I’ve not really missed Calgary winters, which I left behind me 27 years ago by moving to Brisbane. I’ve been back in winter only three or four times over that quarter century. Maybe that says something.
This one coming up soon is a family holiday. We’ve put our order in for cold snowy days. Ten Australians are joining me on this trip, including four under fifteen. It will be so fun to experience snowy cold through people who have not grown up with it.
For me, it’s kind of ‘meh’.
For them, it’s all they’ve been talking about for months.

It’s time I’m more flexible with how and where I write my thoughts. This commitment to 100-words-a-day has been around for more than five years, though I certainly haven’t kept my commitment of writing 100 words every day. But there have been enough times that I wanted to, but because I was inflexible that it had to be at my laptop, and if the words didn’t come while I was at the laptop, I didn’t write that day.

This is what it looks like writing from an iPhone.
Oh, right, it doesn’t look any different to you. Good to know.

I received a call recently from an ex-colleague. We worked together many years ago on a construction project in western Queensland.
Early starts, long days, 28 days on/9 days off work cycle. You know the type of project: it had challenges and some great teamwork and many tough days, and there were good connections made.
That’s in my past now; but that phone call reminded me of those times, and how it all shapes and makes us. The projects, opportunities, successes, and failures: it’s all part of life.
The things you are doing today will become part of your past.

Logical and creative thinking are different activities.
To engage in logical arguments, we first need a solid proposition statement, a questionable idea, or a controversial concept.  That statement (or hypothesis) will either be accurate (true) or not accurate (false).  I reckon creative thinking can’t be so binary. For logic discussions, facts or details are presented, to build confidence and belief in the proposition. Eventually, with enough information and knowledge, a conclusion about the proposition can be made. Creative thinking can be…inconclusive.
For those leaning towards being logical, also remember there are creative individuals out there who don’t think that way.

An 8-year-old asked me, “what’s a deadline?”. Oh, the innocence of not knowing what a deadline is.
The origin of the word is from the mid-1800s, being an actual line around a prison that if a prisoner crossed it, well, that’s the deadline. I didn’t tell the 8-year-old that definition.
I wonder when it became a business term, now being a key tool used to motivate us to accomplish something by a certain date.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, “I love the whooshing sound deadlines make as they go past”. Fortunately, in this context, no one dies when they whoosh past.

Communicating by the written word is both fabulous, and fraught.
It is fabulous when the meaning of the sentence, chapter, or hundred words, makes an impact and we think a little differently.
It is fraught when the meaning of the sentence, chapter, or hundred words, is misinterpreted, badly presented, or just plain incorrect.
With writing, there are nuances, contexts and interpretations that are easily missed. And with AI taking over, this is even more fraught.
I think in the future, the spoken word (talking to each other) will become more important, more fabulous, and more fun. And probably fraught, too.

Working with procedures and standards over the years has enabled me to accept that there are many ways to interpret words, and even more ways to interpret combinations of words.
For example, whether a “report” and a “record” are, or aren’t, the same thing, can be the subject of a surprisingly amount of deliberation.
Procedure and standards writing needs to be precise, and at the same time, succinct. It’s an ongoing challenge for those of us writing the words. My hat’s off to those who are in the middle of these experiences: learn from it, and try to enjoy it.

There’s a lot of possibility in the question “what happened?”. If it’s being asked, then something must’ve happened. And if ‘something happened’, there’s a story to tell.
Many business books state the importance of storytelling.  There’s no doubt stories are an effective way to get the point across, to develop empathy, and to connect with teammates or subordinates.
This applies to technical discussions too.  Identifying and communicating “what happened” on projects, technical topics, and research makes it just a little more interesting to talk about. Using engaging stories helps to communicate the achievements and innovations that happen on every project.

In a learning phase, it’s important to also get experience with the topic, in addition to the ‘book’ knowledge.
Then, to solidify that learning, should you either a) get more experience in it, or, b) reflect, articulate and codify the experience already accumulated?

My instinct is to choose a) practise more.  But some research* shows, counterintuitively, that “reflection and review” is a superior mode of ‘bedding in’ knowledge. I was completely surprised by that finding.

Apparently, ‘reflection’ on new knowledge is better than more experience with it. Structured reflection (with someone else) is more valuable than taking another training course.

*Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning, G. Di Stefano et al, 2014.

