S10E2 - Home automation & lists of things with Adrian Lansdown

Welcome back to season ten of the Mate Life Work podcast with me side job link. I am an engineering manager by day, parent of two by night and I still try to find time for all those fun side projects along the way. Today I have invited along a good old friend who I've known for many, many years, who goes by the name of Adrian Lands Down. Now. We work together on many things and he's a fellow colleague as well, but he's also got some really interesting ways of organizing his time. How he finds the time to do all the cool stuff he does with home automation around his house. And I really wanted to get into a conversation with him about all those fun things about what we do in a day job and how we organize our times around it. So, without any further ado, this is make Life Work with Adrian Lansdown. How are you Mum?

Hey, thank you for having me on very well today.

Excellent. What is going on in your world today?

Very busy, lots of things, lots of changes at work. So making sure everything is organized under control and planned out.

Planned. This might be the key word today, but I like the way you go with it.

Well, yeah, so big planning as my dyslexic thinker brain my way around that is basically I plan everything to an extreme possibly. I think some people might see it that way. I like to know what's coming up, what I've got coming, what's going, putting all in order is the key piece.

This sounds like a deep dive in a moment what that actually entails.

I know, because then I sound like I'm some sort of expert. I'm like, yeah, this is the idea of it. Does it actually work?

That was my outcome. Really? Does it even work?

Yeah, I think on paper, in that paper based world, you write on a wall, everything works really well. I think you can take a lot of the sort of productivity experts that have got their things. I think probably a lot of the time these things work. If you write them down, you say, that right, we're going to have your highlight of the day. That works. But then you don't do the highlight of the day because something comes up first thing in the morning, then it's middle of the morning and then it's lunchtime and before you know it you've got to the end of the day and then it's like, what was my thing of the day? What was I doing today? Yeah, there's definitely a discipline around it. There's a habit forming piece of trying to get into that. I try to sort of plan out my weeks. Big fan of sort of Cal Newport's planning ways. So he does his quarterly semester, then you go into the month planning and then the week planning, and then from the week planning, you take that into the per day planning I've found that works really well for me.

Okay.

The problem is sometimes Mondays are busy and then you're like, oh, then it's Tuesday and before you know it, it's Wednesday and you haven't really planned out the week and you've lost half the week already.

Yeah.

And that's definitely when I start to feel a little bit lost and out of control and that's where I'm like, right, just reset the week. It's Wednesday, but I'm going to say it's Monday. Tomorrow.

Okay. You rebase loading your week from Wednesday, the new Adrian calendar.

This is now a two day week. Right? What am I going to do in those two days? I tried to do that. Tracking habits, bullet journaling, all sounds wonderful. And I think it is good to be able to look back and see, like, right, this is what I've done this week. There's definitely a big part of me that's like, oh, actually, I've got to Tuesday, Wednesday, and that's totally out of sync. I don't know where I'm going, I don't know what I've done, what do I want to do? So, yeah, I just reset, just start over.

It's two day week, it works for you. That's cool. I feel like we've jumped ahead quite quickly here in our chat.

We haven't planned this out, that's the problem.

Well, typical fashion and how we work. Yeah, we have a little bit but feed my pants. But if you rewind a little bit, do you want to tell us a bit about who you are, what you do and all that sort of stuff, like family arrangements, personal arrangements, all that sort of bit detail that you're willing to share?

Yeah. So I'm an engineering manager at Asos, so we work very closely together, but completely different people, but obviously doing a very similar job. I've been doing that for nearly a year. Previous to that, managing other teams, mainly around it and sort of web development areas. Outside of that, I've got a wife and two kids. Kids are now coming up to the right old age of four and six, which I'm sure I'm meant to tell you, it gets a little bit easier. It does get easier, right? Yeah. That's what you want. The different issues with the older children, it cascades. Right? And you're like, oh, yeah, it'll be easier next year. But it's different issues when you get into school and there's definitely a piece around planning, like nursery, that's like a nine to five thing. And then you start to get into the school term and you're like, oh, when are they going to be here? Who's going to look after them in the summer? That's an interesting piece because you don't really want to do paying for the whole of summer and childcare.

No, but there are options normally.

Yeah. And then outside of that, I don't know, I don't know if I feel like I have a lot of time or very little time as much as I sort of try to get as much in very much into sort of home automation, smart home trying to get those things set up which with kids works pretty well. I mean there's definitely some things that work there that help out but yeah, getting time to do that when it's like 09:00 and just like tired from the week is very slow to get progress there.

