The idea that your job should be the primary source of meaning in your life is an elaborately made trap, propped up across industries, designed to make you a loyal worker who uses the bulk of their intellectual and creative capacity to further their own career.
This is a balm!
Choose a city, choose a radio station, choose a mode of transport (I like walking) and enjoy exploring.
Brian and Joschi are considering an interesting approach for their Material conference:
Maybe we should think about a “crop rotation” method for our event? One year in Iceland to help benefit the local community, then the following year move to Germany so it is easier for people to attend, then a third year of rest and change the format to a virtual or remote event. Then repeat on that three year cycle.
The sixth episode of season two of the Clearleft podcast is available now. The last episode of the season!
The topic is remote work. The timing is kind of perfect. It was exactly one year ago today that Clearleft went fully remote. Having a podcast episode to mark the anniversary seems fitting.
I didn’t interview anyone specifically for this episode. Instead, whenever I was chatting to someone about some other topic—design systems, prototyping, or whatever—I’d wrap up by asking them to describe their surroundings and ask them how they were adjusting to life at home. After two season’s worth of interviews, I had a decent library of responses. So this episode includes voices you last heard from back in season one: Paul, Charlotte, Amy, and Aarron.
Then the episode shifts. I’ve got excerpts from a panel discussion we held a while back on the future of work. These panel discussions used to happen up in London, but this one was, obviously, online. It’s got a terrific line-up: Jean, Holly, Emma, and Lola, all dialing in from different countries and all sharing their stories openly and honestly. (Fun fact: I first met Lola three years ago at the Pixel Up conference in South Africa and on this day in 2018 we were out on Safari together.)
I’m happy with how this episode turned out. It’s a fitting finish to the season. It’s just seventeen and a half minutes long so take a little time out of your day to have a listen.
As always, if you like what you hear, please spread the word.
Ambient reassurance is the experience of small, unplanned moments of interaction with colleagues that provide reassurance that you’re on the right track. They provide encouragement and they help us to maintain self belief in those moments where we are liable to lapse into unproductive self doubt or imposter syndrome.
In hindsight I realise, these moments flowed naturally in an office environment.
Some good writing advice in here:
- Spell out your acronyms.
- Use active voice, not passive voice.
- Fewer commas. More periods.
Look, employers are always free to – and should! – evaluate the work product produced by employees. But they don’t have to surveil someone’s every move or screenshot their computer every five minutes to do so. That’s monitoring the inputs. Monitor the outputs instead, and you’ll have a much healthier, saner relationship.
If you hire smart, capable people and trust them to do good work – surprise-surprise – people will return the sentiment deliver just that! The irony of setting up these invasive surveillance regimes is that they end up causing the motivation to goof off to beat the very systems that were setup to catch such behavior.
My back-up strategy is similar to Brendan’s (using Super Duper and Backblaze):
In backup parlance there’s a thing called 3-2-1. That is, you should three copies of your files — two locally on different devices and one off site.
But I only do my local back-ups once a week (eek!)—I should do better.
This a great step-by-step walkthrough from Rey on setting up a remote version of Internet Explorer for testing on Mac.
This looks like it could be one alternative to Adobe Shadow or Edge Inspect or whatever they’re calling it now that they’re charging $120 a year for using it.
A wonderful example of why the patent system is so totally b0rked and completely unsuited to software. Someone patent Ajax (or Remote Scripting, if you prefer) back in 2001. Un. Bel. Eeeevable.