February was a really tough month for a lot of reasons at work and in personal life, too. Despite the challenges, I started to write about my Notion templates I have built over the last couple years, a topic I am really exited about. In Chicago, it’s largely been spring-like temperatures and rain instead of snow which has allowed me to be outside for walks a bit more than usual.

Posts

• January 2023 Review

• Goals

• How I Use Notion to Manage My Work Week

• How I Use Notion to Manage People

Books

• You’ve Been Played, by Adrian Hon - A fascinating dive into gamification of everything, the science behind it and some of the good and bad ways its being used today.

• Endurance, by Scott Kelly - I’ve always been fascinated by space and astronauts, and remember following the Kelly brothers when they were active at NASA. This is a great book to see insights into what its like to be an astronaut. I am usually enamored by the systems and checks that NASA enforces for their work - everything is documented, cross referenced and redundancies to fall back on.

Links

• The Use/Reuse Paradox - Usability vs. reusability is a design trade-off. Increasing one reduces the other. Great musings on something that has been on my mind lately.

• How to spend your first 30 days in a new senior-level role - Addressing the first 30, 60, 90 days in a new senior leadership role and what to avoid doing while building trust.

• Val.town - I saw this over on Tom MacWright’s blog where he is building a new tiny api without the servers and fuss type service. I am looking forward see what this evolves into.

• From Overwhelming to Intuitive: Effective Data Table Design - I’m a sucker for good data design, and over on Muzli they posted a whole write up on do’s and dont’s for displaying data in tables. Worth a read to challenge yourself if you can improve your own designs.

Other

• Took a quick trip to Washington D.C. this month and visited a couple breweries. Had a great time exploring the city since the last time I was there in 2007.

• A couple months ago, I got this cocktail smoking kit, and I have been having a lot of fun making some smoked old fashioned at home.