Hi,
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned changes to the August posting schedule. Here is how I see it working out.
First, the current Wednesday/Friday/Sunday format will remain as is. Those posts are going well and I'll stick with what's working.
On Tuesdays, I'll post the short snippets I used to include in the 'proper admin' blogs: stories from my wanderings, recurring features, and leftover thoughts from past posts. If things go well on Tuesdays, I'll consider adding more short pieces on the other open days of the week.
And when I say 'short', I'm not messing around. I'm using around three hundred words as a cutoff. Any longer and I'll post it on one of the other three days of the week. Just to give you, excellent reader, an idea of how 'long' this is, I'll include an emoji (the first TOA emoji ever) after the three hundredth word of this post.
I'm also considering adjustments to presentation. My initial thought a year and a half ago was to create separate blogs for different interests, topics, or sides to my personality. Last August, I started The Business Bro blog as the first of these experiments.
It does seem like it also will be the last. The more TOA goes on, the less interested I am in this plan. Each new space (as was the case with recurring features) simply creates more non-writing work for me. As of today, I'm leaning toward getting everything here and having all my work under one roof. But again, that's a thought in process.
Thanks for reading in July.
Tim
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Books I'm excited to (probably) read this month...
-The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks
A book often cited as one of the most influential in the field of software project management (¯\_(ツ)_/¯), I've finally decided to check this book out after repeated conversations with recruiters and hiring managers about my 'project management' background.
In general, these conversations seem to go just fine. But on the other hand, still jobless.
Can't hurt to know what I'm bullshitting about!
-Animal Farm by George Orwell
A book which requires no introduction. Children's books about animals never do. This is good because I'm tired and bored at the moment, a combination traditionally resulting in subpar TOA posts.
But one more, just as a bonus...
-Option B by Sheryl Sandberg
About a week or two after my mom died, I found this blog post Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, left on her own site (Facebook). It was the first piece of writing (and perhaps the first thing, period) I responded to since her passing.
I read the post in full each morning for a short while. It served as a useful set of reminders each day as I faced the challenge of coming into work and keeping my focus for the next few hours. As I re-read the post just now for this newsletter and found myself finishing sentences or quoting upcoming phrases like I had just read it yesterday, I finally realized the extent to which Sandberg's post resonated with me two summers ago.
One day, I copied her post into an email draft and read it from there. For whatever reason (probably during a busy morning) I started stripping out the lines which no longer applied. Sometime in late fall, I was down to one line:
'Pervasiveness - this does not have to affect every area of my life; the ability to compartmentalize is healthy.'
The next week, I chucked the email draft. Compartmentalizing, like any remedy, is healthy for a time. But when the time comes to move on, it's best to move on. I sensed it was time to fuse the separate pieces of me back together. From there, I could let the best I brought to my life outside of work start to make me a better worker.
Still, I suspected at the time this book would eventually come out. In a way, I've been waiting almost two years to read this. I'm looking forward to it a great deal.
I might even get around to it in August. Who knows?
In the next month of...True On Average...
1) Another post about a traffic light
2) Another post about a one-way street
3) I succumb to the madness of adding fractions
See you in August!
-July 2017
