Notes: 1 of 13. 2024

I’m experimenting with writing private week notes. It’s been a rewarding practice for the last four weeks. Purging my mind when it’s overwhelmed, forming better memories of what happened over a week, what I’ve been thinking, what I consumed, who I hung out with and so on. The shift from only journalling to clear the fog to taking a few minutes a day to log activities, wins, discoveries – has been joyful in comparison. I feel that my writing muscle is marginally improving just by being consistent.

I set up a template in Notion with a few fields, days of the week and a division between life and work. The template started to add friction over time and words are just landing on the pages now. If this practice sticks around I’ll write a longer meta analysis, for now though I’m interested in outlining the last four weeks. There’s 13 blocks of four weeks in a year, that feels like a sweeter spot for publishing web post summaries for me than every week. Lets see, this could be the first and last one.

Summary 1-4 weeks

It’s nearly been a full house of January cliches: weight loss, health regimes, exercising more, eating better, budgeting, planning and dollops of productivity (reading and doing). Boozing and vaping didn’t fall victim though. We are 7.69% through the year.

Health & Exercise

A bad skin flare up in week one drove me to revisit buying a UVB light, big thanks to Hugh for suggesting, supporting and chatting me through it all. I’m a week into treatment right now, 8-12 weeks to see results. Had a second flare up in week three.

I logged 14 spinning sessions, four weights (one was with Dan) and zero runs. Found an awesome YouTuber who captures rides, perfect for riding along to. Dropped 2.4kg at my best, down from 72.4kg, I’m at 23.1% body fat, from memory it’s around 17%/63kg the magic happens and the lard packets around my body feel less bulbous and grim. I’m not going too obsessive with the daily weighs this time. Need to get the frequency of exercise up after eating though, tackle those glucose spikes. Sleep is a shit show right now, 4-5am wake ups, black out blinds soon to be ordered. Deep cleaned my ears (yum) with solution a couple of times, it worked really well.

Self Initiated

No-code all the way on Inventory Supplies/House/Design and Playground. Picking back up the dusty projects using only no-code has been a huge motivator. The speed of making really is a thing for me. I’ve set myself a target of getting all sites running Gutenburg no-code fully by the end of the next four weeks. In addition, it felt great to leave Super.so, not because the product is in anyway bad, I can’t justify hundreds of pounds a year to run a few simple websites that are just for me. Had a failed journey down buying ACF Pro and implementing custom blocks. That’s going to remain on ice until I’ve got the sites migrated and populated – who knows WP updates this year might solve the most of my features (doubtful bidirectional database relationships though)

x3 Web posts published: YouTube Diet, No code, Inventory. Capturing progress on self initiated stuff is very low friction compared to the many draft ideas I’ve got stashed away. I penciled a few ideas for others: spinning set-up, Mac Mini Server, content design for internal process.

Work: Design & Research Operations

I’ve been campaigning for the approach of defining outcomes first then exploring outputs on a few projects, some lovely wins where we’re now exploring what we want to change and why not just discussing the gut feel of a solution.

This led me to the murky world of KPIs, never ending lists of measurable measures. My system radar started wondering about cheatsheet-ing it, it was a breeze to get sector examples quickly from ChatGTP. Furthermore, can we create formulas for some of the transformation programs. This then bled into prioritisation frame+(subframe)works for transformation. Revisiting after I have cleared a delivery.

Speaking of which, the main focus of my time has been writing, pairing and reviewing our first team career framework for the Experience Design & Research team. My fourth, fifth? framework in my in-house operations roles. It’s getting easier to work out what good looks like and simplify the usability, but getting the terms right is still the biggest challenge. I’m always fighting the corner of plain English, but alas jargon is near unavoidable in our sector whilst trying to be concise. Launch is days away, we’re now in the calibration with HR phase.

We’re going back and forth on how we frame and simplify a strategy. More to come on this as we go into annual reviews and push the button on a new approach with frameworks.

I’ve started a big push to glow up our knowledge management, documentation and content design across the business. Created a quick guide on what’s possible for coms and knowledge roll out today with pain-points exposed. We’re getting buy in from our partner teams on new workflow suggestions, next steps is a meaty but lean business case with actual tasks prototyped out to show what’s possible.

We’ve been exploring vendors for brand documentation and marketing workflows. A good reminder that SaaS sales can be a nightmare, especially those with a closed product. I’m keen to get to the bottom of the use cases we have and aim to stick down some estimations on workflow cost savings, if any.

Finally, I’m guessing a lot of folks in the industry are looking at the cost benefit of Figma Dev mode right now as the beta ends and we roll into paid seats. I’ve got some time penciled to go deep on this now the career framework workload is tailing off.

Organising Stuff

Created a shared Notion for all our favourite dinners, freezer meals, meal plans. Being more mindful of what we’re planning to cook and eat at home has saved us loads, really good for the vibes too. A couple of meal prep freezer dinners here and there have felt magic after a busy day.

Hollie and I sat down and updated all our finance spreadsheets, adjusted the outgoings based on recent cost increases. Planned our war chests, overpayments approach (added a calculator into our mega spreadsheet for this). Used ChatGTP to diagram and calculate finance compounds, repayments and options for the future, really solid. Moved pensions and ISAs over to Vanguard, it feels good to have more agency over the funds and use an infinitely better product in diversification and user experience.

Opened a new Halifax current account within a minute using their app, really impressive onboarding for existing customers. Doing a switch away from First Direct as their feature set and UX is low grade.

The house got de-Chistmassed, a few cupboards and spaces faced and cleaned up, still got more to go, I’m looking at you paperwork cupboard. Yikes.

I’ve been consistently plugging away at sorting the tech stack for my new Mac Mini Server project. Mostly deplatformed off Google Drive & Photos. A big long documentation page of the new “server” is in the making, might put the basics up and add to it soon. Highlights included: first pass sort on the photo library – mad feelings sorting years of photos, started to create photo collections and set-up Arq backup with tight controls. Tired a Local LLM and that went badly, need to revisit now I’ve freed up space. Started looking at Audible backup and self-hosting audiobooks using Bound (thanks Mathew) and Libation.

Builders have been looking at the wall leak, no report back yet, it seems to have stopped since a site visit. Windows are proper screwed though, all the alkaline from the bricks has built up on the glass. Measured up for frame black out blinds, order is going in this week. I’ve been researching air purifiers for the living space as oil smells are really getting to me these days. Tracking on CamelCamelCamel. Dealt with a pot plant fly infestation, Caro’s cuttings had to go into water quarantine for a few days and are now back in pots with the most expensive soil I’ve ever bought.

Travel

Planned a lot of trips in the space of a couple of weeks: Madrid, Barcelona (x2), Split, Lisbon. Two of these are home exchanges, helping us go further with our money. We’ve been aggressively stashing away out of our fun money.

Delights

Morning coffee walks with Hollie to Dark Arts, sometimes with dog, they know our orders and feels like a Hackney proxy to our routine in Barcelona – just x10 more gritty.

Spring springing, it’s just started and I stand by that it’s my favourite time of year, can’t wait to get gardening this year.

Pairing with James on our career framework, lots of figuring it out chats that help understand each other and what we’re making so much better than doing it solo.

Catch-ups

Pints with Simon at The Buxton, Commercial and then Carpenters
Pub trip with Barney, chats about the beauty of some computer games
Pizza with Andy, life chats, comfy chairs
Wines with Alex, hearing all about baby Dotty, congrats to Jane & Alex
Pints with Jess (she was off the booze), old work chats
Lunch with Pan at the Vincent, lovely vibes and conversation
Gym sesh with Dan then lunch with Caro and Dan, what a treat to have Caro in London
Food hall and cocktails with x2 Dans, where are all the web designers now?
Hollie’s folks down at Hailing Island, looked after us, beautiful coast walk

What the Hell Stuff?

My kindle couldn’t register itself after I lent it to Hollie. Amazon told me to buy a new one as it was too old – jokers – found my way in eventually through 2FA being triggered on the iPad which made the SMS in my hand fail.

I thought the smart fused spur was messing with our bedroom ceiling lights after it magically stoped working, again. It made no sense to me why that would happen with them being on unique breakers, I just got paranoid the device was sketchy. Turned out the wardrobe was rocking a light switch on and off. We had forgotten we put a wardrobe over it. Proper lols. Asked the sparky to swap out the smart switch for a basic LED timer, blank off the switch and add two lights to the downstairs bathroom.

Trip to Portsmouth was cursed. Stinky smoke car, failing CarPlay, congestion charge fears, route madness, dog chundering twice, A3 traffic jams, GMaps freaking out and re-routing, dog eating its toy and needing a £512 emergency vets visit, finding two screws in the tyre of the car. On the bright side we avoided the dog being seriously sick or the car crashing at motorway speed. A lesson in looking at the positive sides of shitty situations.

Two puncture repair kits glue had vanished, is that just what happens to that type of glue?

Pondering

People who make/improve/question systems vs people who don’t.
Easy way to always find the cheapest flight route day before fixing to holiday dates.

Media Diet

Films & TV

12 Strong. OK war film, hammy in places and kinda forgettable.

Anatomy of a Fall. Essential, great film.

Kandahar. Terrible, was hoping for slapstick Gerrard lols, fail.

The Creator. Amazing graphics and sounds, lost interest though.

Poor Things. Watched at The Castle with Hollie, fell asleep, missed the sex chapter of the film. Not sure its for me.

The Wire S1, S2. Love that Hollie and I are watching this together, her first time.

Reacher. One eye on it, pretty terrible, junk food.

Oppenheimer. Watched with the KEFs for audio, great, rewatchable for sure.

Wall Street. Never seen it, Andy mentioned it and it’s a silly classic

Music

Bandcamp techno purchases (thanks mum for the voucher). I will write up a Q1 summary so I have time to get into what I bought.

Have had a few Hi-Fi and headphone listening sessions on my own.

Anthony Naples, Jacques Greene, Monolake, Four Tet, Skee Mask, Andrea, Gang Starr, KAYTRANADA, Leon Vynehall, DeepChord, Robert Hood, Blur, DJ Heartstring, Overmono, MJ Cole, Tourist, Radiohead, Joy Orbison, Job Hopkins, Richie Hawtin, Nils Frahm

Books

The Slight Edge. Listened. Bought this after watching a finance YouTuber reference compound psychology. It’s an OK book, ideas are solid but implementation is cheesy and repetitive. I do like the mindset of always figuring out what is the next best thing to positively compound for you.

Be Useful, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Starting listening. I’ve got a soft spot for him and I thought as I’m listening to so much self improvement waffle, why not enjoy Arnie’s take on it.

Feel Good Productivity. Reading by tucking into chapters. I followed Ali a few years back, fell off as the content was a bit too intense but I’ve always been curious to what he’d put in a book having no experience working for a company. Some nice nuggets here and there, but somethings not quite nailing it.

I must branch out now, theres only so much self-improvement I can handle, I’m pretty much just bingeing them for the hell of it.

YouTube

Privacy and security researcher tips and guides helping me broaden my tech view

The Jones Act – you can’t ship between two American places without an American owned and crewed boat – this makes things very expensive for remote locations in the USA

Veritasium’s Oppenheimer story is a great partner to the film

Telekon Electronic Beats: Blind Test 90s Dub Techno – some bangers here

State of the Word 2023 WordPress updates coming in 2024, exciting stuff here for my sites

Matt doing it the Armstrong way made me well up this, dead dad trigger for sure.

Bonkers custom Porsche – presenter is a bit much, the car though, wow

Web Posts I Read

The David Heinemeier Hansson post about “We tried that, didn’t work”

Neil Williams week notes, an inspiration for me and enjoyed the “joined-up single department that delivers deeper and more sustainable change”

Maggie Appleton’s amazing site and ambient copresence, got me thinking about “digital gardens” again, a huge motivator for my self initiated projects

A home cooked app this hits all my buttons of making, analogies and writing all at once

The Verge’s beautiful page on the dire state Google and SEO

Interview with the former CEO of Aldi UK – Paul Foley. Loved every bit of this

The internet is full of ai dogshit even more fuel to get publishing yourself

Taylor Swift Workout an ultrarunner tries to keep pace with Taylor’s tour training regimen

Rob Boyett put some really helpful camera prompts up for image LLMs

My first year as CPO (at Eventbrite), really valuable post for anyone involved in product

A year of output from Andy Kong, I’ve bookmarked to see how this progresses

The Early History of the Channel Tunnel, great bit of history coverage here

Gaming

Grid Legends on macOS. Not playing as much as I did over Christmas, still nice to bust out a few laps in 10 minutes when I need some gaming time.

Phew, that was a lot of stuff. Compiling this from four notes and writing at speed took around two-three hours. Let’s see how this experiment fairs.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 1st February 2024

Inventory Supplies

Continuing with my no-code experiments I moved onto tackling a self initiated project that has been getting dusty. Within a couple of days I recreated a “close enough” version of Inventory Supplies — a database of technical, functional and beautiful products.

I’ve made this website three times now. Yeah. First it was a WordPress Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) build where I created it from custom post types and relational tables for brands, retails and their products. The tricky part was getting lost in queries, post loads in overlays and a smattering of responsive rules that exposed my old school approach to CSS queries.

Defeated and frustrated I never got around to finding that magic bucket filled with heaps of free time to up-skill my skills that had become anti-skills on the project.

Sometime last year in 2023 I started messing around with Super.so, a no-code solution that turns Notion pages into websites. I bit the bullet and paid for a subscription and ported the domain over. It wasn’t till I did my year ahead money planning a few weeks ago that £408(ish) a year to run a couple of listings sites seemed, well, really silly. In my last post I wrote about no-coding this site and how breezy it had all been. So, here is Inventory Supplies.

In the heat of the moment researching blocks and custom fields I hit the trigger on buying ACF Pro. Only to then read the docs and find out it is way more implementation than I’d like to deal with to keep the speed of creation up. A real big speed bump. I’m in two minds here, WordPress demoed their Guttenburg custom fields last year – pegged for release this year. So that *could solve my problems. But, I don’t think it will solve the relational tables feature that will make connecting brands to products and to retailers, giving the site a real database experience.

Or, I could ask a refund, focus on content and layout and port this website full over to Guttenburg.

Or, I could bite the bullet and follow the docs, scream into forums and hit ChatGTP up for some moral support. Perhaps even GitHub CoPilot.

Anyhow. I’m going to sleep on it for a few more nights and perhaps dabble in some non-no-code again so my front-end brain feels more activated. If you’d like to check out the project you can in on the live and the first version below:

https://inventory.supplies/

Or, you can go and check out the original and somewhat broken version here

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 25th January 2024

No code

Last year at Phillips we created a new division of the business with the goal to sell art in the middle market. Limited editions of works that could be easily purchased without auction. There’s a pickle of systems in auction businesses and building an ecom platform from scratch or deeply integrating one would have delayed go to market time beyond feasibility. We championed for Shopify, lightly integrated with existing payment services. More interestingly, we constrained the design of the experience to only using Shopify’s core theme Dawn, no-code and no front-end engineers. This prevented the project taking Engineer time away from critical auction projects, zeroed out any contractor costs and allowed the Experience Design & Research team to move fast autonomously. You can visit the shop here.

This planted the seed for me to finally visit WordPress no code for my self-initiated projects. For the last few years I’d been ignoring WordPress updates. I’m very much stuck in time when it comes to making webpages. This current site is all designed in Figma and then I spend way too long trying to achieve the designs using my outdated front end knowledge and ACF layouts. I’m always scared that if I open the door to modern techniques I will spend all my time experimenting and learning without publishing anything remotely close to the designs.

I created a new press over at https://playground.lawrencebrown.eu/ and I’ve been watching the talented Jamie Marshall on his channel to wrap my head around the model, controls and workflow to build and design what I want. I came across Jamie via Matt Mullenweg’s blog post where Jamie rebuilds TechCrunch in 30 minutes using the no code approach. My plan is to keep putting the time into the styles and templates to the point I can transfer over a no code build to this primary url.

