One of my favorite stories when I was a kid was the Greek myth of Icarus, son of Daedalus, master craftsman who created the Labyrinth. They were both stuck in Jail so Daedalus built Icarus a pair of wings to escape. But Icarus flew too close to the sun and the wax which held the wings together melted.
This story is an example of something called the Golden Mean...learning to hold the middle between two extremes. Not jail and Not the sun, but learning to focus on the middle path that leads to balance and success. The story and philosophy has always appealed to me.
I struggle to keep that balance, but it does help that I really love what I do, and that to me, there's nothing more exciting than learning new things.
The Enemy of the Good
One of the other ways you may have heard of the Golden Mean is through this saying
The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
Trying to build something perfect prevents you from launching something good or great. I've been on a journey in the past couple of years to work on a ton of different things. Mainly, streaming, but also improving on my daily process for getting things done. A journey of improving is a constant struggle.
I'll give you an example. I've been working on my own blog for what seems like an eternity and if you've worked on the web, you know that change is so common that almost every time I go write a blog post, I feel like I should update something.
For example, It uses an old version of Vue.js, not the latest version of Bootstrap and there's always some module that needs updating. I could go over all the things that are wrong on this site, but focusing on the problems doesn't help.
This week, I added a new section called shorts. When I first started posting regularly, I didn't know what to post about. But I knew that I often bookmarked things that I enjoyed, so I started posting about those. Something that often bothered me is that both Twitter and LinkedIn posts have a super short lifespan.
Honestly, sometimes I can't find a post that I enjoyed, so shorts was a way to quickly turn the posts into more content. That content will be in the Toolbox and you'll see some of it below.
Processes, not Problems
So, what do I do? Not worry about it too much. I try to write down the things I need to do and when I have some free time (hahahaha), I fix little things. If I have to do a course on Bootstrap migration, that's a great time to update my site. It gives me practical knowledge on something I need to do anyways.
This week, Bootstrap launched a new version of their platform (Bootstrap 5.1). I just turned in the course for how to deal with the 5.0 updates on the weekend. I had to turn around new videos on the changes right away, so I spent some time learning the new things as usual (my job) and could have gone to writing scripts for the new videos. What I did instead is jump into a live stream and talk about the changes.
I took something that was a normal task and turned it into content. I worked and recorded the new videos and next week, when I do a new stream, I'll have content for the stream based on some of the new videos I just finished.
Invest in Processes not Problems
If you're just focused on fixing problems, you'll end up on a temporal loop that deals with small things over an over, you'll forget about organizing your work so that you can become more efficient. It's one of the reasons I like using Kanban Boards instead of ToDo apps, why I write in Markdown instead of Word.
It took me just as long to use the stream as part of my research process that I normally do anyways. I feel like this is the way that I should be changing my process to make streams a more natural part of what I'm already doing.
The Toolbox Episode 03
While I was going through all the work, I found this awesome markdown based tool called Obsidian. It started to change I organize everything I do. It's more than just a writing tool, but it lets you write everything in Markdown locally.
So my next toolbox episode (sign up for a reminder) will be about this tool and how it's changing my life. How I'm organizing my processes to take advantage of how this tool is saving me time and re-writing my brain.
The Shorts
Speaking of which, here's some of my new shorts I talked about. It's super easy to add these, but remember you can always find and search for them on the site.
Introducing the World Wide Web
The web is now 30 years old and this page has some awesome stats and info. 60% of the world is online. 81% of Americans log on a daily basis, 69,444 users apply for jobs and much more.
HTML2Canvas
This module lets you add screenshot capture of whole pages or parts of a page to your projects using JavaScript. It's DOM based, so it might not be 100% accurate, but still cool as heck.
Github CodeSpaces
This had been a long time coming. Github is now available for Teams and Enterprise. The beta remains until they announce a personal option. They reduced the startup time to 10 seconds and Github itself is dogfooding how they build things. For them it went from 45 minds to the 10 seconds mentioned above.
Markdown Presentation Ecosystem
You know I'm a big fan of markdown and reveal.js, but this markdown presentation as an ecosystem sounds pretty cool. I don't feel like I'm going to be moving rayveal.js anytime soon, but it might be worth a look.