Twice a week, I was in the basement studio my bandmates and I made to record basic demos. And every six weeks or so, we would play a show to a live audience at some dirty bar somewhere.
Each show was about forty minutes or so, which was (in hindsight) a generous allotment for a high school rock band. Assuming my estimate of six hours a day was accurate (and I think it was pretty close), I would practice 252 hours for every forty-five minute show.
Here’s what I learned from all that practicing: The act of creation is not a sprint. It’s a marathon. It’s the slow and steady toil of practice.
It’s much easier to write a song, or perform at a concert, if practicing your instrument is a daily habit.
I think we need to have the same attitude with our businesses. If we want them to be successful, we have to practice. I don’t mean that you need to publish something every day on your blog, or that you have to quit your day job and devote your days to your artisanal footwear company. (I didn’t drop out of high school, in case you were wondering.)
But you do need to practice your craft, whatever it is. If you’re a preacher, you need to witness. If you’re a writer, you need to write. If you’re a musician, you need to practice your scales.
It isn’t for the sake of perfection. I want to discourage you from expecting perfection of yourself. Nobody ever attends a perfect concert, and one of the football teams in a game has to lose.
But the team that practices is more likely to win in the long run, and more likely to learn from their mistakes.
For years, I’ve gone back and forth from OmniFocus to other task management systems. I’ve tried so many of them: Things, Todoist, Wunderlist, Basecamp, Reminders, Asana, 2do — I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. I’ve never lasted more than a month or two with any of these before coming back to OmniFocus.
I have a love/hate relationship with OmniFocus. (I once called OmniFocus “expensive” and “dystopian” on my personal blog, which may have been a bit melodramatic.)
But this app is honestly the only task management system that lets me work the way my brain works.
I’ve spent the past year going back and forth between all these systems, and after purchasing it three or four years ago (whenever version 2 came out), I’ve come full circle to embracing OmniFocus again. I’ve made a lot of notes over the past year about how I work and why OmniFocus works for me.
If you’ve been struggling to embrace a digital task management system, or trying to figure out what app you should use, then I hope this can help you.
First of all: like many creative types /coders that I know, I tend to think in outlines. Give me the back of a napkin and I’m writing a list out on it. OmniFocus is the only todo app that feels like an outlining app. (Obviously, that’s because OmniFocus shares heritage with OmniOutliner — another app I’m a huge fan of.) So every day, when I’m doing a bit of a brain or idea dump, I can write it exactly how I would an outline. (It’s even better once you have the keyboard shortcuts memorized.)
But I know I’m not using OmniFocus right. I don’t use Reviews (well, not often). I don’t know use Contexts at all (seriously, not even a little). But I use Projects religiously. I’ve organized my life into folders of projects in OmniFocus. Each folder includes a project called Miscellaneous, which I use to dump individual tasks that don’t belong to a larger project, but still need to be filed in the right place. I have a folder for my studio, a folder for my church volunteering projects, and a folder for each client and product that I cater to. When a task gets added, assuming there’s a project or client related to it, the task immediately gets dumped in the proper spot.
I know what you’re thinking: “This sounds like a ton of work. I don’t want to think this hard.”
But it’s really not. It works just like an outline. Here’s a bullet list to show off (in brief) what a typical list within folders might look like.
Etc, etc.
It’s not hard. It’s sensible — the exact same way you’d write it down on the back of the napkin.
To manage the bloat of projects, I also set up a ton of deferred start dates, which often repeat annually for clients on retainers. I can plan out a client’s entire year with them, and then start nudging them the day a project is set to start. This has the side benefit of hiding any “inactive” project from my regular OmniFocus views. So there’s not too much clutter. Just enough to get a birds’ eye view.
All of this sounds really hard to manage, I know. I’ve got about 50 active projects going on at any given time.
This is where a task management system usually falls apart: what happens when you have hundreds and hundreds of items in it?
Most people start using Contexts at this point. I really don’t understand Contexts. I don’t get tags either. These systems don’t work the way my brain works. They give me headaches.
I bought the Pro edition of OmniFocus, so I could set up custom perspectives. Perspectives are, for me, a bit of a lifesaver. They let me focus on individual projects at a time, instead of the full monte. (Hence the “Focus” in OmniFocus.)
I have two perspectives I use religiously.
One is called “Doing”. I manually select the projects that I must make progress on every day right now, and have only those listed in this perspective. With one click, I can go to the perspective, see a quick list of the projects I should focus on, and check on the related tasks for each project.
The other perspective is called “Today”. It also focused on a project, but this project is just a single action list called “Today”. Every morning, I delete everything in the list and write out only what needs to be accomplished that day. I don’t assign a due date or anything — I only use due dates if my life depends on it — but I start working through “Today” every time I finish in my Forecast.
Most hardcore OmniFocus people have a Today view in OmniFocus. The problem is, that Today view is usually based on some mixture of defer dates, due dates, and flagged tasks. I can’t have an entirely automated system like that; I need to manually curate my daily tasks.
I’ve tried, and tried, and tried to set up so many similar lists in any other app, but it never works for me. OmniFocus is the only app that bends to my will. (Things comes close, but their app is too inflexible to be of any real use for people with a million projects and areas of responsibilities.)
This workflow works if you’re the sort of person that dumps everything you need to do into your phone, but still writes out a quick list on paper every morning. I’ve just elected to make the whole thing digital.
If I’m being completely honest: you could probably make a compromised version of this system on anybody’s platform. But I don’t think anybody else makes it as easy to do what you want.
This isn’t a sales pitch. I get 0% of the money from doing this. I’m just finally happy with my system. If you want to try it out, you can check out OmniFocus on OmniGroup’s website.
If you’re a designer who works with clients on a regular basis, it’s easy to be exhausted. Working with clients is hard! I’ve seen many designers, myself included, shake their heads in despair at client requests. I’ve also seen a lot of designers give up fighting them.
But you can’t. The fight is what leads to good design. Good design is a fight.
I’ve known one of my current clients for years now — probably getting close to half a decade. They’re a great crew, and the boss is a fantastic guy to work for. But we got into a few arguments on the most recent project that ended with me apologizing for the ruckus once the whole thing was over.
The client simply said this: “it’s okay. Arguing is part of good work.”
If you want to design something of value, you’re inevitably going to upset people. Design is saying no to a thousand ideas so you can say yes to one good one. That naturally leads to arguments.
But don’t be disheartened: the best designers, in the world’s most desirable companies, fight every day. It’s a fight to make something worthwhile. But it’s a fight you can win.