S10E5 - The lost joy of web design with Andy Clarke & Dan Davies

Four.

Welcome back to season ten of the Make Life Work podcast with me side jobbling. I am an engineering manager by day, a family man, and I still try to find time for side projects. So this podcast is all about trying to find that balance. Today, I am talking to some old friends, andy Clark and Dan Davis from the old web days about how they've got through the pandemic, some of the recent challenges they've been through, but also some of the fun things they've been up to as well. So let's get into this. This is make life work with Malarkey and Dan Davis.

Here we go. It's wonderful to get you together, boys, and thank you for giving up your evenings to talk nonsense with me.

Well, no, it's fine. I mean, I've been trying to see Dan Davis for about the last three months, but to be honest, he never leaves his conservatory. Do you, Dan?

Well, no, I don't, but then no one ever comes to me.

Well, even after all these years, I actually don't know where you live. I know you live down the road, but I actually don't have your address, so if I needed you in some sort of emergency, I wouldn't be able to get you.

No, I've been recluse illness, family snow as well.

Snow? The snow has been bad, actually. I mean, it's beautiful and clear and whatever out there now, but, yeah, there's going to be people listening that live in countries where they get proper snow and they're gonna add snot snow that's like a sprinkling of icing sugar. But to us, you know, it's a lot of snow. To a Canadian, it's like bugger all. Hey, I learned something today. I was actually dumbfounded today about something.

Really?

I learnt that there is a Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

Wow. There's a hall of them.

Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Who is in it? Who could possibly be in it? Apart from Brian Adams?

Celine Dion shouldn't be in there.

Oh, Celine Dion. Is she's Canadian? Yeah, but she's in it.

Alanis Morrissette. Was she Canadian?

Never listened to her.

Was she?

You're pushing me now, though. And they're all going to be 90s references, nothing around that.

Yeah, between us, we can't think of more than, like, two Canadian musicians. It says a lot about the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, doesn't it?

So when you found out about this, did you not look into who that was in there?

No, I didn't get that far. Because who the hell cares about Canada except Canadians? We're going to offend all those Canadian listeners. Yeah, we're going to offend some people tonight.

What is going on, though?

I can't complain. We haven't heard from Dan yet. Let's speak to Dan first and find out how Dan's going on.

Well, you wonder why I am. Well, I've not been very well. Life's just a bit of a roller coaster, though, really is, yeah. Feel like it's passing me by. There's one thing after another. Before Christmas, there was illness in the family. I've had an illness. Now works. Busy life. Just life gets in the way and it's really hard. And with the news, what's going on and stuff, it's one thing after another.

Do you watch the news, though? Because I do and I don't, and it just really makes me angry all the time. And I know that when you watch news of horrible things going on in Turkey and Syria and all this kind of stuff, and real proper humanitarian crises, and then it just drops off the news because there's some ridiculous thing, and it's purely because we're not doing enough to help people and stuff like that. And the whole thing just makes me cross. And I suppose that's a symptom of getting old, I suppose you just start to get cross at things and shout at clouds.

Isn't that a simpsons reference?

Yeah, it is a Simpsons reference, yeah.

Very good.

So I try not to watch the news. I'll read the Guardian on the phone, but I won't watch the news because.

It'S everywhere now, though. It's on social media, get it sent to my phone, get updates on my phone. The bit that boys me is the kids get it as well on their phones. They get sent stuff.

And when you're a young kid, hard.

This is going to turn into an old man podcast, but it used to be that you got your news from reading the newspaper and you might sit down and watch the 06:00 or 09:00 or 10:00 news, depending on what else was on, but it wasn't this constant kind of omnipresent gloom. And maybe the kids are fine with it. Maybe the kids are fine with all of this multiple stimulation going on the whole time, but old farts like me find it draining.

I'm completely with you on that.

It was interesting because, well, the daughter was googling things when she was seeing things on the phone. She ended up googling stuff to find out what it was, which was blew my mind because she was asking questions about Coronavirus. There was Monkey Parks, it was all these and it's obviously they're there, they're seeing it, but they've got Google now. They can go away and look at stuff. There's YouTube. She's watching YouTube videos on stuff in the news. It's so much more available now. And it's not always like the spoken truth either, is it? You get a lot of sort of third party news things as well, like social media as well. They're putting up their own news. They want to see the Match of the Day alternative on GB News.

I didn't know where I was going.

