So I’ll be on vacation Monday and you won’t see anything from me except Monday’s post which is already good to go. In fact, you probably won’t see anything the week after either because I usually do it the week before.

No, I’m not going to rush through things, I’m just going to take a vacation and some work won’t get done.

You should do the same.

If you’ve found my content helpful then new in 2019 I’ve opened up a Patreon page. You can help ensure that more helpful content keeps coming.

I Shipped

Content this week was a big one starting with Monday where I walked through all the ways to capture information with DEVONthink To Go. Read or watch it here.

I also wrote a review of Quiet by Susan Cain. Overall, great book and I resonated with much of what she had to say. I’m an introvert and I don’t do group work. I sit in my office and research/read/code and then send it off to readers and clients.

Friday Five

1. After work there is still all the chores to do for working families

From Screentime Age:

At three, most families choose Community preschool programs, which often only run for two hours a day. Kids go to another child care provider after this. Then when parents come home after working a full day they are still left with all of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and housework to do. Schools typically have at least 10 weeks of vacation/break time throughout the year. If parents split time off to reduce expenses for camps and childcare, they are LUCKY to be able to spend a few days together, as a family, without jockeying work, home, and all the other things of life. Plus, many parents worry that our streets/neighborhoods are not safe for children to just go out and play in.

We do some of this splitting as parents. I work early till about 3pm most days of the week and then my wife goes to work as a figure skating coach until about 8pm most nights. That does leave each of us “solo” parenting for their chunk of the day most of the year.

She gets about 6 weeks off as spring ice ends before summer ice begins. Then there are another 4 weeks of from the end of summer ice to the start of fall ice.

I have certainly been finding myself tired at the end of a long day (where I did dip in and out of some chores and helping with the kids because I work at home) and letting the TV attract the attention of the kids. I do this more often than I want, but…I feel so tired at the end of the day. At least that’s my excuse.

Overall, good post on the challenges parents face as they hear about the ills of screentime, but wonder how on earth they get the basics done while keeping their kids away from screens.

2. Always Enough Work

You will always be able to find enough work to skip your run.

There will always be one more thing to do so you can’t go watch your kid swim or skate or play basketball.

There is always one more email that will entice you to keep your laptop open instead of curling up with your spouse and talking about nothing.

Running a business is not a reason to not have a life.

3. Business Dashboard and Metric Advice

Good post from Segment about how to measure your metrics so that you don’t get caught up in vanity metrics and so that you have something useful. If you can’t look at your numbers and make changes to improve those numbers then you have bad numbers.

4. Cal Newport: Sorrow and Pleasure of no Screen

Find the whole article here but this is what stood out to me.

She ended up cancelling the Netflix subscription she previously relied on to escape from life.

It stood out because I’ve been thinking seriously about it for a while now. I guess I should talk to my wife about cutting the Netflix subscription for the summer? We’d still have over 200 movies via iTunes and our DVD collection to watch if we wanted to watch something.

I guess that’s a discussion for tomorrow[^ I’d say tonight, but my wife works tonight from the time I get home until the kid’s bedtime.].

5. Extra Complexity Everywhere

I’m very much looking forward to the rest of what Jamie will write about…writing. Today’s start is a good rumination on writing getting so much more complex.

I’m going through some issues around this right now as well as I try to get out of software lock-in so that I can have as open a writing process as possible.