A couple of days ago I was going to the office. It was Friday, I had some meetings scheduled and some light office tasks to do. All in all, it should be an easy day as it was the first working week of the year.
As I was walking from the car park to the office, I noticed a guy walking in front of me. He was strolling along, with a coffee in his hand and looking kind of dreamy. Unintentionally I set off to overtake him and hurry along my way.
Then it hit me: “Why am I in a hurry?”. As I wrote above, there is no urgent meeting that I needed to attend or a task I had to do. Where did this urge to overtake him and look busy come from?
The modern life being promoted around us, teaches us not to loose time and to always be busy. If we are not, then we will not be successful, reach our goals or we will simply be brand-marked as slackers.
But this time I intentionally chose to stop my overtaking and match the speed of a dreamy looking guy. Our lives are marathons, not sprints. Preserve your energy for the moments where you really need them.
This year the company did their bi-annual Employee Survey powered by Gallup. As we did this 2 years ago, my team's results were among the lowest ranking. But this time the Employees Engagement Index went up significantly. I was rated very good by the people I lead concerning my leadership skills and they showed way higher engagement values than comparable teams.
So what led to this improvement?
It‘s start of the year and time of dreaming about big goals we want to achieve this year. I tend to give myself too many, or too ambitious, goals. Then I either drive myself crazy to reach them, or the regular life gets to me and I get a bad feeling in the stomach because of „my failure“.
This year I‘ll just aim for consistency in healthy habits and things that give me joy, e.g. if my goal is regular running then I‘ll aim to go like 3 times a week but do not care about the speed or distance, or I’ll try to go fishing once a week even if it’s just a couple of hours etc.
I often read about people „living“ in their TODO list, meaning everything that comes to mind, is seen on the net, needs to be done someday (maybe), … gets jotted down and processed thru their productivity system. The purpose of this is to not forget anything and to live a quantified, but relaxed life, as everything is recorded and nothing is forgotten.
Although I can relate to the „nothing gets forgotten“ part, because I need this to ease my mind, having everything I need to do in a day, week, … added to my TODO list, makes me feel like a machine and I actually feel psychological pressure to „get those tasks done“. I do not like it.
Every once in a while I fall down that rabbit hole and start filling my main.org with everything possible. But then at some point the list gets too long and I start feeling that pressure of still having „so many open tasks“ when the day is done. The only thing that helps then is to radically go thru the list and delete all the junk that is not 100% a real task, that has to get done, or a note which has value and shall be kept.
Brainiac is a minimal, distraction-free Emacs configuration designed for GTD workflows, notes, and task management using Org-mode. This v1.1 update focuses on stability and workflow refinements — keeping the setup lightweight while improving daily use.
If you're new to Brainiac, check out the original introduction to learn about the philosophy behind this configuration.
This post closes a series of reflections written at different points during my first tenure as a team lead — after roughly six weeks, 12 weeks, 18 months, 30 months, and now 48 months. Each text captures a moment in time, written without knowing what would come next.
I’m intentionally leaving the earlier posts unchanged. Not because they are complete, but because they reflect the questions, uncertainties, and partial clarity that tend to accompany leadership in real life. Read together, they don’t form a guide — they form a trajectory.
If you’re new to leadership or approaching it for the first time, consider this series less as advice and more as field notes from different distances to the same starting point.
I am glad to announce that my custom Emacs configuration Brainiac has reached release status. I am now using it without major changes since a couple of weeks, so it's time to freeze this version if other people want to use it.
As a lot of other peoples, I am interested in self improvement. So I read related blog posts, books etc. All of these sources are filled with examples of good habits one should develop, in order to be healthier and happier in life.
Here are some I tried and failed at over the years:
As a manager one of my tasks is to do yearly performance evaluations of the employees in my team.
I take this very seriously, as although I speak regularly with my people about tasks and behaviors, this yearly review gives me time to pause and reflect deeper about the stuff I (and the company) find important and how does the employee measure against that.
During the year I keep notes of all 1:1 meetings we have and also of stuff that happens between them that catch my eye, positive as well as possible improvement points. During the yearly review preparations, I sit down and go thru all the notes in order to consolidate the feedback I want to give to the employee.