Matthew Lang

... with some teaser posters from the fans. Really like this one.

via DBSW

It's been over a year now since Journalong was launched and since it's launch, the total number of customers is still less than triple figures. Okay, so I wasn't expecting to be the next Dropbox of the journalling world in terms of success, but hitting my milestone of a hundred customers would be nice.

I still believe there is a place for a product like Journalong in the world, but I'm definitely not attracting increasing numbers of customers with the current pricing model. What got me thinking about this was the recent product announcements from 37signals for their Basecamp Personal and Breeze products which are priced as one off purchases. Sure, these are products that will hang off Basecamp, but the idea of a one off price for software is something that is done in the native mobile apps area. Lots of apps are priced as a one-off purchase rather than as a subscription. Journalong has been priced as a subscription service from the start but is it priced right?

While $10 a year sounds cheap as chips to some people, others look at as expensive. I fork out about $50 (US) per month on software subscriptions and I use everyone of them daily. Some are a couple of dollars a month, while one almost hits the $20 mark. So, I'm used to seeing value that software can provide and pay for it.

Which brings me to my next question. Does Journalong provide value? For me, most definitely yes. For others? Maybe not. Journalong definitely delivers value in my eyes, but I also need to determine if that value is worth the current subscription price.

Pricing and value are two of the most important areas in a successful product. Without getting the price and value right for your product, you're going to be left with a product that no-one is going to pay for and use.

So if you've created an account for a trial of Journalong in the last year but didn't fancy it, then expect an email from myself in the next few weeks. I'm looking to get more feedback on Journalong as a product and whether it is delivering value.

Goal setting. How many different methods have you tried? Lots? So have I, and every time I tried to use them I failed to reach the goal. Inevitably when I focus on one goal, everything else suffers. A few years ago I tried freelancing at night, however after month I was flat out exhausted and I the time I had to spend with my family also suffered. At the time I focused on the goal without seeing the rest of the world.

Last year though I tried something different. I used compass points.

Compass points are Nicholas Bate's strategy for making sure that goals in each aspect of life are moving forward goals in life that are based on aspects of your life. We all have different aspects in life, but when people set goals, they tend to focus on a specific set of goals and forget everything else in life.

The compass points that Nicholas Bate uses are:

• Career
• Mind/Body
• Personal Finance
• Relationships
• Fun
• Contribution

Now before you jump in and start assigning next actions to each of these compass points, take a step back. Each of these compass points are different and therefore require a different plan. Maintaining a healthy diet and exercise is different to advancing your career. Being healthy means regular exercise and of course eating healthily, but advancing your career might involve a training course at a local college. Also, compass points are not independent of each other. Focusing on one compass point for too long will likely have a negative affect on the other five compass points.

I used these compass points last year and had some success with them. Obviously, there's things in life that affect your plans and goals, but last year I advanced my career and I had some success with getting my finances in order and I made some open source contributions. I didn't set goals for all the compass points, but it did keep me focused on trying to maintain a balance between all of them. I'm using the compass points again this year, but with more of a focus on achieving a goal with each of them.

Nicholas has full blog post and free download on using compass points, which I highly recommend you read.

I would fail at this as well.

via xkcd

via Pedal Consumption

I read an interesting post by Curtis McHale today highlighting his pledge to maintain a daily contribution to open-source projects. Well done Curtis! It's developers like him that make the open source projects that many of us use possible.

While I don't currently contribute to open source projects (I really should), one thing that I looked at was the contribution streak for Github. The streak is the number of days you make a contribution to projects on Github. To maintain the streak you need to make a contribution every day. If you miss a day, the streak resets to zero. The question I have is, does it include weekends?

I was in a similar position a couple of years ago. I started using 750words.com to write daily. Every day I tried to squeeze in 750 words of writing in my day. It wasn't easy, but I managed to do it daily for a good couple of months. Then the fatigue started to set in. Finding time at the weekend was becoming difficult.

In the end I decided that maintaining this amount of writing everyday wasn't feasible. So I stopped. I can tell you that while writing every day was great, the relief of not having to write was great too. I didn't feel bad about it.

