Even though I have been blogging at DocumentSnap for quite a while, I’ve never taken much time to make my writing more productive. That’s all changed in the past few weeks, and I’ve started looking for ways to make my workflow more efficient.
Various DocumentSnap readers had been recommending Hazel to me for quite some time, but I had never gotten around to checking it out until I finally decided to write a post about using Hazel in a paperless workflow.
Since writing that post and listening to the Mac Power Users podcast about it, I have become a complete Hazel addict. I’m now actively trying to find more and more things to Hazel-ify on my Mac.
So I got to thinking, how can I use Hazel to speed up blogging?
At the same time as getting in to Hazel, I’ve started using Jon Gruber’s Markdown syntax. In the past, I wrote either in the Wordpress admin interface or in ecto, but the latter kept losing posts and it was driving me nuts.
Recently I switched to writing everything in a text editor using Markdown, which I am completely loving. I started using TextWrangler, but now I have switched to WriteRoom which I had gotten free in a MacHeist bundle a long time ago.
WriteRoom is great by the way. Here’s a screenshot of this post as I am writing this (how meta):
Since my switch to WriteRoom, I had to figure out a way to run Markdown against my text files and I thought “hey, why not use Hazel?”. Here’s what I did.
Create a rule to run Markdown
Since I save all my Markdown’ed posts as .txt file in a folder, I set up a Hazel rule to watch that folder for anything .txt. If it finds it, it runs the Markdown perl script against it and outputs it to an .html file. Here’s a screenshot of the rule:
Clean up the old html files
I don’t really care to keep around the .html files because I can just let Hazel re-generate them in the unlikely event that I need the file again. I decided to keep them around for a week, so here is my rule for that:
Post to the web
If I was using something like TextMate, I could use the blogging bundle to post online. But for now, I just copy and paste the contents of the .html file into Wordpress or Tumblr admin interface and then add in the images there.
What’s next?
I am pretty I can improve the workflow of adding images to the posts instead of manually uploading them to the admin interface and adding them into the post there. That’ll be next I think.
Do you have any good tips for making writing for the web more efficient? I’d love to hear them.
I know they’re the biggest band in the world, and I like a few songs, and sure they have a good album here and there (War springs to mind), but I just have never gotten into them.
Back in the early 90’s in my band-tshirt phase, I saw a hilarious (not really, but it seemed funny at the time) anti-U2 shirt at Lyle’s Place in Victoria and decided I had to have it.
One fateful night, I wore it to a Sloan show at the historic but now sadly defunct Harpo’s Cabaret.
All was going well until an angry young woman stormed up to me. Our conversation went something like this:
Her: “Why are you wearing that shirt?” Me: “I don’t know. I just don’t like U2” Her: “What do you have against Bono?” Me: “Nothing, I’m just not a fan.” Her: (glaring) “Jealousy will get you nowhere!” (storms off)
My friends, particularly Kimli, have been getting comedy mileage out of that night ever since.
I tell this story not only to give an example of how spectacularly bad my record of talking to girls at bars is, but because I’ve come to find throughout my career that the young Chris Murphy-groupie-wannabe that night may have been wise beyond her years.
Smoke And Mirrors
How many times have you admired a person or an organization, and later found out that it was all smoke and mirrors?
You KNOW these businesses. These are the ones who have a great online or social media presence and appear to be helping a lot of people, but in reality they are foundering along, not really making any money and at risk of crumbling at the first sign of trouble
I personally have been guilty of this so many times. I’ve looked at people or organizations with borderline jealousy, and then found that things were not quite what they seemed. Here’s a few examples.
(By the way, by using these examples I am in no way trying to make light of their troubles. Giving it a try and failing is a lot better than sitting around not doing anything.)
The Java Shop With No One To Serve It To
When I was in school, most development companies in town worked with Microsoft technologies. One night on the local news, I saw a story about a Vancouver company that was working with Java. The reporter gushed at the cutting edge technology the company worked with, their beautiful office with the expensive barista-style espresso machine, and all the awards that the company was winning.
I decided I was only going to get a job as a Java developer, and worked like crazy and talked my way into a job at the company that I had seen on the news.
The problem? This company had a product that didn’t really work, no real customers, and some borderline shady stock stuff going on.
The whole house of cards crashed down 9 months after I started.
Oh, those “Best Product” awards? They were all industry and trade show awards that were bought and paid for.
The Social Media Superstars
There was a company that was all over the local tech scene. They had a cool innovative business with cutting edge technologies (I thought), and I dreamt it would be so cool to be involved with them. It didn’t seem like they could do any wrong.
It turns out that the whole thing was a financial mess with poor business processes, lack of planning, and mismanagement, and is completely gone now.
The Financiers With Limited Finances
A local startup incubator was highly admired in the city, and hosted (and continues to host) a number of events.
How cool would it be to be involved with a startup incubator?
Not very cool for the companies that had to be kicked out of the program when a funding crunch came, and the way that the founders publicly responded was as criticized as the funding issues itself.
Ask Questions. Lots of Questions.