It’ll be extraordinary to see where no code solutions get to in the next few years. The market competition and feature set is really strong, blogging and self hosting is growing again each year and I do start to wonder how much the code side of my skills really matter now. Perhaps, its knowing just enough that I can add those few lines of modifications each time that I get exactly what I intended but with only managing snippets not tens of code files.

Finally, it gets me wondering, when this url is running no code, what will I be trying out in my playground subdomain area?

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 23rd January 2024

YouTube Diet

Over the years I’ve used January to take a break from social media. From memory it was Twitter that I took a rest from first. I’d felt irritated from constantly checking it. Finding myself reading through outbursts of venom, petty snipes, pithy points and taking a useless interest in anything that wondered its way into the timeline viewport. Come to think of it, this was the Trump era. A few years later I did the same with Instagram. I got lucky there and managed to avoid the platform for a while and eventually closed my account. I didn’t like what it became when the stories arrived, I soon left.

I never left Twitter but managed to curb the habit to a once in a while thing. Finally, when Space Karen took over I zeroed out the following and left it open for being able to access urls when needed. It’s a tool I have for when I actually need it. I’ve also made a work Instagram account so I can see what we post when it’s referenced in meetings. I was running a few scripts on Tampermonkey that allowed me to view Instagram in my work browser without an account, however it looks like the engineers at Facebook spend a lot of time on preventing these as every script seems to become useless within a few weeks.

Taking a break from social media in January seems to work well for me. What isn’t working well for me right now is YouTube shorts. The sneaky bastards have got me hooked to what I’d describe as the most toxic social product design mechanic I’ve ever knowingly been hooked on. I swerved TikTok so hard because its content felt so trashy when I saw others using it. I tried it out once for a few days and it was a pure assault, so many cringe families dancing around kitchen islands or American kids performing unfunny comedy bits. I later learned that you have to endure the trash for a while and then the magic computer script will finally hone in on what you actually like to watch. It still seemed irritating as hell though.

YouTube shorts arrived and were easy to avoid for a long time. Then, I guess, there was a perfect storm. Firstly, decent YouTubers started to make shorts, it was no longer just recycled TikTok’s. Secondly, shorts started appearing in every part of the product experience. Finally, I caved. Now I’m hooked on trash. The recipe for short form is so devilish:

Fruit machine mechanic. Don’t give people back to back decent content, instead, pop some useless stuff in between so they keep on watching and flicking through trying to find the win.
Make the content range wider. Don’t take data from subscriptions and views of long form, instead widen the range beyond what folks usually watch. So now you’re not only watching something that is low grade, but it’s also of zero interest to your standard viewing suggestions
Finally, irritating wins. Now, perhaps content creators did this themselves and no platform designed this part – but irritating Ai voices, 100’s of cuts per video, lame captions, goofy sound effects, trashy music, narrating the bleeding obvious and hamming everything up for the camera is the bread and butter of most short form clips. It’s trash. Pure junk food.

However, every now and then there is that one clip that is smart, well filmed, subtle, clever and sometimes intriguing. On the most part though, we’re back to pith.

All that that’s left to do is hang up my YouTube hat for while. But, that is massive kick in the teeth because I love learning from long form video, I listen to a lot DJ sets, find tracks, research topics and value a lot of the YouTubers I’ve followed for years. So I’m not going to quit YouTube. Instead I need to approach this a bit differently and again, treat social media as I would a tool.

Here’s my plan for getting unhooked:

Delete YouTube from my phone. That’s where the core of the problem is in the product experience.
Manually download videos to watch on my phone. There’s going to be occasions that I want to unwind and learn something. Having a handful of videos to watch across a few topics will be of value.
Subscriptions first, spend only a minute in the suggested. I’ve seen some folks write about forwarding the youtube homepage to the subscriptions so you don’t end up down the rabbit hole of suggested watching crap. On desktop, I believe I’m not too bad at cherry picking stuff that is of value and adding it to my watch later.
Blog what I watch. I’ve been considering writing week notes again. I’m unsure if it works for me to publish them online like some folks do. Anyhow, I do like the idea of being more considered around content consumption – be it articles, films, tv shows, albums or YouTube videos. I read a blog post recently that said something along the lines of “what you consume in the week shapes your thinking”. Perhaps writing it up could help mould some thoughts.
Considered queuing. This idea might just be organisation p0rn. But, it could help to set a queue up for a specific time later in the day or week. For example, I’m researching macOS apps at the moment and theres a few videos that make sense to group, watch, take notes and check-out recommendations from the videos. This way, its a more intentional approach, it considers purpose, time and value to the content.

I’ve paused my YouTube subscription. I’ve cleaned out unwanted videos from my watch later queue. I’ve got a clever little application to grab videos for me for offline. Let’s see what happens.

Treat services as tools.

Instagram → View only web account (e.g. for checking restaurant menus)

Twitter → View only web account (e.g. research a topic)

YouTube → View only, 3rd party downloader (e.g watch only your subscriptions)

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 2nd January 2024

Social Media

The Domain Riddle

Why keep an unused domain you bought for a side project? The annual renewal comes around, you haven’t touched it in over a year and £32 is due. In no particular order, here follows the riddle in my mind:

a) Renew and go all in. This is the dreamer’s plan. Top tier effort and aspiration. Requires: blood, sweat and tears to revive the initial energy you had when you bought the domain. Furthermore, you have the grunt work of realising everything you’ve had in your mind whilst it has sat unused.

b) Move on, let it go. Acceptance nirvana plan. Life is short and complicated. Ideas are cheap, execution is everything — and that last bit didn’t happen. You haven’t touched the idea in over a year so what makes you think you will now? Less is more. You’re now free of the guilt shackles, although you have to join the DNF bench.

c) Renew it. It’s not that much money in the bigger picture. You can leave it parked on the ideas shelf for another while. No real damage done. Although, what is that? Is it a creeping sense of not delivering and executing something? A mild haunting available at random whenever you don’t need it.

d) Rethink the idea, make the execution easy. You’re caught in a trap where the idea is bigger than the time you have to realise it. What if you go back to the drawing board and make it much easier to execute? So easy that something could be on the domain within a few hours.

e) Start a core meltdown, lower your self-esteem rods. Everything in your life is behind, nothing is complete. In fact the very idea that any good could come of this idea, other ideas and future ones is a work on insanity. Press the reactor buttons, watch the fallout from a safe place and give up. Form the foetal position and find cover.

f) Why would you need more than one domain? Is it old school web thinking to buy domains for specific uses? Use your existing domain once you’ve made the thing.

I bought a new Mac Mini as a personal machine a few weeks ago. It’s my first personal Mac in around a decade. As part of defining the software, process and data setup I want to run I’ve been craving simplicity. I’m sitting on ~550GB of legacy personal data. The simpler the system design of my digital world the better. Less maintenance, less time, less risk, less brain power spent on what feels like a low value element of modern life. Nobody spends their last days thankful that they hoarded gigabytes of unorganised data.

So, with simplicity in mind, what is the answer to the domain riddle? When I ask myself that I know I should let this one expire. A win for simplicity. It’s a name and I can always buy another similar — likely cheaper alternative — if the wind changes direction.

But, hold up one moment. Option D is haunting me. There’s some resonance here, something playing on my mind. Rather than making it much easier, how about it starts easy, then gets progressively harder? My answer is figuring out a gated and phased approach. Right now, I’m resisting the urge to write about modern software development practices.

Order complete.

Now, let’s open the drawing board and figure out the easiest thing to do in hours, not days.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 31st December 2023

A4 Paper

A4 paper
Waterstones had a bar
Cup of disappointment
Tea pot £5
The table with 95% hair
Alton Towers/Disneyland
The bar ends there?
Boy Scout
Mustard bench nearly capsized
DJ tiny decks got refused
Nose.com
The lesbians all look like each other
Was that a dog?
The wettest cigi
Boohoo.com and Action Man
DJs mum filmed TikToks
Rednecks
What’s that nice stone over there?
Girl goes into a cemetery
Jurassic Park
It’s great but could it just stop for a minute
Bomb disposal horse
Neil Armstrong
Shippy bois
Splatty jubes
The sea has the best tracks
Skyscrapers are just shells

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 27th June 2023

A4 Paper

Visualising Running

There’s been some bumps in the road during April, May and a bit of June. My exercise frequency went right down from where I was in the first few months of the year.

Today, I’m on my 12th consecutive day of running. Last Friday, the fifth day, I started thinking about momentum. The visualisation that came to mind was a large, thick, metal disc spinning around on an axel.

I could see this disc perfectly in my mind. Almost like an enlarged MiniDisc internal disc, but it is about 50 cm wide and 15 cm deep.

The disc is rotating a bit faster than a 45 RPM vinyl on a record player. The discs rotation, inertia and force is how I feel. The more I think about this disc and about how I feel now on day twelve is that the disc has now gained some bearings, or perhaps the bearings have just been greased. The discs heavy weight delightfully gliding along with a smidgen of a push.

For many of us, it might be a shared belief that the more frequently you do something, the easier not only it is to do the thing in practice but also the discipline of maintaining a routine. I’ve read this countless times, it’s a core theme in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.

I’d guess the difference here is I’d never thought to visualise myself as a chunky spinning disc.

The more I think about getting back my momentum with running and exercise the more I can visualise the discs properties and behaviours.

It’s heavy, slow and resistant to start it moving
Once it has started moving it can just as easily stop, it hasn’t yet found its inertia
After a few consistent applications of effort, it has become a flywheel, maintaining consistent torque, ready for more when it needs to apply it

Part of the trick is remembering that when you’ve been away from something for a while, the start is slow. The very act of doing it is met with an opposing force – the resistance.

Footnote: I managed thirteen consecutive days. I had a fun night on the Saturday and took Sunday off. Monday, the pavement was calling me. No need to even think about it. Lace up, push that disc with each step. It’s spinning delightfully.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 27th June 2023

Vision Pro. Note to self.

I’ve written web posts just for me before. The training posts here are logs of my actions, results and mishaps. Written just for me to get the stuff out of my head and perhaps, more importantly to look back to. They help challenge my mindset when it changes.

It’s Sunday 11 June 2023. Apple held their annual developer conference this week and showcased a headset – Vision Pro.

Until I watched the event I hadn’t given headsets too much time in my brain wonderings. This week I’ve been looping thoughts, concerns and questions. Why though? I guess because there is a significant belief system that Apple shapes a large segment of affluent Westerners futures. And, I’m looking at this forecast and I’m in disbelief of its value. Furthermore, it feels worrying. So, here are a few bullets, things I’ve been pondering, thoughts I want to revisit over the years as this plays out.

I find that there’s something strangely depressing about a screen being strapped to your head. Why? In design I value control, choice, real world sensations.
I’m not a gamer, but I believe gaming to be the only killer use case. I’d like to try a driving game in one.
I know that the strategy is about using the next few years as developer innovation to create the killer use cases outside of gaming. But I just keep asking – so what? – I can’t imagine the value, I can only imagine the burdens. I’m stuck on this one. I can’t imagine what will make peoples lives better inside a headset. Let’s see what gets created, let’s see how I feel.
I found the productivity, work and communication experiences demoed really irritating. I like to gaze away from screens to think, ponder, compose my thoughts. The notion of being trapped inside a screen feels feverish.
I kept on thinking about how many terrible things there are in software design already. Tech capitalism is mostly geared to just add more stuff that makes profit. The terrible things are often left ignored, unless there is money to be made. I’m wondering about how many of these terrible things end up making their way into spatial computing experiences. When I think about the areas we can improve in our sector we have a long way to go to serve people better. Perhaps an analogy that might work is, imagine a car company adding more gadgets to a car but never improving the safety, emissions or comfort. The way we experience software and platforms today can be really damaging and spatial computing appears to be burying our eyes and cortex within it.
Am I too old to understand headsets? My dad carried on buying CDs after I gifted him Spotify. In his mind, he wanted to “put music on”, listen to it and easily carry it between his house and car. Spotify was a bit like Google to him, a handy search tool. By contrast, I grew up on the Napster era internet (we had a modem was age 13, 1998), Spotify felt logical and native. Will a younger generation see headsets as native? Perhaps this is just part of being alive in the Industrial Revolutions, innovation won’t always gel with your own default mode and era.
A few folks have complained about the price, it’s a rich persons toy. I get that we’re looking at a first generation product, the price will go down, competitors will learn from the engineering and produce affordable rival products. It still will be a luxury item, but no different in price from a computer, tablet or phone.
Apple appears to have cracked the latency issues headsets suffer from. John Gruber talked about how windows didn’t jiggle or move when he used it. I’ve been thinking about these breakthrough moments, multi-touch is a good example. Once it exists in the world a lot of changes follow because of what is enabled. This feels to me like a Pandoras box moment, the genie is out of the bottle. As it’s now possible to do spatial stuff without the janky experience, does this force the hand? We’re kinda good at creating things that don’t benefit us but because they are possible and desirable. These things produce juggernaut level systems we can end up trapped in: such as, ultra processed food, credit or property.
I’ve kept mulling over what we need vs what they can make. A few folks have reacted in the same way. Why make a headset for entertainment when the world has so many problems? I guess it depends what you’re in the business of. Apple are mainly in computing, entertainment and health. They’ve never stated they are in the business of fixing the planet. It’s a peculiar line of thinking really. It’s logical they will make another device. And it stands to reason that it’s doubtful it will truly benefit the world in a meaningful way beyond entertaining folks. Perhaps there could be some novel productivity increases. But yeah, companies don’t often just make what we need.
Companies do make stuff that fails. This could never gain significant traction and we all spend a lot of time thinking and talking about it. Not everything works everytime.
Final bullet for today, I’ve been mulling over what all of these thoughts say about my beliefs of ‘what is good design?’. Im in danger of dragging out the cliched Dieter Rams reference here. But pausing for a moment and asking myself, if you’re confused by the industrial and experience design of Apples headset, what do you believe good design is? My previous thought on fixing the terrible things about software comes back around. I don’t have a clear and simple answer. I guess it’s something around not letting capitalism eat the design experience.

No big conclusion. No snappy thought piece. I’m going to revisit these thoughts as things shape up.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 11th June 2023

February Health Log

This is the 54th day and the second monthly health log where I do a bit of reflective practice. You can read previous logs here: Jan. All round the results have been solid this month, I’m losing fat at 440 grams average per week. I’ve started preventative physio for my legs, been increasing running volume and variety, weights sessions are seeing a good volume increase too. No major slip ups on food, that feels really well tuned in. Booze was more than I’d like which needs addressing this month. I will run my first half in 33 days so I will be refining my training towards that.

Goals

Say goodbye to my gut fat
Improve cardio performance
Improve gut health
Drink less booze

Results

28 days of Feb: down 1.6kg of fat. 143.05km of running. 6 lifting sessions.

	Jan 6th	Jan 31st	Feb 28th	Month Change	Total Change
Weight (kg)	68.2	65.3	62.8	-2.5	-5.4
Fat (%)	22.2	19.6	17.8	-2.6	-4.4
Muscle (kg)	50.4	49.8	49	-0.8	-1.4
Fat Mass (kg)	15.1	12.8	11.2	-1.6	-3.9

Context

It’s the second month of dedicated focus on my health. I did a reset last month and started easing back into training and progressively adding volume. For the last few years I’d been ballooning in weight and fat. My diet was all over the place and my training was inconsistent or non existent for weeks on end.

What did I do in February?

Food & Drink

No big changes on food, I’m hovering between 2-3 meals a day, aiming to maximise protein at 42 grams per meal. Small amount of whole carbs, variety of veg and fruits
A few meals out, takeaways here and there so I’m not working off an unsustainable model of pure whole and unprocessed foods. Added a couple of absolute bangers I had out locally below.
Booze went off track after seeing a few people, definitely felt the impact of just a few extra drinks compared to January.
No fasting, I considered a 2+ day one but I’m slightly hesitant as I’m balancing a higher volume of running with a reduced meal size already. Perhaps after the first half race it’s worth a shot.
Experimented with adding coffee back in on a few occasions because I do really love it. Mixed results, a range of feeling OK, anxious and gut somersault. I’m really on the fence about coffee. Perhaps I just stick to certain days of the week to enjoy it. Whatever happens, I’ve broken through the pattern of depending on it twice daily and my gut grinding for hours on end.