Absolutely. So yeah, lots to pick apart there and I guess just a little bit around the job. That is a typical nine to five ish job with a lot of people management, which is an energy drain as well as that sort of thing.

Yeah, for sure. There's definitely an energy usage there that you have to sort of manage a day and plan out of. Like how putting all of the one to ones back to back with no gaps in between sometimes there's definitely days where there are a lot of meetings you just like, oh, I just need a bit of a step back. But I think generally sort of the work life balance is pretty good. Sort of separating that place away, having those two, this is my work phase and this is my home face mix in between those.

Again, knowing your arrangement, you've got your own sort of office in the garden, I guess, and that gives you a chance to complement a lot of the different places. What you're thinking?

Yeah, as lucky as my life has been, I've sort of worn at every sort of corner. I feel like our house was sort of a new build estate and they built the garage in the wrong place. Instead of knocking it down, they put a window on it and said it was a summer house. Okay, interesting. It's basically a double garage with a window. And then my lockdown project was like, yeah, I'll definitely do something. And so we got a builder in to put the insulation and plaster on the wall. I definitely then was like, yeah, I'm going to take on as much as this as I can because everyone was like at home, couldn't go anywhere. I've decided DIY is not for young children is definitely a piece around that. DIY is not for me though we're.

Better with gadgets than we are with real things.

Yeah. I like to be able to sort of like, oh, I'll save that on, I'll go back to the old version of that one.

But it's done nice.

It looks great.

I'm not busy. I've seen it for a longer phone.

It works out really well. So we've got like a we got old sofa in here. I've got two desks which like living the dream for some people, right. Like real hard life is useful. Having the kids in here like they consider the desk and do whatever they need to do. And then the big cinema of the screen in the background, which is also really nice because you can have it a little bit louder away from the kids at night, be able to actually watch a film, have the lights off, have the sound up. And then I've hooked it all into my home. Automation. So if the kids open their doors or they make a noise in their room or any of the outer doors in the house open, or anyone's in the driveway, it flashes up, a little notification, a little screenshot you could just.

Take off, surely, but all down.

It'S really nice. It has that reassurance piece of like you can keep track of them and most of the time they're all right. Most of the time actually in the driveway, it's a cat. And you're like, okay, yeah, I don't need to it's not someone breaking into my house. It's just a cat in the driveway.

Yeah, I found that with our security cameras. I've got one on the front of the house, which is literally where the road is. So every single car that goes past is a trigger and it defeats the purpose. And I want something into the site. No, the car that's parked outside my house, please trigger me on that one because I don't care if they're just driving past.

Yeah, so our houses, we don't really have like a front garden. It's like a meter from the front door to the pavement. And so, yeah, I've had a lot of issues with the things being triggered, just anyone walking past. So I've got a system called Frigate, which actually is doing some machine modeling to work out if it's a human or not. And if it is, it sends me a notification.

Interesting. How does that work then?

So it's looking at the images, so it sees motion and so, yeah, it's local. It's got a little USB chip that I plugged into my server. It's Google Coral Tpu I think the name is. So it's doing a lot of the modeling on there. So it's really quick. So it's not using sort of a standard CPU, it's using that and that checks if it's a human or not based on the model. And so far it works really well actually. Seeing people on the pavement or people coming to that little slot just in front of my door and then alerts me. It's a little bit slow at time. It probably takes about 5 seconds to get the notification.

That could be worse though.

Could be, yeah.

I mean, I think my back door camera can take three or 4 seconds to give me a push notification. Yeah, quite handy though, again with the kids, like knowing that they're coming back from schoolma. Great, thanks. I turned off the automation for when I leave the house the other day or when I'm in the house. I was like, I need to know what I'm in the house as well as when I'm out, so just turn that trigger off at no point.

Yeah those things can come to work so we've got nest thermostats as well. So it does the away, it does the automatic, oh, you're not in the house, it will turn the heating off. But then in the middle of the winter when it's not been on all day, and you come back and you're like, oh, actually it's going to take a little bit longer to warm up, so that's something I still need to work on. And tweak there to make sure, right, you are coming home, you're going in the right direction. I'm going to turn the heating on now before you get back to a 15 degree house that's going to take 2 hours to heat up.

Yeah, totally typical engineer managers continuous improvement mindset there. It's like oh this is a way to make things better here shortly.

Yeah. And that's how you keep tinkering and you never really finish anything or improve on it. Well you're aiming to improve on it but really you're just tweaking and it's hopefully getting better over time.

