Goodbye 2021

A lot of really good things happened to my projects and goals this year, I went over some of them in a recent podcast episode, you can listen to that here if you missed it. You really should follow the podcast, just saying.

Hello 2022

So what am I doubling down on this year?

That is where the keyword Reduction comes into the picture.

Reduction

Don’t worry, this has more to do with the way I do things, you might not even notice any changes on my sites, podcasts, videos, or projects. Although we will get to projects in a minute.

Last year, I experimented with lots of different tools. Both hardware and software ranged from workflows to content creation. This year, thanks to those experiments I have reduced my tools and workflows to ones that I think enable me to make the quality I’m aiming for and reduce my brain minutes to more making than managing.

As a content producer that is a very important point that I want to emphasize. We should spend more time making things than we do managing how we make those things. Both are important. However, actual making should have a greater percentage of time and brain attention than managing the making, in my opinion.

Another key part of reducing the areas of coverage is looking at automation where it makes sense and can be applied. Here are a few examples that you may want to consider and I have successfully automated.

Follow-up tasks when posting new content

For example, sending a post to social media platforms or messaging apps.

Email management

This one takes a little work and planning. However, thanks to SaneBox I have wrestled my email inbox to show me only the things that need my attention more urgently than anything else. Everything else gets filtered into separate places for me to view as appropriate. For example, newsletters and receipts.

File management

Not a day goes by that I am not downloading or creating something. That generates files, those files only need to be around just long enough for the task at hand. After that, they are either archived in an appropriate place or destroyed.

Source Code

There really is no need for me to keep local copies of source code when I’m not needing it, gone are the days of needing hard drives full of files. We have more than enough reliable cloud options available to us. So I am moving all code to repositories, some public and some private. Now I just pull down code as and when I need it, then push the updated code to the cloud. This has the added benefit of running further automation like code checking and publishing. It also makes it very easy to use across multiple machines always have the latest version available.

Let it begin

As the first week of January 2022 ends, let’s get this thing started. See you in the Web sphere folks!