Week 10:

Taking a week off

Next week I am taking a week off. We have conventional vacation day rules at APX. We can take 30 days of vacation every year, and we have until the end of March of the following year to use them if we do not need them during the calendar year they were supposed to be taken. As you probably have noticed, 2020 was strange. It was not easy to go on vacation. Especially not during the school holidays. We made two super nice road trips, but at the end of 2020, I still had some days left. I am convinced that the idea of vacation days is to decouple from work and recharge your batteries so that I will take my remaining days next week.

Unfortunately, everything is still locked down, and all hotels and campsites are closed, and the weather forecast is mediocre at best. My family cannot join me in multi day activities as they have to attend school. Also, I want to spend the weekends with them and have one non APX meeting in Berlin on Tuesday that I do not want to miss. This means I have 3 days to do something. I will take my camera and will go picture hunting while doing day hikes. Expect some pictures in next week’s email.

How have you spent your 2020 vacation days? What are your plans for 2021? Do you make plans for this year? We have decided not to make any plans for the first half of this year and will most likely be making road trips again. Maybe a multi-day hike.

How to get the most out of a network

Taking notes and following up: Joergs Perspective

Balancing your week

Finding the right balance between manager and maker time is one of the biggest challenges of my work life. There are so many people I want to meet and connect with and so many things I can only do when having time at my desk. I still have not figured out how to balance the time and create enough uninterrupted focus time blocks. I know; I could plan it in my calendar. But then I would have to send an email to people who ask for a meeting that sounds like: “great to hear from you! Let’s meet. The next free slot is in the second half of May”. I had a long conversation with my Sharpist coach about my extreme resistance to send emails like this.

Spring Cleaning

Are you spring cleaning? Like in your house or apartment and also in your virtual world? I am not a big fan of household chores, and I love the fact that we have a robot vacuum and someone who comes and cleans our place once per week. But in spring, I love the moments when we clean the windows and start a ritual of going through every room and putting all the books back into the shelves, getting rid of all the magazines and putting winter coats and shoes back into their boxes, or letting go of them. This brings spring energy to our place and life.

While doing this, I also do the same thing with my digital environments, devices and tools. I am cleaning up my ToDos and Emails a bit more radical than usual, and I also spend some time thinking about how I want to spend my working time and come up with a new set of “rules” Anne and I use to plan my time. This usually is something that happens during March. So I am in the middle of doing it right now. I tend to also think about the tools I use and get rid of some I have switched to and from over the past months.

This year I have:

• decided to use one computer only again. A few weeks ago, I had a business and a personal Laptop and liked the fact that I have two separate infrastructures. Over the past few weeks, I have used only one of the machines, and I felt excellent when I deleted and factory-installed my rather new MacBook Pro that I will take to the office tomorrow and give to Anne she can give it to someone who can actually use it.

• Concentrated my notetaking in roamresearch.com and am again and again amazed at what is possible with this tool. I am still figuring out how I can get extra info out of my notes using queries.

• Figured that I need two ToDo systems: Asana for working with APX and a personal one for my three daily ToDos I definitely want to achieve every day. I am switching between roamresearch.com and TeuxDeux.com right now.

• I went through all my subscriptions and canceled quite a few I do not need anymore. What helped me here quite a bit is having a list of things and services I subscribe to as a note.

• Emtpied my APX filing cabinet of lots of files and other things that had amassed over the past few years. I got rid of all business cards, conference badges that I collected and went through all the files and folders that I wanted to keep when I put them in the cabinet. What remained after an hour of cleaning over lunch are a few books, one folder, an ostrich pillow (might have to go in the end) and a wooden cup.

For now my feeling is that I do not need any material memories or things that stay with me when it comes to APX. This is a topic I have been thinking about for quite some time and also had fun discussions with a few people about: Can it be documented or better archived what APX and before it Axel Springer Plug and Play have been doing? The clear answer is: it depends. Of course it makes total sense for us to learn from what we do and build this into the tools and processes we are using every day, but the physical remains of what we do and how we do it are nothing we need to preserve. The only things that will live longer are the pieces of our art collection that were created by the artists who spent a few months with us. Ripping these pieces out of the context of our old office lets them work quite differently for me. Now their “decorative” character has more presence for me as their natural habitat is gone forever.

Negotiating salaries and other important calculations

a few years ago, at Axel Springer Plug and Play, we met Matteusz, the founder of Omnicalculator. He showed us his app, and we asked him: “This is cool. How many installs do you have?” His answer was something like “close to a million”. We invested, and Mat and his Team built more and more calculators you can use to do everyday calculations:

• this pay raise calculator might come in handy this time of the year.

• with this Impfterminrechner you can calculate when it is your turn to get the vaccination shot in Germany. (So far, it is a bit sad to use it)

• And this Hammock Hang Calculator might come in handy when needed.

If you are looking for something else you want to calculate: there are 1655 free calculators at Omnicalculator.

Things I read (and played) this week

• What is your future thing? Get some inspiration. With one click!

• Where am I? Play a round of GeoGuessr.

• German: This is a set of questions around life and other big and small topics. Absolutely worth checking out. Do you have answers to these questions?

Tomorrow I will have a long night of writing again and I will structure my thoughts and concepts around my book.

Thank you for reading my newsletter and have a great week! If you like my newsletter please feel free to share it with friends.

Best

Joerg