Do you find you enjoy that tinkering process though?

Definitely. I think we talked about sort of being an engineering manager is very people based. You've got connections to the project but at the end of the day have you really pushed that bit of code? Have you moved a ticket along? Have you really helped with production? Probably not. So yeah, being able to tinker with those things and sort of keep my hands a little bit in the code and keep with the development pieces really is a nice thing. But then with home automation you do get close to that bit where well actually the house really needs that bit to run now because otherwise you're not going to turn the heating on in the morning. Otherwise the lights aren't going to come on and everyone expects the lights to come on. So you start to be a little bit careful of like oh well I'm not going to do a release on a Friday. Yeah there's definitely been some bits of like 10:00 at night. I'm like right, I really want to go to bed but I've got to finish this thing because it's just not working anymore and it is literally operating.

The house like the heat existed, the.

Lights are flashing on and off, that sort of thing.

Watching your plumber walk away from you with water mains like dude, you finished it or not.

It's the end of the day though. Yes there's definitely I'm turning off it's.

A gadget, it can wait.

So I do try very much to make sure it's focused on like right the light switch, light switches is a good example of light. If you push that light switch it will turn the light on or off.

Simple in theory.

Even if I've broken everything else light switches will switch on and off. So I go back to those basics of like right, a light switch should still work as a light switch, but if everything's working nicely, maybe it can do some other things so it knows it's night time, so it's going to turn different lights on.

This is something I've really struggled with, actually. Just trying to get the smart bulbs to come on at the right times and off at the right times, and then someone just goes and turn off of the mains. Like, what's the point in any of that?

That is still an ongoing piece. Most of the things I've changed, you can get, like the hue bulbs and then you can get the remote controls. So on some things, I've put little covers over the light switch so people can't turn it off, so they'll go through a maker truck.

Interesting. Just put a blocker in the way.

You just put a blocker in the way. It seems like the simplest way to go around and actually fix it is to say, don't do that, the lights will turn on automatically, don't worry about it. Which has taken a couple of tweaks to get there when the sun is going down, based it on sunset, but actually, 20 minutes before sunset, it's actually getting dark enough to turn lights on. Indeed. Tweaking that little bit.

I like that sort of stuff. That's the tweaking stuff when you're sitting around in the living room without any real distractions.

Yeah, that's the sweet spot of having the lights in. Sort of the lounge in front of the TV turn on when you walk into the room. That's cool. If you're in the middle of a film and the lights go to 100% bright lights, you're like, oh, no, that's actually not working too well anymore.

Yeah, ignore me, love, while I just play with the earth.

That it's a good moment in the.

Film, but don't worry about that.

That's not spoiler. It's fine. It's fine.

We've talked a lot about smart tech and I think we can go off on a tangent with this one. But I think the point here is how do you find the time for this stuff? Like, where does it fit into your typical week or month? I think you alluded to some planning at the start, right?

Yeah, because it's different every day. Some days I'm just like, I'm just not going to do it. I'll just write it off. And that's how we come up with our weekly goals. Or not, is the case. May be. So I do try to plan out that week to say, like, right, this is what I really want to get to this week. And that could be this week has been the kids'birthday. So I'm not going to get anything done because I need to figure out what they're going to get for their birthday and where we're going and what we're doing. But every week I'll just say, right, I'm going to spend some time on home automotion, and I've just got a big list of bugbears in there that really if I've got ten minutes, I'll go and take a couple. Of those off and fix those bits versus if I've got a couple of hours, maybe I can go into a bigger project and sort of blend that out. But it's very much like, I know that I'm going to get 20 minutes in and suddenly a child's going to wake up in the night. So I tried to make it really small. I'm using Obsidian to sort of take notes.

Nice.

So on each of my projects, because I know it's always the way, right? You're like, oh, I've got 3 hours, I can do loads in this space and you get ten minutes in and then like, kids coming or you've got someone knocking on your door. So I try to really step through. So then when I do come back, which is hopefully it's going to take ten minutes, sometimes it's like, right, that's the evening off, I'm going to go to bed now. I can come back to those and be like, right, this is where I was going on from there, pick up again. It's not always the way, but like.

I say, the kids are the variable here, aren't they? We can't rely on them just to sleep when we want them to. Unfortunately.

Yeah. It's always the way of like, they'll wake up when you want them to sleep and when you want them to wake up, they'll be asleep.

Yeah. So go back to your list of Things. Are they organized somewhere like a trello board or how do you manage that?