There are lots more examples, but you get the point. As I said before, my goal is not to pile on to the examples I gave here, but to recommend that whenever you think the grass is greener, just make sure it isn’t GrassBGreen.
I personally now ask a lot of questions about whatever situation I am thinking about going into, and always consider the motivations of the people who are answering.
Also, I worry about what I am doing, and not what other people are up to. If we’re meant to work together we will, and if not, that’s cool too.
My wife and I have a thing for Portland. I don’t know what it is exactly, but we love it there and usually go a few times a year without the kids for some R&R (the tax free shopping doesn’t hurt either).
Usually we do the Priceline game, but this last time we decided to splurge a bit and stayed at The Nines hotel. (Since we are cheap, by splurge I mean drop $110/night on Hotwire instead of $60-80 on Priceline). We loved The Nines by the way. It will probably be our default Portland stay from now on.
Since I am an extreme morning person and my wife is not, usually the way our trips go is I will wake up early in the morning and then, not wanting to disturb her, I will go for a walk or go hang out in the hotel lobby to read.
On our latest stay, the first morning I was in the lobby reading Linchpin, and noticed a hotel employee walking through the lobby on her way somewhere. All of a sudden she stopped, and I watched what she was up to.
She went into the little sitting area you see in the photo and adjusted the green chair. One of its’ legs had gone off the carpet. She straightened the chair, then went on her way doing whatever it was she was heading off to do.
I found this pretty remarkable for a few reasons. First of all, I was sitting right near the chair and didn’t even notice anything wrong with it. Obviously she saw something “off” and corrected it.
Second, as a guest, even if I had chosen that chair to sit, it would have taken me zero effort to move it up to the carpet. I wouldn’t have thought “This is the worst hotel ever!”, but still in the back of my mind something would have been “off”.
Third, as far as I could tell it wasn’t her job to be working the lobby. She was just passing through. However, she saw something that would cause her guests discomfort (a chair with one leg off the carpet), and stopped to correct it.
It’s difficult enough to get employees to do what they are supposed to be doing, let alone the little extra things that can make a big difference to your customers. Whoever manages The Nines has obviously figured out how to do it.
I’ve decided to set a goal for myself that has nothing (directly) to do with business, money, or anything related to the normal sort of things that people set goals for.
I’ve decided that I want to memorize all the countries in the world.
Why On Earth Would You Want To Do That?
It’s not a bad question. There are a bunch of reasons why. A small subset of them are:
Pursuing something meaningful and keeping track of it with numbers is fun and addicting. The numbers help to keep things in context
When I was a kid I used to be really, really into geography and it bothers me a bit that I have lost that
Once in my old job while meeting with a very, very, senior executive, we were talking about a country in Africa and I was upset to realize I didn’t know where it was
Another excellent question. Since I have to pick some criteria, I’m going to go with the list of United Nations Member States.
However, since that list doesn’t include Taiwan and I have many Taiwanese friends, I will include them too. :)
What Will You Use To Memorize Them?
I probably won’t be doing any fancy mnemonic tricks, though I am sure that would help.
What I’ve decided to do is do little mini blog posts on each country in the world, and then test myself using Lizardpoint’s geography tests or something similar.
Why the blog posts? I am someone that learns by writing, so I figure why not write about each country. Seems like a fun project. They won’t be indepth in any way (I don’t have time for that), but hopefully writing each one out will beat them into my brain.
The blog posts will be a on Memorize The World, the Tumblr blog I have set up for this project.
In case you’re wondering why I am posting all this at all, I figure that if I do this process in public, I’ll force myself to stick to it. So you all have permission to mock and shame me if I fall off the rails.
The other day I was having drinks with some friends/former co-workers, and after the obligatory round of workplace gossip, the subject of what I am up to now inevitably came up.
A friend (who I am sure will read this) said “People have been asking me what you are up to so I told them about DocumentSnap. They weren’t impressed.”
My initial beaten-into-me-by-14-years-in-the-workplace reaction was to be upset and offended, but then I started to think about what a huge mindshift it is going from corporate life to self-employment.
In corporate life it is about who has what title, where they sit, how much they make, and (real or manufactured) status.
In self-employment life it is about doing what interests and inspires you, and of course making a living from that.
While it is entirely possible that my days of working with the largest companies in the world are behind me, I didn’t get a huge amount of feedback like this in my former job:
This isn’t about a particular post, and I hope my gushing doesn’t embarrass Brooks. I assure you, his readers, that my only relationship with him is as a subscriber. I just want to say that I so appreciate the way Brooks goes about his business here in the blog and in his educational materials: with humility and modesty, humor and incredible clarity; without condescension (and therefore with respect for us); without being insider-y; with the softest of soft sells when he mentions his availability as a consultant or how buying a scanner via clicking on a link here will “buy me a drink” (but how you have other, valid options!); and just with a generally earnest, trying-to-be-helpful outlook. He deserves kudos written better than this, but better this than nuthin’, I hope. What I read between the lines is a really good person; I sure wish his traits were more common. Thanks much, Brooks, and best of luck with all your continuing and new endeavors (or even, out of respect for Canada, endeavours!).
