Workflows Before Rainbows

https://workflowsbeforerainbows.pika.page/ (RSS)
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🪴 How can our tech be more easeful?
24 Jan 2025 | original ↗

Today I set up 1Password, Kagi, and Fastmail exactly the way I wanted them across three different browsers. Then, while searching for how to get rid of unread counts in...

🪴 The Observer Effect
22 Jan 2025 | original ↗

I sent the link to this blog to a handful of friends yesterday. I wrote that it had felt delicious to write in here without anyone knowing about it, but...

📖 Reading: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
21 Jan 2025 | original ↗

“A good strategy defines a critical challenge. What is more, it builds a bridge between that challenge and action, between desire and immediate objectives that lie within grasp. -- from...

🌈 Getting serious about ease
21 Jan 2025 | original ↗

Now is a time to get deeper in our understanding of what is easeful for us. Be ruthless in discerning what works for you. Separate that which is uncomfortable because...

🪴 What do we owe our own archives?
21 Jan 2025 | original ↗

I’ve just finished redoing my website, and I’m thrilled for it to become a container for my various projects. I took Kening Zhu’s wonderful house on the webs course, which...

🐚 Context is everything.
4 Jan 2025 | original ↗

And maybe that’s why I’m struggling to figure out where I want my online life to take place. Here, on Pika? Maybe. I bought a new URL so that I...

🐚 I still can’t figure out my website.
30 Dec 2024 | original ↗

I’ve been cheating on you, Pika. Pika, the site that started it all. In August, when I typed in some sort of search about whether there was any kind of...

🐚 Frozen concentrate when you could serve it fresh
25 Nov 2024 | original ↗

I haven’t written for myself in a long time. I haven’t written for others in a long time. I’ve written my secret blogs. They exist in a parallel space where...

🐚 I’ve missed writing here
24 Nov 2024 | original ↗

I’ve missed writing here. I love the minimal but robust editor, the fact that it has smart typography, the little cursor in my chosen contrast color. I’ll be honest —...

🌱 When was the last time you explained something to someone?
25 Oct 2024 | original ↗

When was the last time you explained something to someone? Did you do so willingly? With the excitement of mutual discovery? Did you do so grudgingly, perhaps because they’d never...

🐌 So many ideas, so little time
23 Oct 2024 | original ↗

I have too many thoughts this evening. I read a lot while I was nursing, but instead of letting it slosh through my mind, I read with the intent of...

🐚 Ramblings about syntax
22 Oct 2024 | original ↗

I spent a shocking amount of time thinking about websites lately. Although not as much time as I spend looking at them. Scrolling, skimming, occasionally stopping to notice a design...

🐚 Sequencing
21 Oct 2024 | original ↗

I’m a huge fan of Michelle Warner’s Sequence Over Strategy podcast. Her newsletter is great, too. She chooses stories from her own life to illustrate her main points about business design....

📖 Reading: Influence Is Your Superpower
19 Oct 2024 | original ↗

Zoe Chance’s Influence is Your Superpower hooked me in the first few pages. I figured if she knew how to craft such a good opening, she might have something to...

📖 Reading: Several Short Sentences About Writing
19 Oct 2024 | original ↗

Verlyn Klinkenborg thinks we’re wrong about sentences. What they are. What they do. How to make them. His core argument comes early: “There are innumerable ways to write badly. The...

🐚 What even is a newsletter anymore?
18 Oct 2024 | original ↗

I loved Robin Rendle’s piece—what might you even call a presentation like this? A visual essay? In any case, the presentation was well considered and inspiring. Robin writes of the...

🐚 Shoulds
16 Oct 2024 | original ↗

Today I found myself awash in a sea of shoulds. No, not awash. Capsized. Feeling myself sinking and without the energy to do much about it. Despite all prior experience,...

🌱 Is my blue your blue?
16 Oct 2024 | original ↗

Who knew an Ikea rug would spark such an existential crisis? Ours is a color-block rug, with stripes loud enough for a child’s room, but sophisticated enough for the living...

🌈 Welcome to Workflows Before Rainbows
2 Oct 2024 | original ↗

Today I watched the Steve Jobs Apple iPhone launch video after hearing Nancy Duarte’s TED talk explaining that all great presentations have the same structure: they move back and forth...

🌱 Lessons from the Cisco Icon Set
1 Oct 2024 | original ↗

In slide:ology, a book that deserves its own post, Nancy Duarte writes that Cisco, the computer systems company, created a set of icons in the 1980s for describing server relationships,...

🐚 The caterpillar forgets how to walk
30 Sept 2024 | original ↗

I’ve made things too complicated again. It’s almost like, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, except for online presence. I got this secret blog, but then I wanted a secret...

🐚 Visualize Value?
27 Sept 2024 | original ↗

I've been mainlining Visualize Value this evening. I love his images, but I'm not sure if it's for me. Are abstract concepts more dignified when they remain abstract? Who am...

🐚 Kill your darlings
24 Sept 2024 | original ↗

How did it happen that I wrote nearly every day in August, but hardly at all in September? It wasn’t that I was busy. I was busy then, I’m busy...

🐚 So easy to make an e-book!
23 Sept 2024 | original ↗

Today I worked on formatting my book to be an e-book. I used Atticus.io and it was much easier than I expected. I thought it might take weeks! I was...

🌱 Interruptibility is a superpower
23 Sept 2024 | original ↗

Last week, I wrote three conference abstracts while pausing about every half-sentence to interact with my toddler. “This workshop will— “Yes, it’s a pink circle.” —help participants to expand and...

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