Concerning the Ebb and Flow of “Work” →

August 04, 2015 by Cole Conrad in Feels

You have to be inspired first before you can create.

You have to learn before you can teach.

You have to experience before you can share.

There is no shame in taking time “off” of your work, in order to learn something, experience something, and be inspired.

This is the ebb and flow of work. This is having multi-year cycles where we grow in our mastery of creation beyond just mastery of tools and workflows. This is why resting well is so valuable and why learning, thinking, and discovering cannot be underrated.

Over the last two years I've been going through a mental transformation to adapt to a mindfulness that mirrors what Shawn has conveyed in this piece. It's one of the reasons Course Code isn't updated daily and probably won't be for as long as I maintain a day job. I'm happy with that now but two years ago I was a mess between my stressful day job, independent consulting business and expecting myself to write something of any value. It's difficult to find inspiration when that's how you spend your life. It's not that I regret that time in my life, I'm glad I was able to learn from it in my mid-twenties just as we found out Courtney was pregnant with our son. I've been on an interesting road to a more thoughtful investment of my time since. That has included a couple of dramatic changes in our lives and spans of time where I retracted from aspects of life that I needed to let rest (this site included). Overall it's lead me to have longer sprints of inspiration and creativity and has helped me continue to hone in on what's worth my time.

If you're stressed and pulling yourself a hundred different ways, take a break to assess and find what you truly want for your life. What's in the way of letting that be the driver for the decisions you make? If you need to make changes to get there, do it. It will take time (likely more time than you're imagining) but I can tell you that it's worth it. Rest and reflect so you can move forward.

Pro Tip: Create Events Quickly in Calendars+

May 22, 2013 by Cole Conrad

If you're like me then your schedule lives in Google Calendar and the computer you always have on you is running iOS. While Fantastical is my go-to calendar app on the Mac and iPhone I find that Calendars+ from Readdle is the best iPad app for Google Calendar as I need to see what availability I have before committing to an event or meeting.

Becoming the Cache

May 17, 2013 by Cole Conrad

Becoming the Cache

Throughout my career thus far I’ve grown from being an Apple employee to managing the Apple side of an consulting group to leading IT for a growing network of schools with thousands of users. Around a year ago I lost the ability to have mental clarity about everything I was managing. My work had grown from managing a single campus with a 1:1 computing, a flat network design and Apple Airports providing wireless for 450 users to implementing the plan I’d been working on. This included:

Scaling from 450 to 800 users
Prepping campus #2
Switching from Airports to Aerohive APs
Implementing the Casper Suite
Implementing a brand new, fully designed Cisco network infrastructure
Building a WAN to support the JSS
Supporting a new full-scale blended learning system
Setting up Open Directory (and mobile home syncing) for both campuses
Rolling over PowerSchool from year to year for the first time
Switching from an analog phone system to an hosted PBX solution
Imaging 900 Macs w/ evening assistance from some famous internet hipster

All of this work had to happen in less than 2 months and I was solely responsible for seeing this through to completion. What followed was the most grueling summer of my life which may have slightly burned me out.

Why do I bring all of this up? Because I learned a lesson. Well, a whole lot of lessons.

A year later and I’m preparing (/have been preparing for months) to orchestrate the opening of two new campuses and jumping from 800 to 1600 users over the course of a few months. I’ve been testing, choosing and implementing tools over the last year to take the mental management and leverage technology to keep the ship afloat and on course. Thus far I’ve implemented OmniFocus, Evernote, (live by) Google Calendar, MindMeister, Kickoff and most recently Omniplan. I now have another team member and need to be able to keep him informed on what needs done by when along with keeping other departments aware of our progress and any risks we currently or may soon have.

Utilizing these tools I’ve realized that my role has shifted to becoming the cache of my external brain(s) and tools. I have an evening ritual to prepare for the following day by looking over my calendar and looking at the my to-do lists and performing a mini-review of what I could accomplish in the time I have the next day. I often plan meetings and add tasks and milestones for weeks or months in the future and depend on these tools to act as the long term storage for my life and I just keep what I need for the short term mentally stored. This frees up my mental capacity to think through longer term plans such as our continued growth and projects of a size I’ve never been responsible for before such as this and this. Nothing I’ve implemented is perfect and I’m far from even being good at it but I’m becoming more efficient and productive every day and that’s progress.