For several years now I’ve been planning a big garden makeover. My plan starts with our existing wooden garage that needs attention, I would pull that down. I would then get a much larger and more substantial garden building made across the whole of the back of the garden. This...
Although for short periods of time I can be content with just the pleasures of life, I’ve found that the only sustainable ‘good life’ comes from having a purpose as well. That purpose is ideally one that’s within my control as work as a source of purpose has become fickle...
In Buddhist philosophy one of the most important life ‘skills’ to develop is to loosen ones attachments. I’m not a Buddhist, but as an approach to life it has a lot to commend it but I’ve always struggled with this lack of attachment idea. It’s always seemed to me that...
While I was out walking yesterday (and trying to distract myself from the sensation of my leg muscles tearing due to a nasty flare) I was thinking about how to go about gathering information at scale. The most popular mechanism for this is to survey a population asking them for...
A few days ago I wrote about how I keep a largely automated diary using the Momento app on my iPhone. When I started to keep this diary it was a side effect of using twitter and over the years, as the tweet count topped a thousand, I noticed that...
Life would be a lot easier if I had a single Twitter account linked to a single Facebook account. Unfortunately I’m rarely satisfied with simple when it comes to my technology usage, maybe that’s why I like the simple life outside of work. Once my usage of Twitter matured I...
This post is the second in series on how I’ve automated augmenting my memory, the first post covered how I create a diary which is my most important and frequently referenced memory aid. This post covers how I automate the creation of my personal knowledge management archive. This archive has...
I’ve been thinking about innovation recently, how little I see of it at work, which seems strange because mine is a company that really does seem to value innovation. I’ve concluded that the reason is that we have attempted to combine a culture of innovation with a culture of visibility. ...
I’ve noticed recently how things come in waves, this last week has been all about the structural changes to work over the next 3-10 years. First up was a discussion with Stu about the changing mix of task, process, information and knowledge work. Then I started the next book in...
For two years now I’ve been unable to cycle more than a couple of miles, every time I got on my bike it hurt and even those few miles took a week to recover from. I’d tried about 12 physiotherapy sessions last year and while I made some progress an...