Getting Back to Work

Bifurcated. That’s the best single word I can think of describing how things seem to me right now. We’re in this strange period of emergence, where things are half locked-down; half exactly as they ever were. 

My working time is now split 60:40 between remote working from home and the office. I’ve written a rota to get one engineer per day into the office for the next 6 weeks. Mini-pie is back in school 2 days a week. Next week I’m attending an actual, real, in-person, external meeting to kick off a new contract. I’ve just been to a book shop where I had to queue to get in and immediately use hand sanitiser upon entering, as directed by a staff member wearing a full plastic face shield. On my walk home, I saw crowds of people drinking beer in the sun, crammed in by the river.

So in this weird in-between phase I’ve found myself making some foundational changes to my approach to my work. There have been three broad areas of change: 

•  Task Management

•  Equipment

•  What’s on my Phone

Task Management - Bullet Journal No More

Since the start of the year, I’ve been using a physical bullet journal to track all of my tasks. Ever since I started using pen and paper, I knew that I was doing it out of sense of wanting to feel in control, but there was always a risk that the sheer amount of tasks I need to juggle would overwhelm the system. That point duly arrived in the middle of last week, when I started going over two pages, and I was losing the will to keep up with it. 

Sorry pen and paper; it was nice while it lasted.

Back to GTD

Whenever I feel overwhelmed or feel I’ve got too many tasks to keep track of, I fall back on the Getting Things Done (GTD) method. This new disjointed life I’m leading lends itself to a more systematised life management scheme than ‘write a list of all the things I need to do in a book that I carry everywhere’, and GTD’s contexts are going to be especially helpful. 

Previously, I used a bunch of Evernote hacks to create a GTD system, but Evernote’s pricing hikes pushed me off their system a couple of years ago. Luckily, an application called Notion has changed their pricing structure to be free to individual users with no limits.

Notion

Notion is difficult to describe in a few words, but for our purposes it can be thought of as something capable of creating a sort of personal website, and that website can have built in elements like databases. The really powerful feature that makes it useful for GTD is the ability to have linked databases. Conceptually, it’s like having a spreadsheet, where individual cells can also be spreadsheets. 

Barebones task table. Very much a work in progress.

Above is my Task Table, as it currently stands. This is the master task list, where all tasks are logged with as much metadata as I can throw at them. It’s roughly analogous to my longform list of tasks from my paper notebook. It’s exactly as unwieldy as that, which is why I use the Dashboard to view what is most relevant to every working day.

Heath Robinson Dashboard

Under each of the main visible headings in the main window, you can see ‘Task Table’. What that is telling you is that each of those two tables you see on the Dashboard are really like windows, peering into the master Task Table. The tables you see in the dashboard really represents a bunch of filters applied to the main table, so I can just look at what’s important.

I’ve got more work to do, especially with context filtering. I’ve made a page which shows me all the tasks tagged with ‘able to do from my phone’ on it, but I need to make a bunch more of those types of shortcuts.

Once I’ve got the full system up and running, I’ll post about setting it up.

Equipment - Mega Mobile Office

The time has come round for The Big Five Year Upgrade, and my venerable iPad Pro first gen is being put out to pasture. I’ve dropped all the pennies on a brand spanking new iPad Pro 12.9”, as well as the Magic Keyboard. This is now the one personal computer for me (home and travel edition). 

It’s not super-grammable, but there’s a snoozing kitty in the background. You’re welcome.

For the structural analysis software our company uses, I need a PC running Windows 10. Right now at home that’s done by my 15” MacBook Pro (2015) under Boot Camp, which although slightly long in the tooth, is still as capable as any desktop in our office for the work I do. The difference is that now, the laptop will be parked at home, and become effectively a small desktop. 

If I’m in the office, I have a desktop PC. If I’m remote working from home I’m using the MacBook. 

In the medium term future, there may come a time again when I need to travel and design, and under those circumstances I’ll be forced to pack up the fairly chunky MacBook and take it with me. Even in the Before Times though, these events were rare. Usually if I’m travelling for meetings, I’m rarely doing design work: I’m participating in the meeting, taking notes, making sketches. Maybe if there’s a break I’m answering a few emails, or firing off a few Slack messages. This sort of work is iPad Nirvana, and I’ve been doing it for years.

This breaks my computing life down into nice structured, discrete areas. 