There was no match of the day, obviously on Saturday. So GB News did their own version of Match of the Day. If you get a chance to see it, watch it, because it's hilarious with.

This proper car crash.

Oh my goodness, mate. It's just these angry guys, these angry gamblings just try to football me late to normal folk, but having digs left.

Right and center, you can't have a GB News take on football because they'd just be playing on the right wing.

Very good.

Set him up there, isn't it?

But like you say, GB News, what do you expect? I wouldn't expect them to do anything half decent, let alone down the middle.

Honestly. God, this is awful.

But go back to your News thing with kids. I think they're more socially aware now. When we were younger, I didn't give a shit what was happening in politics, I didn't care what was happening generally in the news, but my lad is all over it all now. He comes and talks to me about it before I even know what's happening.

Yeah, it's crazy.

I'm wondering how Andy finds it with his lad.

Well, my lad doesn't live here anymore, my lad's 31. So, yeah, if you're listening, Alex, which I'm sure you won't be, but no, he's a he's a geology lecturer, so he's got his PhD and he's down in London doing teaching people about rocks. But we always had with Alex, we never had any kind of censorship on devices or the web or anything like that. He had his first Mac when he was probably twelve or 13. And we had an iPhone in 2008 and we never restricted anything that there was no screen time limits, we didn't set up any filtering or anything like that. But he was always just such a very sensible bloke. But I wonder about the impacts it has on people's mental health. I mean, it's the same issue with social media and other things and it's also kind of they're pervasive in all other kind of forms of life as well. The fact that you can get something on a whim without any kind of effort at all. If you want pizza, you can pick up the app and you can have pizza in 20 minutes. If you want an album, I can go on to Apple Music and play that album right now. I can go and Google and find out any source of information right now. And that kind of high speed thought, in a way that we kind of live with, is not something which I think human brains were designed for. And maybe young people that have been brought up more with it, maybe they're more adaptable. But I do worry sometimes about the impact that this kind of stuff has on people's mental health, because it might not be that pace of life is a lot quicker than it used to be, but the pace of thought and that constant stimulation is very different.

Absolutely. We're taking the same before and like the TikTok concept, get your content out in 15 seconds and process that. We weren't designed to do that. I mean, yeah, we do have a short attention spans and they're getting worse, but kids have adapted and if they do it the right way I don't think they have. I think they've really suffered in some of these situations, especially since Pandemic hit and we couldn't even leave the house. That was the only consumption of entertainment they could get.

Do you do any limits on screen time?

No, not with a lad, no. He's grown up with trust and I do keep an eye on occasional family records that they can do on all the Microsoft and what have you, but with my little one, she's got a YouTube family account so I can trust that and leave that as her consumption point. But we do just generally say that's enough, turn it off, done. And she'll listen. She's pretty good at just responding to that.

Yeah, they might. So just do what they want, can't stop it, no need to. Or they don't think the problem is.

Once you try to stop it, that just encourages them to do it more anyway.

Yeah, they have screen time bands at the mothers, but not here because I don't want the house when they come in. I want to be left alone.

It makes life so much easier.

There's your MacBook, there's your Xbox and he's watching in between. There's all sorts of stuff now, stuff I would have died had I known he was watching, but now I can sort of relate to the conversations. Now we can have a joke and laugh about it. Obviously she's a teenager now so she's watching stuff that's a bit older, twilight and stuff like that.

Are we all three working from home still? Do you work from home? Sigh.

I am mostly. I go to the office maybe once or twice a month, but generally I'm in this space here all day, every day, all week.

See, that's another thing, which I know that we're probably a lot more used to it than people that were forced to do it during the pandemic. But again, you can be isolated while you're surrounded by people or you're surrounded by kind of outside stimulus or whatever. And it's a very interesting sort of thought exercise or whatever to wonder about how humans adapt to this kind of what is a relatively new kind of way of living. Over the last, not just the last 100 years or 200 years, but the last 30 years, things have changed massively in terms of our access to content and other people and all this stuff.

All those social norms that we grew up with and even in our generation can be thrown out the window now. You can't handshake someone without checking that they want to and that's just something you have to fish or just check that they're happy to make body contact, which I can understand why, but it's just a huge social norm that we're not used to.

Oh hang on, is this to do with spreading COVID or is it some kind of social is is it some kind of social justice thing?

