
<p>I have a lot of different responsibilities on a day-to-day basis. I’m guessing you probably do too.</p>

<p>Family and home responsibilities, like loving my wife, paying bills, and taking my dog on walks.</p>

<p>Personal responsibilities like sleeping enough, exercising, chasing my own goals, and making time for intentional sanity.</p>

<p>Work responsibilities - now there’s a big (and awesome) list. In particular, let me highlight two types of work I do, at work.</p>

- <em>Reactive work</em> - work that requires me to respond to external resources, like emails, phone calls, meetings, etcetera
- <em>Creative work</em> - work that requires me to build something out of nothing (or out of a predetermined specification)

<p>As a company, Whiteboard employees recently read 99U’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Manage-Your-Day-Day-Creative/dp/1477800670">Managing Your Day to Day</a>, an excellent book about building an effective creative routine. We’ve all adopted a good number of practices proscribed in the book to start out the year, and let me tell you, it has been fantastic. A few simple thoughts on these practices, as they will inform what this article is really about.</p>

<h2>Don’t check email, social media, or content sources until 2PM or later.</h2>

<p>Note that this is making space for the creative work, where nothing is needed. Quite a few successful creative folks agree that it’s best to do this kind of work in the morning, so we’re trying it. The basic concept is to avoid getting into response mode, as we tend to allow problems and tensions to linger, but instead to start our day out with a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/goodnight-sleep-clean.html">clean brain after sleep</a>, which will theoretically encourage what Cal Newport calls <a href="http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/11/21/knowledge-workers-are-bad-at-working-and-heres-what-to-do-about-it/">deep work</a>.</p>

<h2>Maintain a stopping point.</h2>

<p>At some point during the day, your routine needs to shift away from working and onto the other parts of your life, like hiking or relaxing or basket weaving. This allows for you to not only fulfill your family and personal responsibilities and/or projects, but also forces you to do only the most important things for projects while you are working on a day to day basis.</p>

<h1>Learn this: The rest of the world is not on your schedule.</h1>

<p>With these two thoughts in mind, we must also realize that the rest of the world isn’t on our schedule. So, emails will come in at night. (Ignore them until 2PM the next day.) People around the world will continue to live their schedules, and in fact even in the United States, people on one coast will have a different schedule than I will.</p>

<p>So, in a very narrow sense, people are asynchronous from one another.</p>

<p>Before you continue, if you think social media is useless, then you can stop here and hopefully still gain something from the article. No one else needs to hear why you’re quitting Twitter and Facebook and throwing your phone away and selling your car and moving out to the back woods to get away from the noise in the world. (You already told us… on Twitter and Facebook.)</p>

<p>If you take social media to be important to your job (it is for mine) or for your personal aspirations (again, it is for mine), then you should understand that schedule is everything.</p>

<h2>Why does schedule matter?</h2>

<p>First of all, professional engagement on social media isn’t about people wanting a glimpse into your life. (Unless, of course, they are particularly interested in your personal affairs. Generally not the case for me, other than my mother.) Instead, it is about what your followers can gain from you.</p>

<p>What we have to understand is that our followers don’t gain anything from us if they don’t see relevant content, but content isn’t enough on it’s own; it must also be <u>timed well</u>.</p>

<p>Open your Twitter timeline, and leave it for 20 minutes. I can almost guarantee, unless you follow a small number of people, that tweets from 20 minutes ago have effectively been buried in those 20 minutes.</p>

<p>So imagine that your next opportunity could come from a Twitter follower who is 4 hours separated from you, time-zone wise. How can you engage with this person in a meaningful way?</p>

<p>As far as social media goes, the answer is to <u>post whenever they are looking</u>.</p>

<p>This has absolutely nothing to do with my segmented work schedule; no one cares that I’m not posting to social media until after 2 PM except my family and my coworkers.</p>

<p>So how do I maintain my sane, segmented daily schedule while also increasing my chances of meaningful engagement on Twitter?</p>

<h2>A good answer: Buffer (or a similar tool).</h2>

<p><a href="http://bufferapp.com">Buffer</a> is a tool that allows you to setup a regular tweeting schedule. You fill up your queue however you see fit, and let Buffer auto-tweet for you. And here’s the kicker:</p>

<p><em>All of your content discovery and sharing can be done in a single block of your day.</em></p>

<p>Let me rephrase:</p>

<p><em>You can now engage with social media asynchronously instead of treating it like a chat room.</em></p>

<p>Let me re-rephrase:</p>

<p><em>You can now have a constant presence on Twitter without inundating your followers and sucking your time away from other (more) important things.</em></p>

<p>If you aren’t getting how this can be insanely valuable if done properly, then you probably need to try it for a while to learn.</p>

