Sunday night, Cescalouise‘s iPhone mysteriously went dark. She had a lot going on Monday, so I gave her my phone to use, then I headed down to NYC for the day and following night.

So I’ve been away from home for the last day and a half with no phone. Not a huge deal, obviously, but also a pretty big departure from normal.

What’s interesting is what I’ve missed and what I haven’t missed.

Of course, I miss being able to communicate with people from wherever I am — but to be honest I don’t think that’s the thing I miss most. The biggest thing I miss is the ability to jot down a thought on the fly. I use Wunderlist and Fetchnotes on a pretty regular basis to capture the passing thought or to-do. It’s an important part of how I keep my slow hunch going.

What I don’t miss is constantly surfing the top of my inbox. I use android desktop widgets and keep both of my main inboxes on one of my home screens. Having them there is convenient, and helps me be responsive to email, but it’s bad for focus. I will probably delete those when I get my phone back.

Walking around NYC and riding the subway, my head has been up and I’ve noticed more things (but of course haven’t been able to capture / share them :-) And of course I notice how many people have their faces in their phones all the time (probably 75% of those of us waiting for the Amtrak in Boston).

All in all, I’m glad to have taken two days off with no phone. Feels a bit like a cleanse. I’ll probably do it again.

I love Google Reader. I’ve used it for a long long time now to keep tabs on things. I suppose it’s an old school method at this point, but I think it’s just great.

The screengrab above is one of my home screens on my galaxy s3. I have moved to a widgets-only mobile desktop, which has become one of my favorite things about the switch from iPhone to Android.

Perhaps my favorite part is the way you can “set it and forget it”. When I come across an interesting blog, I save it to one of my reader folder, and then at some point later I get the happy surprise of finding a post from that blog in my feed.

Just the other day I figured out how to make reader feeds public. So here are the ones that I use the most:

• Geek Crush – I’ve been adding to this list for years, and it now has ~100 smart tech folk in it: hackers, thinkers, founders, VCs, etc.
• Net Policy – started earlier this year and now following ~50 people and orgs in the tech policy space. Pretty great source of news and commentary if you’re into that sort of thing.
• Peer Economy – this one is brand new and far from complete, but I’m working on it. 15 or so blogs following the peer economy space. What’s that, you ask? Here’s a hackpad overview and a list of companies – both very early.

Enjoy!

I always spend a lot of time around the turn of the new year thinking about self-improvement. This year is no different.

Last summer, at a charity fundraiser for a friend, I bought several sessions of personal coaching. Throughout the fall, I’ve been working with my coach, Lisa Lahey, using her methodology called “immunity to change.” The basic idea is that, given an articulated personal goal you are trying to meet, you may also have a series of “hidden goals” that you don’t realize you’re working towards — and these hidden goals may be in conflict with your positive goals. The resistance inherent in this conflict is our immunity to change.

So, the trick is to identify these hidden goals, then further identify what big assumptions (about yourself or your life) are behind those hidden goals, and then do a series of experiments to test those assumptions. Ideally to ultimately prove yourself wrong about the assumptions and vanquish the hidden, constraining goals.

For me, the big goal is to close more loops. One of my worst tendencies is to leave things 80% done (just ask Cescalouse about my home improvement projects). A big part of my job is to keep momentum going — to close loops and keep energy moving through whatever projects I’m working on. I can’t become a bottleneck or a place where ideas stagnate and lose energy.

One of my hidden, competing goals is that I’m an urgency addict. I tend to procrastinate — ruminating on the size and severity of whatever I’m procrastinating from — until pressures build to such an extent that I am forced to power through in a burst of goal-line adrenaline. I “get high” from powering through work on a deadline — and I feel the need to get high by a (presumably false) assumption that my stack of work is overwhelming and super human effort is required to get through it. Unfortunately for me (according to the immunity to change framework), this pattern has been working for me — so the bad behavior is reinforced by a track record of getting things done despite myself.

This is bad for several reasons. Most importantly: it burns energy needlessly (worrying about things rather than actually doing them), and it reduces collaborative leverage (the more out in front you are on something, the better chance to get external engagement).

So here’s what I’ve been doing to combat my immunity to change:

I am consciously shifting my thinking from “big to dos” (i.e., large items on my to do list which are scary and incite procrastination) to “moving the ball forward”. Given any project on my plate, the new approach is “Ok, I’ll spend an hour and get as much done on {project X} as I can”, rather than “oh man, I really need to {item x}”.

