Kickoff For August 6, 2018
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Monday Kickoff, a collection of what I’ve found interesting, informative, and insightful on the web over the last seven days.
Let’s get this Monday started with these links:
Business
Throw away your corporate training plan, wherein Beatrice Karol Burks argues that changing the mindset of people, rather than teaching them skills or specific software, is the key to so-called digital transformation in government and in the workplace.
Living in an Extreme Meritocracy Is Exhausting, wherein we learn that faith in a meritocracy in the work and business worlds comes with a number of tradeoffs, especially being consistently and constantly judged in the workplace.
After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost, wherein we see how a boostrapped online business became a popular and profitable blogging and web publishing platform, get a glimpse of its triumphs and mistakes, and find out that running a successful open source project has its pitfalls.
Productivity
Procrastination and Technology, wherein it’s argued that our fascination with our screens is another step in the evolution of our long-standing social habits, and how we willingly give ourselves over to the distraction economy to get the supposed benefits of mobile services.
Writing in a journal is good for you — and so is throwing it out, wherein we learn that journals are for filling, but not really for reading.
Why I Don’t Use Digital Productivity Tools (or How a Notebook Makes Me More Productive), wherein Curtis McHale shows that you don’t need a half dozen mobile and desktop apps to keep yourself organized and on top of what you need to do. All you need is a pen and a notebook (and not necessarily expensive ones, either).
Technology
There are no digital silver bullets, wherein government digital tech expert Dave Briggs offers some solid guidelines on how to plan an organization’s digital transformation with the caveat that there are no perfect solutions to your problems.
What should you do when Google gets into bed with the US military?, wherein we discover how tech companies (and not just Google) rationalize working on military and secret government projects, why they do it, and the moral and ethical dilemmas their employees and customers face.
Digg’s v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity, wherein we get an insider’s look at the frankly shambolic development, launch, and tragic aftermath of a years-long update to the website Digg.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.