It’s an easy date to remember, July 7, 2014.

7 / 7 / 14

7 + 7 = 14

We discovered the mnemonic that night.

Each of us said our goodbyes a few days prior. The morphine drip had been increased consistently for a couple of weeks and had gotten to the point where it had sedated her completely.

The family had spent the evening going up to our parents’ bedroom to check on her, but by 10pm the nurse was the only one there. I don’t remember whether Dad had gone to bed, but my sister was in the family room while my brother and I smoked outside.

Around 11:30pm, my sister came bursting through the garage door. Her tears were a dead giveaway. After a four-year battle with mesothelioma, Mom finally let go.

The funeral home was notified and indicated they’d arrive in a couple of hours to collect the body. My family and I huddled around her bed, crying the first of many tears to be shed that week. We left her head uncovered until the funeral people arrived. It was shocking how quickly her body turned cold.

We wrapped her body in bed sheets and I kissed her head as we carried her out of the bedroom. She felt so light on the stretcher. The funeral people hopped in their white hearse and drove away into the night.

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My friend Mark recently passed along some advice I’ve been taking to heart of late. Looking at the wide breadth of problems we’re trying to solve at Ensibuuko, I was finding it difficult to determine where to focus my time and attention. The product we’re working on is a complex system that has to integrate into an even more complex financial system and be distributed using a network infrastructure that often fails to reach the customers of the product. None of the issues facing us are insurmountable, but each day we uncover more problems to be solved.

Mark heard the challenges we’re facing and shared an insight he had learned reading the work of Andy Grove: when you are looking at an ever-growing list of things requiring your attention and deciding what to focus on right now, pick the thing where your input will have the greatest impact. Or, as Grove puts it,

An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.

How to determine high-leverage activities

At this point, it becomes a matter of deciding what thing I can do now that will generate the highest level of output. In a talk given to the Mayor’s Advisory Panel on Poverty in London, Ontario, James Shelley presented an overview of Donella Meadows’ thesis on ‘leverage points’ and illustrated how to apply the framework to systems that impact the level of poverty in a given region. The framework Meadows provides is designed to help determine where to intervene in a system, in increasing order of effectiveness and impact:

1. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
2. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
3. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
4. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
5. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
6. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
7. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
8. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
9. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
10. The goals of the system.
11. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
12. The power to transcend paradigms.

Friend and designer, Adam Saint illustrated Meadows’ framework beautifully when describing how to apply her framework to the field of design:

The last item in Adam’s condensed framework — principles and values of a greater context — feels like it deserves the bulk of my time and attention.

Spending time making a decision about fonts and colours will have a nearly imperceivable impact on the success of the product; scouting and recruiting a local product designer who can make those and similar decisions while building a design language for our developers to use in the product: that’s high impact.

Trying to get a handful of network boosters shipped from China to be manually installed individually at each SACCO branch is going to have a linear impact based on the number of boosters we can order and install; building a tool that can influence where telecoms deploy network towers with location and population data: that’s high impact.

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As someone who enjoys tinkering and making things look and work exactly how I envision them to, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. I’ve long resonated with the parable once relayed by Steve Jobs about the carpenter who puts the same amount of care into the hidden parts of a drawer chest that will never been seen as the rest of her creation. That’s taking pride in your craft. The challenge I face now is not how to craft a drawer chest but rather a process for building and distributing drawer chests, all while involving a number of outside parties and systems outside of my control.

This framework is helping me prioritize the problems our company needs to solve while recognizing my time and attention can have drastically varying levels of impact depending on which lever I’m pulling.

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Great news for security-conscious users of Day One, the journaling app for iOS and MacOS. Generating and saving the encryption key on iOS was quick and easy. Getting the newly encrypted journal into the Mac app was a bit less obvious. Rather than selecting an existing journal or adding a new one, you have to sign back into your Day One account and allow the app to sync before you can see and unlock your end-to-end encrypted journal.

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This humble site has seen a number of changes over the last few weeks. As more of my work of late has been focused on research, process, workflows, and strategy, I’ve been itching for ways to stretch my design and development muscles. Below is a summary of the work I’ve been doing to improve your reading experience and my publishing experience.

NightMode

Ever since I lost my Kindle Paperwhite on the flight from Brussels to Entebbe, I’ve been doing the majority of my reading on my iPhone. This has served to emphasize one of my favourite design features of modern reading apps: night mode.

Leaning on the work of Chris Coyier, I first added a simple function which changes between light and dark themes depending on your computer’s local time. Thanks to SASS, I can produce as many colour themes as I’d like just by changing a few variables.

