Blog
Life Contexts - Cues To Differentiate Between Work And Home
As one of the many people now working from home, I found the process difficult at first. I couldn’t switch my mind between my day job, my side-projects, and spending time with family. Everything bled together which left me focusing at the wrong things at the wrong time. Over time, I have learned to set up various “life contexts” to focus my mind to the work at hand. These life contexts are made up of subtle and not so subtle cues that signify the type of work or activity I’m currently doing.
May 31, 2021
The Creator's Philosophy - Create Once Use Many Times
In the world of content creation, we’re always creating new things. New blog posts, new videos, podcasts, and social media posts. It can seem like an endless task to create and add value to the world. The trick to avoiding this overwhelm is to adopt what I’m calling the creator’s philosophy: Create once, use many times. Once you understand and apply this concept to the things you create, you’ll be able to overcome creative blocks to create things that your audience will enjoy.
May 17, 2021
Why You Should Schedule Time For Creativity
The whole idea of creativity and being creative is underestimated in today’s world. We all think we’re not creative or can’t think of original ideas but that’s not the case. There are many definitions of creativity everywhere you look. Simply put, being creative is about being able to combine things in new ways to produce different things. This is such a powerful concept and one that you can apply to almost any discipline.
May 10, 2021
UI Design Patterns - How To Write Effective Error Messages
Any well-designed application should have good error messages. When I say good error messages I’m not talking about a message like “Critical Error x-299498sdkfjh”. Let’s face it, that helps no one. A good error message will tell the user what happened, why it happened, and how the user can fix it. Errors will always happen no matter how well you build something. This is because you can’t account for how every single user will interact with your app.
May 3, 2021
Visual Essays - May
Here you’ll find a collection of my visual essays for May. If you have any feedback or questions for me, reach out on Twitter. 3rd May Understand Mental Models To Improve Your Design Skills pic.twitter.com/MTq0gNY9wR — Michelle (@MishaCreatrix) May 3, 2021 4th May Embrace The Kaizen Mindset💡 pic.twitter.com/2oSARIbTD9 — Michelle (@MishaCreatrix) May 4, 2021 5th May How To Manage Your Attention ⚠ pic.twitter.com/nxHy0hsDAr
May 1, 2021
Jekyll - Add Estimated Reading Time To Posts
Adding the estimated reading time of your article provides valuable context for readers. They can decide if they want to read your article now or bookmark it and save it for later. It’s a feature seen most commonly on the Medium platform but you can replicate this feature on your Jekyll site. After some tweaking, I have been able to add this feature to my website (it’s actually pretty simple) so I’d like to share the process with you.
April 28, 2021
How To Make Your Productivity Systems More Efficient
How we live our lives and the systems we use to keep on top of things is always changing. As we find new helpful nuggets of advice, we adopt those into our systems to try and be more productive, less busy, or happier. With that said, it can be challenging enough to define the areas we are struggling with, never mind coming up with an effective solution and implementing it.
April 26, 2021
Jekyll - How To Enable Incremental Regeneration To Speed Up Build Times
A great tip for speeding up the build time of your Jekyll blog is to make use of the incremental regeneration feature. This process will only generate the pages that were updated since the last build as opposed to re-generating all pages with each build. A Word Of Caution While this sounds like a fix-all solution in theory, in practice a word of caution is advised when using this feature.
April 21, 2021
Why Regular Reflection Can Help You Become More Productive
It can be easy to fall into the pattern of working from day to day, week to week. Finding the time and motivation to learn how to improve or become better than you were before can seem like a huge task. However, by building a practice of regular reflection into your life, you’ll notice huge benefits over time. Being great doesn’t happen overnight. Start small with intentional improvements and build upon those over time to allow for even more improvements.
April 19, 2021
The 12 Week Year by Brian Moran - Book Notes, Summary, Review
The 12 Week Year will fundamentally change how you think about goal planning and working towards those goals. Who Should Read This Book? I would recommend this book to anyone interested in setting and working on goals. Even if you have already read plenty of productivity or goal-setting books, this tactic of the 12 week year is extremely helpful and motivating. Take the time to try it out for one or two quarters and you’ll quickly see the value in this approach.
April 16, 2021
Jekyll - How To Determine Build Times
If you’re looking to optimize the build time of your Jekyll blog, it’s useful to know just how long each part of the build process takes. By using the profile flag at the end of your build command, you’ll be given an output of the build process summary and the site render stats. Here’s the command: bundle exec jekyll build --profile Here’s an example of the build process summary:
April 14, 2021
Overcoming The Blank Page As A Creator
As I sit down to write this article, I’m not starting from scratch. The idea for the article came from my Writing Topics list. The content for the article is being pulled from my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) System in Obsidian. All I have to do is pull out the pieces and structure the content. Sure there is a bit more to it than that but by following this approach to content creation, I’ll never have the problem of starting with a blank screen.
April 12, 2021
Jekyll - How To Limit Posts During The Build Process
As your Jekyll blog grows in size over time, you might find that the build process takes longer to run. This can be frustrating if you just want to test out a small UI change. Luckily, the workaround for this is to limit the number of posts during the build process. Here’s the command: bundle exec jekyll serve --limit_posts 10 This will limit the build to 10 posts but you can change the number to be whatever you need.
