I’d be lying if I said I didn’t work all the time on nights and weekends. Here’s some advice if you do the same:

Whatever you do, don’t email or slack people on the weekends or late in the evening. You can schedule these to show up the next day, or Monday morning. For task management tools, like Jira and Asana, you can reply or create new tasks by email, and schedule those emails.

There are obviously exceptions, but try to avoid making anyone think about work when they’re not being paid.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but:

If you are at a place where you see your past mistakes, it’s a sign of growth. No need to give your past self a hard time about it.

🙃

The effect of Substack throwing up a modal to subscribe the moment I scroll on an article makes me rage close the tab, not subscribe.

Make better user-centric decisions than this.

I’m in a doctors office waiting room with a kiosk. When you enter it says go to kiosk to get a ticket with a number. You touch the kiosk just to get a number printed. When it’s your turn, a voice says “serving X at window Y” just like the DMV (except the sloth is on intercom duty because holy crap is that voice slow).

This is an office that sits empty most of the week. There’s no one else here, and when you press a button for the ticket the voice starts calling it before the printer even finishes.

I’m explaining this because this is a system very clearly designed for the worst case scenario that almost completely discards the most common scenario. And a lot of systems do that, please make sure yours doesn’t. Could the kiosk screen simply say “go to window” when there’s no queue and it knows it’s going to call the number immediately? Well yes, but no one cared enough about the common case.

As always, step 1: care. Without that, step 2 doesn’t matter.