Chris Hannah

Setting yourself goals can be an excellent way to push yourself towards a target and keep yourself heading in the right direction. But something I've discovered recently is that breaking a goal down into actions and turning them into challenges can be very beneficial.

The first question that comes to your mind is probably, what's the difference between a goal and a challenge?

My answer to that would be that your perspective changes when you have a challenge rather than just a goal. Because goals usually don't come with any information on reaching them. They're only a target that you would like to achieve, and the journey is yours to figure out.

Something I've discovered relatively recently is the benefits of setting yourself challenges and using experimentation to improve skills, make informed decisions, and ensure that you stay on track.

What Makes a Good Experiment?

In my opinion, a good experiment has a clear goal in mind and a way that you can track progress. I also think it helps if there is a planning stage before a challenge is set or before any experimentation is started.

From a goal, you should be able to extract actionable tasks to help achieve that end goal.

For example, I had the goal a while ago to sort my email out and build a system that worked for me. As a goal, I would probably write it as "I want to have a better email system". But instead, I broke it down and examined what exactly it was that I was looking for.

Turns out, I didn't want a whole new email system. I just wanted to deal with the one address/account instead of the three I had previously. And to have an automated mechanism that filtered junk, sorted some valuable but not urgent emails, and kept my inbox for anything that I either had to deal with relatively soon or manually organise.

Once I did that, I set myself a fixed duration of 1 week and got on with my experiments. I also found that keeping a log of my decisions and opinions helped keep me on track too.

So What Are the Benefits?

I'm sure there are countless benefits to setting yourself challenges, and experimenting, rather than just introducing a goal. But at least from my perspective, here's what I've found:

It's easy to track progress. Especially when you keep records throughout the process as you make decisions.

It keeps yourself honest throughout the experimentation as you have a clear goal in mind and actions that should get you there.

Making informed decisions become more straightforward. If you perform an early analysis and identify your requirements early on, the decisions you make during and at the end of the process are more informed and more likely to be based on logic than your current thoughts or emotions in a particular moment.

Challenges I Have Set for Myself

Since really thinking about this idea of using challenges, I've set myself two of them. First, to find an email system that suited me, and more recently, to explore the market of writing apps to see if they fit my needs.

The email challenge was rather strict. I had a clear goal of fixing my email system and requirements that I wanted to meet at the end. And I also set myself a week to complete the challenge. I think I benefitted thoroughly from developing the initial requirements, as I found myself veering off the path a few times, but I was pulled back after re-reading my original plan.

I think that keeping a log of my decisions throughout the week also helped. Because although there were benefits of being honest to myself, I was left with a record of my thoughts and decisions at the end of the week as I tried new things. Which meant I could do better analysis at the end and make a better final decision.

The challenge to find a new writing app has been a more flexible one. Mainly since it was more exploratory, I wasn't aware of each app's intricacies, or in fact, what apps were available. So I went in with an open mind and precise requirements (which were refined over time) and decided to test a few apps until I thought there wasn't any more left to try out.

In retrospect, I think I would have benefitted from some more limitations. For example, coming up with an early list of apps and doing a basic research level. Because that would have filtered a few choices out early on.

This kind of reflection is another aspect of experimentation that is also important since it can only improve future challenges' efficiency and success rate.

Final Thoughts

By breaking down goals into steps and setting yourself challenges, I think you're more likely to take action and actually achieve them. And by doing controlled experiments with fixed criteria, you're more likely to finish with usable information that can help you make more informed decisions.

I want to explore challenges more, and I think I'll be doing some more myself. Maybe less around technology choices and more to do with life in general.

I'm interested to see if anyone else has used challenges and how useful they've been. So if you have any past experience, I'd love to hear it.

Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch:

After 4 years on the market, Apple has discontinued its original HomePod. It says that it will continue to produce and focus on the HomePod mini, introduced last year. The larger HomePod offered a beefier sound space but the mini has been very well received and clearly accomplishes many of the duties that the larger version was tasked with. The sound is super solid (especially for the size) and it offers access to Siri, Apple’s assistant feature.

First the iMac Pro, and now the original HomePod. Is this Apple doing a quick clearout before the upcoming event?

Either way, I hope this is a sign that there will be a new HomePod at that event.

It's probably a weird thing to expect, since it's being discontinued. However, the iMac Pro has been discontinued, and most of us expect an equivalent model to be announced soon, albeit with an M-class chip. Also, wouldn't it be weird to have a HomePod mini as the only model in the lineup? What would it be a mini version of?

I've thought about purchasing a 12.9" iPad for a while, but I kept putting it off, until the rumours started last year about new models being introduced in March 2021. After then my mind was made up, I was going to buy get the next big iPad Pro that Apple released.

I wrote in November last year about what the perfect iPad would be for me, and I concluded that the current Air or Pro models would probably suffice in terms of capability, but since I want the larger screen, I'd need to go for a Pro.

It's a bit of an odd situation, because I know I'm going to buy an iPad at the next event, no matter what gets announced. But I don't have an idea what the next iPad Pro models will be like.

There are rumours of a MiniLED display, which is good I guess, but I wouldn't say that's something I particularly care about. I can't quite recall any other rumours, apart from 5G support, but then again I haven't purposefully looked for any.