Yeah, I've been through all of the tools, right? All of what to do list I'm actually using. And I keep coming back to the Things app on Apple iOS still. It's quite a few years old now. It's not really had they made me go back there.

I think a good twelve years, maybe.

Yeah, they keep improving it, they keep doing small updates, but it is not getting a lot of new features, which I quite like about it.

What do you need to do with the feature, though, with the to do app? Surely it's just the same concept every time.

I think there's some to do apps that can definitely question that of like, right, we're going to have a calendar view and a Kanban view and six different ways to notify you of Things. So things is quite basic. You've got your inbox, so I chuck a lot of things in there and I'm just like, right, I'll come back to that later. And then you've got your Today view, which is what you're going to work on today, which I quite like. So I've got my Today view in there. And then you can also say this.

Evening, which is also okay, so you can timebox it.

You can timebox it and sort of focus around those things. You can add the reminders and sort of deadlines around things, but it's just like giving it a little bit of structure of like, this is what I'm going to do today. Yeah, or this is what I'm going to do in the evening later. And the kids have hopefully gone to bed for long enough and then we got the bit in the day. So that's how I've been using that. And then within that, I just got a list of like, home automation broken fixes that definitely need fixing versus improvements of like, I just want to go and then bigger projects that do need a little bit of thinking. And then those bigger projects are the ones that are if I'm feeling a little bit tired, I'll have a little bit of think about like, how am I going to do this? What do I need to do? How am I going to make my smart blinds open and close in a working way?

So it sounds like you're using things to organize your backlog of improvements or books or whatever it is. Do you limit that to just your sort of side projects or do you do that with all sort of daily tasks as well? Because that's where I think I'm woody the water a bit.

Yeah, and that's where I've previously I had the role of head of it at a previous company, so we should separate the work and home life. But then I actually found it sort of going through lockdown that I was sort of mixing the two, like everything exactly. Because I was just in the same. I didn't have this lovely space. So I was in my house, I was doing all this stuff, I was working all the hours I could to make sure everything else was working and you just get on top of it. I have my work stuff that's in my work to do list and that is all work. And then I have my things to do list, which is all of my home stuff, personal stuff and side projects are in there, but there's also like finances, garden DIY, that's what I mean.

The sort of home tasks that you kind of like I will do it one day, but I need to prioritize my fund stuff as well.

Yes, so there's definitely the home stuff that you need to do, tax returns that you've got to get those self assessments done by the end of January so that gets prioritized in there, those deadlines that are coming up. And I do keep all of the fun, the more interesting stuff in there as well, just broken down into different projects and then I'm not great at doing sort of the weekly review, the wrap up of what have I got still in there? Probably still definitely things in there that have been there for a few weeks longer than they should be. But yeah, just coming back to those like right next week. This is really what I want to get done in this area. Otherwise, I find, like, I'm really easily able to get into these little bits and like, oh, that's new and shiny. I'll go and play with that this week.

Do you find that balance difficult to kind of go new and shiny but must finish thing?

Yeah, and that's what I'm really trying to focus on, getting the thing done and be like, right, that bit is done. Put to bed, go. Now I can go on to this new thing. Otherwise, you're like, right, this is a new shiny thing this week, and then I'm going to do this this week, and then I'm going to do this. And before you know it, you haven't really got anything done because you've only sort of jumped in on two different things. And it's yeah, the older if you chase two rabbits, you won't catch any. That's my favorite piece.

That's a nice analogy. Again, I think this is something we can learn from. You mentioned, like, the weekly reflections and planning for the next week that I don't do that final part of actually thinking ahead for the next week. Sometimes I don't want to. It might be buried my head in the sand a little bit, but I'd rather finish what I'm doing this week. And I do like, my Friday wind down. Okay, complete all this stuff. That's the brush that I need to do next week. But I'll plan it next week. I'm not going to get into the detail right now. It's a skill and a discipline I think it's difficult to fine tune into.

And that's why the times that I actually do, like, right, end of a Friday, this is what I've got coming up for work next week. This is what I'm going to do next week. I feel like I go into that weekend much calmer. It's like, right, I can't do that until Monday, so I'm just going to leave up there. That is out of my control for the minute. I know I've got it planned out, and I'll do it next week. I find that really works, but then I don't do it. And then over the weekend, I'm just like, oh, I've got to do this thing, and I've got to do that thing. And I'm just writing between what I'm going to do next week. So, yeah, I definitely need to it's a new year, so 2023, I'm definitely going to get into next year.

