What makes Google Docs a good experience & where to foster connections
Hey folks!
If you've read the news of late, you may have heard about the record-breaking weather we've seen on the west coast of North America. We're far enough north that we weren't in the worst of it — rather than hitting 45° C (113° F), we were only up to 40° C (104° F).
But I've lived in this town for 45 years and have never experienced heat like this.
Many homes up in this part of the world don't have AC. It's simply not needed. There might be 10 days a year where you'd wish you had it. So our entire family ended up sleeping in the basement, which remained blessedly cool enough when the main floor was in the 90s. The heat dome has thankfully moved on, but now the forest fires are well on their way.
All that said, I found myself really enjoying the heat. I've only experienced this kind of weather a couple times in my life: Texas and Fiji felt similar. In my home, there might be 2 weeks — maybe 3 on a good year — where I'd feel comfortable sitting on my deck in shorts and a tee shirt at 8 am. So for the last 10 days, I just enjoyed the experience.
Although the hours of 3–8 pm felt pretty unbearable, I can better appreciate the concept of the siesta now!
Community
Almost 15 years ago, I began reading people's personal blogs. It was around that time that networks like Facebook and Twitter came onto the scene. Although I pretty much quit using Facebook once it gained popularity with the general public, Twitter played a significant role in the connections I made with others. Eventually, that led to starting a business and then subsequent roles on various SaaS companies.
But, in the years since, as I experienced the negative aspects of social media, my usage died down. Even if Twitter was a place of mostly healthy interactions between people (and it's not), the impact on focus and concentration concerns me.
However, I have recently realized I've missed some of the advantages: mostly sharing your work and making connections. So I've wondered where can I find that sense of community again?
One possibility is Polywork. It's relatively new and more focused on providing an alternative to LinkedIn. But perhaps its focus on the individual and personal expression could help foster real connections once again. So far, I've just been putting the occasional activity to my profile.
So I've come to the place where a focus on sharing what I'm doing and connecting with like-minded people is the answer. The question for me now is where to do that.
What service, community, or medium do you user? I'm curious to hear!
When did Google Docs become such a strong tool
My distrust of Google and their business model has meant that I have not adopted or used many of the products they've offered over the years. However, I've long had to use their suite of tools that is available for businesses — which is primarily centered around email. So although I'm hesitant personally, I've been quite involved with their products professionally.
Gmail. Google Calendar. And Google Docs. All web applications that I use daily.
But I've found myself more and more comping to appreciate Google Docs as what it is: a pleasing-to-use Word processing tool that enables collaborative writing with others.
It excels in a few different areas.
Suggestions
For a long time Dropbox Paper played that role for any writing that I had to share with others. But, although Paper is aesthetically pleasing, it has some significant drawbacks.
People can comment on your document, but this is a limited usefulness. Google Docs is far advanced in this area, letting others make changes that you can review, and then accept or reject as you desire. In tools like Paper, you can suggest an alternate wording, but only in the confines of the small comment panes on the side of the document.
It's less than ideal if your suggestions are longer than a sentence or two.
Portability of your content
Another pain of Dropbox is its extremely bastardized markup. Copy and paste content from Dropbox into another tool. You'll see odd characters and, most frustratingly, spaces between paragraphs are removed. I've had to spend a good bit of time cleaning up content after moving copy from Paper to Craft. And it's easy to miss some of the changes, which means you expend your editing energy twice.
I've found Google Docs a far better experience.
And the number one tip for using Google Docs? Make Inter the default font for new documents!
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Items of note
This is the last piece on the topic of returning to the office — I promise. But I've enjoyed the ones where the authors are making the case for taking care with how we approach this summer. While everyone is eager to open up and get things back to normal, we need to do so with care and sensitivity.
And, for the sake of everyone, let's make sure we're not putting a lot of pressure on people to make up for lost time.
Whether you're a CEO, or the leader of a 5-person team, or running this whole thing solo, the next step is the same. It's time to clean house.
Our teams are still building for pre-pandemic roadmaps, with pre-pandemic partnerships, and pre-pandemic expectations, like 2020 never happened. Only we're doing it now with post-pandemic humans.
How not to let work explode your life
This is an epic-ly long long-read. I listened to this article on a recent 30 km run … and it played for more than a third of the time. Whew!
Anyway, it's a long piece on how — among other things — work has changed and how it impacts the rest of our life. It's such a lengthy article that there are several primary points the author makes. I don't agree with all of them, but I was interested in two angles: the loss of serenity in modern times and the (dis)connection between capitalism and romantacism.
We tend to consider Modernism as an artistic, cultural movement. We need to rediscover it as something useful to us on the flight home, something that reflects the most troubling aspects of our inner lives in the contemporary world. Artists like Joyce and Braque are tracking a development that’s still going on in our own lives: the loss of serenity.
There are three deep causes of this loss of serenity: busy-ness, competition and envy.
Emphasis mine.
Anyway, if you have a spare hour this holiday weekend, give this a look.
A Few of Our Favorite Obsidian Plugins
The Sweet Setup has been focused on Obsidian of late. This post highlighted a few plugins that were new to me. I especially liked the look of the Kanban plugin.
If you use Obsidian, scan the options here.
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Quote of the week
Progress — no matter how small — is crucial. For me, it was incredibly easy to spiral into doom and helplessness. When you feel that descent starting, try to take a step back and assess what you know right this second. I almost always realized that there was at least one thing I knew and could tackle at that moment in time. No matter how trivial, taking one crumb off what needs to be done always feels good.
Ben Carr, A mountain of unknown
Gosh, I sure appreciate this mentality and need it every day.
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Currently
Watching: Our family recently viewed Chaos Walking, starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley. It's a futuristic dystopian film with an interesting premise: the planet on which the humans reside causes all thoughts of men to be visible and audible for all to perceive. But that is not the case for women. It's a scenario that brings a lot of humour, but also interesting social norms.
Listening: Reprise by Moby. It's an album of remastered (re-recorded?) tracks from his various albums. I've enjoyed it, especially some of the slower songs towards the end of Play.
Drinking: Lately, water. Lots of water!
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Wherever you are, stay hydrated, friends. Blessing on your week ahead!