Producing words and pictures is, in reality, the output most engineers or knowledge workers today end up doing.  Content writers, too.
To do good work on those words and pictures, to produce value, the writing and designing should get the attention they deserve.
For me to achieve that, I need to set meetings with myself. For a 90-minute block, or whatever, all I’m doing is writing that report, or editing that standard, or reading that article. For that block of time, that’s all I do. No emails, no scrolling, no admin.
When it’s time to go to work, do that.

There’s lots of advice out there that says, “slow down to accomplish more”. While that might be a way to do it, I like “Do one thing at a time” better. For every task or project we’re working on, there’s a lot of ‘administrative’ load in our brains. There are open loops the brain needs to keep track of. The more projects we’re working on at one time, the more of those open loops there are. It takes some practise, and effort, to restrict ourselves to one thing at a time. But, maybe paradoxically, it helps us get more done.

Reading and writing are immensely important human endeavours, human skills, and human communication methods. The widespread ability to read and write have catapulted us into the society we live in now.

On the other hand, maybe widespread reading and writing is getting out of hand, and maybe the advantages have peaked; maybe we’re on a downhill slide.

And then I turn my mind to AI and chatbots writing what we read. To me, that’s a real downhill slide. I’m starting to not trust everything I read. For authenticity, we might be headed back to more talking, less reading and writing.

I had a wide-ranging discussion today about competency: from managing scout leaders’ competence (working with children, taking them on bushwalks, camping), to finding safe cycling routes in Brisbane, to the challenges in ordering pipe for projects where the proponents haven’t ordered linepipe before.

The interesting insight was summarised by observing “boxing at shadows”. When we’re not experienced in something, we’re extra careful, to the point of distrust and wanting reassurance. We box at shadows. In contrast, when we’re experienced, we don’t need to box at those shadows, because they aren’t shadows anymore, not when you have the experience, or competence.

Primary economic activities include the harvesting, extraction, and/or collection of natural resources. Fruit and vegetables, meat, dairy, and agriculture generally are considered “produced”. Mineral and petroleum extraction fit into this group.

Manufacturing, or the secondary economy, uses raw materials for feedstock, combined with enormous amounts of energy, to make new products.

We manufacture millions of things, the list is endless: smart phones, plastic water bottles, solar panels, pens, laptops, eyeglasses, even food is manufactured now.

It’s complex, but also true: the manufacturing industry, which is making millions of products by the millions, has a pretty big impact on the environment.

[ Units / Time ]

If I need to read a large volume of text for a project, I can either track pages read (units), or, do I track time spent?

So, I could set a goal of reading, say, 30 pages a day (measuring units). Or, the goal could be reading for 30minutes a day (measuring time).

Measuring by time doesn’t measure output. In other words, to fully comprehend the content, 30 minutes of reading might only be 10 pages read. A goal of 30 pages might take me 3 hours.

I don’t have an answer. I have to get back to my reading.

[ Visible Progress ]

Something that many of us in the knowledge work environment don’t appreciate enough, is that the type of work we do (mostly revolving around emails and meetings), has the characteristic of not having “visible progress”.

I’ve often found myself wondering at the end of the day, just what did I accomplish? I mean, I’ve sent a dozen emails, sat in meetings, caught up with project members, and generally “done stuff”… but it’s hard to measure.

A key to job satisfaction is making progress visible. And celebrating it. I love the moment of crossing off things on my to do list.

“Just get started”. I’ve been saying that to myself for the past 3 weeks. Taking time off from habits means we must face starting up again.

Internal commitments of our own making, such as posting 100 words most days, or getting fitter, or eating better, or reading more, or any self-directed habit, take extra effort to re-start.

The mantra applies to any change we want to make: just start. The first time (or, coming back after a break), it will be difficult. It will be awkward and it will feel weird.

Just start. If you don’t start, you’ll never achieve.

I tend to start (restart) new things at the beginning of a week, or a month. So, when the calendar turned over to February 1st, 2024, that was my reminder to start up with the 100-words posts again.

This is my 6th year of 100-words posts. I can’t really call it “100-words-a-day” anymore, although that’s how it started, and I’ll still use that hashtag.

I can’t claim I will post every day anymore, but when I do a #100wordsaday post, it will be about something I’ve thought about that day, and the commitment is, it will be precisely 100 words.