Exercise

Bought the Polar H10 and I’m using this in the gym and outside to keep a close eye on the heart rate goal for the session. I’m working off the zones in Strava, which I know are estimates so I’m still interested in getting a VO2 max test done to see what my zones and lactate levels actually look like.
I noticed my pace had to increase by a fair bit (I might be able to figure this out from Strava) in my zone two sessions to get out of zone one. This led very mild muscle strain because my legs just haven’t got used to moving at that pace yet
No half distance for February, I might squeeze that one out in the next few days of early March, however the weather looks well rank.
Ran a total of 143.05km in February. Peaches did her first 10km. I did a silly experiment to see how fast and far I could run in the park – managed 3 km at 3:59 /km pace. I’m finding it hard to easily pull data from Strava on my effort sessions, which tells me I need to make a better effort at labelling runs if I really care about organising the data.
My cardio recovery markers have improved by a big leap, see Apple Health trend below.
Physio for knees and legs is going really well. Had a video appointment with a physiotherapist and he sent a bunch of extra exercises. I’ve got a nice routine going now and added bands, a wobble cushion and a range of exercises to mix it up.
Weight training has been at an average once a week, I’m seeing more volume and better form in a few exercises.
I still haven’t cracked how to make pull ups a part of my weekly routine, perhaps I need to book these in for after I have dropped Peaches off at school. That way I know I would get x3 sessions a week.

Plan for March

Get ready for the Putney Half, this is on the 2nd of April. I need to do a bit of reading about the best training plan, my bet is I will want to be doing a wee bit of zone two the week before and that’s it.
I haven’t yet done any park intervals, so that’d be fun to try. I messed about with the Apple Watch programs and it seems pretty easy to program something into the watch too. My gut says it might just be easier to measure a distance in the park and go for that on loops. Let’s see.
I’ve also been wondering if I set running distance/duration targets for each week. Strava tracks this in the activity view very nicely so they could help nudge me along if I get sidetracked.
The treadmills can be very sketchy at reading the live heart rate, there seems to be no logic to when they cut out or if one treadmill is more reliable than the others. I’ve downloaded an app that I’m going to test drive that claims it gives a live view on the phone. Although, in writing this I now realise that I won’t be able to watch any live DJ Sets which really keep me going. Bugger. I guess I could take an iPad and iPhone, but jeez, way to look like a complete melt. Bottom line, how do I keep track of my heart rate without needing to glance at the watch constantly.
Back on to strict low drinking. I’ve already had a kick start this week just gone and was only out on Friday for x3 drinks with Jess.
More prehab / physio conditioning for my legs. This is going great and I’m keen to get as much as I can in to bolster up the running strength and be ahead of any injury risks. I might pop my routine up as a webpost here, the only issue is the visuals, I guess I could record myself doing them but that’s a bit cringe.
In terms of body fat goals, it’s highly likely I’m getting into the really difficult stage very soon. I’ve been in the high 17% for a total of five days on and off at the point of writing this on 4th March. Realistically, I should be looking at ending March in the high 16%, stretch goal of making the low 16%/high 15%. Again, let’s see. It might just take a couple of months to get there depending on my body’s adaptation.

What have I learned?

Prehab / physio / stretching at least three times a week is essential for strength and bolstering running performance.
Even with a high quality diet and gut health foods I can’t avoid the damage even a low amount booze has on my gut condition.
Tracking and planning my running session types will help prepare my legs for faster speeds as my cardiovascular performance improves.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 5th March 2023

Dog Manual

The bad news is that this is not a manual for dogs. The attempts at getting dogs to read the first draft were frankly a complete waste of time. Distracted and preoccupied, all subjects showed more interest in being a dog than learning more about standard operating procedures of dogs.

With that initial round of research being so fruitless, the executive decision was made to rewrite the dog manual for humans to read and pass on to dogs. So, let’s begin. Well, before we jump into things, our experiences are anecdotal and all details shared below do not qualify as professional dog advice. Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up with regular dog maintenance.

Dog Training

We worked with Jennifer at Bone Ball Bark because she’s amazing. Our training was 1:1 with Jennifer, but she also offers online courses too. She helped us with consistency in our signals, understanding our dogs body language, adding variation to play, recall and attention. We recommend working with a trainer on and off over the first 18 months so you get to build up your handling techniques as the dog matures. There’s a ton of information on YouTube which can become contradictory or overwhelming. One channel that we would recommend checking out is https://www.youtube.com/c/McCannDogs. They tend to get straight to the point and focus on training over brand building and advertising.

Daycare

We love daycare because dogs are pack animals. All the walks and park trips you can squeeze in won’t add up to the equivalent social and stimulation benefits of daycare from a young age upwards. Dogs learn their place in the pack, interact and play with all ages and you’re reducing the chances of your dog being reactive or challenging around other dogs. Well, perhaps. Ours has some bizarre territory guarding around our home in her teenage years even though she’s chill at daycare.

You’ll hit the jackpot if you can find one that also offers overnight stays so you can go on holiday. We highly recommend also finding a pet kennel / hotel that is near to you or on the way to an airport too. The sooner they learn to stay away the easier it will be.

Grannick’s Bitter Apple Chew Deterrent

We like this spray Amazon | Pets at Home because it stops unwanted chewing. During puppy training you need to do a lot of redirection from your stuff being chewed to their stuff being chewed – their toys. You can’t be everywhere all the time to redirect and your student can also be stubbornly in love with your sofa/shoes/anything within reach of its razor teeth. Spray this on items you need to protect and spray a cotton wool ball and pop it in their mouth so they form a sensory connection. It saved our sofa.

Halti Lead and a Canvas Poop Bag Holder

We like this because it is a multi-use lead – Amazon. The clips make it really easy to shorten and secure when eating out, clipping into car boots, making it a longer lead for roaming in grasses for doing the business. It’s soft and won’t rip your hands like alternatives. You can also use it for two point harnesses, we haven’t used it much for that as we’ve focused on reward and audio signals to be near us for walking (when it works). We use a soft canvas poop bag holder – Amazon – as the plastic ones crack and are clunky to use on a lead when handling lead positions.

Kong Teething Toy

We like this toy – Amazon – because it works off energy and placates a dog being left alone. Buy at least four of these and get the small size ones for early puppy days. We buy pre-cooked chicken thighs, chop the meat into tiny cubes and stuff it into the end. Buy a stopper for the end from etsy, now you can fill it with a bit of water as well and freeze it easily with no mess. Whip this out when the puppy needs to go down a few notches or you’re off out or leaving it alone. We use chicken as it makes no difference to how much kibble we feed in a day and we won’t end up with the dog having the runs from too much fibre. Also, wet kibble is rank. Recipe ideas ?

Nail Clippers

We like these clippers – Amazon – because puppies’ claws are like razors. You’ll want to spend time desensitising your puppy to touching paws, claws, tail, ears and mouth so they don’t get surprised by this later on in life and misbehave when touched. Clipping claws at home is a good skill to acquire. Watch lots of YouTube videos, look at Google Images and do it in a brightly lit room so you can see where the nail ends and the blood vessel starts. Only do it when your puppy is in a low energy mood and comfortable being handled, or else it’s a battle you won’t win.

Licky Mat

We like this mat – Amazon – because you can distract your dog. Slap some dog peanut butter or meat paste on this, pop it in the bath or on a window and you have a dog completely distracted while you wash them, carry out any inspections, do something important or leave them on their own for a bit. We found too much peanut butter gave her wet poos, meat products tend to be the calmest thing for her tummy.

Washable Dog Pee/Poop Mat

We like these mats – Amazon – because you can transition off disposables sooner. We used a mix of the disposables and then went onto reusables which are now for any sick days. It took us a while to realise that when you’re mat training, don’t chuck out a pad after one pee, leave it so the dog can smell where it went and go back and do it again. We got through heaps of mats because we wanted it to be clean for her and us, turns out it’s better to be consistent and remind them by smell.

Microfibre Towels and a Cleaning Station

(no link, just buy the stuff) We like these as you can towel off a wet dog quickly and they dry out quickly too. We have a few large microfibre towels for when she goes swimming, has a messy walk or a shower. When she was a puppy we had a whole box dedicated to her cleaning stuff for the home, paper towels, flash wipes, spray, baby wipes, poop bags – this box was on hand at all times to keep on top of it all.

Simple Solution Enzymatic Cleaner

We like this spray – Amazon – as it uses enzymes to remove urine smells only dogs noses pick up. You might get through a lot of this so I’d be tempted to buy the four litre one and decant it into a spray bottle. Use it as per instructions, it needs time to work. It should stop that random place they once took a piss becoming their favourite place to drown in their pungent wee every day. We’ve never had carpets so I can’t vouch for its stain removing powers.

Mess Free Chicken Training Treats

We like these treats – Amazon – as you can put them in your pocket with no mess and little smell. When you’re out walking or in the park you need some currency to train the dog with. We settled on these as chicken is low impact on her gut, she can eat as many as she likes and her poo won’t change, we can keep them in any coat or trouser pocket and don’t have to carry a training bag or keep them sealed in a hard to open plastic bag. Note: some dogs are allergic to chicken, you’ll soon know if that is the case. Some dogs are really fussy, and you’ll need to experiment with different treats till you find the one they want.

Pocket Ball Launcher

We like this ball launcher – Amazon – because it is small enough for bags. I honestly didn’t think I needed a ball launcher, but they are great for wearing dogs out. If you buy this smaller one you can easily fit it into a trendy sling bag and stop yourself looking like a walking dog shop. People might even think you’re a normal cool person and not some neurotic puppy person.

Probiotics

We like these probiotics – – Amazon – because they help balance dog gut when they are sick. They eat bad stuff and they get infected with parasites. Vets will always tell you to put this on some chicken and rice and charge you lots of money for it. Buy it from Amazon ahead of time and when you notice their poop looking bad get straight on it and add this to their next meal of bland chicken and rice.

Real Fur and Toys

It’s easy to buy a lot of toys, get to know what your dog is interested in over time and you’ll save on filling the house with the unloved and rejected. Ours is really into fur toys – Real fur for working dogs – because they are really high value to dogs with prey drive. We have ended up rotating toys so she focuses on a few at a time and enjoys them more. Kong makes high quality toys that last. Avoid cheap Amazon brands as they won’t have been tested with dogs, even at a safe material level. Generally it’s better to pick them out at a quality pet shop.

Rabbitgoo Harness

We like this harness – Amazon – because it fits working dogs well. There are a lot of harnesses on the market, some really interesting designs and colourways, however for the size and shape of our dog this harness had the best fit and large surface area for her comfort. We would recommend buying a few brands and trying them out. Working dogs tend to need utility over fashion when it comes to harnesses due to their weight, size and willingness on a lead.

Eden Dog Food

We like this food – Eden – because it is high quality food. Avoid any of the trendy direct to consumer “custom” pet foods, they are low quality and spend their money on marketing. Eden can be bought from My Pet Warehouse with next day delivery, it’s very high fibre, protein and calorie per gram. So much so we have to weigh exactly the right amount for each feed. You will want a puppy mix to cover the nutrients needed for growing dogs and then you can switch over to adult dog mix when they are grown. Never switch a food instantly, always migrate over several days or you will have a sick dog.

Long Line

We like long lines – Amazon – because you can build up your recall and off leash confidence. Long lines help you transition from your normal walking lead to a longer and easier to grab lead in the park. The first few times letting go of the lead can be scary and a longer line helps build up your confidence. However, you must be really careful not to use them in busy gatherings with other dogs. It’s very easy for a tangled mess to happen and some dogs have had their legs broken by other dogs long lines. Figure out quiet times in the park for using them, build up bit by bit while you’re getting your recall and reward cemented in dog brain. If you notice a park getting busy, switch back to a short lead. The majority of dogs can be off lead when around other playful dogs with no problems, they tend to stay in their pack playing and sniffing.

Dog Chew Buffalo Horn

We like this buffalo chew – Amazon because it lasts ages. When your dog is over three months old you can give them tougher things to chew. They will enjoy chewing and destroying these with low mess, no calories and provide stimulation for the dog on a daily basis. Check what age your breed can start to enjoy these.

Dog Chew Antler

We like these antlers – Amazon – because they are compact. When you travel or just to have around the house, these provide good stimulation, no smell and help with teething. Check what age your breed can start to enjoy these.

Stuff I wish we had done differently

Never prepared food for dog where human food is prepared. Dogs are laser focused pattern spotters and place their bets every time food could ever possibly be presented again. I wish we had made a space in the hallway cupboard for storing and preparing her food. Potentially, the association with the kitchen and food never would have happened. You can’t get around the smells of food though, so who knows.
Store dog treats or food in the same brand of tupperware we use for human food. She knows the sound of that Tupperware opening and instantly places her bets on it being for her. Luckily she’s very polite, but it’s irritating when cooking.
Spent more time on recall at a young age. We spent a fair amount of time and got some great results, however with some breeds it is a lifelong practice and her recall is now a bit selective depending on the park she’s in. Squirrels are our main competition for attention.
Eased off on how many dogs she greeted when she was a puppy. This one is hard to balance, not enough socialisation can make a dog hard work around others and too much can make them over interested in every dog. We have ended up with dog being highly interested in every dog, which can be tough when walking or needing her to follow commands. She only really wants a quick sniff, so it’s not the biggest deal breaker.

Things we Don’t Think are Worth it

Clickers. It’s easier to teach “yes” than it is to have a clicker in your hand at all times.
Pet health food from the vets. We had much better success with chicken and brown rice, most vets are paid to dish out the “special food” which can take days for your dog to settle down eating, we stick to low impact chicken and rice.
Internet flea and wormer. Always go to the vets and get the subscription from them, they have access to the more advanced and comprehensive chemicals than the direct to consumer brands do. You’ll have better coverage and a medical history when required.
Puppy carry accessories. We bought a bunch of things to carry dog when she was young, she outgrew them so quickly and the usage was probably minutes in total.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 11th February 2023

January Health Log

This year I’m rebooting some plans from last year. The monthly log is still a solid bit of reflective practice, a chance to celebrate any wins and set the attention for the coming month. I put too much pressure on the Hackney Half last year so I’m going to do four half marathons rather than just one in 2023. That way, I always need to be training and there is no big pressure, just consistency. I’d love to close this year with no love handles, 40 is around the corner and it’d be a delight to feel and look amazing.

Goals

Say goodbye to my gut fat
Improve cardio performance
Improve gut health
Drink less booze

Results

26 days of Jan: down 2.3kg of fat. 9 hours of running, 85.7km. 7 lifting sessions. 42% of the month I drank booze. Gut inflamation down.

	Jan 6th	Jan 31st	Change
Weight (kg)	68.2	65.3	-2.9
Fat (%)	22.2	19.6	-2.6
Muscle (%)	50.4	49.8	-0.6
Fat Mass (kg)	15.1	12.8	-2.3

Context

2022 featured valiant efforts to run, build muscle and lose fat. These were thwarted by covid, colds, holidays and a decadent summer. Towards the end of the year I got back to running and lifting in a consistent rhythm. As a result of zone two running my resting heart rate dropped down. My nutrition choices were clearly out of whack as my gut started getting more unstable and inflamed. A new year, back from Mexico and I hatched a plan to reset the dials on my health. As much as 2022 did feel like a flop, I ended the year not as fat as I started – I was 73 kg and 25% fat in April 2022. So, not all bad news.

What did I do in January?

Food & Drink

I landed back in the UK on 6th Jan with food poisoning. A couple of days of fasting and slowly introducing chicken and rice helped my gut inflammation. The plan was to slowly start adding more fibre day by day.
Cut to one meal a day for ~five days. Started to feel woozy when adding running and lifting back in. I was also concerned about not getting enough nutrition each day.
Stumbled upon Tim Spector interview, researched further and bought recommended high polyphenol foods.
Stayed off booze for a few days to give my gut a good chance of restoration.
Set a rough guide on only drinking when I go out with friends, no drinking at home unless it’s a special occasion. Red wine only and I’m tracking how many I have.
Purchased three bottles of nice wine to hold back for special occasions. I want to reverse the pattern of home drinking and perhaps build up a collection of good bottles.
Had one coffee as a test on my first day back to work. It made me anxious and tense, randomly clicking things on the computer with no real sense of focus. I’ve stayed off coffee since.
Started eating fish, one tin of mackerel in the morning to add omega3 into my diet.
Ate very little processed food, sugar and take-aways. I had a Five Guys burger and some Chick N’ Sours, but no snacks and puddings from M&S.

