Author: Nick Kempinski

I’ll keep if brief.

How I feel at work

How I feel at home

You know, sometimes you start the day tripping over something in the dark trying to get up quietly no to wake anyone up. Then you bang around and the whole house is awake?

That feels like the beginning of my year.

I’m not going to jinx it, because I remember that on those day’s, while it take a bit, I do get some semblance of recovery.

Missions

My weeknotes for work ( I do them on an internal blog ) was about setting missions. I used to do Chris Brogans 3 Words. But right now, that seems much to much. I’m going to focus a but more low key on smaller missions this year. What’s my mission today? this week? Nothing more, nothing longer.

The goal, if I choose to accept, is simply complete the mission.

Is work not that into me?

One mission I have is to get people at work sharing. There’s something about our communication that feels too silent for a relatively small, all remote, growth stage company.

Part of the difficulty of working all remote, is something you feel like “they just aren’t that into me”. Which most of the time that’s not the case. Silence, when you don’t want it, is probably the hardest part of remote working. You go a bit zany. The more asynchronous communication processes you can instill, can help with those moments.

Right now, I’m feeling it.

And I want to fix it.

Designing my life

My outside work mission? To get into the drivers seat to design my life. There’s a few exercises I’m stuck on, but one foot in front of the other. I’ll get there. I’m saying it out loud on a blog on the internet, so it must come true – By the end of the year I’ll be prototyping and experimenting with life idea’s.

Happy 2025!

This week has been health and family first. The rest can wait.

I’ve had several conversations over the course of the week that have me thinking about repackaging a couple idea’s into an upcoming post:

• The Literaty – the idea that there will always be a deep underground group of active readers.
• Proficiently Literate – that as the US drop below 50% proficiently literate, what’s going to happen?
• The rise of government during the rise of literacy = the reduction of oligarchy as literacy rises. What happens in the other direction?
• I want to learn more about serfdom. I have a feeling there’s something in there that has some parallels to what we’re seeing in the world. I just can’t put my finger on it.

Make a mess clean a mess

I tell my kids this all the time. This week I made the mess. Long story short, with Power Pages and Power Platform I was given the choice of “blue door” and “blue door” and I investigated, thought I experimented and when it came to click and squint…. I picked the wrong “blue”. 

When doing so, it brought in a flood of things into the “solution” we didn’t want.

Clean up was just as slow. Do you want to remove the purple thing or the purple thing. Luckily, I was able to find a way ( through a series of 4 clicks… over and over… ) which which was which.

The Team Onion

Read The Team Onion this week in search of more comms ideas for the day job. I bought it right before postal strike, I was the silly one who picked “regular mail”.

I thought I would never read it, but today, I finally got the book!

It’s one of these things that deceptively simple, but breaking down has some very interesting applications.

Time to throw it against the company wall, and see if it sticks.

So long and that’s for all the follicles. That’s a wrap to Movember.

This week I came across GitLab’s Handbook! How have I not seen this or read this before!? It’s amazing from an org comms perspective.

• overview the good and the bad of all-remote work
• odd pieces of personality
• other companies inspired by GitLab
• Head of Remote or Future of Work, is a pretty cool job title to aspire for.
• So much more goodies in there.

I’m starting to see if I can make changes to the day job to veer this way. It’s gonna be tough, but I think worth it. Here’s some of the hurtles:

• The team doesn’t default to share.
• Git will probably not fly with most of the company – unlike at GitLab were if you don’t at least understand basic git, you have bigger problems.
  • Day job has SharePoint, but SharePoint? Can SharePoint work??? 🤷
    • Hint: I tinkered, and it might be possible.
    • We’ve got Microsoft 365 and I’m trying to champion the toolset. I’m a use-it-if-you-got-it, use-it-more-if-you’re-paying-for-it kinda guy.
• We are all-remote, and prefer synchronous work
• No one seems to write anything that comes across my desk at least.
• Did I mention the team doesn’t default to share?

Movember is coming to an end. Thank you to everyone whose donated.

Let’s see…. this week 🤔… this week 🤔…

• I used my todo list
• Get new phone. I’m feel like the only person who won’t go big, sticking with the iPhone SE ( now 3rd gen )
• New cell provider. It’s time. The old one was way to much. And I’m Canadian, so that’s way way way way too much.
• Keep reading. Agile Conversations
• Keep designing my life. Still hung on Odyssey plan. More an issue with making time at this point I think? My therapist might disagree.