Spoiler: It’s not you
It’s common for professionals on their way out of a company, especially if they have had a long-term and prominent role, to start thinking in terms of “legacy” — that is, the mark they will leave on a place of business and what they want to be known for.
This tendency, however natural, is misguided. There is another way to imagine how you should spend your final days at a company.
First and foremost, don’t leave any messes, especially if they’re of your own making. This could include everything from budget deficits to personnel issues. Don’t be so focused on…
I tried the Todoist one on Zapier and Automate.io. Neither one could find all of my databases. I don't know about you, but I've found APIs always to be a bit hit and miss.
I’m coming up on my two-year anniversary with Notion, but I’m still tinkering with my set-up, sometimes in big ways.
My most recent experiment included a tour of Roam Research, to see if I could incorporate any of what makes it so appealing into my Notion workspace.
Here’s what I learned:
The idea is the thing
Roam emphasizes the value of building a workspace around your ideas. Its linking of pages means that you are always being reminded of what you’ve read and what you’ve thought on a topic.
My “Resources” database in Notion used to live near the back…
My time with Roam Research
The year is 2031. The nation-state system, which had been the dominant international order since 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, has crumbled. One dominant social and cultural group functions as a de facto world government.
None of these leaders are elected. The legitimacy of this elite class is not questioned because their edicts, issued in the form of YouTube videos and blog posts, are simple if not obvious solutions to all of humankind’s pressing problems. What these minds all have in common is that they all use the same platform for note taking: Roam Research.
This vision, although a…
If you love email, there’s a lot to love about HEY, the new platform, and service from the Basecamp folks, which, at $99/year (or more if you want a fancy address), has over 170,000 subscribers in its first month.
HEY has a contact-based filtering system that allows you to direct important mail to your “Imbox,” send lower-priority mail to “The Feed,” or file receipts and documents away in “The Paper Trail.” It also allows you to add notes, rename and merge email, highlight and clip passages, add labels, and bulk reply. Whoa!
The Devil’s in the Definitions
bad apples [bad ˈapəls]
noun
1. A sociological argument that the harms done by a few police officers should not tarnish the profession as a whole.
2. A sociological argument that the harms done by a few protestors should tarnish the movement as a whole.
community [kəˈmyo͞onədē]
noun
1. A group of people with shared values or interests, especially within the same geographic location.
2. People who look like me.
curfew [ˈkərˌfyo͞o]
noun
The time at which the street lights go on and the tear gas comes out.
downtown [dounˈtoun]
noun
The central location of a large population area. See also “Ground zero.”
gaslighting [gaslīt-ing]
sic
This is not a thing. You’re just…
There have been countless articles on remote work over the last few months. As someone who’s relatively new to working away from the office, I read a good many of them, but was often disappointed that the tips were either common sense or offered with the expectation that everyone is facing the struggles.
Here’s a list of my observations and thoughts on what has worked for me.
Be a person. Working from home has put serious strain on our communications technologies — and I’m not just talking about the stock webcams in many computers. But it has also revealed the…
Na… na na NA na na na!
In between all of the terrible news about the coronavirus pandemic, you might have heard that Paul McCartney’s lyric sheet for Hey Jude was bought at auction for $910,000.
That was me. I bought it.
I know what you’re thinking: What a rich asshole. Well, I’ll leave the asshole part for you to decide, but I can guarantee that I’m not wealthy. To quote another well-known but perhaps less valuable Beatles’ lyric: “Try to see it my way.”
My start-up was recently acquired by Apple for $200 million, which is not much by Apple’s standards; I was certainly hoping for…
It was always going to come to this.
History will not be kind to Donald Trump. The longest and most painful chapter in his presidency is the one we’re living through now: the corona virus pandemic.
But unlike many of the other disastrous aspects of his administration, Trump should not bear the bulk of the blame for the federal government’s handling of the crisis. The Republican Party’s bungled response has been forty years in the making. Trump is not the cause of the poor response; he was just the unfortunate sucker who was left holding the ideology when the music stopped.
The scope of the federal government had…
A Pro Mac-ifesto
More than one person has called me an “Apple Fan Boy,” which is supposed to be an insult, but is really just designed to goad me into reacting in a way that everyone would call “toxic.”
Instead, I’m here to unapologetically declare my ability to recognize superior craftsmanship and celebrate all that Apple has done for humanity.
For instance, I was standing in line at Trader Joe’s on the day after the AirPods Pro were released in October of last year. Two different people noticed them in my ears and asked me how I liked them. I was more than…
Steven Michels
Teaching and learning, arts and letters, wellness and happiness. I’m your fan. www.stevenmichels.com
