It’s September 12th, and while I haven’t officially shut down the company, I have made the decision to. Over the next two months, while continuing to support the one paying customer whose photo booths I’m still supporting with ShutterPilot Photo Hub, I’ll be winding things down.

The biggest reasons I see documents people write that don’t get read are (in order):

1. there is a culture of “ask first, document never” (i.e. tribal knowledge)
2. the document is not discoverable
3. the document is too long
4. people don’t know why they should read the document
5. the document has too many “branches” (if x, then y)
6. the document is out of date (sigh)

At work, we’ve been talking about Hammock Driven Development and just how important it is to take time to think about what you’re about to do and plan how you’ll do it.

For many many reasons, I’ve decided to move my personal web site off of being a pails app with PHP and into a static site constructed with Jekyll and hosted with Github Pages.

During the week, I wake up at 5AM, hop in the shower, and then start working. I start off the day by checking and responding to any emails and Slack messages from the previous workday. I don't worry about whether someone is online to receive any Slack messages I send (I wasn't online when they sent them, and I treat Slack as an asynchronous form of communication like a short-form less-formal version of email); I assume they will respond when they get back online.

As a result of the apps I purged in the previous blog post, my screen time is down 34% from the previous week, for an average of 56 minutes per day. I consider this a win!

I'm currently reading Deep Work, a book about how we are constantly surrounded by distractions in a world that still (or perhaps more so) values the productivity that results from focused work and provides some tips on how to deal with it. I've long been interested in overhauling my schedule and how I work, part of which involves purging my phone of useless apps. Here's how I decided what to remove.

One thing I'm trying to do more of is rather than responding to opinion or teachable-moment type things with a statement, formulating a question which will open the possibility to (what I think is) the right answer, or will at least lead to good discussion.

After the first full day of wearing the Apple Watch, some observations from my experience:

I just won an Apple Watch (Series 4) from a contest at Cherwell Software, but I don't use an iPhone as my primary phone. This blog post is the first in what will be a series of blog posts about how effectively I can use an Apple Watch with or in spite of my Android Phone.