Newsletter – February 2021

Here’s the technology and people update for February 2021.

I know I say this every month, but thank you so much for the replies and the opportunity to meet up in person, on Zoom and through messages. I really appreciate you spending time to talk about tech, life and randomness.

HELPING OUT
I seem to have spent a lot of the last month helping others get their heads around technology, business and what the future might bring and how we could plan for it.
This includes my 500 Startup mentees, some of you here, and a great session with students from the Kirirom Institute of Technology to talk about Travel Tech, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and much more. I also got to meet up with the other Women in Tech group (men are allowed to come to the meeting). It was a really supportive environment with more than a few heartfelt moments where members talked about their journey and how they overcame personal as well as professional situations to get where they were.

PERSONAL PROMOTION
I know many struggle with this one, me particularly but pretty much everything I watch, read and listen to says that we need to publish our work. How else to will we find those serendipitous moments if no one knows what we do. So the content continues.
Please follow me on Instagram where this week I have a short movie with one of the monkeys who wandered into the house while I was working. She was not happy when I threw her out.
I would be so, so grateful if you would subscribe to my channel on YouTube where I’m continuing on the plan to create 100 videos this year. Even though there aren’t that many videos I’m almost at the point where there’s someone watching a video almost every hour of the day.
One social media platform I almost never use is Facebook, and they’re in the news yet again for being the bad guys.

AUTOMATION
I’ve had lots of enquiries about Automation this month, with one client asking me to “just fix my life” as they were spending almost a whole day to do tasks that could just be automated. What started out as a simple spreadsheet fix in the early days has morphed into a critical and unwieldy core of the business as its grown. Is this a scenario you’re heading toward ? – maybe I can help.
Automation, CRM, Project Management Tools

PRODUCTIVITY
I still love ToDoist and finally uninstalled Things3, my previous task manager. I can’t see me going back.
Whilst no one took part in last month’s survey (lesson learnt) I have reached a natural limit of about 10 tasks per day. It seems pretty consistent and I’m quite geek’d out that I’m now an ‘Expert’ as far as ToDoist is concerned.

CONSULTING & DIGITAL SKILLS
Its been quiet, but I anticipate another project to look at Digital Skills is heading my way. I also presented to the Development Sector this month on how they risk falling behind. They need to improve their digital literacy and create roles that can bridge the divide between what development requires and what technology can deliver in terms of solutions.

” One pressing need is for all development professionals to have a basic level of “digital literacy”’ – USAID

I NEED A BIT OF HELP – IS THIS YOU?
I’ve been considering the possibility of speeding up the achivement of my goals for this year. So rather than doing everything myself, I would love to have someone help me. The things that take me a long time are writing and content generation. Plus I get a bit stuck on ideas and turning them into something structured. So report writing, scripts for YouTube videos, small bits of research and the odd bit of PR.
So with that said, if you can write well, structure content, and potentially do a bit of social media promotion (LinkedIn a bonus) I’d love to hear from you. Its only a part-time thing for now but who knows where it could go. If this is you, or you know someone who could help, please contact me.

MISCELLANEOUS LINKS
A heavy-going article on the weird world here:

My takeaway quotes:

• The biggest risk in the weird new world is neither long-term security or short-term survivability. Those are important, of course, but moot if you become too disenchanted with the world to even get up in the morning and do something meaningful with your day.
• The greatest endemic risk to the psyche in 2021 is not that you’ll end up on the streets next week or fail to fund your retirement in 30 years. The greatest risk is that you’ll feel so relentlessly battered by the weirdness all around that you’ll go numb and simply disengage from the world entirely today.
• This is becoming increasingly common. It is getting easier and easier to become terminally, fatally, disenchanted with the world and turn into one of the walking dead, a zombie assemblage of functional but pointless Adult/Parent drives, until one day you fall down and can’t get up again because you don’t want to.
  There’s also a long article on genius (complete with equation) here:

G = S x N x D

I love long articles.

That’s it for this month. As always I love your replies, and continue to be interested in some of the challenges you face and problems you want to solve. Please do let me know what you’re up to.

PS. Don’t forget the request for subscribers to my YouTube channel

Chris