That's the other thing at the moment, in January, you always kind of got that revived energy of like, right, this year I will, I must do, and then come April time, and I can't bother with this anymore, or I found a distraction, which is often the case.

Yeah. And that's that's where I'd really like I don't like making sort of longer term goals because you don't know where you're going to get to. But I have with the kids, because the kids will always say, like, oh, yeah, I really want to do that thing. And then you get to the weekend and you're like, what was that thing we were going to so I have now started to make, like, a kids activity list of like, we are going to do that thing. And then it's like, when I think of this thing or I think of, are we going to go here? And then you actually get the time to go and do it, you're like, where are we going to go this weekend? I don't know. So I've now got a big list of, like, right, these are things we can do. Broken up into categories a little bit. Things at home, things to go out and do trips before we get to, like, oh, we went through, like, summer. We didn't get to go and do this. It's that project management bringing it into the home line.

But again, because we've got that skill and background from our roles, I tend to do this a lot, thinking, how can I break us down? Is it really feasible in the timeline who can do this with us using all those questions, open questions that you might use as an It manager? It's funny how you mix it up.

Yeah, I feel like it works. I'm not sure how the family feel.

About it, but I will add that caveat. My wife hates it, but she knows where I'm coming from.

Yeah, it's just having that list, I think, with the bucket list last summer, wow, that feels like a long time ago now. Last summer, me and the boy when he started on the summer holidays were like, right, what is the list that we're going to do this summer? And I think we got to most of it and it's like, right, it's nice to get to the end, get to September and be like, yeah, we did do those things and we got through them.

Please. Let's see you corrected Kanban whiteboard in your office for him?

No, in our kitchen we have got a whiteboard, but it is just for meal.

Okay.

So with the kids at nursery, kids at school and the meals we're going to have in the evening or lunchtime as well for weekends, because we did get into a piece where a certain child had pizza for dinner one evening because he went to a friend's house. Then for lunch at school, he had pizza and then he came home from school and had pizza. So there's definitely a piece there of bit of variety and yeah, it just gives me my structure that I'm happy with. We can change these things. I'm like, people come round and like, that's what you're going to have tonight. Or we're here. I thought we were going to have, like, Chinese takeaway. Like, yeah, we can change it. It's fine to change, but we don't have to think about it. We don't have to plan out what. Pasta we're going to have. So there is a little bit of planning there, but it's not a Camban board, so I feel all right.

Okay, good. I do not have a Camband whiteboard.

Yeah, I don't have a Camban whiteboard and I don't have a project management tool for the family. Just have a basic to do list. Is that to do list? And then I've got project lists, but they're just text files, bullet points in. Got it. Yeah. No real big, like project management boards. The kids holidays or child care for the rest of the year. I've now planned that is in a spreadsheet. Wow.

You're getting proper granular on your holiday planning now.

Thankfully. We've got two sets of grandparents that are generally helpful with sort of picking up childcare issues, and there's a lot of holidays that are coming up. When do we need them, when don't we need them? When are they available? And it's starting to put it into a calendar, but then the calendar gets really complicated and you just want to sort through. I'm like the answer, as always, with a lot of things. I feel excel. Get a spreadsheet, a couple of columns.

Yeah, but that's a typical geek mindset. I hate to say it, because that's what we tend to do, is like, I could spreadsheet the crap out of this.

All of the dates are in a spreadsheet and there's a primary caregiver provided for each date, and there's got a probability column of how committed it is. Wow. The server out is less committed. I've got up till the 27 December in there. If you want to take on two children, I have got a lot of slots available during the summer for child care that I've got available. If anybody wants to volunteer, anyone listening.

Who wants to be an agent's child minder.

If you want a four and six year old, they're very well trained or.

Have capacity for one. Because we found it's better when you got a crowd of kids because they.

Look after each other, then yeah, you need that good age, age gap between them, because the more older they are, they take care of each other and it falls.

They tend to. We found this last summer. It was actually last Easter. We took some extra kids away with us, but it made it easier. We took some friends kids with us. It wasn't just random, don't worry.

But we were like, look, there were.

A similar age range, and actually they from they filled in the gap between my eldest and my youngest. So it made it a lot nicer as a group that they actually spent time together, which said, look, stick together, go and do your swimming, or whatever you want to go and do as you play in, you know, where we are and come back when you need to fork food or drink. And it was so much better as a holiday. It was so much easier.

Yeah. I think there's definitely that piece of, you know, they look after each other until it all goes wrong. Can go wrong. It can, but it can all go amazingly well.

