Introducing A whole load of Good Ship

Well here we are. 3 years after thinking, suggesting, threatening to write a newsletter I have. I’m making no promises that this will be regular or consistent as I generally work in waves, but I’ll do some more, and probably sooner than another 3 years (maybe)

The general structure will be:

• Some things I’ve done or written

• A new tool or resource that looks cool

• Good things others have done

• And then probably some random ramblings

Some Good Ship

One of the first blog posts I ever did was called “What I use” and was about the tools and things I use to run my business and my work. It’s over two years old now and I thought now was a good time to review this as things have changed. Also I was struck by a conversation I had around why some organisations still use legacy systems, and apart from the costs and difficulties of change, one of the reasons is maybe inertia. If it isn’t utterly broken, and we never review it, does it matter? Also if you don’t know anything better, then why change? Well as someone who’s job is kinda to know this stuff, I don’t really have that excuse. So I try to review what I use every year when I prepare my company accounts. And I ask myself, could I spend my money in a way that creates more value for me? That doesn’t always mean spending less. Sometimes it means spending more, but mostly it involves moving money from one thing to another to create more value.

What has stayed the same

Meeting scheduling: Savvycal

Online meetings: Zoom

Email and docs: G Suite

Not much has changed here. Still prefer the interface of Savvycal to Calendly.

What has changed

Time tracking: I ditched Harvest as it just didn’t meet my needs. I built a time tracking an invoicing tool with Airtable and Zapier. Zapier pulls in entries into my google calendar and sends the details to Airtable, which then categorises these entries into project via key words. Airtable holds all the projects, how much I charge for the time and who to bill. I also use ToDoist for some tasks, and when completed, again Zapier pulls that into Airtable and categorises. Finally, when I want to bill, I click a button on airtable for a Project, which then sends all the details to Xero which then emails the invoice to the correct person.

I saved £9 a month on Harvest and used it on Zapier. I use Zapier (and Airtable) a lot for paid work anyway, so this just made sense. It also meant I could build some other dashboards for looking at how I work, and importantly for me, see how much time I give for free. I vaguely have an idea that I want to give around 20% of my time for free, and my Airtable tracker allows me to check this

You can see copy the Airtable base and Zaps I use here

Websites: I have two main websites. The Good Ship and Good Data. Underlying both of these sites is Notion. I use Notion for a few other things anyway, so decided to use it as the base for websites. It’s not perfect, but it allows me to get resources up quickly. For The Good Ship site I use something called Super to turn it from Notion page to web page. It allows some custom CSS and you can buy templates. For Good Data I use some code and Cloudflare to direct to the Good Data domain. I also have OpenIdeas.uk (which you should definitely check out) which uses Airtable and Softr.

The important things for me with websites is database structures and speed.

Cost: $12 a month for Super. Cloudflare is free. Airtable is already costed into my main work.

Research and Note taking: I stopped using Roam Research. How much I used it and how it sat within my ‘stack’ didn’t make the cost worth it. I now use Notion as my main place for notes. I have templates set up for different needs, and notes are tagged by projects, themes or ideas. This works quite well. The templates function of Notion is underused by people I think. Lots of people have downloaded this Notion tool I put together, which has lots of templates for meetings and notes. Might be useful.

I also use something called Fathom for video calls which allows me to live tag different parts of calls. It transcribes calls, and you can highlight different text with tags. This is really useful for research interviews. I then use something called Coda to take all of those highlights into a structured database. This happens automatically and means I have all the notes in a filterable database.

I also use two Chrome Extensions which send links and images to either Airtable or Notion.

A note on Miro: When I wrote the previous blog I was playing around with Miro and Mural for workshops. I’ve pretty much ditched both for workshops now. I still use Mural sometimes for mapping things out 1-1, but I don’t really think they work for workshops. Some people do, that’s fine.

New tool highlight

Thanks to Tom French for pointing out Felt which is a cool new map maker tool. It’s a lot of fun and helps with telling stories using maps which i think is important.

Good things by other people

These are all things which I’ve come across recently which I think are interesting.

Two things kind of linked which are about spreadsheets. Excel never dies is a lovely longform about the history of everyone’s favourite low-code tool MS Excel. I also thought this thread about the potential for spreadsheets as apps was interesting.

This is from last month, but I thought was really good. “"This guide tells the story of Lab Fellowship, an incubation programme for people and ideas with the potential to transform our financial system. “ Lots in there about Open Sharing and principles.

The prolific Roger Swannell put out the Charity opportunity canvas which I thought was excellent. I’m pretty sure Roger doesn’t sleep the amount he puts out.

Accessibility ABCs – a practical toolkit for the global civic tech community by MySociety is good.

Random Ramblings

Resilience

There has been a huge proliferation of using Resilience when talking about organisations in the last year. What I often don’t see is what people mean by resilience. When I talk about resilience I am very clear I am talking about

an organisations ability to anticipate, prepare, respond and adapt.

These 4 words are really useful in framing resilience in practical ways. Thinking through a particular scenario using these 4 different words is hugely important for resilience.

• How can we anticipate x better?

• How can we prepare for x better?

• If x happened how could we respond?

• If x happened how would we adapt? (this is often longer term)

Sociocracy

As part of the Power to Change Powering Up Programme we have been using Sociocracy to make decisions about how the programme runs. This is such a departure and involves Power to Change trying to give up a lot of power in decision making (props to them!). As a consultant this is a really interesting place to be. I’ve been using Sociocratic methods more and more in different scenarios with organisations, and place based collaborations as a way of shifting from the norm, especially when one organisation or person holds a lot of power in a relationship. It’s not easy, but it can be very powerful.

That’s all!

Ok that’s all I’ve got time for now. I gave myself an hour, and my time is up. Feel free to drop me a line about things you use, or cool things you’ve seen. Otherwise, thanks for reading and see you again some time in the future!