1 Arthur Wren had stopped looking at himself in mirrors around the time other people stopped looking at him. He placed that somewhere in his early sixties, well before Maggie got sick. So he could not blame it on the grief. It was an arrangement that suited everyone. He shaved
Most organisations adopting OKRs today are using a tool built for engineering teams to solve problems that are not engineering problems. The framework works. It often works very well. It does not work everywhere. I spent the first part of my career as an internal auditor, and one of the
A few years ago I wrote here that better leadership, on its own, will not save us. I was deep into Cal Newport's A World Without Email at the time, and the book had me convinced of one thing: most of what we treat as a leadership problem
In 2024 we spent over three weeks clearing out my father's house. My father was, at the end of his life, a hoarder. Every cupboard was full. Every drawer was full. The cellar was so full that we didn’t even start emptying it, leaving it all to
Most government AI programmes are designed to fail. Not by intent, but by instinct. When a public organisation decides to build an AI initiative, it does what public organisations always do with new things they do not fully understand: it builds controls around them. Governance committees. Approval gates. Reporting requirements.
Stream of Consciousness
This is a fork of the excellent document written bij Michael Lopp, aka Rands in Repose, which you can find here. It is titled “How to … Rands”, and the credit for the idea and a lot of the content is entirely his. The article is a sort of introduction on
note taking
I love cursive writing. I always have. I was born into a generation that still had cursive writing drilled into them in school, and it is a great way to express your ideas, thoughts, and feelings at human speed. There is also a very tangible aspect to it: I have
Laurence Tratt wrote this interesting article on his blog two days ago. "Choosing what to read" as an article is more than worth your time reading it. It talks about making the best reading and opinion influencing choices in a world where we get overwhelmed with articles about
I'm getting deep into "A world without email", the new book by Cal Newport. Excellent read and in terms of insight eye-opening. If you want science supported insights into what works and does not in the workplace, this should be among the books you read
There's a lot going on around you ... what will you do about it? All around you, every single moment, "stuff" exists and "stuff" happens. I refer to it as "stuff" because it is undefined. And it is undefined because you haven'
Preface This post is inspired by an exchange with Nick Milo, who runs Linking Your Thinking. If you want to learn more about personal knowledge management (PKM) and more about PKM's within Obsidian, pay him a visit on his YouTube channel. Worth the time you'll invest.
Look at that computer I came from a time when internal auditors still worked with their hands ... writing cursive internal audit working papers, on paper, binding them all together with binding clips and being subject to a thorough or sometimes not so thorough manager working paper review. It was on
I am convinced there is something in an area of your life currently blocking you from moving forward in an intended direction. You may be aware of it or you may not, but I am almost certain it is there. This problem, this issue likely manifests itself as a sense
I am the proud father of two teenagers. And I see them suffering through the challenges of studying in the year(s) of COVID-19. In Flanders, we have defaulted to 50% in class and 50% at home learning. And it is during the at home learning that both my
I'm an avid podcast listener. One of these podcasts is Focused, hosted by David Sparks and Mike Schmitz. In the most recent episode they invited Ernie Svenson, a former lawyer turned entrepreneur. The entire episode was full of wisdom and I enjoyed listening to it. In one of
There are posts on this blog I’ve written in 20 minutes or even less. They are based on a straightforward idea that has formed in my mind. I merely have to copy those thoughts into coherent sentences to be able to publish. Those posts are few, but they exist.
Here's a pattern I've seen different people using, and I've used it myself: establishing multiple buckets for each of one's areas of responsibility and prioritising tasks within each of these buckets. At the face of it, it does make sense: we have
I was surprised, and not positively, when I realised that the level of awareness of the world our children have, is lower than the level we had at a similar age. This in spite of the many more sources of information available to them. To learn about the world, we