While I'm not writing everyday now, I am trying to publish a blog post every weekday. It leaves me the weekend to reflect on the last week and get some ideas in place for the following week. The same goes for an open source project I am about to start. Yes I might work on it at the weekend, but I'll mostly be working on it during the week.

Maintaining streaks like this are fun, but trying to fit them in seven days a week can be difficult too. I know for a fact that I'll never accumulate a streak of more than five on Github, but I'm happy with that. Sometimes I need the weekend to be a code-free time.

A new bike to lust after.

via BikeRadar

I'm not the first person to realise this, but productivity apps don't work for me. I've tried countless apps and services but none of them seem to work for me. The recurring problem I have is that all of them require me to be online or have a digital device in my hand. I like my iPhone, but using a task manager app on my phone usually ends up becoming a chore that I could do without.

My latest experiment was using Wunderlist to track some projects I've been working on. I setup the necessary lists I needed and started working with them. However after a few weeks of using it I ended up with lists of stuff that I haven't looked at for a fortnight.

Maybe it's just me, but tools like Evernote, Things, Omnifocus, and Wunderlist and other apps that aim to make you more productive, inevitably become dumping grounds for ideas, todos and other stuff that I end up never reviewing or actioning.

So what works for me then?

Pen and paper seems to be the choice that I keep coming back too. It's simple, effective and cheap, but not in terms of price. In terms of focus. I never get distracted by the latest features of pen and paper. There aren't any. I just open, write and close.

There's a place for productivity apps in my workflow and that's when you are collaborating with others as part of a team. Seeing what tasks are yours and sharing information in a group of people working on a project together is essential to making progress. I've no arguments with using productivity apps in this context. Especially when that team isn't in the same physcial office as is the case with so many people who take advantage of telecommuting to their job.

However, for personal projects and products I'm working on and day to day stuff that life throws at you, I'll stick with the lo-fi option of pen and paper. It works for me and that's what matters.

The fixed gear bike. Two wheels. One gear. Brakes, optional. Simple really. And that's the reason why the fixed gear bike is loved by many cyclists. It's a simple bike. Amongst it's carbon fibre, multi-geared brethren, it looks out of place, but it has a special place in the hearts of many cyclists. It's a bike with a single function, it just lets you ride.

Now take a look at Pop, the text editor for iOS from Minimal Tools. A single page text editor that offers no settings, no file management facilities, no synchronising with Dropbox. In fact there aren't any features about it. All you can do is write something with it and then copy what you have written to the clipboard. Why the hell would you want to buy this app then when all editors for iOS do this?

Well Pop does one thing that no other editor I have does. It doesn't distract me. It doesn't have anything to distract me with. It just lets me write.

We need more products like Pop and fixed gear bikes. Simple things that do one thing really well. Simple products let you do what you really want to do without any distractions.

I watched Miguel Indurain as a kid. He is a legend in cycling. When I first started watching cycling, Indurain was already on three Tour wins with a fourth on it's way. I watched him take his next Tour title and I was hooked on the sport.

We didn't see the likes of another Indurain until Lance Armstrong came on the scene. After chalking up a succession of Tour wins, there was just no stopping him. There was an aura about him. He just looked like he belonged there. Now today, his credibility as a sportsman is in tatters, but Lance Armstrong isn't the only guilty party to disgrace the sport. His is obviously the most widely covered and most damaging to the sport due to the number of Tour wins he achieved in his career, but there are others.The last 15 years of cycling have seen an increase in the frequency of doping scandals that have been reported. Year after year, riders are accused of doping and what's surprising to me is that riders are still testing positive for banned substances. Enough is enough.

For me the sport has been dogged by too many years of scandals which in turn have led to rumours of corruption higher up in the sport. My love of road cycling is definitely over. As a Brit I should have been over the moon to see Bradley Wiggins on the top of the podium in the Tour last year, but I barely paid much attention to it.

Maybe in a few years, if the sport has really tidied up its image then I'll watch again. However, it's no more road cycling for me.

... with everyone's favourite mentor, Nicholas Bate.