So let's not picture Lord of the Flies.

It wasn't too bad really, after all, though, was it?

It all came good in the end.

Yeah. Right. So figure these things out. We change as we go. We adapt.

Nice. Here's another tick tick pro tip from me. Sorry. Organize your tasks around calendar events. So I import calendar events to the Tiktik mobile apps from Joint Family, Icloud and Google Calendars, along with my own personal calendar for my own events. That way I get immediate visibility of all the other commitments on a daily basis that can help me plan my goals and actions around. Plus you get that added satisfaction of completing those events in your Tiktick app along the way. So we talked about kids, talked about your planning and trying to plan around those weird, difficult times. What do you do for your own time? I know you like your home automation, but how do you fit that in?

It's tricky. There is no sort of dedicated time billy available. So it is sort of as and when, which is why I tried to, like I tried to break it down into, like, little tasks of this is what I could do to pick up.

Those do me an agile thing of break it down.

Yeah. What's the smallest thing I can start with to get it going?

What would be your ultimate time box then? Just to commit to something like that?

I think there is some sort of length between sort of an hour and two. Like, if you had two clear hours to really get something in, get it going and then take a break, you could spend all day doing something and you're just like actually, you spend most of the time just distracted on something else. Is it Parkinson's law? You'll feel the time that's available to you?

Okay.

Yeah. That's why I'm like, right, everything should really have a deadline. Everything. We would limit it to this piece of time, and if it's not finished at the end, well, that's not great. But that's the time we've got.

It's not the end of the world when it's your own side. Fun stuff.

I do try to write, I'm going to spend an hour on this and see how far I can get with it and try to make sure that it's always in a workingish state. Sure. Because there have been times when I've been like, I was just going to change this light setting and then you can't turn any lights on. And that does not go over well at all.

Of course not. But it's fun and it's nice and satisfying to get that end result.

Yeah. And that's the bit that I try to come back to, of like, right, I have done this thing and it is better and it is good. I've done something within this hour versus just doing 16 things and forgetting about them by tomorrow.

Yeah. And I know a lot of people really are curious about this stuff. We've got people that we work with that are either really into it, we've got people in our little on side flat community that like the idea of what you're doing. Do you ever feel like there's a community that you can build around this or you can do some knowledge sharing or anything? I don't want somebody out there.

Actually there's big communities out there. That's my old love of Twitter. There is a big home assistant community on Twitter. There's stuff on reddit. There's the home assistant forums where everyone is really helpful because everyone's all trying to do similar things and help each other out. But I think there's definitely a step from person with nothing. They might have some technical knowledge, but they're not necessarily doing these things before. They haven't got a raspberry pi to throw at it versus these people that are so deep into the trenches they've forgotten how hard it can be to first do turning a light on because they're turning their lights on based on the color of the sun or what color daylight should be at that time. I think there's a lot of things and I don't know if the world needs more people. I think my home automation is definitely something where it's like cryptocurrency, personal finance, health and medical. I'm not going to give you recommendations myself. There's people that can go and give you that advice. I'm not going to go through those bits. So that's why I feel like, am I boring people on home automation?

I don't think it's boring anyone because it picks interest. It's something we all live in and could do stuff with. Maybe not as much as others, but I'm pretty basic with it all. But I'm still curious what you're doing and how I can go. I need that in my life and I'm going to copy you or ask you how you did that.

That's the nice thing. That's why I'm like, well, I'm more than happy to share, but I don't want to be this person that comes in and goes, oh, that light behind you, you have to press a button to turn it on. That's weird. Not everyone wants to be into this as much as I am.

I'm living in one of the oldest houses that we know and we kind of enable some of the devices around here. But I still try, obviously, where we.

Can this is the wonders of having a modern house where the walls are paper thin and you can get anything through them.

Bodies or people or sound eating.

You can't hide bodies in them anymore. That's the problem. The walls are too thin.

Classic. Yeah. You briefly mentioned Twitter there as well and I feel like we've missed a trick talking about our Twitter days. What do you miss about it more than anything? Because I know we're both kind of shifting away from it now.

I do miss the people. I think a lot of people sort of saw Twitter as very negative space, but the people I only looked I didn't use the official Twitter app, I used Tweetbot or Twitter if it was showing me the because we were both on Twitter for, what, 16 years?

Since, give or take. Very the first year, 2007, we joined was it six?

I think it was six.

Okay.