Exercise

Got back on the treadmill for zone two runs, averaging five runs a week. Got one interval session in which I think gave me a bit of strain due to my treadmill form at a fast pace.
Ran a half marathon distance set to Maffetone Method heart rate of 148 bpm. The thinking was to mentally and physically get used to it. Went slightly turbo in the last 2km and completed it with a sub 2 hours time. IT bands were quite tight for the next two days, recovery was a breeze though.
Started stretching a lot more, I think I know enough stretches by memory now to do it zone out and crack on for at least fifteen minutes.
Tried one (or two?) lifting sessions where the weight was at the top end so I could only do 3-6 reps. Had a couple of mini and long workouts.

Plan for next month

Accurate heart rate tracking after buying the Polar H10, I want to combine this with heart rate alarms on my watch for outdoor running so I can keep in zones easily.
Get another half distance in. Add a couple of interval sessions in the park so I can concentrate on form that seems harder for me to get right on a treadmill
Focused IT band physio sessions at home, I’ve created a Notion gif cheat sheet from YouTube tutorial videos.
Experiment with ~two minute high intensity exercise bursts through the work days to improve fat loss, vitality and heart strength — probably by doing jumping jacks.
I’ve already started making sure Peaches gets walked after I’ve eaten dinner, helping smooth out my blood sugar spikes.
Plan out my training across the week and for the year. Nothing too complex, just picking what will happen in the week and keeping tabs on race dates across as they come into view – reduced booze and training effort.
Two day long fast. I’m keen to see if I notice any benefits other than fat loss, mainly to gut and skin health.
Even less drinking. The toughest part to crack is only having three small glasses of red wine when I’m at a pub or bar.
Continue with Tim Spector approach to nutrition. If time allows I might write down a few recipes so I have dishes I can lean on with no effort.
I want to say goodbye to vaping. I’m really stuck on how to scrub this one, I’m considering hypnosis.

What have I learned?

Eating a wide range of plants high in polyphenols helps increase the microbiome diversity which improves gut health, brain activity and supports weight loss.
Lean protein appears to be more suitable for fat loss for my body, switching from thighs to breasts has made a noticeable difference.
My heart rate is lowering when running. Both average and maximum are down in my training log when doing the same pace on the treadmill.
Drinking is getting harder on me as I get older. Even with easing up on the frequency and volume over January I still noticed gut inflammation, fatigue, brain fog and increased heart rate on days after drinks.
Currently I’m shifting 300 grams of fat a week, I have to remind myself that the initial bit is always easier than the rest

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 5th February 2023

What if brand X did Y?

I’ve been a bit of a brand nerd most of my life. Thinking back it probably incubated when I was a kid and spent ages thumbing through the Argos catalogue. Differentiating between electronics brands, product features and prices.

With this brand spotting and nerding I often ended up wondering… what if brand X did something they don’t normally do? It’s kind of a daydreaming activity where I just start imagining what it could look like rather than caring too much about the corporate strategy and profit margins.

Sometimes the wonderings are really obvious, many of us have probably had the same thoughts. In some cases, the things I wondered already existed and I hadn’t heard of them. This isn’t a smart list of genius ideas. I’m not yelling into the wind “only if brand X knew what I knew”. I guess I’m just interested in collecting my daydreams into one place.

I’ve wondered about…

Tiny IKEA.

We really enjoy the grocery section at IKEA. I’d love to see a tiny IKEA with majority food, a small cafe, marketplace best sellers, new products and a click and collect. I stumbled upon a medium sized IKEA next to the Port of Piraeus near Athens a couple of years ago. There were also a few kitchen and office showrooms dotted about years ago I believe, not quite the same delight as food and essentials.

Nandos Express.

I’m not a frequent flyer at Nandos, don’t mind it but don’t crave it. It seemed bonkers that so many folks go wild for it and you could only get it by going in for a sit down. Well, turns out there is one, I walked past it years ago just near Liverpool Street station. Looks like its gone now as delivery apps have solved this.

Audi Road Bike.

I used to own a Trek 1.2 road bike. It was a mighty little bike for its price. When pedalling up hills across the UK I’d often wonder what an Audi bike would look like, feel like to ride and what acoustic design the components would have. Wonder no more, here it is for €17,500. Ugh, not quite what I pictured.

KFC breakfast

Fried chicken is fine at any time of the day when you like fried chicken. Perhaps I started wondering about this after I had fantastic fried chicken brunch at the now defunct Duke’s Brew & Que. A bit of Googling and we can find KFC has done some bonkers stuff in Japan, and yes, we did even get a trial of breakfast in 2016 from 10 branches in the calm waters of UK KFC.

Vegan Greggs.

Err, this one isn’t even worth typing up. I did buy shares in Greggs once, got scared about picking shares though and went with an index fund instead – Vanguard normcore.

Premium B&Q.

Only the good tools, parts, components, accessories, chemicals, etc, blah. Make it a small shop — are you spotting a pattern here? — so it can easily squeeze into city districts. Amazon is full of bogus DIY stuff too. Sadly a lot of the local indie places are closed up now or not as plentiful as they once were.

Sidenotes

Mark Pollard’s strategy frameworks are really fun for this type of stuff. https://www.markpollard.net/examples-of-strategy/
You can run ideas workshops by asking teams to imagine “what it would look like if company X did Y?”
These are just daydreams about brands, I appreciate the death grip of monopolies conquering every bit of our high streets and wallets is probably not for the best.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 28th January 2023

Lightweight Internet Service Stacks

? This research page is being made in public. You will find editing notes and placeholder content. I like making in public, more liberating than an eternity of hiding in a Google Doc.

This is an ongoing research page that documents lightweight internet publishing / ecom / social / communications services. The rough goal is to combine low cost or free services to build a ‘stack’ that allows you to be followed, found, sell and easily publish. The stimulus for this came from chatting to my mum about her website, art sales, social accounts, running costs and her audience. More detail on that in the Back Story section below.

I guess the big driver for me is to document a few stack options that people I know or meet could easily use. The trick is finding the perfect balance between ease of use, cost and impact. For example, eBay is easy to use and fees only apply on sales, but it might not be the best network to be found on. Shopify is also easy to use, but will cost a lot to run and isn’t a network. Squarespace allows a huge amount of customisation and flexibility but can be a chore to setup, maintain and will cost at least £144 a year. Some of the free or low cost services have a terrible experience for everyone, be it irritating pop-ups asking visitors to join, subscribe, convert to paid or locking owners into walled databases. And the visual design no code services require a bit of a design eye to make them look as good as the marketing examples. So it really is a balancing act to find the right stack. A goldilocks problem.

Right now it makes sense to publish this initial page and as the research and testing progresses I’m betting a series of focused sub pages and chapters will be written up that focus in on a stack recipe and how to it works.

The bottom line is – you want to put stuff online, how do you combine what is out there without having a massive bill and headache.

Services

This list could be endless, theres a lot of services out there. I’m going to see what I find, evaluate service offers, road test them and see how they can be of value in their most affordable pricing plan. Please do email me suggestions

We might steer towards complexity of setup and usage here and there. And also quickly away from it if the service gets too gnarly for most.

One page build services

Bio.fm [$50-100 per year]
Carrd [$9-49 per year]
Universe
About.me

Social services

Instagram
TikTok
Pinterest
YouTube

Newsletters

Substack

Blogs / Articles

Medium

Music

Soundcloud
Mixcloud

Shops

Etsy
Shopify
Depop
Ebay

Payment Services

Gumroad
Stripe

Portfolio Services

Cargo collective

No Code Visual Web Builders

Unstack
Super.so
Webflow [$168 -$468]
Wix
Canva
Squarespace [£144 +]
Google sites
WordPress.com

Business Listing Services

Google Maps

Blogs

Reference Landing Page Services

Linktree

Others

Neocities

Use cases

You want to upload and sort collections of images with text data attributes
You want to upload text notes
Occasionally you want to sell digital or physical items

Inbox & Questions

Can I make something that is really easy to publish a one page website?
If you want photo galleries, can you use a cloud service like Dropbox to host and another service to render out folders as pages?
How “easy” is it to use GitHub pages to host a Linktree style page?
Its not about the “correct stack”, its about the intention of each layer
Quality instagram images are needed in the first place to get click through

Creating, running and hosting a website isn’t for everyone. On its own it might not be the most effective service to reach an audience as most people spend their internet time inside networks these days.

The common pattern today is to use Linktree on your social profile url and bounce visitors to bunch of other places: more networks, forms, shops, websites, donations, newsletters and such.

Linktree seems to be a good service, at around ~£48 a year I started to wonder – what else is out there and what other publishing needs can be met on a budget?

Backstory

My mum is a painter. Last year she asked me to redesign her website. It would have been a bit of a chore to go through a redesign and rebuild because her website was running on an old custom build of WordPress. I wanted to find something she could easily update herself.

It got me thinking about if her website is the most useful thing to spend effort on when most of her views and engagement are going to come through a social network of some sort. Should she be encouraging people to follow her on social networks when they meet her? If they do, then they are more likely to see her new work than if they were to bookmark her website.

I wondered if using Linktree to bounce people to all her social accounts and exhibition websites would be a good fit. This then led me to think about what would be a suitable lightweight stack that an artist or a small business can use that isn’t going to cost an arm and a leg.

These days a lot of the small services do come with fees, but there’s loads of free stuff out there or potentially stuff you can re-purpose that’s free.

So I thought it be interesting to document lightweight stacks – combinations of web services – that allow you to have visual presence and more feature options that just using Instagram alone.

I’ve also been on at my friend Caroline, she’s a Gardner. I believe that she should build up a little portfolio of her amazing work and a library of her plant knowledge. Finally, I’m a little bit stumped when I find small businesses exclusively use Instagram. What could they add that would help customers out? These three scenarios were the starting point for the research and have given me some interesting use cases to consider when auditing what is out there and how to combine them.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 15th January 2023

What's in my Bag? Part 1

I have two travel pouches ready to go for short or long trips. One pouch has the essentials for washing and cleaning, the other, technology and miscellaneous handy items.

A short trip is going to Bristol from London for the day or stay over. A long trip is a holiday or business travel.

Nearly everything in these bags is a duplicate or near enough of something I use at home. I have tried keeping items in a travel drawer so I could use them both at home or when travelling. The goal—less is more, be minimalist. Inviability, stuff did not end up back in the drawer, which led to tiresome scrambling around the house. The joy I get from frictionless packing for trips can’t be articulated clearly enough. If you’re not employing a duplicate approach, give it a try, you’ll be liberated. Wasted time, stress, doubt, thankless decision making and on the road purchases are a thing of the past, at least for packing.

This collection of items isn’t perfect. Change is inevitable. That’ll likely come from using the pouches over time. For now though, what have I got here?

Bellroy Travel Pouch

Eye mask, Generic Amazon Brand: for sleeping or relaxing on transport.
Swappable plug USB Wall Charger, Anker: Plug can be changed for USA/UK/EU, x2 USB-A, x1 USB-C. This is the cornerstone object in the pouch, charges a laptop, phone, watch all at once and over night. Mostly removes the need for a travel adapter.
Passport Notebook, MUJI: doodling sketches/diagrams/notes when at a bar, coffee shop or sat waiting. Added benefit of being able to leave/give a written note.
Signpen, Pilot: Has ink, it’s a pen. I prefer a marker style pen, not great for page bleed in this notebook, could be swapped out.
Battery pack, Anker: x1 USB-A, holds ~1.5 fast phone charges. I’m on the fence if this could be swapped for a smaller unit or if the pouch get swapped for a more flexible material. There is also a case for replacing all USB-A for USB-C, however, hotels, hire cars and aeroplanes are mostly still on USB-A which makes it a tough one to call.
Bank Card, Revolut: This is for emergency use if my wallet/phone vanishes.
Micro USB: Charging Kindles, vapes, battery pack.
Earpods, Apple: Back-up pair if AirPods are out of action, lightning interface for phone calls and music, fitted with EarSkinz silicon covers to improve ear fit.
Collapsable phone stand, SFASTER: The is one of the smallest phone stands I could find at the time, folds down to credit card size, pops up so I can watch videos on trains and planes.
Cleaning liquid, Method – in a MUJI Clear Spray Bottle 18ml: helps keep my specs and laptop screen clean, smears and dirt on either really winds me up.
Microfibre cleaning cloth: It cleans things.
Lightning USB-A, USB-C to USB-C, USB-A to Apple Watch cables for phone, laptop and watch. All Apple brand so no funny business with chip licensing. Not the most durable on the market. All cables tied with velcro cable ties, these are a must for cable management.
Chewing gum, Extra. UK gum hits different and is good to have on hand post coffee/food.

Matador Wash bag

Toothpaste, Arm & Hammer: Can’t get enough of that baking soda. Toothbrush, Boots brand: It’s a brush.
Deodorant, Sanex: Could be much smaller.
Face Sun Creme 50SPF, Eucerin: Can’t advocate this product and brand enough. If you have any skin worries, spend a bit more than you would on high street brands.
Shampoo, Head & Shoulders: This gets refilled at home.
Soap: Wrapped in a small sealable bag with elastic band to take up less space and keep it clean.
Travel mirror, MUJI: It’s a mirror.
Nail scissors: Handy for beard trims, nose hair trims, cutting stuff.
Nail clippers: I hate typing with more than a few days of nail growth so carry these to keep my nails in check.
Tweezers: They get hairs/splinters out.
Moisturiser, Eucerin DermatoClean Hyaluron Cleansing Milk: Just like the suncream, this product is amazing for balancing tricky skin. Refilled into a MUJI 50ml pump bottle.
Face Sun Creme 50SPF, Avène: Carried in my pocket in sunny places as a top-up.
Sumotech, Bumble and Bumble: a hybrid clay/wax for styling short hair, very natural ingredients that was out and don’t cause irritation. Refilled into a MUJI small travel pot.
Washable cotton pad: Useful for removing dirt and sun creme.

What’s missing?

Electric beard timmer. Packed in a tote at the top of my bag for airpot secruity.
Kindle. Packed as leaving the house.
AirPods Pro. Daily carry, packed as leaving the house.
USB-A to C adapter for rental cars. I need to re-buy a few of these as they are now in use on USB hubs at home.

Next Up

Writing up this web post got me thinking about other pouches I already have or need to create. Brad and I had been chatting about having no phone days at the weekend. Packing a note book, a camera, iPod and a book. Going for a walk and a pint and unplugging from our devices. I really like this idea and want to encourage the activity by creating a ready-to-go bag specifically for this. I’m wrestling with the idea of buying a feature phone to go with it. Seems better to just unplug completely and use my no-phone back-up contact details to get in touch with Hollie if I ever needed to.

I carry a sling bag with me for dog park visits and walks at the weekend. This has a small zip pouch with a few bits in. We take a couple of essentials out ad-hoc for the dog in the park. In addition, we did make an emergency dog mess car pouch after a code brown poo critical incident whilst travelling down the A406. If we owned a car this would live in the boot, but it’s found its way back into a drawer, forgotten and unlikely to leave the drawer. This needs a refresh and putting in a dedicated bag that travels with the dog. A doggie bag.

Summary

Offline bag
Sling bag/Dog bag
Dog travel bag
Self catering bag

Afterword

(to be edited)

Back in the day this would have been an upload to Flickr with heaps of hotspots for you to hover over, tagged #whatsinmybag. I guess that’s where a mild obsession of mine grew, the original photo sharing playground.

When I was travelling for work a lot, be it just visiting a clients office or flying to another country I got used to having some essentials ready to go to save packing headaches.

What with lockdowns, a new fully remote job and then only a bit of travel my tech and wash bag setup disbanded.

