Dan's Daily

Many problems in the workplace stem from either a lack of, or poor, communication.

So when in doubt, try overcommunicate.

The worst that can happen is your manager, team mate, or collaborator will say they already get the point.

The alternative, however, could result in hours or days spent in confusion and chaos.

Another good thing to remember is it’s unlikely that others know our problem space like we do. What may feel like overcommunication to us could be just the right amount of context for them to understand what’s going on.

An epithet is a phrase expressing an attribute regarded as characteristic of a person.

Marcus Aurelius, one of my favourite examples of wise and just leadership, used to have “epithets for the self”. These would be simple words that he could repeat to himself to prepare him for conversations or challenges ahead.

Aurelius’ were: upright, modest, straightforward, sane, and cooperative.

What kind of person do you want to be?

What will be your epithet?

I loved visiting the ancient city of Pompeii back in 2018. Located close to modern day Naples, Pompeii was buried in 4-6 metres of volcanic ash from a Mt. Vesuvius eruption almost 2,000 years ago. The city was largely preserved under the ash, so once excavated, it give us an amazing snapshot into what life was like in the ancient world.

Spoiler alert, it’s much the same! They lived in homes, had bakeries, schools, and gymnasiums. The mechanics of daily life have barely changed.

One of the things that stood out to me was a mosaic tiling in the one of the homes. It was an image of man’s best friend, with an accompanying message, “Beware of the Dog!”. Dogs were clearly an important part of the social fabric of families and society back then.

At the time, I said to my family, “Isn’t it amazing that we have the same relationships with dogs today as they did in the ancient world?”

I didn’t stop to think about how much further back this relationship actually started.

However, this week I came across a study where zoo archaeologists and evolutionary biologists teamed up to find that “sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape. Beside them ran wolflike creatures, more docile than their ancestors and remarkably willing to help their primate companions hunt down prey and drag it back to camp. These were the world’s first dogs.”

If true, the earliest known domestication of dogs was 23,000 years ago! To put this in perspective, we only started farming 11,000 years ago, and were completely nomadic before this.

Maru and I are dog people, and we can’t wait to one day have a dog of our own. And there may just be 23,000 years of evolutionary conditioning to explain why!

I came across a great study published in April this year that proved a positive relationship between listening to natural sounds and physical and mental health.

“Of the three types of natural sounds (birds, water, and mixed), we found that water sounds had the largest mean effect size for health… and bird sounds had the largest mean effect size for stress and annoyance.”

This information is great, but it’s only useful if we do something with it.

Will this change your sound track for tomorrow?

Why not try this.

I try to keep a structured set of bookmarks to store the articles and pages I find on the web. But no matter how hard I try, I end up with an unwieldy collection of bookmark folders, sub-folders, and lists of webpages that are hard to manage.

A couple months ago, my friend Andrew told me about Pinboard, a simple, online bookmarking product. The mechanics that stood out to me were: 1) whenever you add a bookmark, you also take 2 seconds to add a few ‘tags’ that describe the contents of the page, and 2) you use search to quickly find the relevant tags / bookmarks.

There are people who have tens of thousands of bookmarks on Pinboard, and they love the product.

So I thought I’d give it a go, and I’m finding it great so far for $22 a year. Now, $22 a year may seem like a lot for a bookmarking service, but now we get to the real reason why Andrew told me about Pinboard.

Pinboard is built and maintained by one-man operation, Maciej Cegłowski. Via Pinboard, he’s making a point: that you don’t need VC money or a scale-at-all-costs approach to have a successful tech company.

He has users who love his product, he is contactable by email or on twitter for any of his customers to ask questions or suggest product ideas.

He’s built a different type of tech company. And I like it for both the service, and for what it stands for.

In particularly stressful periods, I’ve found a specific journaling habit to be a cathartic salve.

Sit down with pen and paper—or your preferred writing app—and hold no expectations. There’s no word count. There’s no grammar book. There’s no expected structure or form.

All you need to do is write.

As wide-ranging or as random as each sentence may seem, write it down. Let your subconscious out.

And continue writing.

And continue.

Until there is nothing left.

You’ll feel a weight lifted when the last sentence is finished.

Note: This post is part of a weekly series called ‘Seneca Sundays’. Each week, I reflect on one of Seneca’s ‘Moral Letters to Lucilius’, and summarise the most practical and useful principles to share with you.

This letter is a short one with a couple of sound ideas to ponder over.

1. Spend time with the eminent dead

Seneca says, “I spend my time in the company of all the best; no matter in what lands they may have lived, or in what age, I let my thoughts fly to them.”

We have instant access to the wisest humans in history. Each time we pick up one of their books, it’s an opportunity to listen, converse, disagree, and debate with the ideas that have stood the test of time.

By absorbing the best lessons of the eminent dead, it’s a shortcut—a cheat code of sorts—to help us live a better life. There’s no need for us to learn these lessons through personal experience when we can learn vicariously from the best.

2. We control our own hours. No excuses.

Many people hide behind the excuse that they’re busy. They can’t get fit, eat well, start that business, or spend more time with friends and family, because of one reason or another.

Seneca criticises this point of view. He says, “I do not surrender myself to my affairs, but loan myself to them, and I do not hunt out excuses for wasting my time.”