Seems like a simple thing, but it actually has been surprisingly powerful. Yesterday I cut my whole day into hour-long blocks, where I moved the ball forward on each of my big projects for an hour. It worked. Items that might have otherwise triggered stress and procrastination dissolve into “getting things done for an hour”. Moving the ball forward for an hour is progress, no matter how you cut it.

In addition to (and perhaps more importantly than) reducing the “looming burden” of a large number of big independent tasks, taking this approach creates focus. And focus is perhaps the most powerful tool we have (and often the most elusive).

This is just a start. We will see if it sticks. But I think it is useful and perhaps it can work for others as well.

I love milestones. Times of year that mark change and give you a chance to pause and reset.

I think that’s part of why I had such a hard time living in California during college, and why I appreciated the seasons so much when I moved back east. They provide a very natural rhythm.

The time between Christmas and New Years is one of my favorite transition times. I love the fact that nearly everyone is on vacation, so everything slows down. In the past I have usually stayed at work during that week and used the time to catch up on everything.

With new years, I love the opportunity to pause, take stock of everything, get organized, and get ready to hit the ground running in the new year.

For me, this is my “spring cleaning”, more than anything I do in the spring.

Here’s what I’m working towards this week to get cleaned up and ready for 2013:

• Resetting email. I got crushed on email in the last month, and have a lot of open threads (I apologize to anyone I owe an email to). I am working towards inbox zero by New Years.
• Rebooting my blog — as of yesterday, I’ve merged my blog and my tumblog into one. I’ve moved my blog archives dating back to 2006 to the Wayback Archive, and am doing everything on Tumblr now. Fewer things; more focus.
• Mundane things around the house — Yesterday Cescalouise and I cleaned out our basement, and I organized my mess of a closet. Both feel super good to have done, and help create an overall sense of healthiness.
• Going to get a haircut :)

And as always happens, I’m using this time to get inspired about 2013. I’ve been collecting some quotes that are getting me fired up.

Since last Friday, my life has seemingly been consumed with thinking about what happened at Sandy Hook elementary school.

Maybe it’s the just horrific nature of the event.

Maybe it’s that I’m a parent of two small kids, and I haven’t been able to stop hugging and kissing them and thinking about how lucky I am that they are alive.

Maybe it’s the utter complexity of the cultural issues surrounding guns, most of which I’ve honestly been unaware of, that is just fascinating as something to think about.

Maybe it’s the massive attention my colleagues in the tech community have been giving this issue.

Maybe it was President Obama reading out the names of the six-year olds who were shot to pieces last week.

Maybe it’s the outpouring of emotion from the dad’s I’m on an email list with – so many of whom were brought to their knees by this event and are struggling to process it at all.

I’m not sure.

I know guns are one of the most polarizing issues facing the US. But for some reason, I have hope that — despite where the lines have been drawn and dug in deeper over the last decades — there’s an opportunity here to find a way of looking at this that transcends those lines.

Maybe I think that’s possible because of the Internet, and the way it “unbundles” everything. Whereas in the past you were either a Democrat or an NRA member — because those were the easiest way to organize people in a pre-networked era — now it’s possible to be a gun owner *and* in favor of regulations that make sense. And it’s possible to be on the left and understand why people like guns.

Perhaps that is a wildly naive idea. But if there’s anything I live for, it’s the hope and belief that the web can help us find new solutions to old problems. So I am sticking with that outlook for now.

A web-wide moment of silence

Since the weekend, I have been part of a conversation within the tech community about how to respond here. What started as a few emails turned into a mega conference call, and has since turned into a lot of independent and creative efforts to draw attention to this issue. I’d like to thank Ken Lerer and Ron Conway, in particular, for taking the lead on organizing the collective energy of the tech community around this.

What I’ve been helping organize is a web-wide moment of silence — an effort to get as many websites as possible to “go silent” on Friday morning during the national moment of silence a week after the shootings.

At 9:30am ET tomorrow morning, this website, and the hundreds of other websites who are participating in this effort, will go dark for 5 minutes.

It will be a moment to pause, respectfully, and remember the 20 young children and their teachers who were murdered last week. And perhaps, to reflect on the collective power we may have to help make such things happen less in the future.