I don’t consider this to be an EDC (every day carry). My keys, phone and some dog treats are my actual EDC. These two bags are for travelling to Bristol for work or going on a holiday.

EDC has been fetishised a lot since I surfed it back in the Flickr heydays. Today it seems to be less about #whatsinmybag and more the alpha male version of the laugh, love, life Pinterest meme. Lots of tough knifes, tough watches, tough cases, tough metal wallets, tough pens and tough utility knifes (note: one knife is not enough).

The rise of tech YouTubers have also added to the pile of #whatsinmybag. Guess what they carry? Exclusively the best tech and only tech products from the last 6-12 months.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 13th September 2022

Travel

July Training, Not Training

If you’re reading this and you’re not me, it probably won’t be that thrilling. There are plenty of other content nuggets more compelling and scientific to consume on exercise and health. This is the fourth web post that logs what is on my mind so I can refer back to it later. Read April’s here, May’s here and June’s here. The aim is these monthly posts will be valuable to rewire habits and thinking with my training.

Goal: Keep on reducing body fat so I look good on the beach

Results: Progress stalled, workouts and running significantly down, skipping meals has been helping maintain weight

	April 1st	April 29th	May 31st	June 28th	July 29th	Month Change	Total Change
Weight (kg)	73.1	69.8	68.6	66.1	66.4	+0.3	-6.7
Fat (%)	25	22.6	22	20.5	20.6	+0.1	-4.4
Muscle (%)	71.2	73.4	74.1	75.4	75.4	0	-4.2
Fat Mass (kg)	18.3	15.8	15.1	13.6	13.7	+0.1	-4.6

I’ve reached what could easily turn into the inflection point. Four months of concentrating on my body, diet and exercise and the progress has stalled. I’ve been here before and gained the weight, undone the habitual cache of exercise and stuffed any old food in my mouth. Today is 1st August, I need a reboot, a level up a back to basics to avoid the inflection point.

There have been a couple of small wins this month, more on that in a bit.

Context: Eighteen weeks into the mission of losing fat, gaining muscle and improving cardiovascular performance I’ve plateaued in the last four weeks. For a variety of reasons I’ve started to fall off the wagon. I need to get back on. July has been crap. Hardly any workouts, running or progression to speak of.

I’m still feeling really motivated to carry on and recalibrate. Not to dwell on the last month for too long, I think it has been a combination of drinking too much, hot weather, holidays, bad sleep (see drinking and hot weather).

How about some good stuff? I put 2KG on going on holiday for a week and eating everything. The good bit – within four days of returning and skipping meals I lost 2.8KG. And, I saw my first sub 20% body fat on the scale – 19.7%.

Not eating is the biggest progression accelerator.

Plan for August

Full house on training, show up to each planned session
Drop 2% body fat
Reduce drinking right down
Improve sleep
Get back on the wagon
Think, research and write about mindsets – what makes us believe we’re staying on the wagon

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 1st August 2022

Repairing Water Damaged Plasterboard

Unfortunately for us, we ended up with a soggy ceiling at the start of 2022. Assumed sealant failure in the flat upstairs allowed some water to escape, with no obviously logical route, it trickled its way down into a ~60cm long blob on our bathroom ceiling.

The developers builders swapped the neighbours sealant out and patched our ceiling. Weeks later our plasterboard had started to deteriorate. The blob had become boil. Popped, dried and undesirable.

Steps to fix:

These are the high level steps I planned out from a bit of YouTube research and a sense check post on r/DIYUK.

Dry out everything thoroughly
Remove damaged material and surrounding material
Cut a trench for new tape installation over any joins that were damaged
Install plasterboard tape
Cover damaged area with plasterboard bonding agent
Apply plasterboard filler in staged layers, never more than needed
Sand back excess edges of filler to blend level with existing
Apply stain remover paint or spray
Paint two coats of primer
Paint two coats of moisture resistant bathroom paint

Risks

I made a couple of mistakes along the way which took more time and effort to fix. I’d also learnt a few tips from the research.

Not removing the right amount of damage. It’s a Goldilocks problem. Too little and you’re repairing on compromised material. Too much and you’re wasting time and energy. I used a hand sander power tool to sand back the area so I was aware of what was damaged on the surface. This helped determine which bits were dead and could be picked out using a knife. Feeling the board gives you a sense of what’s crumbling and what is cosmetic water marking.

Setting your tape replacement too high or uneven. The damage I was working with was directly on a tape line, this ripped off with ease once I started removing the mess. A join and the material added to boards needs this tape to help form structure, reduce chances of visible lines between boards and hides fixing screws. When you remove the damage you’ll want to cut an area the width of the tape. Don’t make the tape so long that it starts to come above it’s repair trench.

Skipping adding a plasterboard treatment material. Luckily I learnt this step from a helpful person on Reddit that responded to a post I made about my repair plan. Plasterboard that has previously been finished and now needs a repair can be tricky to work with. The new filler can struggle to bond to the surface. Before filling you’ll want to add a material that helps improve the chances of the filler sticking. You can use Polyvinyl Acetate (PVA) – not the school glue – but it requires mixing it perfectly. Alternatively you can use a product like the Bostik plasterers stabilising primer, thats what I used. Only downside is it is sold in large quantities which you might need all of it for a small job.

Adding too much filler that will need lots of sanding back. I made exactly this mistake. Slapping it on without a care in the world and not checking the levelling to the existing ceiling, not working in stages between drying or using a range of tools will, ultimately, you’ll end you up just like me. Next time I repair a larger area my bet is that I need a larger skimming tool and a wetter mix of filler to keep that horizontal line smoothly consistent.

Rushing the sanding. I ended up using a torch clipped to my cap to inspect the ridges and lumps in the filler. Spend time on this bit as you’ll paint over it and still see the difference in levels.

Rushing the painting. Primer helps mask the repair and is essential for getting a surface ready to make paint. I’d never really thought about what primer is until I looked into it. It makes paint work. You’d think paint is paint, it paints stuff and changes it’s colour. Well, it turns out it’s mostly rubbish at being paint without prime underneath it. I’m no expert, so have look at it yourself and what you’re about to slather in liquid pigment.

Tools & Materials

Power sander
80 and 180 grit sandpaper
Scraper
Stanley knife
Plastic dust sheets
Small paintbrushes
Paint roller
Dust mask with filter units
High powered torch
Bostick cementone plasterers stabilising primer
Pollyfilla
Ploycell stain stop spray
Primer and undercoat paint (multipurpose)
Bathroom paint, resistant to moisture and steam

There’s a few tools I wish I’d had for the job but I made do with the basics.

Vacuum adapter and vacuum for the hand sander. This could have reduced the mess and improved visibility when working on levelling the plaster.
Plastering taping knife. This is a wider metal edge tool for getting a consistent line across the application of plaster
Angled brush for cutting in paint edges. Our house is all white paint so it’s not a big deal if the edges are not accurate. I learnt as I was about to start painting that an angled brush is the way to make edging easy.

Wrapping up

I’d assumed this job was one for a pro. A bit of research built up my confidence and being methodical with each step helps get a good result. If you’re reading this and wondering if you should do the same type of repair – do it. Contractors might be reluctant to do this job on its own as it requires a lot of short steps and drying time between each. Further more you start to look at your own home with a new level of confidence that “it’s just material and I can repair, replace and upgrade that when I need to”. It’s liberating.

Final note: methodology is a variable based on research, experience and skill. I’m a beginner and learnt through research. Then doing. Once. If you’ve done this more than once you’ll probably do it differently. Email me and let me know what you would have done, I’ll add it here.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 19th July 2022

Photos Feature - Part 1 - Goodbye Instagram

This month I hit an exciting milestone, 11 years of my Instagram photos are now uploaded to this website and my account at ~~Instagram~~ ~~Facebook~~ Meta is closed. After I downloaded all my data from Meta the photos sat on my hard drive gathering dust for a while and I dreaded the hours of manually uploading each one. But, I’m now done with the archive upload phases of the project.

The last photos I published to Instagram were a batch when I was in Milan on holiday in November 2018. Today, one of the next phases of the project is to fill in the gaps between then and now. After stopping using Instagram I started missing the feeling of processing and posting images online. That feeling is one of the driving forces behind working on this project. It is bonkers how quickly time has passed in front of me. I went from my first slow and clunky manual film camera, to low quality, expensive, bulky digital cameras, to publishing at any time just from a phone. Sadly, the story ends in the chasm of despair – attention addiction on mass to a shopping, tracking and advertising platform. Yikes.

I’m interested in the bit where I got to take, edit and publish photos (2009 – 2014). So I made that.

This project isn’t without its faults. I have completed some very basic styling using outdated CSS techniques, there are no responsive variants on the photo assets and worst of all, I probably shouldn’t have used Advanced Custom Fields to store the photos. It will need rebuilding, I’m okay with that. I’ve committed to this for the long run, I’d love to have this running for as long as I live. So, yeah, it’s on the long list to address these mistakes. I’d argue that the psychological power of getting off my arse and making the first version is more rewarding than gazing out the window wondering when my skills will be just right to achieve the standards I see in others.

One thing that really stood out through the upload phase was how pleasing it is to reflect back over time using photos. By contrast, if I open up Google Photos or my camera roll on my phone it’s too much. There is just too much data for me to take in. Curation really helps. A few old Instagram photos were selected for deletion while doing the upload. I used to post way too much. Terrible photos that I can only assume at the time I was using it more like Twitter. If it was a bad photo and I couldn’t really see a point in it, it got deleted. That isn’t to say all the photos are works of art.

If you’re looking through the photos wondering why some of those that made it were really all _that_ worthy? I’d probably chalk it up to keeping a visual memory. I ended up using Instagram in this way, not everything was a balanced, interesting and well composed snap – sometimes it was just some basic bitch insta snap of a cheesecake. And that’s fine with my basic self.

In writing down this entry on the /photo project, I’m scratching my head on what’s next. Also, I’m wondering how I keep on top of new snaps. I think it makes sense to batch download month by month the gap from November 2018 to now and pick my favourites, post-process them on my phone and go from there. When I’m up to the present day – who knows, I do wonder about the value of posting in the moment vs batching them weekly or monthly. Perhaps it’s a good ambient time kill activity to post the recent snaps when standing in a line waiting or on the tube. Perhaps it’s better just to be bored, let my thoughts wash over me. I guess I’ll find out when I try it.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 5th July 2022

June Training

If you’re reading this and you’re not me, it probably won’t be that thrilling. There are plenty of other content nuggets more compelling and scientific to consume on exercise and health. This is the third web post that logs what is on my mind so I can refer back to it later. Read April’s here and May’s here. The aim is these monthly posts will be valuable to rewire habits and thinking with my training.

Goal: Keep on reducing body fat so I look good on the beach

Results: Slow start to the month but a strong finish, closing in on sub 20% body fat

	April 1st	April 29th	May 31st	June 28th	Month Change	Total Change
Weight (kg)	73.1	69.8	68.6	66.1	-2.5	-7
Fat (%)	25	22.6	22	20.5	-1.5	-4.5
Muscle (%)	71.2	73.4	74.1	75.4	1.3	-4.2
Fat Mass (kg)	18.3	15.8	15.1	13.6	-1.5	-4.7

I didn’t get back into jogging until half way through the month, once I’m in a rut I stay there and I’d love to design a way that I can break out of it. The last two weeks I’ve got three weights sessions in, several one meal per day days and I’m really chuffed to be seeing 66’s-kgs on the scale for what I think might be a decade.

Context: For the last 12 weeks I’ve been working towards the goal of shifting fat, growing a bit of muscle and increasing my cardiovascular performance. Last month in May the plan took a slight detour when I got quite sick for a long time, spent a long time not moving and recovering. Q2’s plan was all about the Hackney Half training, better attention to diet and following one all round weights routine that ensured I worked my core and legs as well as my upper body.

June has been pretty good, considering it gets harder to shift mass as you lose more of it, the numbers above are quite strong. I’m still really motivated by the idea of looking great on the beach, I’ve never felt confident in my body to wonder around in the sun without keeping a baggy t-shirt on. The longer this journey goes on, the less the numbers are really in my head and more the visual of not having a podgy overhang on my trousers, boxers or shorts. They are still handy to keep the balance of “what happens next?” when getting on the scales twice a week.

What has happened?

Longer durations between eating, sometimes eating once a day
Some meals are just protein and veg
There were a couple of spikes in weight data, from memory this was poor eating and no running
Two experiments ran with weights sessions flat out (~30min)
Upped weights on a few exercises, made some harder by body position
Jogging at the gym started again half way through the month, pace 7km/h
Lowered boozing during the week for half the month

When I was sick in May I extended skipping meals a bit longer than just breakfast. This month I’ve done it again a few times and it works especially well after a weekend of eating out and catching up with people. For example, eating between 3-5pm on Sunday and then waiting until Monday 5-6pm to eat again is pretty easy for me. I have wondered about setting fixed days in the week to do this but I think it’s better to do it ad hoc to allow for a flexible social and couples calendar.

Look at the graph below. The start of the month had a couple of spikes (“Lynn, I’ve pierced my foot on a spiiiiike!“). I can’t remember specifically what happened there, my bet is it was sweets, take-aways, eating out and booze compounded. I wasn’t back running again at the start of the month either. The fasting, dog walking and weights seemed to nicely correct them pretty quickly. I did end up thinking about when I’m my ideal body weight and shape – what will my maintenance intake of food look like? My bet is on skipping meals, the benefits are huge and I will always be doing this in some form regardless of how steady I feel.

Weights. The two sessions I did at fast pace – fifteen exercises with zero rest in between until one set was complete – were an absolute energy drain for nearly three days afterwards. I haven’t looked into if the increase in pace is beneficial in any way. It is reassuring to know it can be done in ~30 mins, but it kind of sucked doing it. As soon as form vanishes or motivation dips, it feels like it would be easy to get out of the rhythm of 2-3 routines a week. I started upping some weights 2kgs, second sets was mostly possible, sometimes a reduction in reps. I also made press ups a touch harder by changing hand positioning and switched to a leg elevated bench dip.

The plan is that Q3 will have two weights routines. One normal mode, one functional strength. My bet right now is that doing every single one as functional strength may be too hard to sustain three times a week. Somedays you need to show up and get on with it after a bad sleep or a night out – so I’m building in that insurance layer to the plan. I need to start the routine tomorrow and currently it’ very scrappy – Russian twists, farmer carries, press up and raise above head, walking lunges, standing press, pull ups, jackknife sit-up, push to dumbbell burpie, squats, calve raises. Not yet added to my Strong app as a routine. Let’s see.

Not much to say about the running itself, it just needs to happen. I’ve started making a techno playlist on YouTube so I can watch DJs mixing while running, probably the easiest way to zone out for 30/40 mins.

Finally, here are the quarters numbers:

Plan for next month

Call me crazy, I might do a dexa body scan ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (might)
More skipping meals, boost that mitochondria fat breaking function
Fast runs need to come back, two weeks of jogging under my belt so this should be easy
Functional strength routine should help grow and develop more interesting muscles than the isolated normie ones
Training while in Barcelona, don’t let the flights make you fat
Stability training of some type, probably combined with warm ups and cool downs on running
I feel slightly under prepared with the details on the training, it will help to get a few basics down on paper for the month
Drop 2% fat (<18% body fat by August 1st)

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 30th June 2022

High-end Audio: The iTunes Audit

You know when you start a thing and pretty soon enough it dawns on you that you’ll be doing that thing for a long, long, long time? And, the more you consider when you might be done, you realise it’s highly likely you will never really be done. I got to that stage a few months ago when I decided to tackle ~90GB of music files sat on an old hard drive. If I can offer myself any post-rational advice, when you find yourself at that stage, ask yourself if you genuinely care about what you’re spending your time on. Luckily I’m delighted to say that I’d rank music and its technology ecosystem a 10/10 on the MEGAFUN for Larry Index. MFFL.

Swiftly moving on from talking myself into the delight of another Sisyphean tale being added to my waking hours, I’m keen to jot down a few exciting moments along the way. And this web post marks the completion of skimming through all ~90GB of music files and processing them to either the trash, Roon, a DJ folder for rekordbox or an inbox folder.