Of course, as someone who cares deeply about his own reading environment, I wouldn’t want to prevent you from viewing the site how you’d prefer. Using some more JavaScript and HTML5’s localStorage and sessionStorage, I’ve added the ability for you to override the time-based theme to suit your own preference. I’m storing your preference in sessionStorage so it will reset the next time you visit this site.

You can have a look at how I’m doing this thanks to…

Public Github Repo

I’ve learned everything I know about design and development through experience and the generosity of others. Just last night I was having a conversation about viewing the source code of my favourite sites to see how they’re made. I did this back when I first started in design and still do to this day.

On a few occasions I’ve published some tips and tricks here on the site, but recently I’ve been thinking about how I could share even more. Of course one option is to continue writing and publishing what I know and I certainly intend to do so. However, I realized recently that by opening up the entire codebase for my site to the public, anyone can have a look under the hood and learn from both my successes and my mistakes.

Since its inception, this site has been my playground for learning and experimentation. By opening up the code for you to see, my hope is you will be inspired to follow a similar path.

Microblog

The dozen or so of you who subscribe to my feed may have noticed an increase in posts from me this past week. This is due to the recent addition of micro posts, small title-less musings that fall between longer-form posts like this one.

Back when I used ExpressionEngine to publish this site, I used to have a section called “asides”. These were always links to other sites with a bit of personal commentary. At times these links were interspersed with the long-form posts, other times they lived on their own page. Currently, the new micro posts only live on the homepage of this site.

The way I’ve designed the new micro posts makes linking to other pages optional. While some may link out, others will feel more like a tweet. Until Manton Reece’s new service, Micro.blog opens to the general public, I’m using IFTTT to post these to my Twitter feed.

Probably the best part of adding these short-form posts to the site has been the inspiration to finally find a solution to a problem I’ve faced for almost 5 years now, which was…

Publishing from my iPhone

When I had finally had enough of ExpressionEngine, I started publishing to Tumblr for one very simple reason: it was the only way (outside of using WordPress) I could see to publish from my iPhone.

While the Tumblr app is a great app, I’ve always struggled philosophically with the fact that Tumblr is a hosted service. This means someone else could shut it down or repurpose its content for nefarious purposes at any time without my consent. If the recent del.icio.us announcement is any indication, it’s not unreasonable to foresee Yahoo-owned Tumblr suffering a similar fate.

Eventually, this philosophical divide felt more important than the need to publish from my phone. At the same time, I had become far more comfortable working in terminal and decided to publish my site through Jekyll.

The transition from Tumblr to Jekyll happened over a year ago. While I’ve enjoyed publishing via the command line on my computer, the nagging desire to publish directly from my phone never waivered.

My first attempt at solving this problem was to use Siteleaf, a cloud-based platform for publishing static websites. Siteleaf provides users an online dashboard — similar to the WordPress dashboard — that allows you to publish posts and pages to a Jekyll site using a beautifully designed GUI.

As great as this experience is on a desktop, the only option for publishing through Siteleaf on mobile is though the mobile web app. Having to wait for the web app to load and not having the ability to draft posts offline made this solution untenable on the phone.

My optimal solution is to use a native app (or apps) to publish to my site. After a bit of research, I found Kirby Turner’s method of posting to Jekyll from his iPhone to be a good place to start. Kirby uses Editorial to write his posts and Editorial Workflows to publish to his site through Working Copy, a git client for iOS.

I downloaded Editorial to see what it was like and have really enjoyed writing this post in it. However, Editorial is a bit too cumbersome when I want to post a micro post. To me, those are more like tweets and should take far less time to compose than is required by Editorial.

Drafts is an app that gives you a blank sheet each time you open it. It’s the quickest way I’ve found to go from having an idea to jotting it down so as not to forget and I’ve used the app for this purpose for several years.

Posting micro posts felt exactly up Drafts’ alley, so I adapted Kirby’s approach by using Drafts to write, Workflow to run the post through a series of actions, and Working Copy to commit the post to my git repo. While publishing the post isn’t quite as quick as tweeting, it feels really good to know my content is going to a place I own and control.

Feeds

Much like the last time I added short-form posts to my site, this time has necessitated the need for new RSS feeds. This was also the perfect opportunity to familiarize myself with the new JSON feed format by Manton Reece and Brent Simmons.

Head to the new Subscribe page to see all of the feed options available as well as an option to receive a weekly digest via email.

Back to blogging

Around this time last year, I was beating myself up for not writing as often as I would have liked. I said I was going to start publishing once a week which was a foolish thing to say. I was and am still a ways away from being able to maintain that kind of pace.

But, I’m feeling more motivated than ever to write and publish thanks to the effort I’ve put into making this site a better place for you and for me.

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