<h2>A challenge.</h2>

<p>Use a tool like Buffer to write your posts and share content for a limited, concentrated block in a day. Experience the peace of limiting social media distraction throughout your day, and the benefit of increasing intentionality and regularity of your online presence as a result of smarter computing.</p>

<p>(Disclaimer: I’m in no way affiliated with Buffer, nor do I receive any benefit for touting their service, but it is in my opinion the prettiest and generally the most popular tool for this particular use case. If I’m missing the mark here, please let me know.)</p>


I’m Using Buffer to Segment My Working Day, and it’s Awesome

<p>What will you do when you have the opportunity to trade your privacy as a currency?</p>

<p>Of course, it’s not a sustainable model, but that’s not the point. The point is that as long as we can trade our info for goods and services, we will set new standards for technological boundaries on our lives. And we’ve already seen it coming fast - mobility has been tackled, wearability is next, and embedded/environmentally ubiquitous will come after.</p>

<p>Apple released a phone that knows you by the same way you are identified by if you commit a crime or two. (This is a gross over-generalization, but stick with me.) On the flip-side (read: not the private sector) the NSA can listen in on your conversations. Without a warrant. Endorsed by the president. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us/white-house-tries-to-prevent-judge-from-ruling-on-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=1&amp;">He doesn’t really want a call made on whether that’s okay.</a></p>

<p>And what will this bring? With movies like The Fifth Estate coming into mainstream (albeit fairly unsuccessfully) and with technological literacy being pushed with efforts to get <em>everyone to code</em>, there will eventually be a <strong>click</strong> moment where people understand the seriousness of the NSA’s deal to weaken RSA. Eventually there will be an enlightenment of what “surveillance state” means as it relates to all of these wearable devices and Xbox eyes and webcams and…</p>

<p>We’ve heard about Luddites, and I think this may be their birthplace: a strong, deep-rooted hatred for the corruption and terror of privacy-destroying devices like Apple’s iPhone 6. They reject the need for technology, first as a hipster trend (like leaving Facebook), but evolving into a real movement.</p>

<p>Obviously this is absurdist in many ways. (At least hopefully that’s obvious.) The truth is, the general population will take longer to shift to technological literacy enough to understand the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/20/nsa-internet-security-rsa-secret-10m-encryption">seriousness of the RSA deal</a>. (By the time that click moment happens, RSA will have become obsolete anyway.) But the underlying pattern is emerging: people will start caring more about privacy than ever before. They will understand that their need to be “always-connected” puts that privacy up for crucifixion, and that creates a direct conflict with the rapidly advancing personal device world. And that will be the war of privacy.</p>


The war of privacy is coming in 2014


<p><strong>tldr;</strong> When adopting tools, do so to eliminate waste. It’s not worth adopting a tool for the sake of the clout of adopting it. For development, automate things you do the same often (or should/could do the same often). Build shareable processes that require little training overhead. Identify pieces of your process that require a common language; these places are usually where tools can be introduced to solidify that common language.</p>

<h2>Don’t mess with my flow.</h2>

<p>If you are a leader of a development team, you know that it can be hard to adopt any team-wide change in workflow. This is especially true if the new project tools are a significant shift away from the way you already work. The truth is, the overhead of managing the tools (instead of working on the project itself) can bog down your team, make for some confusion, and ultimately cause over-engineering and waste of time.</p>

<p>But the truth is, the evolving tools of web design are rising for a reason. Dependency management tools (or any kind of tool, for that matter) that are rising in fame should be evaluated. But where is the line? How can you know when its time to bite the bullet, buckle down, and learn the details of these tools? I think the answer is ultimately subjective, but I’ll share an anecdote with you about how we decided to move our team to a shared workflow that involves dependency management through Grunt, GitHub-centric code control, etcetera, while generally avoiding overhead.</p>

<h2>A Note About Dependency Management</h2>

<p>The goal of dependency management is to abstract away the details of manually managing toolsets that a project uses. In the Rails world, this is done in a <code>Gemfile</code>. In Node, it’s in a <code>package.json</code> file. Almost every project has some kind of dependency; it’s your job as a developer to make sure the dependencies are met in a suitable fashion. Furthermore, every project has different “build processes” - for some, this means compiling code. For others, this means setting environment variables or incrementing a “revision” count. Grunt is a highly-configurable tool that does many of these things for web-based projects. Powered by Node.js, Grunt and related projects have gained an enormous amount of support and active development contributions.</p>

<p>At Whiteboard, we are constantly starting new projects. This can happen even on a daily basis. What’s more, the developers are constantly iterating on and reviewing projects. Our work is highly communication-centric, with a focus primarily on a consumption orientation that is driven to develop brand voice. That’s a long way of saying we work more heavily with content publishing platforms than we do “web apps”.</p>

<p>For this reason, we adopted Wordpress long ago as our primary project platform, and have made Wordpress knowledge a core competency of our agency. We work in other areas (Rails, specifically) as well, but for spinning up a content publishing platform for a client, Wordpress is our go-to.</p>

