Week 2: Back to work, still locked down.
Conscious Leadership, Tufte and
These are the topics of the first “real” week of 2021. Although I have to say it was a bit quieter than normal, many of my colleagues are still all over the world. The general news situation on earth was intense, and I wonder when we will have something like new normality.
These are the articles, books, and things that resonated with me last week:
Edward Tufte: Going through my library, I re-discovered my Edward Tufte books about visualizing information. I first discovered his works years ago when I was researching information visualization and was not happy with the tools I had at hand. Please spend a few minutes with his site, concepts, and presentations.
📖 Book - The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: In the same “let´s go through the library and see which books we have, which we want to let go and which we want to keep”-session I did with my sons, I rediscovered this book. When I first read it two years ago, I very much liked the ideas and philosophy of how leadership can work. After two years, some of the principles have been and are still part of my everyday work, and others I will implement deeper. This is one of my desk books for the next 4 weeks. (I always have up to 5 books on my desk that I pick up when I need a break/ interstitial).
📖 Book: Tribe by Sebastian Junger. After reading a third of the book, I switched over to Blinkist (use this deep-link if you have an account) because I wanted to get through it faster. I liked the romantic and nostalgic view on how some settlers in the 18th century in the US joined native Americans and their tribes. And the analysis that we in today’s world, miss our social circles and have a strong desire to belong. But I was a bit underwhelmed by the view of females and their roles. (No, I am not writing this because it is “fashionable.” Equality is one of my deep convictions.)
🕯Things: Santal 26 Candle. I like tech things and some art. I got this candle in late fall and put it on my desk (usually there is only my computer, keyboard, mouse, display, books, and sometimes a notepad and pen on it). Spending so many hours at this desk during lock-down, I really enjoy the candle.
Two WiFis at home: For a long time, we have two separate internet connections at home. One via telephone lines and the other one using cable tv. When all of us are at home, and the twins are attending their digital school classes, and Dina and I are both in video meetings, it is super handy to switch to another network. Especially when the network capacities are at capacity in our area of Berlin. Usually, one of the two networks works.
⏲ Things: my TimeTimer. It is super hard for me to resist interruptions of work. Some things get me into a flow state immediately, like writing something I care about or reading things I am interested in. And there are also quite a lot of things that need to be done (i.e., taxes, working to lots of emails). For both scenarios, I have been using different timers for years. When I start with the task, I “time-box” it by switching off all distractions as much as possible and set a timer for 20, 40, or 50 minutes and start. As I need change, I tend to switch timers once in a while. Right now, I am analog and use a small TimeTimer that shows me how much time is left. A kitchen Timer works perfectly well. If you want to get deeper into this: Pomodoro Technique
Things: 🦐 Garnelen Guemmer. (this one is in German) I really love living in Berlin. Our city is always “ready for more,” and when you can cope with its quirkiness and sometimes incompetence, life can be fun here. During the lockdown, we do family walks and discover new areas of the city. Last week we walked down to the Teltow-Kanal and then towards Steglitz. On our way back home, we saw a line of people cueing in front of a store. This is a rare sight in Berlin, and especially in this area of town, I had never seen a cue in front of anything. It was a shrimp store, and we thought people are buying shrimps and lobsters. But then we figured: It’s a specialty store where you can buy shrimp, crabs, and snails and all the equipment you need to “grow” them at home. Being a diver, I know how colorful they can be, but I was surprised to find a specialty store for this in my neighborhood and so many shrimp lovers that they had to cue in front of the store. I personally still rather want to see them in their natural habitat, but we had some fun times learning about “Schneckenpaket Scheibenklar” and “Neocaridina Paket 2”
📚I am reading this week: Re-Reading Make Time, reading Post Corona by Scott Galloway, and listening to William Gibson’s Agency.
This is it for this week. In case you are interested in my reading highlights: I am using readwise.io to aggregate my highlights, and there is an automatic weekly email you can subscribe to in case you are interested.
Enjoy the read, have a shrimp (literally…), and best until next week!
Joerg