Weeknotes #9: gimme a break
Taking breaks for productivity
A couple weeks ago I was feeling a little bit frayed around the edges and decided to take a couple days off work to simply chill. The funny thing is that I felt the same way almost exactly a year ago, which is fairly instructive—I’ve got to take some downtime before mid-June rolls around. Maybe that’s a little…obvious to some, but like others, I have a hard time stepping away from the work to rest. I want to acknowledge here that (rather unfortunately) PTO is a privilege that not everyone has. But for those who do, sometimes taking a short break to recharge can be far more beneficial to productivity than powering through on fumes.
BALC accessibility remediation
(Context in Weeknotes #3) I started simplifying the layout of some pages that had inaccessible filters, which are also no longer very applicable. For example, filtering design grads based on where they wanted to live in 2014 makes no sense in 2019+. In the process of simplifying the layout, I started using CSS Grid here (again, 2019), then decided to write these parts as components (in the design sense, thank you Web Components for making this confusing) and started porting other parts of the site over to the new components. If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll ask for a glass of milk...In any case, now I've got dust all over the place, and none of this pushed to production yet, but there you are. Progress?
Reading
Design and development
Work and productivity
- How to Actually Enjoy—And Stick With—Your New Year's Goals
- The Complete Guide to Deep Work
- How to Gain Control of Your Free Time (video): found this advice particularly inspiring, will have to try out writing about future me's past year to set priorities!
Other interesting articles
- Why would a screen reader user have a braille display?: not the reason I was expecting this article to touch on (a break from the cognitive load of aural output). 👨👧👦
- I Staked Out My Local Domino’s to See Just How Accurate Its Pizza Tracker Is: hard-hitting journalism!
- Introducing tracking prevention, now available in Microsoft Edge preview builds: much as I love the internet, there’s a lot of junk out there. Excited for this privacy feature we shipped!