<h2>Manual Dependency Management</h2>

<p>A year ago, our processes were very slim. I like to think of this as a Good Thing™. We worked quickly, and used tools as they popped up. In the Wordpress world, we found a few base themes (like <a href="http://themble.com/bones/">Bones</a>), and then threw our own self-brewed stuff on top. The development team is experienced enough to adopt a wide variety of tools, and this worked fine. But we started to notice problems creeping into our system: our tools were all <em>quite similar</em> amongst a set of projects, but none of them were dependably exactly the same. We also knew that the tools <em>could</em> be unified - we used the same basic types of tools/libraries/themes/structure on every single project.</p>

<p>We had adopted LESS, but were using CodeKit on our private machines without any global configuration. (CodeKit is awesome, and has these types of project-level options available, but we weren’t using them.) After a few accidental overwrites and other issues, we realized that everyone’s process, like our toolsets, were very similar, but just off enough to show cracks in our system.</p>

<h2>Makefiles</h2>

<p>Our first step towards a solution was to adopt a Bootstrap-inspired approach to compilation and project builds. Before Bootstrap 3, the process for compiling assets primarily revolved around a Makefile. We brewed up our own makefile, and created the first version of a theme we called Launchframe. This unified a lot of our tools, and immediately this increased our ability to communicate about projects to one another, without much hassle. The powerful element here is that our code started looking and feeling exactly the same (rather than relatively the same). We also all adopted native (Mac OS)AMP + phpMyAdmin stacks on our Mac OS machines, using Homebrew to get everything installed. This makes for predictable and very easily executable PHP-based projects. (There are quite a few guides for how to do this, including <a href="http://vanbosse.be/blog/detail/a-homebrew-lamp-stack">this Homebrew-specific one</a>.)</p>

<h2>Moving to Grunt</h2>

<p>The Makefile approach eventually started showing its flaws. Most specifically, some of the error reporting and watch scripts didn’t quite work as expected. While Make is certainly a powerful way to handle problems, we realized that people in our field were handling these same problems in a much more actively supported way through Grunt (and associated CLI tools). When Bootstrap 3 moved to Grunt, we made the move to Grunt, and once again adopted a lot of the techniques in the Bootstrap build process.</p>

<h2>The Trick</h2>

<p>The best way to reduce overhead for any kind of development process is to first <em>find your consistencies and near-consistencies</em>, and commit to them. Once you’ve made this commitment, build your tools to automate these consistencies. For us, we always use jQuery, we always use LESS, we always start with our base theme, and we always use a particular file structure. To make the process as easy as possible, we chose to commit to these consistencies, and build our workflow so that our developers need to only know the basic overview of the process. To start a new project at Whiteboard, you install Wordpress, change into that directory and type <code>npm install</code>. This will install all dependencies for the Grunt tasks to work properly. Then, run grunt watch. Develop on the project like you always do, and push live.</p>