It was a long time ago and there was just a list and you just scrolled through it until you reached the top.

If you want to go back even further, you didn't even have a list, you just had an IRC channel that you can kind of go, oh, yeah, give me a push, or I'll follow that in my terminal instead.

Yeah, and that's still the way I was like, right, I will go through and I'm like, that's all I'm seeing. I'm not seeing people talking about football or the news or things I don't want to hear about. Sure, there's going to be people that on there that I follow that talk about these things.

True.

But one, I'd mute quite a few keywords to not get the Eurovision update, but also, maybe I'll follow that person or possibly I'll mute a few people to make sure I'm getting the content that I want. So I never saw this sort of toxic world that people described Twitter as of like, oh, it's very negative. So I definitely miss having this community there to sort of tell people about the thing I'm doing to get that.

Feedback or ask you could always go out and ask a question. You wouldn't get trolls coming back at you. They go, have you seen this? Or have you tried that? Or Actually, let me have a look at that with you. That was kind of the community I missed from Twitter from the early days. It was very tech minded or can do minded. Not what do you want to do that for? Idiot or already been done. Why haven't you read this already?

Yeah, it's very supportive. That's the same with sort of the home automation stuff, with the home assistant piece as well. People are very good at it and it's really interesting to see what people are up to. I mean, that's definitely a rabbit hole distraction of like, oh, that person's doing that, I could do that as well, what's that doing? But, yeah, I definitely miss that piece. But also, I think there's been a lot of people coming back to blogs, a lot of people going back to on the side. Slack workspace, and I think that's quite nice as well. I quite like the RSS. It's a bit more I'm going to pull this information in when I'm ready instead of it having sort of thrown at me in my face, constantly having to keep up with those bits.

True. So, yeah, how do you factor and balance that potential? Time suck as well. I mean, we've moved to Mastodon now, both of us, on the shared instance, but I'm being very cautious that it's taken up a lot of my time and mind, not necessarily energy, and I'm trying to make sure I don't make that mistake again that I made with Twitter in the early days. Have you got foundership?

Yeah. And I think so far there were definitely some stumbling blocks of getting into Mastodon. It wasn't quite like Twitter, it wasn't quite as smooth. None of the apps at that point, this was like end of last year, were quite that good. It didn't have that glossy, like, Apple feel to them. They were all a little bit like janky around the edges, which actually meant, I don't really want to do this, doesn't think it's nice, I'm not going to go in and do this. That was just keeping me away a little bit. And then Twitter went and blocked Twitter, a fake and Tweetbot. So it's like, I'm just not going to go in there. That just kept me away.

Sure. So Twitter has made you better in a way.

In a way I've sort of just stepped back.

Thanks for your help. I feel a lot better now.

I don't feel too much that I'm missing things. I'm using Reader by Readwise and in that I've subscribed to a Twitter list of all the people into Home Assistant and so that now goes into my RSS feed. And so I'm like, oh, that's cool, I can still see what people are doing. It's not quite the same of like I can't reply back and ask a quick question. I can't sort of be involved because I'm reading this 6 hours later and that's where I've definitely, instead of sort of having the live dashboard of streaming tweets coming in at me, I'm just like, yeah, at the end of the day, maybe I'll go and have a look and a bit of a read. Here's some longer articles, here are some pieces and I'll just take them in. I'm not going to go back and have a conversation around it.

Yeah, but I think that was the beauty of early Twitter anyway. And they say even like async chat in Slack or wherever you go nowadays, for this doesn't have to be live. And I like the fact you are dipping into the content when you want to, reading it at your leisure, keyword leisure and replying or engaging if it's relevant. And that's probably a better way of managing yourself anyway.

Yeah. And being in a queue. I'm just going to go and check on Twitter. That piece has sort of gone from my life. I'm sitting in the car for five minutes waiting for something to happen. All right, I'll go and have a look. That piece is not there and I think it's actually quite a calming effect.

It is.

I'm still into mastodon. I still think it's quite good. It's nice having those people in there at that information feed, but I don't feel that I'm so committed to it. I'm not going to be like, yeah, I'm really into this. This is what everyone should using. I'm just like, yeah, it's there, I'm on it.

Yeah. Each to the road.

I'm not fully sucked in like I used to be.

Maybe like some others around here. I feel like there's a sort of undertone to what you're saying, Adrian.

I don't know. I don't know how you want to use and consume. That is up to you, but yeah, I've just like taking a step back and going through I think a level.