I actually missed the office as someone that was very much all for remote working. I'm being left alone. I actually miss it. I actually am very lonely at the moment, which is horrible because I never thought I would be, but people were saying we'll come to the meetups. It's not the meetups, it's not being there, it's not the banter, anything like that. It's more the way of working that I miss just being able to show stuff or share ideas or get a quick opinion. It's not the same over messaging services and slap and stuff like that, it's just not the same. I miss those relationships, all those working relationships. I could give or take the going out and stuff like that. That doesn't bother me. But I do miss that part of the office a lot.

It's very similar.

We went remote, fully remote, just before the pandemic and we stayed remote and then we grew and I don't know half the people in the business now and I've never met them or anything, I'm never going to meet most of them and people will say you should go and meet them, blah blah blah. But that's just the way it is. We're never going to meet half the people now because these remote ways of working, that's what it is now, isn't it? You won't be sitting with these people or working the old ways so we have to come up with new ways of working now.

I went to the office in Switzerland last week. I was there Monday to Friday. It was nice, it was nice to see people and they're always really friendly and yeah, there's a bunch of people that I don't know, but that's fine. You tend to be working with the people that you're working with and we had a series of kind of meetings and workshops and stuff every day just to get the most out of me actually being on site and by the end of it I was bloody knackered. I think it was that kind of introverts lack of energy or something, I don't know what. But bloody hell, I just came home and slept because I was completely gone. My mental energy had completely been used.

Up, completely relay with that. The days I do go in the office, we try to make the most of those office times actually getting a whiteboard out and post it and do some real in person physical conversations. And it is mentally draining. It's physically draining because we're so used to just sitting in our desk for 7 hours at home, not even commuting, let alone doing when you're there. And again, going back to our point earlier, have we adjusted in a couple of years to doing this? This is not like something that we've been doing over time. It's instant and we actually adjust straight.

Away I got a train last year and I went to Manchester it was this year, I can't remember what year. Isn't it one of the music? I went to Manchester and I was knackered just from sitting on a train straight to bed. And I used to do that every day, 4 hours a day on a train. And I can see now, though, I look back my partners, I'd come home, I'd eat crap, stay up late, go to bed. Now, I don't do any of that and I feel much better for it. But I can see how my body was reacting to it now, just by doing it once, I was absolutely shattered.

How often do you in the office, Dan?

Now? Never.

We haven't gone off purely at home. At home?

Yeah. We have these things like hubble that's called where you can go to work in places and work together and a lot do it, a lot do it. But there's not in Wales, which is great because I'm the only Welshman in the business so it means going to Manchester, but it's such a pain going to Manchester from North Wales with trains and I'm not driving, I'm not taking many to Manchester, so it is it's a train. I just can't be bothered because I just feel knackered after it. It's just not worth it. There's a due on Friday. I'd love to have gone, but it's just a Friday night on a train in Manchester. No, I'd rather be at home, tucked up and I might watch a bit of Murder She Wrote or something like that, I don't know.

I like the way that you got your Mini and Murder She Wrote into the same segment of conversation that's Dan summed up right there, isn't it?

Well, it was a sad time at Christmas when she died because obviously the Queen Angela's been passed away, which was really sad, and I just got a Mini. She's been really exciting so my life's been better with the many to a.

Degree, but this whole I don't know whether we have to talk about work life balance, because I did believe that was the subject of the podcast. It pretty much rather than just bemoaning the death of 80s fictional detectives part of it, but it's interesting because I don't know do you sit and watch, like, repeats of Murder She Wrote while you're working during the day? Yeah, see, I do. I don't watch Murder, She Wrote, but I'm on season six now of Star Trek Voyager and I started rewatching all of Star Trek Voyager, like last Monday, and it's just on constantly in the background while I'm working and people go, how can you work with the that's not the TV, it's my imac. How can you work with something on in the background? And it's like I work on my own, it's there, it's other voices, it's something that I don't have to tune into, I don't have to concentrate on necessarily like a podcast or something like that but it's just kind of on in the background.

I purposely watch it because when I was learning web design and starting out as a hobby, I did it while I was watching TV and stuff like that. So I'm trying to treat my job like a hobby again to try and get the enjoyment back. So having the TV on and being just so tinkering, I know it's a job but I'm trying to treat it with the same sort of feeling I used to have and it makes it go so much quicker and my creativity is much better because I'm not thinking about work in a work mode. I feel like I'm in a creative hobbyist kind of flow and having the TV on, put movies on or whatever, it helps me to relax and when I relax I'm much more creative than when I'm in an office. Must be creative in these time zones during the day sort of thing for.