April 7, 2021
Why Writing Blog Posts In Markdown Is A Game Changer
I enjoy writing my articles using Markdown as it offers a lot of benefits. I’m able to write without distraction. Plus my hands never need to leave the keyboard to format what I’m writing. I can make things bold, italicized, or underlined all while typing away on my keyboard. Markdown is a lightweight markup language that many people use in a variety of situations. From coding projects to technical writing to writing blog posts like I’m doing here.
April 5, 2021
Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy - Book Notes, Summary, Review
Eat That Frog is all about doing that one thing, the thing that provides you with the most value in the long-term. If you can Eat That Frog first thing in the morning before anything else, you’ve set yourself up for success. Many of you will have heard of this concept before but if you’re like me you may not have read the original source. Who Should Read This Book? I would recommend this book to anyone looking to figure out the most important things they should be working on. The tasks or projects that will provide value to your life.
April 2, 2021
Jekyll - Creating External Links That Open In A New Tab
A common convention for external links is that they open in a new tab. The idea behind this is that you can easily go back to the previous tab if you need to. This makes it easy for users to return to your website. You might already know how to do this in plain HTML. However, if you’ve built your website in Jekyll like me, you’ll want to know how this can be achieved on your Jekyll website.
March 31, 2021
Keep A Web Dev Notebook To Learn More Effectively
If you have read my recent post: You Learn More Effectively By Practicing, you’ll know that I’ve consciously made an effort to continue building my web development knowledge. Over the last couple of years, I developed my knowledge in other areas to help with my current job. Topics like user guides and e-learning videos dominated my mind over keeping on top of the latest best practices of building a website.
March 29, 2021
Visual Essays - March + April
Here you’ll find a collection of my visual essays for March + April. If you have any feedback or questions for me, reach out on Twitter. 29th March Why you need a daily shutdown routine 👩💻 pic.twitter.com/itFppB0YhJ — Michelle (@MishaCreatrix) March 29, 2021 30th March Use the Pomodoro Technique to beat procrastination 🍅 pic.twitter.com/sc8eFxRXQt — Michelle (@MishaCreatrix) March 30, 2021 31st March Use An Inbox For Quick Capture To Avoid Distraction 📥 pic.twitter.com/AG29lCSHFP
March 29, 2021
Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky - Book Notes, Summary, Review
Cognitive Surplus was a thought-provoking but enjoyable book to read. It raised a lot of great points about the world we currently live in. A world where people are actively consuming media and have lots of “free time” when compared with previous generations. Read This Book On Amazon Who Should Read This Book? It’s difficult to recommend this book to a specific type of person as it provides a lot of value no matter who you are.
March 26, 2021
How To Remove A Post Category From The Blog Page In WordPress
If you have many different post categories on your WordPress website, you might want to funnel them to different pages. This is especially important to consider if you have included each of your post categories in your navigation menu. An overly-cluttered navigation structure can immediately turn users off from your website and can cause them to leave. On my website, for instance, you’ll see that I have an Articles section and a Book Notes section.
March 24, 2021
You Learn More Effectively By Practicing
I recently started back into building up my web development skills. A lot has changed in the time since I last actively made an effort to advance my knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so I needed to catch up! With that in mind, I set about finding courses, tutorials, and YouTube videos that would help to build my knowledge. Let’s just say, there’s no shortage of great resources for this sort of thing.
March 22, 2021
Hooked by Nir Eyal - Book Notes, Summary, Review
Hooked by Nir Eyal outlines The Hook Model, a methodology for building habit forming products that improve a user’s life in some way. I found this to be a very interesting and informative book with lots of new concepts and terms related to marketing and product design. There’s something here for those working in the world of product design as well as outside observers. Read This Book On Amazon Who Should Read This Book? I would recommend this book to designers and to people working in product creation.
March 19, 2021
My Obsidian Setup - Mar 2021
I have been using Obsidian as my personal knowledge management (PKM) system for the last number of months. I, like many people, was hesitant to jump ship from tools like Notion or Evernote but after much deliberation at the time, I’m glad I decided to start using it. Just as an aside here, I didn’t stop using Notion completely. In fact, I think I’ve established an effective system using both applications but that’s a topic for another time.
March 15, 2021
How A UI Designer Uses Todoist
I recently revised the way I use Todoist to manage my work-related tasks as a UI Designer at the company where I work. After re-reading the book Getting Things Done by David Allen I realized that my task management process was over-complicated. This meant that I spent more time organizing tasks than doing them, which is a bad sign. After re-building my task management system, I thought it would be a good idea to share this setup with you to show you how a UI designer uses Todoist.
March 12, 2021
My Writing Workflow For Content Creation
I recently revised my content creation workflow to tie in better with my goal to develop a consistent writing habit. With that in mind, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to share with you my simplified writing workflow for content creation. This is how I operate each weekday to create content to share with you on this blog. My Content Creation Buckets If you’ve read my previous post on how batching tasks can increase your productivity, you’ll know that I operate my content creation by batching or chunking my work into defined groupings of tasks.
March 8, 2021