So there you go. I’m pretty cool with the way things are now, impressive or otherwise. :)
Mark’s post is about startups (and is from the perspective of the startup hiring someone away), but it made me think about the way that I left and how it relates/differs to Mark’s post.
Some relevant things about my situation that will frame what I’m going to write here:
I had been at the company for 7 years
I started on the front lines of my department and worked my way up to lead it
When I started, it was a small Vancouver company, and it had been bought out and merged into a 55,000 person global organization
I was (and still am) close personal friends with my boss, who started in her new position at the same time that I was leaving mine
I was (and still am) close personal friends with many people who reported to me (that’s a subject for another post)
My “right hand woman” who had been with me since the beginning also left at around the same time
I was not leaving for another job (also a subject for another post)
You Gave How Much Notice?
It was two-and-a-half months notice between when I first told my new boss that I was leaving, and my final day.
Yes, you read that correctly - I gave two and a half months’ notice.
There are a number of reasons for my decision here, not all of them I need to go into, but it essentially came down to:
Loyalty to my friend/boss
Loyalty to my awesome employees
Large companies can take a long time to move on personnel issues, and I wanted to make sure there was time to sort out my replacement
We wanted to reduce the impact of having multiple people leave at once
My role and department had a lot of moving parts and I wanted to make sure everything was transitioned properly
There were some transition things going on anyways that I wanted to see through
Give An Inch….
Here is what Mark says about giving extended notice:
Nothing good has ever come out of a potential employee staying longer at their previous company. It’s more time that they can be flipped into staying. They’re always guilted into staying longer than they should.
Mark’s insight is quite interesting and, in my experience at various companies, very true.
In my own case here, the longer I was there during those two months, the more reasons were presented by the organization for why I should stay. On their face they were all absolutely valid reasons, and the longer the “notice period” went on, the more valid they seemed.
Would I Do It Again?
Would I give an almost 3 month notice again? Probably not. All the reasons I gave for my extended notice were absolutely valid and everything worked out fine, but there is just something “weird” about that period between when your leaving becomes public knowledge and you actually leave.
When it is the normal 2 weeks notice it is fine, but when you start talking months you are in a pretty difficult situation, especially when you have staff.
I was just lucky that my team was awesome and they didn’t make it too hard, but it certainly could have gone the other way.
Explaining Why You Are Leaving
Mark is pretty unequivocal that you should never, ever, get into why you are leaving. You should just say you are leaving for “personal reasons” and leave it at that:
The most common mistakes people make is telling their employer why they were >unhappy. This accomplishes nothing.
Only two outcomes – 1) they’re bitter about the things you told them needed to >improve. […]
2) They use what you’re unhappy about as a means to convince you to stay. […]
So my script for employees is to say, “I’m leaving for personal reasons. I loved my time at YourCo. I learned so much. I grew. I build fantastic friends and I’ll always be part of the alumni club. But it was just time for me to move on to another opportunity. It wasn’t YourCo. It was me. I was ready for the change.
I totally agree that you need to be very, very careful what you say when you are leaving.
I knew someone who exited his job by leaving a 6 page report on everything that was wrong in the company. That is definitely not advisable.
Having said that, I think that a lot of it depends on your position, influence, and your reasons for leaving.
It is possible to leave and recommend some areas for improvement. You are not helping the people you are “leaving behind” if you leave with big elephants standing there in the room.
It is possible (I believe) to leave while giving “helpful suggestions” if they are tactful, without blame (or names), and done in the spirit of suggesting improvement rather than complaining.
It is an art though, so if you are not the sort of person that is good at walking that particular tightrope, stick with Mark’s advice. You can never go wrong with “personal reasons”.
So, how about you. Any good leaving your job stories? Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Welcome to Dropping Keys, the personal blog of Brooks Duncan (that’s me). I’m quite possibly the last person on Earth to have a personal blog, but that’s cool with me if it is cool with you.
You can find out more about me on my About page, but very briefly, I am a former accountant/computer programmer/software support manager who recently left the corporate world to strike out on my own.
For those that don’t know me from my corporate life, I’m probably best known for the DocumentSnap blog, where I post tips and strategies for going paperless.
Why Is The Blog Called Dropping Keys?
Good question. The inspiration for the title came from this post by Chris Guillebeau, where he posted this poem by Hafiz, a 14th century Sufi poet:
The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.
That pretty much describes how I have tried to approach my career this far (er, the sage, not the small man), and my goal for the future is, again as Chris says, to “build fewer cages; drop more keys.”
What Will I Be Posting Here?
This blog will be mostly a way for me to get stuff out of my head that I am thinking about.
Since I just finished up a number of years managing people and have experience working in large corporates, small dying startups, government, and family businesses, a lot of my posts will probably be about work, management, entrepreneurship, and stuff like that.
Since I also have two boys, I will probably post some family stuff too, who knows. I promise not to post about my cat (especially since I don’t have one). We shall see!
If there’s anything you want me to write about in particular, feel free to drop a comment or send me an email. Thanks for reading!
My wife and I have a thing for Portland. I don’t know what it is exactly, but we love it there and usually go a few times a year without the kids for some R&R (the tax free shopping doesn’t hurt either).
