Weekly reviews: WTF, OCO and BLUNT

Weekly reviews are where we turn failure into learning experiences. They’re postmortems of the week, and they should be very focused on the things we should do differently (or more of) next time. They don’t have to be huge. In fact, one would hope we don’t have massive learning experiences every single week. But there […]

Resetting after your morning goes to bits

One of the things I find hardest at work is resetting if my morning didn’t go at all as planned; if rather than getting stuck into my planned, focused work I ended up running around like a headless chicken, trying to clear multiple small things that kept popping up like moles in a whack-a game. […]

Quick writing tip: Start with meaning

“What do all the words mean?” Asking that is a very powerful way to start working on a document that Product or Engineering requested, but for which they provided little more than a headline: “We need a document explaining how to cook fish in an office microwave”. What do all the words mean? Then continue […]

How to properly end things

There is a line in Atomic Habits that I really like: “I’m just proactively lazy. It gives you so much time back”. It refers to resetting a room after every use so that it’s ready the next time you want to use it. I like to apply it to my work computer, and I am […]

The shower isn’t necessary

You know that moment in the shower when you suddenly get an excellent idea? That happens when your brain, working away quietly while you’re talking to yourself about what could possibly have compelled you to buy shower gel that smells like a food item, suddenly connects two dots. We say that things just clicked, or […]

Writing from the ground up

Writing begins with awareness of the single word, then moves up. What can a word mean, and what does it actually mean in its current context? Does the sentence make its point as clearly as possible? Does the paragraph come together as a single point? Is it in the right place Does the whole document tell […]