We’re almost two years in, and I still find a lot of people who do not have a headset for videoconferencing.

When you’re speaking to a muted room, it’s eerie and unnatural — you feel alone even if you can see other people’s faces. You lose all of those spontaneous reactions that keep a conversation flowing.

Once you have a headset, the next step is to clean up the space behind you, so you won’t have to use those horrible fake backgrounds.

A Zoom (or Teams) call is not a meeting.

There are no humans on this call. Yes, there are 14 participants with their video on, one with their video off, and someone dialing in. Yes, you can gather some interesting signal from a single frame of this meeting, but this is a crappy 2D representation of the team; both essential signal and purpose are missing from this situation.

+1 for using CGI Princess Leia from Rogue One to make his point…

There are some very interesting ideas in this proposal, but will Apple go that far?

With "Ask app not to track" Apple recently changed the game of privacy, at the dismay at the global advertisement industry.

We think they could go even further:

To lead the industry towards technology that is truly respectful of human attention. To align the incentives for developers with the users best interest. To change the course of technology once more.

Here's how...

Don’t forget to schedule your breaks!

A reminder to you all to make time for yourself and schedule your break moments in your calendar!

Productive procrastination tip by @PatrickRhone:

Task yourself with a huge must-do project that has a deadline far out enough that you can safely procrastinate on it for a day or two.

Watch your productivity on every other possible thing go way up to avoid that one.

This looks very promising:

As a result of the non-standardization of blocks, our end-users suffer. If someone is using my blog engine, they can only use those blocks that I had time to implement. Those blocks may be pretty basic or incomplete. Users might want to use a fancier block that they saw in WordPress or Medium or Notion, but my editor doesn’t have it. Blocks can’t be shared or moved around very easily, and our users are limited to the features and capabilities that we had time to re-implement.

To fix this, we’re going to create a protocol called the Block Protocol.

It’s open, free, non-proprietary, we want it to be everywhere on the web.

Un buen resumen del episodio de esta semana:

Don't stop learning new things.

Learning shouldn't be limited to school/college. It's a life-long journey.

The more you learn, the more doors you can unlock in life.

This is a great feature:

The “Title bar window shake” is a lifesaver for those times when you have a million windows open and you need to really drill down and focus on just one of them. To do so, you simply click and hold on your desired window’s title bar and, while holding the mouse button down, give it a little wiggle back and forth. All the other windows you have open will be minimized.

I wonder why Microsoft decided to turn this off by default in Windows 11.

By the way, on Mac I simply use the ⌘+⌥+H keyboard shortcut.

93% van de ZZP-ers zijn hardwerkende mensen die klaar zijn met het klassieke baas-werknemers spelletje zijn. Ik noem ze al een tijdje Hiërarchische Vluchtelingen.

I love this term. Instead of freelancers, lets call them “Hierarchical Refugees” (¿«Refugiados jerárquicos» en español?)

Try this genius hack to clear your inbox and start fresh… without deleting everything!

As someone with anywhere upwards of 10,000 emails in my inbox — many of them unread, to the dismay of my OCD friends — I am always looking for tips and tricks to help me manage my email. One of those is to start each new year with an absolutely clean inbox. Remember what that looks like? Yeah, me neither.

Listen to @PatrickRhone.

Say what you mean. Mean what you say.

Something that preoccupies me more and more lately:

Digital communication has profound benefits in terms of helping people collaborate, stay in touch, and share things with each other. But social media has played a huge role in spreading misinformation that makes people suspicious of their governments. Social media feeds have become so personalized that you don't see factual information if it doesn't align with your profile.

Who doesn’t want to be a “time millionaire”?

time millionaires measure their worth not in terms of financial capital, but according to the seconds, minutes and hours they claw back from employment for leisure and recreation.

A helpful reminder:

Reminding yourself you can do anything.

But you really can’t do everything.

Unsubscribe!

Cyber Monday is a nice event to remind you that you are not using the “unsubscribe” links enough in your email inbox.

To me, the ‘week’ is the most human unit of time.

Days, months, and years all make sense as units of time—they match up, at least roughly, with the revolutions of Earth, the moon, and the sun.

Weeks, however, are much weirder and clunkier. A duration of seven days doesn’t align with any natural cycles or fit cleanly into months or years.

What a great list of mini standards by Nicholas Bate.

Definition of done by @patrickrhone

Dinner is not done once everyone has eaten. Dinner is done once the dishes are washed and the kitchen is cleaned.

Another example of a word that has lost its original meaning.

We’ve probably lost the battle to save the word masterclass. Much like the word “decimate”, masterclass has acquired a broader and less specific meaning, becoming an adjective rather than a noun, a way to describe the qualities of a performance or teacher.

Though the summary did not motivate me to buy this book, I love the quote:

One of the most unfortunate realities about being productive is that most of what we do is a total waste of time.

Some more thoughts by Cal Newport based on the same research that led me to write this note in my Digital Garden.

The allure of productivity is therefore a complex one. We cannot dismiss it as the result of the evil master plan of mustache twirling capitalists. We also cannot embrace it as an unalloyed good. It’s a human drive tangled with the contradictory imperatives of culture.

The Netherlands offer so much more than Amsterdam and tulips. Most tourists do not take the opportinity to visit the heather field, which especillay in august, are very beautiful as shown by these spectacular photos by Albert Dros.

It usually starts mid or early Augusts and lasts until the end of the month, and it turns a lot of areas completely purple. What am I talking about? The heather plants. Compare it to the France’s Lavender fields that start a couple of weeks earlier in July. The purple heather fields in the Netherlands are a dream for any landscape photographer. Combine them with mist and you’ve got yourself a dreamscape that looks like it popped straight out of a fairytale.

Heck, even I would love to go back to school if this were the curriculum:

The basic foundation is student-centered, self-directed projects. In service of learning to solve interesting problems and how to lead as well as follow. And to support that, the “courses” are practical tools students can use on their projects.

This quote perfectly descibes my current professional situation:

You teach best what you most need to learn.