We’d be furious if someone stole our possessions, so why do we let others steal our time without any protest?

There really are no excuses for how we spend our time.

Think about the people you love most.

Imagine them in your mind’s eye.

Do you regret any time spent with them?

No one regrets spending more time with the people they love.

That’s a recipe for no regrets.

I had my first personal training session in 2+ years today.

I’ve been trying to reach some new health and fitness goals this year, and I’ve hit a ceiling. My diet, strength training, and cardio programmes haven’t changed, my progress has flat-lined, and now I’m worried about regression.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is… you know it!

So I’m changing the inputs.

I’m getting a personal trainer who knows more, has more experience, and can help chart a course to break through barriers that I can’t seem to do alone.

When progress stalls, think about changing the inputs.

An Amazon Fresh store opened close to home today.

The store uses Amazon Go technology, which partially automates the supermarket experience by allowing you to purchase products without being checked out by a cashier. You simply put items in your bag, walk out, and receive an email a few hours later with your receipt.

Ever since the concept was announced in 2018, I’ve been eager to try it. And considering it only took Amazon 3 years to open one of these stores within 5 mins walk from our home, it’s an impressive example of Amazon’s speed and scale.

As a product manager, part of my job is trying to break my own products—to make sure they work—before releasing them to the public. So when other companies bring new products to market, I often find myself deliberately trying to break them.

I put lots of items in my basket, walked around the store, added more items, and then went back and put half of the items back on the shelves.

When I left the store, the receipt was with me in a few hours and was 100% accurate.

Not having to wait in line, no scanning or re-bagging, and simply walking out with my shopping was a surreal experience, and one that made the supermarket experience much better.

Our families, teams, companies, and societies only get better when people—like you and I—look at how things are today and feel unsatisfied.

Never being satisfied is the first step to seeing the possibility of what our world could be.

Never being satisfied is a habit for how we should be thinking about and approaching these problems.

Never being satisfied is necessary for progress.

I recently had to use the government digital services from both the United Kingdom and New Zealand to complete some personal admin.

As with anything related to income, taxes, licences, or identity verification, things can be complex. And sometimes, you just need to speak to someone to get things sorted.

The UK’s Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) had me on the phone for almost an hour without a resolution in sight. I’ve previously blogged about issues I’ve had with HMRC, and it felt like much the same.

New Zealand’s service, on the other hand, was a completely different experience. The customer service desk was up and running at 5am New Zealand time when I called. The agent quickly diagnosed the issue. They then gave me step-by-step instructions to resolve my issue.

Both institutions have the same marketing spiel: to make it safe, easy, and simple to access the government’s digital services.

But the actual product and service experience was night and day.

My lesson and reflection for today: Marketing will fade. So focus on the product, invest in your craft, and let the results speak for themselves.

Whether it’s a speech, a slide deck, a blog post, or an email: the outline stifles creativity.

The outline provides form and structure, but it also doubles as a cage.

The antidote: let the words flow. Don’t worry about the structure. Write without inhibition. Get everything down on paper. Get comfortable with bad ideas, because the the bad ones arrive on time, and the good ones are fashionably late.

After all this, then allow yourself to add some structure.

But until then, ditch the outline.

Note: This post is part of a weekly series called ‘Seneca Sundays’. Each week, I reflect on one of Seneca’s ‘Moral Letters to Lucilius’, and summarise the most practical and useful principles to share with you.

In this letter, Seneca challenges us to rethink our perspective on death.

We all share death’s inevitability. And it has either scared, or still scares, all of us.

However, Seneca’s advice on death isn’t morbid, in fact it helps us to live richer and fuller lives.

1. Death doesn’t stay with us, so there’s little to dread.

Death is a moment. It doesn’t persist.

Death is only worth dreading if it can remain with us, so “death must either not come at all, or else it must come and pass away.”

Seneca says we shouldn’t spend the few precious hours we have dreading the single, final hour. He reinforces this by saying, “No one can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.”

2. But, make sure to think about death every day

At first, this piece of advice seems odd. If we shouldn’t dread death, why then think about it regularly?

Seneca says, “Rehearse this thought every day, that you may be able to depart from life contentedly… Most people ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.”

This idea reminded me of the Jon Foreman song ‘Learning How to Die’. The pre-chorus is melancholic, where Foreman is stuck in this “wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life”. But as the song transitions into the chorus, it becomes hopeful as the subject—a woman on her deathbed—realises that life’s hardships were simply taking her on a journey to learn how to die in peace.

Seneca rounds out this point by saying no thing can leave us truly happy unless we embrace that we could lose that thing at any moment.

3. Remember, it’s the pursuit of the superfluous that causes stress.

Seneca, as per his custom in each letter, ends with a useful but tangential point: we need little to quench our thirst, fend off hunger, and protect against the cold. These things are actually quite straightforward to attain. We need little to survive.

But rather, “it is the superfluous things for which people sweat, – the superfluous things that wear our togas threadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.”

What are the things we’re stressing about today? Is that stress really necessary? Can we recognise if we’re pursuing the necessary or the superfluous?

Here’s something I’ve been pondered a lot recently:

If you don’t have a point of view, you inevitably let someone else make the decisions for you.

Agency. Influence. Potential. Progress.

All of it starts with having a point of view.