Ultimately we need to get big, get niche or get out. There are no magic recipes for success. But staying specialist, staying niche is close. And becoming generalist and starting to sell on price alone to compete is a road to self-destruction.

— Build a better business 4 by Nicholas Bate

I've been trying to get back into using mind mapping on a daily basis again. I've used it a couple of times this week already. So far so good.The problem I have is that the largest notebook that I am using is a tad on the small side (think half of A4 size) and therefore I can only fit two levels of branches in a single mind map.

And that's the recurring problem I have with mind mapping. You need a big workspace to mind map effectively and that means nothing smaller than A4, but I tend to favour smaller notebooks as a daily scratchpad and dumping ground.

Which brings me to outlining. It's fit perfectly with the small notebooks I have and it although it's more linear than mind mapping, I can still organise stuff in a hierarchy much like mind maps do.

Which is better to use though?

via FGGT

Matt Gemmell recently blogged about his array of writing tools. While my selection is somewhat smaller, I thought it was still worth writing about the tools that I use.

I keep a list of writing ideas in my notebook. During the weekend I pick out what I want to write about and do a quick outline of the article in my notebook.

Once I have an outline for some posts, I enter them into
Pop. This is a minimal text editor for iOS that lets you write and copy what you have written. That's it. No saving of files, sharing or syncing. It is everything that many apps dread to be: featureless. This is where Pop excels though. A minimal interface means that I can just open the app and get on with writing. I tend to use Pop when I'm out and about. For jotting ideas down or expanding on my initial outlines, it's hard to beat. You just open and write.

If I'm at home I tend to use
Plaintext on my iPad. It has a similar minimal user interface to Pop but also includes syncing to your Dropbox. At this point I liked to have a hard copy of my writing, so that I can have it available on my laptop.

Finally there's
Mou. I tend to do final edits and drafts with Mou as well as use it for composing emails and writing guides. Mou has some nice features like split views, word counts and of course it's a Markdown editor, so I can add headings, lists and hyperlinks easily.

I'm also looking at
Scrivener for longer forms of writing such as short stories and novels. I've already done Nanowrimo once and would love to do it again this year.

I initially tried to use web based writing tools for a while there, but the simplicity of native applications like the ones I have mentioned are hard to beat.

So we're definitely going to Canada this year. Which means I'm definitely heading down to YNOT's with a wad of notes to get me some YNOT stuff for the bikes.

via YNOT

A look at the contents of a writer's notebook.

Marvellous to see a notebook like this which has recorded life experiences, ideas, notes and other things that are deemed interesting enough to record by the owner.

This was supposed to be this year's theme but I opted for being independent instead in light of my recent foray into the world of freelancing. I thought I would take a minute to outline what being present is, and why I was going to make it my theme for the year.

The world we live is increasingly dominated by technology and distractions. Ironically what you're reading right now is a distraction, but let's just say it's a good distraction.

Anyway, technology and distractions. Being a dad of two kids means that you are inevitably in the presence of other parents and their kids a lot of the time. One thing that I notice is the number of parents that are glued to their mobile phones when they are in the presence of their kids.

On one of our frequent trips to the driving range last year, I decided to treat my son to a round of crazy golf there. During our game, I noticed that the mum in the family in front of us was checking her phone every minute. She spent more time with the phone in her hand than her putter. The sad part was that while her kids were trying to impress her with their putting abilities, the mum was too pre-occupied with her phone to even notice. She wasn't being present with her kids.

Being present for me means your undivided attention. Since observing this I've become more aware of the time and attention I am giving to my family. I generally turn my phone off at night now after dinner. It's so that I can be present at home, mentally and physically, without any distractions putting me off. I don't want my kids to remember me as having my head buried in a phone all the time. I want them to remember all the times that I was present for them.

It doesn't always work out this way though, but I'm learning to schedule my freelancing work during the day and to limit my time using technology at night and at the weekend. Being present might not be this years theme for myself, but I'm more and more aware of it every time I go to check my phone or pick up the iPad for a quick surf.

The last couple of months have been a bit hectic in our house with an unscheduled job hunt for myself and the holidays were just coming up. With everything that was going on during this time, I stopped reading for a while. What's surprising about this is that I'm a pretty consistent reader, maybe making my way through a couple of books a month.

