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Weeknotes #15: autumn and proactive engagement

A cairn of pumpkins in a sunny pumpkin patch

Batching tasks

A couple months ago I read “Make Time” by John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp, which encourages you to choose a “highlight”, or a daily priority to focus on above all else. A highlight should take 60–90 minutes. One of the authors’ suggestions was to batch smaller tasks and use that as a highlight. I batched some to-dos I was dragging around into a few buckets: home-based tasks, errands, phone-based tasks, and online tasks. I found that working in batches is extremely satisfying, because you can knock a whole bunch of things out at once, instead of scheduling 1–2 per day and feeling cruddy when you have to reschedule them time and again.

Proactive collective action

Learning that Github (owned by my current company, Microsoft) has renewed a contract with ICE was incredibly frustrating. I applaud the Github employees and Microsoft employees who called for Github to cancel this contract. This was also a good reminder to me to find a way to proactively engage with my fellow employees to take action on building a more ethical tech industry. A mad dash to help out when something happens does not always pan out well, in part because at a big company it can be really challenging to connect with the folks you need. Gotta get plugged in early.

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