Welcome to 2020! First and foremost, no posts from me involving vision or eyesight or any other optometrist puns for this year. I promise 366 days free of anything having to do with eyeballs. That does mean a whole world of other puns that I’m going to be focusing on!

Now, let’s look back at 2019. The word that I could use to describe it was “hectic”. It felt like everything was in overdrive all year long. There were several times that I got to the end of the week and realized that I didn’t have any kind of post ready to go. I’m the kind of person that likes to write when the inspiration hits me. And instead I found myself scrambling to write up some thoughts. And that was something I told myself that I was going to get away from. So we’re going to call that one a miss and get back to trying to post on a day other than Friday.

That also means that, given all the other content that I’ve been working on with Gestalt IT that I’m going to have to schedule some time actually working on that content instead of hoping that some idea is going to fly out of the blue at 11:30pm the night before I’m supposed to put a post up. The good news is that also means that I’m going to be upping the amount of content that I’m consuming for inspiration. Since I spent a good chunk of they year going on a morning walk it meant that I had a lot more time to consume podcast episodes and wash those ideas around. I’m sure that means that I’m going to find the time and the motivation to keep turning out content.

Part of the reason for that is because of something that Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) told me during a call this past year. He said that I’ve been consistently turning out content for the last 9 years on a weekly basis. I’m proud of that fact. Sure, there’s been a couple of times in the last year or two when I’ve missed and had to publish something on a Saturday or the Monday after. But overall I’m happy with the amount of content that I’ve been writing here. And because you all keep on reading it I’m going to keep writing it. There’s a lot of value in what I do here and I hope you all continue to value it too.

IA Writing

Last January I switched over to using IA Writer for my posts on my iPad. I wrote primarily on that platform all year long. I can say that It’s very handy to be able to grab your mobile device and hammer out a post. Given that I can do split screen and reference my hand-written notes from briefings it’s a huge advantage to keeping my thoughts organized and ready to put down on paper.

Between IA Writer for writing, Notability for taking notes during briefings, and Things to keep me on track for the posts that I need to cover I’ve gotten my workflow down to something that works for me. I’m going to keep tweaking it for sure but I’m happy that I can get information to a place where I can refer to it later and have reminders about what I need to cover. It makes everything seamless and consistent. There are still some things that I need to use Microsoft Word to write, but those are long-form projects. Overall, I’m going to keep refining my process to make it better and more appropriate for me.

Ultimately, that’s a big goal for me in 2020 and something that I’ve finally realized that I do regularly without conscious thought. If you’ve read any books on process or project management you’ve probably heard of kaizen, the Japanese concept of continuous improvement of processes. It’s something that drives companies like Toyota to get better at everything they do and never accept anything as “complete”.

I’ve read about kaizen before but I never really understood that it could mean any improvement before. I had it in my head that the process was about change all the time. It wasn’t until I sat down this year and analyzed what I was doing to find that I’m always trying to optimize what I do. It’s not about finding shortcuts for the sake of saving time. It’s about optimizing what I do to save effort and the investment of time. For me it’s not about spending 8 hours to write a script that will automate a one-time 30-minute task. It’s about breaking down the task and figuring out how many times I’ll do it and how I need to optimize the process to spend less time on it. If the answer is a script or an automation routine then I’m all for it. But the key is recognizing the kaizen process and putting a name to my behavior.

Tom’s Take

2020 is going to be busy. Tech Field Day is going to be busy. I’m going to be at a lot of events checking out what’s going on and how to make new things happen. I’m also going to be writing a lot. And when you factor in my roles outside of work with Wood Badge and a trip to Philmont, NM with my son for a high adventure trip with his scout troop you can see I’m going to be quite occupied even when I’m not writing. But I’m not going to remove anything from my process. As I said above, I’m going to kaizen everything and fit it all in. That might mean having a couple of posts queued up when I’m in the back country or taking some extra time after dinner to write. But 2020 is going to be a big year of optimizing my workflows and improving in every way.