Before I started the music files audit I had an idea in 2019/20 to reduce my digital clutter. I had ended up with a lot of data in all sorts of places and it needed some attention. The journey my music took was pretty wild. I moved off iTunes as Spotify became feasible for everyday use and the ~90GB got uploaded to Google Play Music. My thinking at the time was that I’d recreate what I could in Spotify and use Google Play Music when I wanted to dig something out the archive. What actually happened is that my collection went into cold storage there, only to be pulled when I had a lightbulb moment for a track, mix or album I wanted to hear. Spotify dominated by always having a new new to hit play on. Google closed their storage service in 2020 and sudo merged the streaming part with YouTube Music. I downloaded the ~90GB of music files and put them on a physical spinny hard drive under our bed.

Now listen, before the rise of streaming there were the far more thrilling days of buying albums from shops, sharing albums with friends, downloading DJ sets from forums, downloading shows hosted on websites and ripping CDs. They all went into one database, which, at some stage in my life was organised at just above average level of care and attention. That data was now without its base and it sat in a worse place than the ignored cold storage of Google, it sat with the eliminated usb cables of yesteryears, unplugged, dusty and dead.

Beep, beep, beep. Wait. What is that? Can you hear it too? That is the sound of life once again. The collector has come to his senses, dust dusted, untangled from the tether of useless cables, the spinny hard drive has been plugged in and is … transferring … for quite some time.

I used our media server MacBook Air to start trying to make sense of the data in Finder. That was impossible as the filenames were bonkers and everything was in just one folder. It was time to go back to where it all began and drag that one folder straight into iTunes. I don’t care that it got renamed to Apple Music. It is still iTunes when you’re doing something like this. And so began the monumental quest of auditing all of it to work out what to actually do with it.

The plan at the time was to get the best of the music into Doppler and sync that with iCloud or Google Drive. I’d bought into Doppler as the user experience and interface is wonderfully elegant with just enough features. However, I stumbled into a couple of gotchas. FLAC playback was stuttering and I was repeating my previous failure of separating streaming and local files into two experiences. After many chats with Dan and Brad, a handful of John Darko videos and starting to nerd out on high end headphones and audio formats I decided to double down and bought into Roon.

Six months later, I’m done. The gigs of music is less gigs, the good stuff is saved and the bad stuff is trashed. But, I’m not done. In reality I’ve only just poured the foundations of the house. House music.

What did I learn from the audit?

There was a lot of shit. iTunes libraries suffered from more is more. Mine was a victim.

There was a fair amount of gold. Music that hasn’t made its way onto streaming. Mixes, EPs and albums from an era when I was dedicating a lot time to music discovery as opposed to letting a computer program choose tracks for me.

I got rid of a lot of classics. These are songs that are easy to find on streaming but I’m unlikely to listen to the whole album or the song unless it is on a mixtape. Usually pop or rock. They deserve a place but cluttering the library is low value.

MP3s are shit quality. Who knew? Well, yeah, a lot of the gold requires an additional audit to determine if I link the high end TIDAL version or if I buy the lossless files. This got me thinking not only about the cost but then how much I actually value that particular creation. Not having a bag of endless cash is good, it makes you focus on what you really appreciate and assign a value to it.

A small library is a tough concept. While reviewing the seemingly endless ~90GB I kept thinking, “can I get my core library to 100 albums, if I add one I have to take one away”. Today, I’m at 490 albums and I haven’t yet started to sift through the Spotify playlists. I haven’t got a solid answer for this one. My current bet is that I will use tags to define 100 essentials. Works that I consider to be the sounds that are important to me, available in lossless formats. The Roon library only has entries that I know, listen to and believe to be a great work. This needs a bit more thinking through, it’s tough.

Metadata is messy data. I wasn’t super diligent with metadata in the days of building an iTunes library. Some stuff got fixed, a lot didn’t. I’m crossing my fingers that what I experienced in the recent audit in Apple Music was a look-up and not permanently changed in the file meta. Roon has done a wonderful job of providing the right data on its lookup. The worry is when I want to use these files outside the platform. Conveniently, this app popped up in my Twitter timeline this week https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ which looks a touch friendlier to use than others

I’m missing amazing albums. They were not in my collection. They were overlooked or never discovered. But, perhaps they should be added. Where does this start and end though? How do I keep a simple system and not just overload by adding “missing” and never really listening? I’ve been wondering about setting focus for a few weeks at a time and going through artists back catalogue, listening, deciding, refining. Album of the Week web posts are likely the best way to capture my research and link back to stuff as I go.

I don’t want to do this again. Never again. I guess my approach to music collecting and listening is very different now. I was, like a lot of us in the iPod era, a greedy little shit that took any MP3s I could get my hands on and stuffed them into the iTunes database and never really did much to keep things clean, updated or managed in anyway. A well thought out library is the way.

Apple Music is buggy and the ux doesn’t work for me. Playback often didn’t work during the audit, I’d have to go backwards and forwards between tracks to try and get it to kick in. It could be me, but I never seemed to hit target spots for transport controls that easily, the basics of pressing play was tough. Scrubbing the same.

Supporting artists is important. Buy more music. Stream to discover.

The High-end Audio Quest

This is my first go at writing this down so I’m likely to revise this plan over time.

Set-up Roon Server to run on home network, KEF LSX and Bluesound Node
Transfer out of Spotify and into TIDAL
Organise Roon and TIDAL so hearted songs don’t end up in {My Library} – I want to make active decisions to add an EP or album to the library, I want to remove the behaviour of having a track only collection that Spotify promoted and I guess iTunes started
Audit old local files and add the good music to Roon ? (I am here)
Audit old Spotify playlists and add albums and EPs to Roon that are missing
Double audit local files and buy or link high end audio formats (MP3 → FLAC)
Triple audit local files and evaluate where the discography gaps are with the music styles I love
Define a tagging system for stuff I care about – e.g. I want to see a list of DJ Mixes
Fix metadata tags on local files so they can be used easily outside Roon
Create 90 minute fixed duration mixtapes (now called playlists) that are fit for themes, invest more time and effort than the endless mess of Spotify playlists I ended up with
Figure out how I get music on my phone for offline listening
Figure out budget and plan to buy more music from Bandcamp
Consider downloading vulnerable online only DJ Mixes
What do I do with audio/music that is not a fit for the Roon library but I still want to hold onto
Buy a DJ controller and start using rekordbox, audit mixable tracks that were salvaged from the ~90GB
Create a “one USB key” approach to DJing that enables me to be mobile if I want to DJ out of home
Carefully consider if and when any audio hardware additions or upgrades are worth it

I did say a few paragraphs ago that I wanted to “reduce my digital clutter”. This list can appear to be an increase of clutter rather than reduction. I coud just ignore the hard drive under a bed or just use Spotify. For me, clutter in this context is music you’re mindlessly adding to a library, not listening to or haven’t listened to. I’m highly interested in music and along the way tools, services and technology devalued it by increasing its capacity, discovery bandwidth and encouraging likes and loves rather than purchase investments. Finally, digital clutter is everywhere and having purpose and plan for each area of your digital data is the most important thing, otherwise we all end up mindlessly storing more and more stuff with very little need for it and zero joy.

Next up, auditing the Spotify playlists whilst picking albums of the week to go deeper into the library and define the essentials.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 5th June 2022

May Training

If you’re reading this and you’re not me, it probably won’t be that thrilling. There are plenty of other content nuggets more compelling and scientific to consume on exercise and health. This is the second web post that logs what is on my mind so I can refer back to it later. Read April 2022 training post here. The aim is these monthly posts will be valuable to rewire habits and thinking with my training.

Goal: Reduce body fat and build a reliable base fitness for running Hackney Half marathon in 60 days. Start date 1st April, race date 22nd May.

Results: Cold virus contracted on 2nd May, too sick to run.

	April 1st	April 29th	May 31st	Month Change	Total Change
Weight (kg)	73.1	69.8	68.6	-1.2	-4.5
Fat (%)	25	22.6	22	-0.6	-3
Muscle (%)	71.2	73.4	74.1	0.7	-2.9
Fat Mass (kg)	18.3	15.8	15.1	-0.7	3.2

It has been 29 gruelling days of living with a cold virus. I managed all of two runs and seven weights session. Cancelled running the half marathon and I’m gutted about the outcome.

Context: I started May the leanest, strongest and fastest I’d been in years. On April 30th I ran for an hour at my race pace, felt amazing and logged a 4:39 /km average. My assumption was that I’d train for three more weeks up to the half marathon and focus on three times: 1:35 – 1:40 – 1:50. I bet that I’d finish the month with my weight around 67kg and be closer to <20% body fat. I’d just come from months of ballooning and no running, more detail on this in April’s web log.

What happen?

Caught the cold virus (probably at a night out in Birmingham) on the 30th April, by the 2nd of April I was in bed
Training ground to a halt, I was too sick to concentrate, work, run and sleep
The virus haunted me on and off for three weeks, I always felt like I was around the corner from recovery – I never quite arrived until week four since being in bed. Week four I was back at work and had my spirit and energy back
During week three of the virus my GP was alarmed by the blood coming from my nose and sent me for chest x-rays, bloods and a face to face consultation
My assumption that I had sinusitis turned out to be true, a huge relief after an evening in hospital
Seven weights training session in total over month, I think the goal would have been 14
Two runs, one while sick which was a terrible idea, one yesterday now I’m better
Skipped two meals on a few days, eating only dinner
Indulged on food more times than I can remember, puddings, large portions, take-outs, carb heavy options

What a shitty month. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples in my life of a well made plan not going to plan. Perhaps running races are just cursed. Before I delve further into the dark of the last month, I’m going to look at a few positives that and the bigger picture. I reached 67.2kg | 21% body fat | 14.1kg fat mass on May 26th – this is with diet being all over the place, no running and a few weight sessions. That is just under 6kg total loss, 4% body fat loss and 4.2kg of fat mass loss in 60 days. Those are some great stats and they can get better. On top of that, my weights session yesterday (Mon 30th May) saw me push arnold press and tricep extension up to 14kg, squat, goblet squat and floor press all to 20kg. I learnt that the dog can jog! Over the last year I’ve tried running with her and it’s been a nightmare, she steps into a sprint and pulls your arm out of its socket whilst tripping you up with the lead when she changes direction. However, if you jog and never let her get past a fast trot – she can actually jog. I’ve done about three of these so far, ideally I want to get as many in as possible in June. My belly isn’t so fat that my Nike Germany t-shirt clings to it, only noticed this month. Skipping two meals wasn’t that hard. I want to test this out now I’m feeling heaps better, it could have been the ride of paracetamol, endless tea and living on a sofa that made it so easy. However tricky it might be, I’ve been learning about the benefits so I’m all for as many additional skipped meals as I can squeeze in whilst still feeling strong and capable. Which leads nicely into learning about electrolytes. In the past, when I’ve skipped meals I haven’t had any supplements. In June I’m going to see how I feel when topping up on electrolytes.

Right, onto some analysis – I haven’t seen huge wins this month, it is a slow and steady improvement. Which is okay, but we’re approaching familiar plateau. Potentially a dangerously complacent one when combined with no running. The total wins of dropping a bunch of fat of 60 days can easily become the only thing I concentrate on. Whilst at the same time my fat loss is slowing, my eating plan is closer to random guess work and a few bad habits of sweet treats are creeping back in. If we add all these together the forecast could easily trend back to fat gain. The numbers right now look like this:

Note: I mentioned the best day of the month, this wasn’t a weigh in day so it sat between logged spreadsheet days.

May is now behind me. Thinking about the 30 days of June, what do I want to get out of it? I really want to break into the sub 20% body fat. Now, this is a strange concept as fat percentage is calculated from total weight and a dexa scan is the only real way to determine fat composition. So the goal is more about seeing the fat loss in the mirror and feeling less fat. I’m using my scales a bit like I use Google Maps when I have a working knowledge of how to get somewhere, it’s a calibrator to keep you in check. Also, as I can still pinch a fair old grab of belly fat with my finger and thumb – theres no real concern on the metric accuracy when the evidence is a fist of fat.

Next up, running. Running and spinning. From watching a few training videos I really like the idea of mixing up my heart rate zone 2 training with spinning so I get the benefits of effort exertion but I’m not overworking muscles in the same way day on day. This should reduce the risk of injury and increase the volume of training. Dog jogs, park jogs, in and then out routes, fast laps in Victoria Park and laps with Chris are all on the cards. I might not hit the final target this month, but there is a plan to do a half marathon distance with Hollie on the bike next to me when I feel as physically fit as I did on April 30th.

I’m going to continue with the Q2 weight lifting routine, ideally pushing a few sessions to fatigue, overload and reduce the rest time. These will be done on days where I’m well slept and up for the intensity. It would be a nice to have to get some big lifts in at the gym, highly likely to only do these if and when.

Food is easy to get complacent about, theres been a lot of eating out, over eating, eating sugar and carby meals and larger portion sizes this month. June is about recalibrating these. I’m tempted to set some rules on the consumption, but, I know they tend to be hard to follow to the letter. I will let the scales guide me and aim for a mix of skipped meals and veg/protein only after spikes. I do need to get better at picking healthier options when I eat out. I’m still in the stage of seeing weight loss even when not running, however, my bet is this will plateau soon if what I’m eating still follows three a day and spikes. It is a tough one as I don’t sustain a strict plan for long.

Plan for next month

65kg | 19% body fat | 12kg fat mass – these are tough targets, but that’s the point, right?
Running training back to 1hr at 4:39 /km average or better
Run with Chris, dog and in-and-out routes
15 chin-ups in a row
Four mega weights session (low rest, higher volume)
Skip breakfast unless a weekend, skip three lunches on weekdays (around 40% meal skipping from three meals a day)
50% of meals out are healthier options and/or not a full portion eaten

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 31st May 2022

Album of the Week: The Dead Bears - Newworldaquarium

I’ve been digging through my old hard drives for a while now, a few months back I started sorting the music folders. The aim is get rid of all the crap and discover some gold along the way. My memory is patchy, but I think I bought this album when I was living in Manchester and Chris was working at Boomkat. The more I try and access that memory the more clearly I can picture him telling me I needed to buy it.

It was an instant heart warmer, still is today.

Quick notes: Pleasing distortion. Dub techno signature sounds. House kicks. Phasic shuffle style. Haunting keys and melodic sample sprinkles. Some tracks feel like an intermission or passing soundtrack through moments. The build on every track is wonderfully subtle. Kicks are blaring at the front. Delightful panning across the sequencing – I’d savour this on headphones for sure. There is a strong diversity in mood across the album, feels like a journey.

Tracks to concentrate on:

Avon Sparkle is a stand out track
The Tide You Can’t Feel is dreamy
Trespassers is a driving 4/4 banger

Looks like there was a reissue and an adapted red overlay added to the artwork for that. I’m a massive fan of the white original above.

The Dead Bears by newworldaquarium

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 7th May 2022

Music

April Training

If you’re reading this and you’re not me, it probably won’t be that thrilling. There are plenty of other content nuggets more compelling and scientific to consume on exercise and health. I’m writing this down to clear it out my mind and refer back to later. These two things feel most important to me right now, clear a busy mind, keep myself on the horse. Hopefully, these monthly posts will be valuable to rewire habits and thinking if and when I’m not training like I have in the last month.

Goal: Reduce body fat and build a reliable base fitness for running Hackney Half marathon in 60 days. Start date 1st April, race date 22nd May.

Results: A solid start out the gate.

	April 1st	April 29th	Change
Weight (kg)	73.1	69.8	-3.3
Fat (%)	25	22.6	-2.4
Muscle (%)	71.2	73.4	2.2
Fat Mass (kg)	18.3	15.8	-2.5

All round, I’m feeling stronger and faster. The training of 2-3 weights and 3-4 runs a week is a better mix than just the weights.