Things are settled down now so I've started getting back on track with my reading again. I picked up where I left off with Post Captain, and I'm digesting a couple of freelancing books this month. I'm sticking with one fiction book and one or two non-fiction books every month.

In the future I'm hoping to publish my progress through the books throughout the year, so watch out for posts on the blog and possibly reviews as well.

One of Patrick Rhone's latest posts is his list of tools for daily learning. Patrick's list is a great place to start for daily learning and I'm glad to see that there's a couple of tools there that I use myself. I've never considered them as learning tools but that's what they are really. Tools for discovering new things and learning.

My take on it is to always be learning. Never stop learning.

My first exposure to computer programming came when I was about ten when my Granpa bought an Atari 800XL. Right from the moment he got it, he immersed himself in programming books and magazines. As a kid you wouldn't give it any thought, but now when I think back I think it was amazing that given my Granpa's age, he was still learning on a daily basis.

This way of thinking that you should always be learning is something I've tried to do for the last few years, but along the way I usually forget things. I've learned the hard way that I need to keep a journal for such things so that I can review it at a later date.

My daily learning comes in the form of technical things like programming languages, web frameworks and other web development related topics. I've also read up on topics like decision making, writing and of course I'm reading through the Aubrey-Maturin series, which his made me much more knowledgeable of 19th century naval warfare.

The benefits of daily learning are just that. Daily learning. Being that bit more wiser on a daily basis. I'll never stop reading, writing, learning and discovering new things. Having a blog to write about my learning experiences when I'm in my seventies? I hope so.

Some of you might already know this from my tweets in the past but for those that don't here's the thing. My son has been playing golf since he was 1 year old. Yes you're reading that right. 1 year old.

In the last 5 years we've slowly encouraged the sport with him by taking him to the driving range, local golf courses and he's had some coaching from a couple of professionals in the past. He loves the game. He watches all the majors when they are on and cheers for his favourite golfers.

In order to develop this little talent further we decided to take our son to coaching a couple of years ago. The coaching was one to one with a professional. I would drop my son off and then observe from a distance while he hit some balls, played some games and then after half an hour I would collect him.

After a year it seemed like he wasn't making any more progress, but I decided to let it go on the basis that he is only a kid after all. The most worrying part though was that he wasn't really enjoying it anymore.Then one Saturday, during one of our frequent trips to the driving range, we just happened to see that the driving range were doing group lessons for kids. We asked our son if he wanted to go and he jumped at the chance.

He now gets coaching alongside other kids and since moving him to the group coaching, he has come on leaps and bounds. His progress in the last six months has been great. The best part of it is that he enjoys his golf again and wants to do better.

In hindsight the one to one coaching was the wrong choice for our son, but as a parent you want the best for your kids and to give them all the opportunities you can.

Rather than wanting the best for your kids, you should also remember to let them enjoy being a kid. I'm glad now that our son is enjoying his golf again but more importantly, he's enjoying it with other kids his age.

via FGGT

... with Patrick Rhone.

My friend Curtis has been busy penning a new book.

Congrats on the launch Curtis!

I read an article today where the author outlined her opinion on using the right tool for the job. Actually it was more like an advertisement for the authors book, but that isn't the problem.

The problem with the article is that the author immediately made assumptions about the person she was meeting with. Just because the person showed up with a pen and notebook, the author made an assumption that this person was using the wrong tool for the meeting.

Here's the thing. Everyone has their own choice that works for them.

Whether it's the latest tablet on the market, a netbook or your own choice of pen and paper, the tools that work for you the best are the ones that you have tried after eliminating countless others.

Let's look at text editors. A text editor is what programmers use on a daily basis. Working with code means that programmers need shortcuts to frequently used code templates, viewing files side by side and other key features.

I've chopped and changed over the last couple of years but I have always went back to the one that I work with best. Yet I know other programmers that have opted to use other text editors. Do I criticise these programmers for their choice?

No. It's what works for them.

I know better than tell someone that they're using the wrong tool for the job.

Can't wait to show my oldest son this!

via Distracted By Star Wars