I used to have a tradition that I called Saturday writing day. These Saturdays got their start at the gym. I’d then shower at the gym then head over to the Mosaic District for a nice big breakfast and then find a spot to spend my day writing. I wrote many of my past articles this way.
Here’s what I miss about writing in a public place:
Continue reading “3 things I miss about writing in a public place”
Increasingly, over the past few months, my personal email — a Gmail account — I’ve had since the beginning is almost useless due to spam. Combined with my lingering issues over the Gmail UI, I reconsidered and got myself a Hey.com account. It still has the new email account smell.
Here are some of the joys I’m rediscovering with a fresh email account:
Over the years, my Gmail and willkelly.com emails became intermingled, mostly when I was a freelance writer. Since day 1, I use my Hey.com for only personal email. It’s not for pitches. It’s not for my opensource.com contributions either.
Recently, I used my Hey.com email to sign my Mom up for her Covid vaccination. Using a clean email account gave me confidence that these most important emails wouldn’t get lost in the spam repository that my personal Gmail account has become.
I went back and forth over whether to purchase a Hey.com email account. The email experience has long been ruined for me because of spam. While I didn’t quite get the filtering features during my Hey.com trial, I’ve come to appreciate them after seeing them in action.
Hey.com does restrict you to their email client, which feels like a step backward somehow. The bright spot is that the Hey.com user interface is relatively novel, with many of the same design sensibilities I enjoy using Basecamp.
During the pandemic, I’ve been fine-tuning my personal technology stack the whole time. My personal attitude about apps is that the application work for me, I don’t work for the application. So while I’m the first person to experiment with a new application, it needs to be easy to use.
Here’s how my current pandemic tech stack looks:
Continue reading “My COVID-19 Tech Stack: It’s all about Communications and Collaboration”
The last eleven months of the pandemic have played havoc with my sleep. It’s typical for me to wake up at some point during the night and then roll over and go back to sleep. In pandemic times, there are times I wake up wired, and just know I won’t be falling back to sleep. Here are some things I do when I can’t sleep:
Continue reading “10 things I do when I can’t sleep: Pandemic edition”
Rolling past nine months of working at home during a pandemic has been a lesson in maintaining productivity for me. For years, I would pride myself on being able to spend the day writing, head to the gym, then come home and write some more until it was time to sleep. Rinse. Repeat.
The pandemic changed all that for me (and lots of others too). Here are some things I do to maintain my productivity during this time:
Continue reading “My search for peak productivity in a pandemic”
