Productivity

Two Skills, One Notion: The Operations Hub Behind My Morning

I’ve written about two skills in the last couple of weeks. The morning briefing one that reads Gmail, Outlook, Teams and my calendar so I don’t have to. The pre-call brief one that writes a context page for every meeting on my calendar before I sit down. Both posts mentioned Notion, mostly in passing, as the place the calendar lives. A friend asked me last week what that actually looked like. He’d built the pre-call skill from the post, pointed it at a single-table Notion database, and watched it produce briefs that were missing half the context he expected. The skill wasn’t the problem. The Notion underneath it was.

Thursday, May 28, 2026 | 16 minutes Read

The Briefing Skill That Builds Itself Around You

I ended the pre-call brief post with a section called “the setup”: a four-step recipe for building the same thing yourself. A call-prep skill, a scheduled task, a Notion database, a way to get the brief in front of you at join time. Here’s the shape, off you go. That’s the bit people wrote to me about. And the honest answer is that the recipe isn’t enough, because every post I’ve written about this (that one, and the morning briefing one before it) describes my setup. My Gmail. My Outlook for Mac. My Teams. A Notion database fed by a Mac app I built. “Here’s the shape, go build it” really means “copy my skill and rewrite half of it for your stack.” Which is a rubbish answer to give someone.

Thursday, May 28, 2026 | 3 minutes Read

The Pre-Call Brief That Writes Itself

I take a lot of calls. Partner syncs, customer technical reviews, internal architecture chats, the occasional demo. On a bad week it’s eight a day. On a good week it’s also eight a day, just with more interesting topics. Eight calls a day is more than my brain wants to hold. I would join a customer call having genuinely forgotten what we discussed three weeks ago. I would walk into a partner sync and spend the first ten minutes catching up to context I should have had on the way in. Sometimes I’d realise mid-call that I’d committed to send something last time and never had.

Tuesday, May 26, 2026 | 7 minutes Read

The Morning Briefing I Don't Have to Write

Every morning starts the same way. Coffee, desk, the slow dread of opening four different surfaces to figure out what I missed. Gmail for personal. Outlook for work. Teams for whatever the team was arguing about in the Workflows chat at 11pm. And the calendar, because none of that matters if I’m walking into a meeting I forgot about in twenty minutes. Doing that reading manually takes about twenty minutes. Most of it is junk. The handful of things that actually matter are buried somewhere between a “FYI” message and an Apple developer notification I should have read three days ago.

Tuesday, May 26, 2026 | 6 minutes Read

Ten PRs Before Lunch, From My Phone

Two hours, ten merged PRs, no editor. Just a phone, Claude Code, and the prompting habits that turn the model from a coder into a release engineer.

Sunday, April 26, 2026 | 12 minutes Read

Agentic Coding Is the Consultant's Revolution

I’m a principal consultant, not a developer. I still ship software. Here’s what agentic coding looks like when the person driving it cares more about outcomes than about the code.

Sunday, April 19, 2026 | 7 minutes Read

Building Meeting Reminder: An ADHD-Focused Menu Bar App for macOS

The problem I lose track of time. Not in a cute “oh wow, 3pm already” way — in a “the meeting started 4 minutes ago and nobody’s in the room but me and confusion” way. Calendar notifications are too quiet. Slack DMs asking “you joining?” are too late. And the moment I’m deep in a document or a terminal, the rest of the world stops existing. I’d been using In Your Face for a while — a brilliant macOS app that throws a full-screen block in front of you before meetings. It’s excellent. But I wanted to tinker, I wanted something free and open source, and I wanted to layer in a few things specific to how my brain misses meetings.

Friday, April 10, 2026 | 3 minutes Read

Why I Use Netlify Redirects (and Not Hugo's)

One of the most useful things I’ve done for my personal site recently is set up short, memorable URLs that redirect to the tools and platforms I use every day. For example, if you want to book a meeting with me, you can now just visit: /book …which will redirect you to my Calendly page. The Problem with Hugo Redirects At first, I tried to use Hugo’s built-in redirect system. Hugo supports redirects through a combination of page front matter and generated aliases, but I ran into a couple of issues:

Sunday, May 11, 2025 | 2 minutes Read