Of maturity comes from it as well, doesn't it? We were doing this stuff 1516 years ago and we have got children now and jobs and all the other things that take up life.

Yeah. And like my YouTube subscriptions that are in there, I'm like, why am I watching some man build a diesel engine? I don't there's definitely, like, some structure that maybe I should put in there that I'm like, actually, I don't need to know how to build a diesel engine. That's not going to be helpful to anyone in my future. But it's interesting to watch.

It is. But I think, again, at the back of Lockdown, I think we all found out these rabbit holes of content, consumption points. I was looking at how to build a pizza oven in the garden and watch too many videos on how to.

Do I've I've seen too many. I think that's a good thing. That was my decision.

That's the time it was to do. When my wife had gone to bed, I was like, I like the idea of doing this. How did you do it? I can't bother with that.

Like, what am I going to do with this pizza oven? The rest of these people that are living in Italy, we've got our own off the grid farm and we're going to build ourselves a pizza oven that we can use throughout the year. That's amazing. I live in the middle of the UK, where it rains for eight months of the year.

Your son would love it, though.

Yeah, you'd love it. Getting near to a hot fire. I don't know how I'd feel of.

Constantly eating pizza all the time.

Yeah, well, that's where we need to be and that's why we have a board of how we plan these things out.

There we go. You heard it here. We've gone around the weekend a lot in this conversation. I'm just trying to work out how to bring it back. It'll be good to get one big main tip from you and how you've, Germany, found that balance and organized your weeks or months or however you do that.

Okay. My takeaway tip would be to go and look upon Newport. He's on YouTube. Don't get distracted. There is a playlist in there called His Core Principles, and he describes how he goes through and does his quarterly planning, his weekly planning. He goes through those and blocking out time for your day. Because I find that definitely, especially in engineering management roles or those similar management roles, you can go from meeting to meeting and not do anything and playing right between two and three, this is what I'm going to do, and I'm going to focus into that area because generally your kids will be fine. They'll figure things out. Your direct reports will be fine. They're very smart. They'll figure it out. You don't need to be there all of the time. No, but it's very hard to do. It's hard to step away.

It's a good tip. But yeah, definitely a kind of time box and creating that focus, time to do things that in towards your mid or short term or long term goals that you've got planned.

Yeah. And having that, well, I am going to think about what I'm going to do this month, what I'm going to do this quarter, because it's already coming up to before you know it, it's the end of the year and you've not done anything before we know it.

Yes. It's useful stuff there, man. Thanks for your insights and stories. If people want to find out more about your home automation or just have a general chat, where can they get older?

I could say, Go to Twitter.com, Adrian. But that does not they could, but.

It won't take you where you they.

Could, but I think it's there. But I think my last tweet was like, I'm on Master don here. You could, though, go to Adrianlanstown.com, where mainly I try to test how I'm posting to it or animated Gifs. I wouldn't say there's, like, a lot of good content there. That is not a place to go for content, but that's where you can find me. That's where you can contact me or find a gift from. The OC, I think, is currently my latest.

Okay, I'll go with it.

I'm still working on it. I'm still working on that.

Working on it. But you are on the mastodon just when you're around rather than all the time.

Yeah. And I don't know how committed I am. I don't know if I want to get back into that rabbit hole.

Okay, interesting. Because we do share that instance. So let's take that one offline.

I still want to keep it. I still think it's the way of it's definitely a thing to keep going, and I still hope that it's not going to be like, oh, yeah, well, let's all go back to Twitter. I think it's definitely got a structure in there. It all seems to work nicely, but I just don't know how I want to consume it true.

And you got your RSS feeds in Reader for now too.

Yeah, like secretly. I'm still reading everything.

Exactly. You're still stalking us?

I'm still keeping up.

Excellent. Cheers, man. And yeah, we'll pull those details in the Show Notes. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you. Goodbye.

Huge thanks to Adrian for joining us this week. As you can probably tell, we do know each other quite well and bounce off each other some interesting ideas, but hopefully a few useful tips along the way. If you want to reach out to him, you can find his [email protected]. All these details will be in the Show Notes and he is available on Mastodon on managingengineers. Net at adrian. If you want to get in touch with me, I am also on [email protected] at syi. You can email me [email protected] or you can visit the website make Lifework Podcast.com. Please like rate review all that good stuff in your favorite podcast app. Whichever one you prefer, we are available in all of them and do get in touch with any thoughts, ideas or topics you'd like to know about. That's enough from me and I'll be back in a few weeks time. We'll with another episode of the Make Life Work Podcast.