Category: Work

Communicating in 2016: Leave Good Messages

Communicating in 2016: Leave Good Messages

Subtitled; Never Just Say ‘Ping’

I was chatting with my friend Dan today, who works for one of the biggest publishing houses in the world. I’ve known Dan for a really long time. Here’s a picture of us from almost ten years ago:

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Dan was telling me that his subsection of the company was starting to use Slack for communication at work. You know Slack right? We’ve been using Slack for a while at Automattic (for a time, the open source WordPress project was the biggest single group using Slack – or so I heard. Couldn’t tell you if that’s still true!).

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Work from Home but Still Eat with Friends

Working remotely has tons of advantages, and it’s one of the best features of being a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.

(In fairness, all positions at Automattic are fully remote!)

I’ve worked remotely for over two years, and I’ve learned a few tricks, a few tactics to do battle with the parts of working from home that can be challenging.

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2015: The Good Stuff

2015: The Good Stuff

This is the third chunk of my 2015 wrap up series. Here are my broad goals for 2016, and here are the things that I think I could have done better in 2015. 

My vision statement for 2015 was “Send value into the universe, selflessly.” Looking back today, in January 2016, I think that I stayed true to that vision statement. Both at work and at home, I spent a lot of time and brain power finding ways to create value, create connections between people, and unlock the treasures that were trapped inside their own little silos.

Like my list of things that could have gone better, I’m going to try to focus on things that I directly created or did, rather than simply thought about. These are the things that count, I think.

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Lessons from 2015

Lessons from 2015

In taking some time to look back through my 2015 calendar and flip back through all of my posts for the year, I tried to sort things into two piles – things that went well, and things that didn’t go well.

Broadly, in my own life, I’m trying to focus more on things that are created, that move from the world of the mental into the world of the actual. I’ve tried to keep my went-well and didn’t-go-well piles limited only to that sort of thing, since it’s hard to say whether an idea “went well” if it did not result in any type of action or tangible outcome.

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Looking Forward: 2016 and Beyond

Looking Forward: 2016 and Beyond

I figure I’ll put together a 2015 recap soon – there are a lot of calendars and old Posts and such to dig through before I really have a great grasp on what the year really was about.

What I’m doing here is putting together a quick bullet-point list of things I’d like to put on my big-picture to-do list for 2016, or at least the first half of 2016. I figure I’ll hash these out in greater detail as they become more focused, but for now I think an outline of how I’d like 2016 to go is appropriate.

Big Picture:

  • Have perpetual, recurring, family activities. Swim classes, regular rituals, etc.
  • Eat more, better food.
  • Make fitness a practice and not a means to an end.
  • Focus on fewer things, more deeply.

More measurable:

  • Produce side revenue of ~50% of my take-home salary.
  • Release an interview every Thursday.
  • Do at least 2 more 30 Day Challenges (maybe with d3? more R? Python?)
  • Publish twice weekly on s12k, focusing on remote work and remote leadership, with an average word count of > 500 words