<h2>A Step Further</h2>

<p>Who wants to install Wordpress? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could automate the whole process from front to back, and have a few prompts with configuration options along the way? Of course it would. So I made this script. Running this on a configured machine with the right tools does everything to open up the project, watching and ready to be edited. It’s also a lot of fun to run it, considering the colors <code>lolcat</code> provides. :) It utilizes a few tools here and there, particularly <code>wpcli</code>, to get things going. This could probably be grunt-ified, but ask yourself: why would that be valuable?</p>

```
#!/bin/bash
command -v lolcat &gt;/dev/null 2&gt;&amp;1 || { echo &gt;&amp;2 "I require lolcat but it's not installed. Run gem install lolcat."; exit 1; }
command -v wp &gt;/dev/null 2&gt;&amp;1 || { echo &gt;&amp;2 "I require Wordpress CLI but it's not installed. ,\n Run the following:,\n curl https://raw.github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli.github.com/master/installer.sh | bash
."; exit 1; }
command -v git &gt;/dev/null 2&gt;&amp;1 || { echo &gt;&amp;2 "I require git. For more information, visit: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-Installing-Git "; exit 1; }

purple='\x1B[0;35m'
NC='\x1B[0m' # No Color


echo '

LAUNCHFRAME 0.1 #########
####### A WHITEBOARD TOOL

       !
       !
       ^
      / \
     /___\
    |=   =|
    |     |
    |     |
    |     |
    |     |
    |     |
    |     |
    |     |
    |     |
    |     |
   /|##|##|\
  / |##|##| \
 /  |##|##|  \
|  / ^ | ^ \  |
| /  ( | )  \ |
|/   ( | )   \|
    ((   ))
   ((  :  ))
   ((  :  ))
    ((   ))
     (( ))
      ( )
       .
       .
       .
' | lolcat

if [[ $1 == "" ]]; then
    read -p "Enter the site folder you want to create for installation: " sitefolder
else
    sitefolder=$1
fi

echo -e "${purple}Downloading Wordpress... Please wait a moment.${NC}"

mkdir -p "${sitefolder}" &amp;&amp; cd "${sitefolder}"

wp core download

echo -n "Enter database name (press enter for wp_${sitefolder}) "
read dbname
if [[ $dbname == "" ]]; then
    dbname="wp_$sitefolder"
fi

echo -n "Enter database username (press enter for root) "
read dbuser
if [[ $dbuser == "" ]]; then
    dbuser="root"
fi
read -p "Enter database password (required): " dbpass
while [[ $dbpass = "" ]]; do
    read -p "You cannot continue without entering a database password (required): " dbpass
done

echo -n "Enter site url (press enter for http://localhost/${sitefolder}) "
read siteurl
if [[ $siteurl == "" ]]; then
    siteurl="http://localhost/${sitefolder}"
fi

echo -n "Enter site title (press enter for ${sitefolder}) "
read sitetitle
if [[ $sitetitle == "" ]]; then
    sitetitle="${sitefolder}"
fi
echo -n "Enter admin email (press enter for admin@example.com) "
read adminemail
if [[ $adminemail == "" ]]; then
    adminemail="admin@example.com"
fi

echo -e ",\n"
echo -e "${purple}Creating the wp-config file.${NC}"
echo -e ",\n"

wp core config --dbname=$dbname --dbuser=$dbuser --dbpass=$dbpass

echo -e ",\n"
echo -e "${purple}Creating the database.${NC}"
echo -e ",\n"

adminpw='[filtered]'
adminun='admin'
wp db create
wp core install --url=$siteurl --title=$sitetitle --admin_name=$adminun --admin_password=$adminpw --admin_email="$adminemail"

echo -n "Install Multiple Post Thumbnails? (y/N) "
read a
if [[ ${a:0:1} == "Y" || ${a:0:1} == "y" ]]; then
    wp plugin install multiple-post-thumbnails
    wp plugin activate multiple-post-thumbnails
else
    echo -e ",\n"
    echo -e "${purple}Run wp plugin install multiple-post-thumbnails to install later.${NC}"
    echo -e ",\n"
fi

echo -n "Install Yoast SEO? (y/N)"
read a
if [[ ${a:0:1} == "Y" || ${a:0:1} == "y" ]]; then
    wp plugin install wordpress-seo
    wp plugin activate wordpress-seo
else
    echo -e ",\n"
    echo -e "${purple}Run wp plugin install wordpress-seo to install later.${NC}"
    echo -e ",\n"
fi

echo -e ",\n"
echo -e "${purple}Downloading Launchframe...${NC}"
echo -e ",\n"

wp theme install https://github.com/Whiteboard/launchframe/archive/master.zip

echo -e ",\n"
echo -e "${purple}Activating Launchframe...${NC}"
echo -e ",\n"

mv wp-content/themes/launchframe-master wp-content/themes/launchframe
wp theme activate launchframe
echo -n "Install Custom Meta Boxes? (y/N)"
read a
if [[ ${a:0:1} == "Y" || ${a:0:1} == "y" ]]; then
  git clone git@github.com:jaredatch/Custom-Metaboxes-and-Fields-for-WordPress.git wp-content/themes/launchframe/inc/cmb
  echo "Custom Meta Boxes requires a manual include and setup - be sure to add this in functions.php or somewhere similar."
fi

cd wp-content/themes/launchframe
npm install


echo -e ",\n"
echo -e "${purple}Opening the site install...${NC}"
echo -e ",\n"

open $siteurl

echo "Done!"
echo '
  ______   _______  _______  _______  _______
(  ___ \ (  ___  )(  ___  )(  ___  )(       )
| (   ) )| (   ) || (   ) || (   ) || () () |
| (__/ / | |   | || |   | || |   | || || || |
|  __ (  | |   | || |   | || |   | || |(_)| |
| (  \ \ | |   | || |   | || |   | || |   | |
| )___) )| (___) || (___) || (___) || )   ( |
|/ \___/ (_______)(_______)(_______)|/     \|


 ' | lolcat
subl ../../..
grunt watch
```

<h2>Do What Keeps You Moving</h2>

<p>The thing we’ve learned about learning new tools is to find ways of constantly doing something new. This means stop doing the same things over and over. Wasting your time doing the same things over and over means you aren’t innovating, and you aren’t creating change. Don’t stop learning, but learn, implement, and move on to learning more and doing more. This is perhaps an opinionated understanding of the purpose of learning as it applies to development, but it certainly offers a strong method for balancing intellectual progress and business-oriented productivity.</p>


Jonathan Cutrell

The war of privacy is coming in 2014