Nevertheless, there are a few things that I would like in the next models, and I think a lot of people would also appreciate them:

• Longer battery life (similar to the M1 Macs).
• M1 (or equivalent) chip.
• 2 USB C ports.
• Better front-facing camera, and positioned top-centre while in landscape mode.
• Possibly an even bigger size than 12.9"?

I would also like a new Magic Keyboard to be announced since I think the trackpad could do with being a bit bigger. This is probably unrealistic but could be possible if Apple released a larger size.

Apart from that, the rest of my iPad wishes are software-based. So I'll have to wait until WWDC for those.

GlanceCam is an app developed by my friend, Cesare Forelli, and it's once that I've admired for a long time. In short, it's an app that lets you view IP cameras from your Mac. But in reality it's so much more, especially with the recent major update.

It's a relatively minimal design, however it's still packed full of functionality. It support multi-windows, always on top, 4K streams, you can use it to sent HTTP GET commands to your devices, keyboard shortcuts, a URL scheme, AppleScript support, and so much more.

This app is probably the main reason why I'm thinking of investing in some cameras for my house.

I'm definitely a culprit of this.

I’ve been trying to find a way to discover interesting links and generally more things to read. Because, although I currently use a mix of Micro.blog, Twitter, and RSS, to get news/articles delivered to me. It always felt to me that it wasn’t exactly a diverse source of information and that it relied on a number of people discovering something first.

But then I listened to the latest version of AppStories, where John Voorhees and Federico Viticci discussed how they read newsletters, and they came on to the subject of Mailbrew¹. Which reminded me that I tried the service out a while ago, but for some reason that I can’t remember, I stopped using it.

However, they’ve since added a Twitter integration that allows you to view the “top links” from either your timeline or a specific list. And since I’ve stopped using Twitter as much recently, I thought it sounded pretty handy. So I’ve decided to give it a go again.

My daily digest still needs a bit of refinement, since I probably have slightly too many sections. But I’m sure I’ll make changes as I go and if I start seeing trends where a section just isn’t that interesting.

But for now, I’ve gone with these sources:

• Top posts from Hacker News
• Popular items from Product Hunt
• Assorted feeds:
  • Designer News
  • Lifehacker
  • The Verge
  • BBC News
  • The Independent
  • Dev.to (Swift)
• Top posts from specific Reddit subreddits:
  • productivity
  • design
  • travel
  • technology
  • programming
  • apple
• Top links from Twitter (I have a few private Twitter lists for bloggers, developers, and tech in general).

Mailbrew seems like a really good fit for my desire to have an easy way to get articles from all around the web. I think the only work that I will need to do is to find the sources that are right for me.

Amit Gawande, on the idea of completely owning your computer:

I want a computer that I own completely. I want a computer that does what I want it to do, not one that has a hidden agenda programmed into it at the factory. And, I want to have these capabilities regardless of what anyone has done to the Internet to prevent me from having them. I don’t want to be dependent on the whims of a government or the good will of a giant corporation.

Tie goes on to describe his ideal system and mulls over what he currently has to live with.

This made me think if such a system, or a group of systems for that matter - it’s not just a computer that Tie is talking about here - can actually exist. There’s no incentive for any organization, profit or non-profit, to build such a system. It will not be of interest for an everyday consumer, it would be too dull for him. He would, unmindful of the harms, load it with the unnecessary bloat, ruining the whole promise the system was built on.

There’s a lot of good thoughts in this article. And after some thinking, I’m not sure if this theoretical computer exists.

Zach Phillips, on the ephemeral nature of modern manufacturing:

“They don’t build them like they used to.”

The idea that materials used to be expensive and labor cheap (or free/enslaved) tries to explain this, but it’s much better explained by the fact that maximization of profit has no interest in building something that lasts.

The past few years of my collecting creative tools has been focused on those things that just “can’t” be built anymore, not because there aren’t the people with the skills and desire to build excellent tools, but because the economic system won’t support those who build them.

Overall build-quality and longevity are two things that I think are lacking in a lot of modern products.

One of my favourite YouTubers, Jake Wright, is a software engineer at Monzo, and he tends to make very interesting videos about how he works. He made a video earlier this year showing how he'd been working from home due to the pandemic.

However, like most of us software engineers. he's been working from home ever since. And he's created a follow up video going through an entire work day, which I just found it fascinating.

Michael Zhang, writing for PetaPixel:

Here’s something you may not have known about the 1800s wet plate collodion photography process: it can make certain tattoos disappear in photos. It’s a curious phenomenon that photographer Michael Bradley used for his portrait project Puaki.

“The idea was first sparked when I saw some wet plate collodion images from photographers around the world who had shot people with tattoos,” Bradley tells PetaPixel. “I had been shooting on the wet plate collodion method for a few months and was looking for a long-term project when I saw these images of people with tattoo’s and noticed that some faded away depending on the color of that tattoo.

“I noticed that the green/blue shades looked like they were most likely to disappear, especially on someone with slightly darker skin, and this sparked the idea.”

Michael Bradley produced some incredible photos, and the comparisons are astounding. The tattoos disappear as if by magic, all because the wet colldion process is sensitive to only blue and ultraviolet light.

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Cover Photo: Gary Shane Te Ruki © Michael Bradley