Context: I’ve got the Hackney Half coming up in a few weeks. It will be my fourth half marathon and I’ve gone into the last three with no training plan. The first quarter of this year was pretty focused. I chose to do an enjoyable weights routine, trained every Monday, Wednesday and Friday – covid and travel permitting. I started karate training for the first time as an adult and was at practice nearly every Monday and Thursday. The focus and discipline from that quarter feels banked, just like a savings account with a wedge of money in. It feels like it has potential.

However, I’d noticed my weight creeping up. When I caught a side view of my gut in the mirror it was depressingly large. Hollie and I had chatted about going to the beach in Mexico in March. It filled me with dread knowing that my pregnant milky belly would be joining us. That idea got scrapped.

So, I had a huge slice of motivation to feed the change. Perhaps destroying a few less huge slices of pizza might also help. Last year I reached around 68.6kg and 21.9% body fat when I focused on my food and training. I didn’t look amazing. But I looked and felt heaps better than I did going into April.

What has happened?

Skipping breakfast, dropping oat milk before 1pm
Added more protein back in to meals, cooking quick pan veg, brown rice, chicken
Watching booze, aiming for 1-2 drinks max on casual nights
Weight training is now full body routine, reps till failure on a few exercises
Started 50 min jogs 2-3 times a week, staying in heart rate zone 2
Started incremental fast runs 2 times a week, going off how my legs feel and sustainable pace for the time allocated (20, 30, 40 mins)
Focusing on form when running: mid foot strike, feet under knees, upper body leaning forward, quick steps
Weigh in every Tuesday and Friday, keep it on track but avoid the spiral of weekend fluctuations

Skipping breakfast most days makes sense. I find it easy and the benefits to insulin spikes are a massive win. I’m trying out removing coffee to improve my diverticular reactions. The experiment is to see if coffee alone (not caffeine) impacts my ability to form a 3-4 score Bristol stool scale poop. Oat milk has been dropped from tea before lunch. I don’t mind black tea but would like to find other teas to mix it up.

A few weeks before the race and I’m not overthinking the food. I know chicken, veg and rice is very easy and quick to make. Hopefully the macronutrients are near enough. Once the race is done I might look at measuring macronutrients again, although there is more of a temptation to try skipping a day of food or two meals here and there instead.

Booze hasn’t seemed to have a massive impact on weight loss, however, a big however, it is messing up my sleep more than ever before. Lack of good sleep will only damage muscle recovery and kill opportunities for my body to shift weight. Three drinks (two beers and wine) was too much one night in April to get good sleep. FFS. Ideally I need a two drink limit on casual nights.

Weight training shifted from upper body only in Q1 to all body in Q2. I’ve been working my core a lot more and getting lunges and squats back in. Q1 routine was all about getting back on the horse, making it easy and doing exercises I enjoy. I didn’t push hard or challenge myself. The Q2 routine is about variation of muscle groups, core work, pushing a bit harder. I haven’t always met the three workouts a week goal I set, but, with adding running into the week I have needed rest days here and there. Morning workouts are best, any later in the day and my brain struggles to find deep concentration again. I’ve pushed the second round up to failure with reps or increase of weight.

While I was in Mexico I started researching and planning my running training. YouTube suggested Peter Attia’s podcast with Iñigo San-Millán on heart rate zone two training. A few aspects got my attention: lower resting heart rate, decrease in blood pressure, improving resilience and ability to deal with increasing load, improve zone four-five function and performance. I learnt for the first time about mitochondria and how zone two training improves the efficiency. I suck at keeping pace on the road, I need something to make it easier to just stay on the slow pace of heart rate zone two. A few months back Dan had showed me around his gym in Homerton. I bit the bullet and got a membership just to use a treadmill for jogging at zone two for 50 minute blocks.

My resting heart rate seems to have lowered from the mid sixties to mid fifties in the space of a month.

Faster running didn’t go exactly to plan. The plan has way too much volume. I dialled back the frequency to allow for recovery after listening to my legs. Nina and I had chatted about her shin splints, and remembering my history of injuries I just went off feel of legs alone. However, the results have been pretty good. Last training day of the month I held a 4:39 /km average for 60 minutes. Listening to the legs has been key and trying to get that heart rate sustainable on feel. I’ve not gone mad on the stats yet, guess I can tuck into those later when I’ve got my of a rhythm built up.

Form feels okay, I’m conscious that changing form before a race is a recipe for injury so I’m not forcing form when I run, just being mindful of easy stuff I can do to help my body: relaxed upper half, arms high and on beat, slight upper body lean, toes landing under knees.

Nothing exciting to say about weighing, expect it is essential to staying on the horse. I’ve been doing a couple of extra weighs here and there but only the Tuesday and Friday weigh ins get logged into the spreadsheet tracker. Think of it like checking your bank balance, you can wing it and guess that you’re doing okay or you can check it every few days and keep spending in check.

Plan for the next month

Drop at least 2 kg in weight
Sub 20% body fat, start focusing on shifting the teens
Reduce the impact on my body with a taper two weeks before the race, this means weight training will go down so I could see muscle staying at the same metrics I’m at now. This isn’t such a bother
Sleep as much possible, removing booze where possible or reducing it down to just one drink
Knee strengthening exercises every couple of days
Pull ups and chin ups
Film my running
Skip two meals in a day where possible

Links

Is Oatly Oat Milk Healthy? – Not with quite a bit of sugar it would seem
Zone 2 Training: Dose, Frequency, and Duration | Iñigo San-Millán, Ph.D. & Peter Attia, M.D. – have a watch of the other clips on this episode too

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 3rd May 2022

Roland TR-909

In 2018 I put together a PechaKucha talk at NET-A-PORTER. I wanted to share my interest for music with the team and a journey down YouTube had led me to some pretty interesting stuff about this drum machine.

For a while I’d wanted to make a video version of the talk, below is a very rough first edit of that I’ve put together.

My editing skills need to come a long way to meet what I imagine this could be in my mind. I guess part of the creative process is learning to let go of the imagined quality level and putting your idea out, standing back and taking a breath.

Checklist for future edits

Add intro and ending, explain what a PechaKucha is
Link in all references and further reading
Create my own sound bed for voice over sections
Try swapping sound bed for music samples at lower volumes
Edit script to fit a regular pace for each slide
Move project from Screenflow to Adobe Premiere
Improve visual transitions and timeline
Research how to use samples in work for full referencing

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 27th August 2021

Did IKEA just kill UK Grime?

Do you remember when your parents started using slang words that were only used by your mates? It was awkward, right? You stopped using them.

Brands can have an equally awkward habit of the same weird flex, but ok.

18 years ago, the BRIT awards crowned UK Garage group So Solid Crew with the best video award for 21 Seconds. It is seen by some that this was a turning point for the cultural perception of the brand of UK Garage. It became commercial and destroyed its founding principles.

It’s 2019 and the IKEA Christmas Grime ad is here…

If you squint you can see the approach of this campaign. But something here is very awkward and we’re closing in on two brands—UK Grime and IKEA— destroying their own principles.

Ad Agency Pitch: It’s a funny ad with a dis grime battle rap from cuddly toys aimed at a family getting their home together for Christmas.
The Awkward: The word shame. This is a powerful word. A deep critique on your worth and representation to others. Multiply this by the toughest time of the year for some families. Mental wellbeing?
Subtext: Families are in continued tough times globally and they are more aware of the divide in wealth than ever before, it’s now our everyday spiral of political mess. Even the size of their house is up for grabs here
Distraction: We have all been sold to using the “show your best self” and everyone likes funny grime songs, right? Stormzy played Glasto this year guys! Come on. Also, it’s just a rapping T-Rex.
IKEA’s Problem: their vision is — “To create a better everyday life for the many people” — this campaign message isn’t for the many, it’s actually for the very few. Those with enough capital to do home upgrades while paying for presents, food, booze and more.
Grimes Problem: you just rapped about buying an IKEA folding table. Awkward. Who’s brand is next on your list? Pepsi?
Perhaps it would have been less awkward to have an ad that focused on families upgrading their everyday lives not just a short lived shameful view on being judged at Christmas.
My pitch: Don’t buy yourself some AirPods you melt, buy your family something they can use all year round designed for a compact living space.
It’s 2019, I doubt anyone will think Grime has peaked by rapping for IKEA, everything is a remix, re-memed and upside down. I just don’t think it’s that cool to rap about folding tables — a bit like being on the BRIT awards.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 8th November 2019

An idea for augmented reality

The pitch: reporting damage to hire car clubs is slow and done over the phone when you need to get moving. You don’t want slow—that’s why you hired a car. Instead of phoning, use AR to overlay the known and already reported damage. If it is new damage, report it in the app before you start the journey. If it is existing — no need to wait on the to phone customer services and check it, off you go.

DriveNow is great, I’m a fan. Their customer service is super responsive and detailed too. However, when you’re renting a car you do need to check if it has damage — which in their London fleet seems to be quite common. If you force customers down this route in the app, checking damage becomes part of the rental journey process, it could be super quick and gives DriveNow more data. Saves the phone call too.

▲ I comped this dodgy screen together in a few minutes. Beep beep. ??

Update: The wonderful Annalisa Cividati — shared this company with me: https://www.ravin.ai

“Using most camera types, under most physical conditions, we detect more damages, reduce inspection costs and restore trust anywhere vehicles change hands”

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 23rd July 2019

You’re only as strong as your weakest brand

From eight years working in agencies I ended up thinking a lot about the struggle of managing an agencies brand idea of what they stand for whilst balancing the ideas of the clients brands, their projects and the people within the clients company themselves. You can all end up confused if you’re not strict with your approach and principles.

If you’ve worked at an agency or ever had the utter joy of being pitched to by one you will know the logo slide in the agency presentation. The beautifully grided selection of glossy logos. It’s often on the website too. I’ve been sat in many rooms where it gets interrogated for all sorts of reasons:

How much is that company really using your services?
Did you have a positive impact on that company?
Are they still going?
Who are they, I’ve never heard of them?
Do you know Bob Smith at that company?
Did you hear the gossip about them?

This logo slide can be tricky, you really start to expose your cohort, their brand quickly creep into yours. For all the right and wrong reasons. Your clients belief in you can be completely manufactured from this logo selection.

▲ I keep running over the selection of companies on the Slack NYSE listing poster. They have an estimated 10m+ clients to choose from. I don’t have much of an opinion on what they chose, but I can imagine it was a messy job to pick the companies. You want the logos to resonate with the finance world, you want to show you’re global, you can work with the new starters and the old incumbents.

Slack have a tough job on their hands. Their brand has transformed for this IPO and I believe it has a long way to go for Analysts to really understand the company and product. They will likely take a kicking with reports on competitors user numbers, however, if they can ground their brand next to right cohort of brands — companies really changing what work is and how it is done, that could just be perfect. I really hope so, I bought stock.

1872. Shisedio — Japan, skin, beauty and cosmetics
1928. Cole Haan — Chicago, footwear and accessories
1977. Oracle — Californian B2B computer databases and software
1982. E*Trade — Californian, Financial services, trading platforms
1982. Electronic Arts — Californian, Video Games
2000. IAG — Australian, Insurance
2005. Etsy — USA, Marketplace for handmade and vintage items
2007. Hulu — Californian, JV between Disney & Comcast, SVOD
2007. Farfetch — UK, London, E-commerce luxury clothes

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 22nd July 2019

What company mission do your customers actually remember?

Deliveroo has changed. Businesses do change. The thing is, I remember the mission of the 2015 Deliveroo. I can order from amazing places that don’t actually do delivery and eat at my own kitchen table. “We are on a mission to bring the world’s best local restaurants to everyone’s home or office.” — Deliveroo 2015. View the early pitch deck here

Four years later I open the app when working from home, cupboards are empty and I get this beautiful selection shown below.

How much has the idea changed?
Why did the idea change?
Is this idea as good?

Let’s face it. It’s not is it? “Crap food at any time for a premium rate delivered by drivers making a tricky salary.” Why did this change? Scale, growth and greed. Perhaps, and hold onto your hat here, the idea was never meant to be as big as they are trying to make it.

There’s loads of add on ideas to try and keep companies like Deliveroo growing, all in the name of the future bet of big profits from tiny margins and questionable outsourced labour. Be it:

White-label kitchens (Dark kitchens)
Kitchen hardware as a service (Cloud Kitchens) — hey Travis 😉
EPOS and stock control lock-in (SaaS)
Data driven menus (Foursquare)

What company mission do your customers actually remember?

? Designers tell you Apple isn’t in it for the creative professional anymore.
✈️ Travellers tell you British Airways isn’t a top-end experience anymore.
? Soho House members will tell you it’s too much like WeWork now.

The problem is, these statements are somewhat false. One of the brand ideas of Apple is to be creative, the joy of making something easily. British Airways offer some of the best customer service whilst competing in an aggressive price war sector. Soho House value members having memorable and unique experiences in their houses.

? I will tell you that Deliveroo isn’t the place for the world’s best restaurants.
But I’m wrong, you can still order from some of London’s best affordable restaurants. You can also order from some of the worst.

Protecting your brand idea and mission takes care, time and saying no. Saying no a lot. I wonder where the brand idea of Deliveroo will be in the next four years, is this just part of the growth struggle? This is true of Airbnb too.

What can brands do to protect their idea, their mission, their place in our mind?

Define your Brand Architecture. Deliveroo could make fast food a sub-brand, a category choice off the homescreen. The effort of making a portfolio of rules for your brand and products gives you a huge return in equity and clarity.
Set brand rules based on the idea, Art Directors — this is your design jurisdiction and you get to put your team and suppliers in time-out or jail for breaking these rules
Plan the journey for the brand. Yes, it will change. Look at the greats who have done this over time, Apple is often overused but damn, they are strategy hero’s of positioning, quality and delivery into music, phones, media, health, finance, education… what’s next?
Keep your business plan in check with your idea. My bet is growth greed has caused Deliveroo to compromise. Keep your brand, keep your customers, keep your idea.
Help suppliers, they are your weak point. Airbnb are cited for helping hosts photograph their homes and add finishing touches, again, set your standards to the experience and enforce it.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 19th July 2019

The balance of your business operational models, brand and customer experience

Short story: I got fined by Uber JUMP because I parked a bicycle outside their operational zone. A few days later I got refunded and emailed the above automatically. This business rule was quite well managed, it created a feeling of trust in JUMP that I haven’t always felt with Uber Taxis & Uber Eats.

It got me wondering, what triggers, nudges and logic for your business can be optimised for a reliable operational model and great customer experience whilst strengthening your brand?

Are you looking at the big picture of customer journeys with a Service Designer, Brand Strategist and an Accountant?

?Valuable Reading:
This is Service Design Doing
This is Service Design Thinking

Long story: Uber are here in London with their bicycle rental service; JUMP, it’s exactly the same as the others, except, the hybrid bikes are better. Although, I’m still a fan of City owned schemes for economic and sustainability reasons.

On my first ride I didn’t look up JUMP’s operational zones. With hindsight it’s an obvious thing to check, especially for rental and sharing services.

I pelted it across London from Hackney to Waterloo station, had 5 mins to spare until meeting someone, locked the bike up, opened the app and then… £10 parking fee (shown above, left). I’ve taken the bike out of its agreed area and this idiot just got fined 229.36% the cost of the journey.

A few days and rides later I got the email above (middle and right), refunding me and explaining a bit more about their service terms. I’m guessing a few pieces of programmed logic are happening here. It’s a designed service journey that is carefully balancing operational costs, lifetime customer value (LCV) and the brand experience.

The blind spot is booking a bike away from an exclusion zone shows you a regular map. Book it near the edges of the zones and you see greyed out regions. You’ll quickly get where you can and can’t finish your ride. I didn’t get that where I started my ride.

Logistics and sharing app experiences are deliberately paired back, they have minimal controls, snippets of information and rarely can you access all your data. Product Designers want simplicity and therefore hopefully more bookings.

Let’s go. Let’s book. ? ? ? ?

There isn’t even a cancel button for reserving a JUMP bike. So you get £1 fall out your wallet if you change your mind, which you can get back by emailing them.

As an industry, we Designers are removing or masking more in the name of simplicity and usability, but we’re not always in it for the customer, especially when the revenue model is precarious (ride sharing, food delivery, etc). This will be at the cost of the brand. Experience = brand.

