The Weekly Review: Vol VI Issue 12
Hello friends,
I hope your week is off to a good start! I’ve recently finished a few long running personal projects which means I’ve had a little more time for writing. And I’ve been thinking about the overall purpose of this newsletter.
Paul Jarvis, writing for the Revue blog, shares what makes a good newsletter and how to start your own.
There’s no one format that works best. What matters first is that it’s the best format for the subscribers you’ve got and want to attract, and second, that it’s the best format for you to keep doing it for a while and at a regular cadence.
I like that he lists the main types of newsletters and prefaces that with the advice above. This was a nice little kick in the pants to remind me why I started my own newsletter 5 years ago. And while I love the format and have stuck with it for so long, the focus on the overall purpose ebbs and flows.
It’s summed up best on my About page:
During my career, I’ve watched how the Internet and constant connection has changed how people work, myself included. I’ve spent a lot of time meditating on how that has been both good and bad. Through it all, I’ve sought the desire, tools, and techniques that would meld my faith and my work into a cohesive whole.
And while that focus has ebbed of late, it’s about to take centre stage once again. Discipleship is regularly on my mind, but I have a couple of bigger projects in the coming months focused completely on the topic.
As always, let me know if there’s any particular subject or area that you’d like to hear about.
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App of the week
In the past, I’ve used Sketch a lot to illustrate concepts for my team, or create user journeys, or onboarding flows. Although it’s a full design tool for making mockups or full product designs, I found it also worked well for conceptual models.
Here’s an example I made for showing the ideal user journey for a Beanstalk customer.
Over the past couple of years, I haven’t needed to make this type of thing as often and I discovered at some point that I never installed Sketch on my newest laptop. And when the time came to create something new, I found that the version of Sketch was so far behind, I’d have to purchase an upgrade.
I like to pay for good software, but I hesitate when it’s not a tool I use regularly. And somewhere in the past months, I came across Whimsical. I think this is a service that could replace something like Sketch for me.
I won’t produce artifacts like the example above with Whimsical, but it does provide the ability to quickly create mockups, mind maps, flowcharts, and “walls of sticky notes”.
These are all lower fidelity, but that’s most often all I need in my role.
Check it out.
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Items of note
Collaborate with kindness: Consider these etiquette tips in Slack
Matt Haughey shares some tips on how to use Slack in a manner more respectful of your team members. Things like:
Use emoji, bulleted lists, and bold and italic text styling to make your titles and key points stand out in longer messages. This is especially useful for announcements or meeting recaps.
That applies to any kind of digital communication, but sure. However, the more I read the article, the more it made something obvious: Slack, and other instant chat tools like it, are not the best way to communicate as a team by default.
Consider this suggestion:
You can also use DND to carve out focus time during your workday. Click the bell icon atop your channel menu and select a time. Your status in Slack will then communicate to colleagues that you’re heads-down working and they shouldn’t expect an immediate response.
This begs the question: why are most work environments defaulting to expect an immediate response? We’ve gotten so used to this behaviour that it’s expected and teams building tools like Slack have to build in features to combat the expectation.
Again:
Imagine you sent an email to your team with a new product idea. First you’re met with total silence, then later a reply or two. You have to guess how the rest of the team feels, or you can ask at your next team meeting. What if that idea were posted in a team Slack channel instead? You’d likely see emoji reactions soon after posting. They might show support, indicate that the team wants to think about it, or note an approval.
A brand new product idea needs more than emoji reactions. Perhaps live chat is not the place for nuanced discussion.
At any rate, I like Slack — as far as instant chat tools go, it’s the best. But this post left me feeling like they have to explain away some of the functionality of the product. Many of the included tips just sounded like the practice of writing an effective email, the very thing Slack was created to replace.
iCloud has finally delivered on Steve Jobs’ original promise from 2011
Bradley Chambers takes a moment to step back and review the current effectiveness of iCloud. He shares about making a recent upgrade and making the decision to set it up from scratch rather than using Migration Assistant. His summary:
A lot of people will say that “Apple can’t do cloud-services”, but I am here to say that as someone who relies on iCloud for almost all of my work, Apple has finally arrived with the iCloud experience. The unboxing experience was superb, and the set up process was a breeze. After I signed into iCloud, all my data just appeared.
A colleague recently asked the question of whether iCloud was good enough now that he could skip using Dropbox completely. I remembered asking the same question, but that was back in 2014. I made the full switch to iCloud in 2017 and never looked back.
Apple definitely took a lot of heat for not being good at cloud services. But somewhere along the way they fixed most of the problems. Enough so that I rarely think about this stuff anymore. My Time Machine backups (or lack thereof) can attest to that.
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Quote of the week
Yes, I have a great deal to live for and somehow I have a feeling that I shall come back to the both of them, but if it is God’s wish that I do not, I shall leave with a prayer, that my son shall live a better life and a safer life in his world than the life lived in the world of his father.
Bill Svrluga Sr., in a journal entry found and shared by his family in a moving piece in the Washington Post.
Bill Sr. never talked to his family about his experience in WWII and D-Day. And although they knew it was important to him, his journal entries told a story beyond what they had expected. I have a super soft spot for veterans and their stories (especially WWII stories), so this kind of read gets me teared up.
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Currently
Reading: God in the Dock, a collection of essays from C.S. Lewis. Goodness, can this guy turn a sentence. I adore his logical approach to complex and his ability to articulate weighty matters with simplicity. I’m not super far into this one yet as it takes a little more effort to follow some of the arguments he’s rebutting. But it is an enjoyable read.
A thought struck me as I dug in: this is a collection of blog posts. Of course, C.S. and the minds of his time didn’t have websites. But these essays are largely in response to the writings of others or addressing societal issues of the period. As a reader decades later, you have to expend a little more effort to get a grasp of what the author is referring to, get into the shoes of another writer first before you can fully comprehend what the author you're reading is trying to communicate.
So far it feels worth it.
Listening: Andy Mineo is another hip hop artist that we’ve been listening to a lot in our home lately. There are some good tracks where he’s collaborated with Trip Lee or Lecrae, but I’m enjoying his own albums as well. Adam King recommended this collaboration recently — I dig it.
Drinking: it’s the season of fruit beers. Not sours (I can only enjoy those occasionally), but fruity wheat ales, or an ISA. I’ve enjoyed a good bit of grapefruit and mango in a few different options the past couple of weeks. Our weather has been wet and dark, but I’m not letting that stop me from enjoying some summer ales.
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Me and the Mrs. are taking another trip to the lake this week — this time without the family. It’s one of our favourite times of the year and gives the opportunity to reflect on things, pray, and plan. And nap. And eat. And read, a lot.
See you on the other side.