WHAT A SABBATICAL TO LEARN AI ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
I took six months out to go deep on applied AI, across my life and above all across my businesses. This is the first of my quarterly reports on it. I pulled up my own task history to write it, and found the plan I wrote on day one and the thing I’d actually been doing weren’t quite the same project. I set out to apply AI to my work. What I mostly did was build, and I’m not mad about it.
THE OBR'S WEBSITE PROBLEM WAS ALWAYS GOING TO HAPPEN
I was in the room — or close enough — when the OBR was asked to move to GOV.UK and declined. Thirteen years later, that decision cost someone their job.
MISTER START PANTS
A new starting point for the internet
AI AGENTS
Just a roundup of AI Agents that might be worth a look
EX-TWITTER: A HALF-DAY-ONLY PROJECT
X-Twitter is now a cesspool. Here’s my exit from that cesspool.
LINKEDIN: IS IT IMPERSONATING YOU?
Not yet, but not not-ever
FRACTIONAL? PART-TIME? UNEMPLOYED?
Someone asked me on a call whether I was really fractional, or just out of work. Fifteen years into working independently, the honest answer is that fractional, interim, consultant and contractor are not mutually exclusive — the question is whether the engagement type matches what the client actually needs. The 100-Year Life is right about longevity and misses what it costs the individual: you cannot be fractional without working full time on your own pipeline.
LINKEDIN LOGIN HACK
Someone reset my LinkedIn password from Arizona at 7:37 one morning, changed the email address, and locked out my devices. I had it back by 4:43pm, with help. Here is the timeline, along with the product-flow problems that made recovery harder than it should have been, and the likely root cause: an expired domain of mine that someone re-registered and used as the legacy email on the account. Toxic legacy tech is a personal cleanup problem, not just a corporate one.
HIRING IN THE MODERN WORLD, JOB HUNTING IN THE MODERN WORLD OR HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB
Every day my feed carries someone saying job hunting is an awful experience, and someone else saying they cannot find good talent. Both are right, and the talent market has been broken for decades because nobody fixes their own part of it. Six problems companies make for themselves — running lean and hiring reactively, judging candidates against a fiction, chasing eyeballs, letting applicant tracking systems harden bad practice, shifting the work onto the candidate, and using all of it to avoid the hard human conversations. Then four things that would actually help.
A STOLEN READING LIST
I stole a 42-book reading list for startup founders from someone I respect on the internet, and parked it here so I would not lose it. Fundamentals and strategy, leadership, growth, business models, founder stories, habits, goal setting — and Sun Tzu, obviously. Thanks Chris.