1.  Work from home primary computer: MacBook Pro running Boot Camp

2.  Work from the office primary computer: Desktop PC

3.  Constant Companion computer: iPad Pro

Phone

I’ve had to do The Bad Thing

Oh nose. Work emails. Outlook. Bad Martyn.

I’ve had to relent, and put my work email on my phone. And yes, that is 31 unread emails.

One utterly ruined weekend circa 2009 has kept work emails off my personal devices for the better part of a decade, but alas, the fallout from Covid-19 has pushed even my sacred belief in work/life separation past its usual breaking point. I just receive so much email that I can no longer afford to not to keep on top of incoming messages. Those 31 unread messages came from a productive Thursday spent with focus on one task, and a Friday which ended up revolving around troubleshooting site issues and a scheduled internal meeting. The good news was that even though those 31 emails are marked unread, I was able to glance at them as they came in on either my phone or my watch. Without some sort of mobile access to email, that would just have been a millstone around my neck.

I hope this doesn’t mark a permanent shift for me to routine email access out of work hours. I am acutely aware of the need to keep work and home separate, and that’s what I tell my team. I want people who can switch off as they leave their office, or their home workspace - I believe it makes for healthier staff. I just hope I can kick the habit if and when things go back to ‘normal’.

Pleasant Interlude Number 2: Linea Sketch 2.5

Turns out I’m a fickle beast.

I spend 1000 or so words singing the praises of Procreate after their update last year, and here I am now re-enraptured by Linea Sketch by iconfactory.

The main reason I went looking for other sketching apps after spending lots of time with Linea Sketch 2.0 was the lack of a fill tool. The primary reason I’m now back on the Linea bandwagon is the introduction of … a fill tool! But there’s way more to this update for engineering sketching than just a simple fill tool, so let’s take a look at the shiny new features.

ZipShapes

As an engineer drawing a large amount of steel detail sketches, I often find myself drawing a good deal of things that look like variation of this:

And now I have a tool that helps me do this much more quickly than before: ZipShapes. Rather than me blather on, let’s attempt some video content...

Before version 2.5 this would have taken me a couple of minutes to do to my satisfaction. The version in the video took 18 seconds.

As well as squares and rectangles, Linea 2.5 recognises circles, ellipses, triangles, and finally irregular polygons; the latter being what it falls back on when it cannot reconcile your doodling to a regular polygon.

Combined with a select tool which can filter by layer you’ve got a very simple to use but very powerful method of creating a good looking line drawing.

Fill Tool

This fill tool though, oh this fill tool. What I love about iconfactory is the way they put in so much thought into their very few tools. It’s like going to a new cafe or restaurant and noticing with pleasure that the menu is small. You know that care has been taken to ensure that although your options are somewhat limited, whatever you do have will be excellent.

The fill tool has two modes: tap to fill, and freehand. The freehand method is, as far as I can tell, broadly same as that in Paper by 53 (another great sketching app, but more free-hand and watercolour based). You select a colour, whether or not you desire transparency, then you draw a shape. The resulting shape is converted to a block of colour with no outline.

Tap to fill is where the real action is at though. The way icon factory have configured it is just genius. It works like the old paint bucket tool in MS Paint, but cleverly with your layers and even guidelines. The fill tool essentially reacts to whatever is on the screen, and ignores whatever is turned off. The fill is made on the currently selected layer, regardless of which layer the detected boundaries are on.

I love this thing.

My usual workflow is to do everything first in blue pencil on my bottom layer with the small 4x4 guidelines switched on, then when I’m happy I ink over that on the topmost layer. When the inks are finished, I use the middle three layers for colours, centrelines and labels. All I need to do to throw in my colours is turn off my pencil layer, centrelines and the guidelines to show just my final ink outlines, select my colours and tap away. Super fast, super obvious, and incredibly helpful.

Ever since seeing Glen Cooper’s (@AvatarEngineers on twitter) vibrant hand calcs done on an iPad 4 or 5 years ago, I’ve endeavoured to get some colour into my sketches because it just brings them out beautifully. The issue has always been time - colour used to take time away from the calcs, and was only something I could afford to do when it was really necessary; now it’s such a quick job it’s crazy not to colour my sketches.

Blending and Versioning

I’m just throwing in a mention for these two new features for completeness, as I’ve not had any real interaction with them. Blending is something I almost certainly will not be using in my day job, but I expect the support for reverting drawings to a previous state will be very useful in the future.

In Conclusion

Linea Sketch 2.5 is all sorts of my jam. If you are an engineer doing hand calcs on your iPad, you ought to be using this. It’s just the best.