Still, I believe JUMP made a fair call on the charge here, definitely not the lack of cancel button. It appears to be the careful balance of business sense and customer experience.

One of the big tasks we’re undertaking at NET-A-PORTER & MR PORTER is to fully map out all service journeys. We want to understand them not only from an interface perspective but from a deeper business analysis — we need that careful balance to our customer service, returns policy, logistics promises, stock control… and so on. I know the challenge will always be make sure every function here feels remunerated whilst the customer feels great too.

To wrap up, a few examples I’ve seen or been thinking about

Strava ask if you want to join a local running club a few days after a run logged — it leads customers to see the value in a paid account.
BOLD hotels surprise you with free drinks at check-in if you say yes to your room not having sheets cleaned every night
?DriveNow should add an AR feature to check car damage before you drive (I’ve been stung a few times by forgetting to check, they could make it fun and easy and logged)

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 18th July 2019

Decision nuggets

▼ This got me thinking. Damn I want some chicken nuggets. Would I ever go to Burger King for them though? Wait. But why? I haven’t even tried BK’s nuggets.

You’ve got to love a strategy that can have a place in our mind the second before we commit to a competitor. They are your doubt. They are your wake up call. At this point, they own questioning a decision, if only for a second.

BK are notable for a variety of interesting marketing ideas, stunts and executions, I wouldn’t say this is one of them.

Although, there’s something wonderfully childish about this. It’s cheeky and we all know BK’s brand is too. Often you hear marketeers talk about “brand positioning” – a place in a consumers mind. They have nailed it here just by the physical positioning and opportunity, with added bonus of not having to worry about any smart ass copywriting.

Questions I’m thinking about

Where is your companies brand positioned literally and strategically?
Will you get this close to influencing your customer during a decision?
How can you deliver brand voice without needing copy?
What are BK’s chicken nuggets actually like?

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 17th July 2019

Make it more uncomfortable

Recently, I’ve been thinking about when is the best time to get someones attention. How could your message be interpreted and received by editing simple variables?

I walk past this campaign / idea / initiative(?) every day

It’s very pretty. Well done Design team. Pretty stuff is the big idea of the Westfield mall. However, I can’t help feeling there are two huge opportunities missed here, and perhaps a vacant mall unit is not the place for this…

Why are there no actual signs of homelessness here — just this sign?
Why isn’t this positioned where dwell time meets audiences consideration — paying for your parking, walking out of the mall, next to the actual pavement?

I’m going to take a bet why.

Because it’s too uncomfortable for these brands to have these reminders next to your shopping session, the brief was about being pretty next to the other pretty retailers +use RFID please.

How effective is this thing if it’s not actually stopping people?

The space should be used to rotate a real story, a real person and real objects, that you have to really deal with as you pass through.

Make it more uncomfortable.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 16th July 2019

A film is written three times…

This film essay video below is brilliant. If you haven’t got 18mins to watch it, all you need to know is — making things is hard, you have your own perception on what you’ve made and what it’s communicating. Then comes along someone else and they see it differently. And again, and so on. You need these people.

Star Wars was a mess in its first screening and idea. It took a lot of effort and humility to address the less than perfect to make it somewhere—some might say—close to perfect.

How often do you let someone edit your work?
How happy are you to admit it isn’t ready?
Are you building this process and mindset into your work or are you being caught out by others peoples last minute feedback?

I keep thinking about workflow and processes that allow you to get an idea down but keep it moving around. Onto Milton Glaser. In this interview he says:

“I move things around till they look right”

There’s something in this comfortableness of changing things. I like this idea.I keep editing these posts I’ve been publishing. I’m aiming to get ideas down that are in my head. I know the words are not great, they are just ok. Giving myself that space to edit and learn feels right though.

For my work output and ideas I keep coming to:

Write it like you’re saying it to your friend
Then re-write it for my Director to read
Now re-write it for our customer to hear

Finally, this jogged another useful process — Upworthy had a guide to content that went around a lot in 2012, the bit I often cite is the “write 25 headlines”

The idea is that you keep going with that edit, keep refining to get the rubbish and the half good out the way.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 15th July 2019

Design challenges: Why ‘how’s it going?’ is the worst question to ask

When you have a design or business problem to solve, what steps do you take?

Do you get your head down and sketch out ideas?
Do you turn to the internet for inspiration?
Do you talk to anyone who will listen?

Before you do anything, firstly, see if you’re thinking about the entire ‘thing’.

A buddy taught me a problem solving model he uses daily:
[Problems, Plan, Progress], shorthand — PPP. He’s a doctor working in A&E. Emergency wards are fast paced, critical and stressful environments. The conversations he has with patients and his colleagues must be responsive, structured and analytical.

By contrast, problem solving a design solution allows open, ambient and sometimes irrelevant communication. Shooting the shit. Which is fine, if we’re getting closer to the answer and we’re remembering to question the problem. It’s doubtful anyone’s life is on the line in a design review*.

The PPP model might feel specific to doctors, but it’s transferable and helps force you into holistic thinking.

Broken down:

What do you think is the problem? Why are you right?
Using your experience and expertise, what is your plan for solving this and what have you done so far?
Are you right? Is the problem solved or are we seeing an improvement?

Why is the model robust?

It forces you to describe the full picture in 3 sentences, not just focusing on your amazing (proposed) plan
It communicates time and status
It opens discussion for improvement
It is transferrable to colleagues, no lone rangers here
It is not subjective

Too often when we focus on problem solving we have a bias to the activity of just ‘doing’. PPP forces you to continuously monitor not only your evaluation of the problem but the efficiency of your answer.

Asking ‘how’s it going?’ often won’t tell you much about what’s actually going on.

*Some designers will tell you they have been close

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 13th January 2017

Apple tvOS right now

The launch of Apple tvOS has created a new opportunity for media and service companies, this time on the (Apple) big screen. Right now there are few apps offering the rich experience of mobile and tablet.

Here are the reduced key takeaways for those venturing into the new promised land:

1st generation apps are always too safe. Stand-out experiences stay on home screens
The processor sets a new standard for the possibilities of motion design
Popular tvOS games will set the path for new interaction patterns
Media partners are working with Apple on the full-fat Siri API to expose endpoints anywhere
Twitter owned auth service Digits works with tvOS to login users using a simple PIN
Use tvOS to ‘stress test’ features before distributing across products

More detail below…

1st generation apps are always too safe. Stand-out experiences stay on home screens.

In 2008 Apple launched the App Store. Developers had worked too closely to the HIG and for the first year the majority of apps were built on the design and interaction patterns defined in this document.

The apps that got attention and became ‘home screen’ apps were those that started to challenge these rules and create a unique experience.

Today we can see exactly the same with tvOS. App creators have a huge opportunity to launch a ‘stand-out’ experience that generates interest and creates loyalty.

The processor sets a new standard for the possibilities of motion design.

Apple have two strong differentiators with their hardware over competitors streaming boxes or traditional TV units. The remote and the processor. The speed and agility of applying visual transitions and effects is outstanding. Live blur and parallax were fundamental to the design framework of iOS7 and they too have found their way into tvOS.

It won’t stop with live blur. Harnessing the processor capabilities will allow app creators to create a rich experience and pave the way for motion language and rules that legacy set top boxes never fully achieve.

Popular tvOS games will set the path for new interaction patterns.

The gyroscope built into the new remote makes the device great for fun gaming. It is doubtful we will see serious video gaming publishers porting their titles as the fidelity of controls needed are not there. Much like the Nintendo Wii the successful titles in the app store are those providing fun, playful interactions and very family friendly.

Some of the multitouch patterns and interaction design in these games will find their way into other apps as over time. Keep playing with the apps (although you might quickly rack up a nice little bill)

Media partners are working with Apple on the full-fat Siri API to expose endpoints anywhere.

Currently Apple have not opened the Siri tvOS API to all developers. They are working with exclusive partners behind the scenes to integrate apps and end points so users can use ‘Hey Siri…’ to expose content across the entire unit.

If you’re part of big media or service company you should be concentrating on search outside of your app.

Twitter owned auth service Digits works with tvOS to login users using a simple PIN.

Signing in and setting up apps is boring. It becomes infuriating on the Apple TV with just a remote and a huge set of input fields to complete. Fortunately the groundwork to improving this experience has been done. Digits is a service from Twitter that completes authorisation using your phone. A six digit code is displayed on the TV that you type in on your phone.

Where possible we want to remove or reduce the need for complex character input. Authorisation, account settings, experience preferences and handover can all be managed by a phone or tablet. The first time use must feel simple, frictionless and journey as quickly as possible to the content.

Using a partner app on native can also achieve auth — but the development overheads are increased.

Use tvOS to ‘stress test’ features before distributing across products.

This is the same strategy as Spotify, have an idea, launch quick, test, iterate. Smart TVs, traditional TV boxes and streaming boxes are all running at a slower release cycle.

Use tvOS to build fast, with the best hardware and gain automatic updates and detailed analytics.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 24th February 2016

Emoji Treasure Hunt

You can have this idea.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I have no opportunity to apply it to any live projects.
Introducing… The Emoji Treasure Hunt ????????. If you’re working at or with a company talking to a younger audience and you have mobile figured out – this will/could work.

Start a flash sales campaign. ????
Put some insanely good discounts out on retail/services items. Retail works better – think ASOS. ????????????????????
Now setup search ???? so that unique combinations of emojis ⛱???? surfaces theses SKUs.
Make it limited to 10s or 100s of items for each SKU to spike interest. ????????

The best bit is the opportunity for combining emojis to surface the related products. This can be made really fun ????????????. Null results should be dealt with small clues????, get users searching again and again, guide them to the prize ????, let them solve the pattern.

The aim – create a result of awareness ????, create a reward incentive ????, increase time on site ????, increase eyes on product catalogue ???? and some offers so good it’s hard to put your phone down ????.

The phone is crucial. Right now emojis are hard on desktop keyboards (or could be considered niche).

Here’s two examples:

???????? = Alexa Bodysuit
????❄️ = North Face Jacket

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 21st February 2016

What’s your dining experience?

It is very difficult to be fully aware of the day to day experience your company provides its clients, suppliers and employees.

Abstract your business. Think of the last meal that you ate out with friends. Think of the full dining experience from pavement to pin number.

What table were you sat at? Did the menu ‘concept’ need explaining? Was the specials board in another room? What price was the house wine and did they take your order before you looked at the mains?

Eating at restaurants exposes an extensive list of interesting service, product and experience elements. The value here is asking ourselves where these map to in our own business and acknowledging our room for improvement.

Do you have a reservation?
Translation: We greet you with barriers and protocol first

Do you know how the menu works?
Translation: We’re complicated, it’s about us

Normally we suggest that you order x and then y with z
Translation: We up-sell before sale

We have one last table left, sorry its not our best
Translation: We’re fine with poor experience for one more sale

Let me recite the eight special dishes for you to memorise
Translation: We’re good at knowing what we do, hope you can keep up

We clear the empties as quick as we can
Translation: We’re busy, you better hurry up

Our cutlery is our cutlery
Translation: We don’t eat our own food with our own knives

Our house wine starts at £25, next bottle up is £32
Translation: We love sales not products

Dining out is a very contained experience, it only lasts a few short hours and we’re very critical when parting with our own cold hard cash.

What’s your ‘worst table’ and who’s getting the blunt knives? Service experience and communication are fundamental to the satisfaction of the products we sell.

The list could have gone on.

Although I fear it was in danger of going full Larry David.

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 15th February 2016

Why I’m not going to give £2 a month to help beat cancer

I received a call from Cancer Research a couple of weeks ago. The guy on the phone thanked me for my donation I made this year. I couldn’t remember donating. He reminded me that I ran a half marathon this year and perhaps it had something to do with that. He moves quickly on to his sales script:

“Why did you choose to donate to Cancer Research?”

Interesting question. He’s keen to establish the motive behind my decision. Ok, but don’t forget: I can’t remember that I donated at this point. Understanding motives is crucial in sales and communication. However, I’m going to stick my neck out here and make an assumption. The forecast of 2013 is that 33% of people in the UK will be diagnosed with cancer. So the chances are incredibly high that everyone he asks that question to is going to have either had or have cancer in addition they know someone they love who has or had cancer. With this in mind — there is no need whatsoever to understand motive on this call.

Furthermore, this script has now opened a can of worms (which, could be intentional)

I reply: “ah, right, I remember, there was a list of charities on the signup form and I picked you guys because my mum was diagnosed a few years ago”

…Phone goes cold…

He replies: “well, I’m very sorry if I’m crossing a line, is your mother — “ I break in and stop him: “dude, she’s fine, they caught it super early and she’s nearly out of remission and doing very well”

Imagine the possible range of answers anyone being phoned with this script could have to that question. At 1pm on a weekday. You’re at lunch at work. Not a great start to what’s about to follow.

He offers his best wishes and continues with “let me tell you about what we’re doing…” And then reads a statistical sell to me about impact of work vs funds raised. Then wraps up with — “Just £10 a month can make all the difference to this, are you interested?”

I stop him. I tell him I’m donating to a charity monthly that I chose years ago and that’s my deal. He then counter offers with suggesting a smaller deal, just £2.

Now you’re thinking come on Lawrence, you cold bastard, you’re not worth £24 a year for cancer research? More on that later.

This script follows the same old routine we all hear all the time.

It’s stale, lazy and really weak for their brand.

Here’s how the call should have gone:

“Hi Lawrence, I’m calling you because you ran Hackney half marathon last year. First off, well done and second, thanks for donating your ticket sale to cancer research, it makes a big difference.

Are you going to run Hackney Half again in 2016?

[Now, at this point I could have said yes or no, the script still works]

[Great] or [If you did run again] we’d love it if you chose us again, but what would really kick this out the park is if you considered sponsorship and ran for us and yourself. I’m sending runners a one-time email today, it’s 3 super powerful tips for those getting sponsorship, to help raise as much dosh and save you time and hassle.

How does that sound? Can I send you that email? [reassure them its not a newsletter]

[Let’s follow the close of the offer]

Give it a read, let me know if you have any questions, you can phone me or just reply.

Final thing you need to know, your race entry will be paid for by us and the money you raise makes a massive difference to our work and to so many lives. There’s a link the email about the details of what we want to raise and how it will save lives.

Thanks for your time and just drop me a line with any questions. We would love to have you board.

A few key takeaways for me here are:

They had my name, address, email, age, donation, if I sponsored ran, my finisher time (watch out for the DNFs) — use this data

Give your audience something useful that they can use
This script is old and stinks:
— “Have you got time today?”
— “Can I tell you about this?”
— “Do you care enough to help us make this change?”
— “All you need to do is sign a direct debit?”
— “How about a smaller direct debit?”
— “How about I try again next time?”
— Lazy lazy lazy
Cancer Research outsourced this call to a 3rd party sales team (they had to tell me this) — why are they not thinking about their data and their segmentation before ‘just chucking people on the phones’
Building brand loyalty and success for charity is about reach and effect, this call was about converting a database entry into a direct debit. It’s done nothing for them as brand for me, I have no real connection there
They only wanted £120 a year, thats not much
They could have landed me running for them every year and getting my entire network to consider backing them and me in that race — which I would hope is way more than £120 a year and includes a message
Charities, companies, start-ups—whoever has a CRM—needs to think about why and how that data got there before they start applying what they think converts to the whole set
Don’t follow the “rule book” just because fundraising has been doing this technique for the last 10–15 years — why carry on with the rubbish conversion rate, linear sales pattern and brand damage?
Brands must think about service journey not sales charts

Finally and way, way more importantly:

My mum caught her cancer early. Go get checked, if you’re in the age and risk zone. Just go get checked. Mum, I love you. I can’t promote that enough. I don’t even want to think about what I would be writing now if she hadn’t had the medical professionals and testing programme we have in the UK.
If you work for Cancer Research and you’ve read this, get in touch, this isn’t a bomb at you, it’s more an observation on the status quo of consumer charity sales. It sucks. Lets do something awesome with your data: email [at] lawrencebrown.eu

Written by
Lawrence Brown on 13th November 2015