I might start working through my Instapaper queue in the car now that it supports CarPlay.

Editing titles on posts on mobile is something I’ve wanted for ages too, so that’s a win.

Sean Byrnes:

In fact, as a leader, there are often only a handful of key decisions that make the difference between success and failure. The challenge is not whether you can be at your best all the time, the challenge is whether you are at your best when you make those key decisions. Since we never know when those decisions will happen, we have to find a way to be ready for them at all times.

…

I rebuilt my schedule with some new rules:

• Exercise is part of my job
• Sleep is part of my job
• Spending time with my family is part of my job

Tom Geraghty:

If we only remember one thing, we should make it the “Platinum Rule” – Treat others as they want to be treated. That means delivering feedback in a way that the recipient prefers, not the way we prefer to deliver it, or even the way we would prefer to receive it.

Plus a bunch more advice.

Kevin Yank:

From time to time someone will ask, “Does Culture Amp still use Elm?” I’ll answer privately that no, we are no longer investing in Elm, and explain why. Invariably, they tell me my answer was super valuable, and that I should share it publicly. Until now, I haven’t.

A site that provides a peek at which apps folks have in their docks.

This charger is great for travelling. It can power my laptop and charge my phone and watch or headphones at the same time.

A bunch of interactive examples and tips on using multiple cursors for editing text by Alex Harri.

A tool from Hashicorp for adding document review and collaboration workflows over Google Docs.

Dan Rockwell:

Smart people have lousy meetings. Keeping meetings on track is like organizing a barrel of hummingbirds.

I especially like the “fill in the blank statements” strategy.

Joshua Sokol:

In February, Japyassú and Kevin Laland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Saint Andrews, proposed a bold answer to the question. They argued in a review paper, published in the journal Animal Cognition, that a spider’s web is at least an adjustable part of its sensory apparatus, and at most an extension of the spider’s cognitive system.

Roger Martin:

The entire white-collar workforce of the modern company works in decision factories where they pump out decisions such as what and how much to produce, how to market and sell what is produced, what new things to consider producing and selling, where to sell what it produces, how to protect the IP behind what it produces, and so on.

If you had that as your conceptualization, you would naturally do things such as organize around decisions; measure output in terms of decisions; measure and work on enhancing the productivity of producing decisions; and so on. But companies don’t do any of the above because their conceptualization is of a coordination and control structure, not a decision factory.

Luis Velasquez and Kristin Gleitsman:

Leaders who model optimism set a positive tone in the workplace, empowering team members to recover from setbacks. If you want your team to navigate challenges independently, the worst thing you can do in the face of a setback is look for who to blame. Developing the organizational muscle to pull together to overcome setbacks is crucial. And while blame is not helpful, team retrospectives can help the team collectively get better at anticipating and avoiding similar setbacks in the future, creating a sense of shared accountability.

Dan North:

tl;dr

• Model and visualise your value chain.
• Structure the people around the value chain.
• Make all the demand visible, so there is no hidden work. This is key.
• Identify work that will reduce drag and give you more discretionary capacity.
• Decide what you want to invest in, and structure the people around that.
• Repeat every quarter, which is long enough to get work done, and short enough to iterate.

Rands:

Leaders sound like they know what they’re talking about because they’ve taken the time to understand the situation entirely. They read the room; they communicate clearly and consistently to their audience. Their context has been carefully constructed by asking penetrating questions from the humans who most understand the situation.

This entire post is on the money.

Jason Fried:

Innovation should almost never happen. It’s incredibly rare. It mostly happens by accident, not by intention. It’s wonderful when it does, but you merely fluctuate in and out of it, it’s not steady state.

Work is mostly mundane. It’s mostly maintenance. It’s mostly local improvement and iteration. Work is mostly… Work. Any innovation is an outlier, nearly a rounding error.