Making these well that's really interesting. I think that's a good topic, this whole kind of staying enthusiastic about what it is that you're doing because especially when you are working alone and we're not having that kind of what do you call it? Banter. Or next to you or across the cubicle where you can say, hey, what do you think of this stupid idea? And the fact that we do so many things now with, I don't know, some sort of asynchronous conversations about designs, whether it's figma comments or Slack channels or all of the things that we use. Actually staying really excited about doing the thing that it was that we wanted to get into. That's a topic all on its own, isn't it?

It's hard. It's hard to stay excited at times because you've got to pay the bills and you've got to get things done. And I work in Ecommerce, as you know. Sigh. It's fast paced, it's really hard and at times you can't be as creative as you want to be. Time, budgets, all this sort of stuff.

Here's another pro tip to maximize your productivity time remove all doom scrolling temptations. So I hide all my social media apps away from my home screen, off the main dock on my mobile phone, so I don't even have that temptation there. I am a sucker for trying to get to inbox zero. I hate those red unread counters and always strive to clear them out. But if they're always shown to me I'm going to be distracted, take them away, don't even worry about them. They are doing you no favors. If you want to, you can fine tune all those notifications as well. To only focus on important contact, not the pointless algorithm sucks you get from social media.

So it can be very hard to have that motivation going and as well as being at home, it's not a happy world out there and it's trying to stay motivated for everything going on around you. It's not easy. So it's my little happy place. I put Annie films on me as she wrote Colombo, and I sit down and just let it play in the background, and I might watch 1015 minutes of it, but I say it's okay to me because I'm still thinking, I'm still working. It relaxes me and I feel so much better about it. And the boss won't feel like that.

But I don't need to know, though. As long as you're output driven, right? Don't matter.

That's it. Yeah, my output is there's no problem with the output. And I work late as well, so when I'm working late, it doesn't feel like I'm working late, because I used to do it when I was starting out, so I used to wait till God knows what times. But it didn't feel like a chore because I was happy, I was learning, I was being creative. And that's it. I think as long as you can maintain that happiness in what you're doing, I think everything's golden.

You said at the start there, Dan, like before we started recording, the good old days, the easy days. It was so much simpler back in the wasn't it?

So odd now. Everything's so judgmental. You're not doing that. You're not doing that. You're not a proper designer. People can do what they want to do. Just let them use whatever tool they want to do, or let them go off and be whatever they want to be. Don't be so judgmental. And it's not a nice environment. At times, the old web feels like we've grown up an awful lot now. Maybe we're all a bit too I don't know.

What was your fondest memory from those early days, though? If you're sticking your mind, either of you, ie.

Five was just being putting batshit crazy stuff out. There was no argument, there was no judgment on it. It was just, I've done this part, it's really cool. Like, it love it cool. Now it's you're not doing this, you're not doing that. You haven't used svgs.

You and I need to have a conversation about Svgs. I've been getting big into Svgs, but you're right, particularly when I sort of started becoming more aware of what was going on outside of outside of North Wales in terms of web stuff. And there used to be an awful lot more experimenting, people putting stuff out there that was different and unusual. Even if it was on and it wasn't just on personal websites, you would be able to experiment with client stuff and other things, and not all of it was good, but that's not the point. And actually, in fact, I put something on Mastodon the other day, which was the fact that I like to make designs that people hate just as much as I like to make designs that people love. Because what is the worst thing you can do is to make a design that people don't care about.

It's true.

And I do lament the fact that whether it's attitude or process or being risk averse or whatever, it is, that people aren't generally prepared to take risks in the way that they used to. So, yeah, I think Dan and I are on the same page with that.

People say they want to make something. We get a lot with clients and they want to be different. They don't want to be different, they don't know what different means. And there isn't enough experimentation. It's really hard to get people to sign it off.

Well, it's interesting because working in ecommerce you're working in ecommerce and I spend most of my time designing a cybersecurity product these days. That tends to be, well, that's what pays the bills and all of those things. You think, well, there's not an awful lot of room for creativity, but there still is. There's still plenty of areas. Yeah, you might not move where the search box goes, and you might not make the add to basket button look like it's not an add to basket button, but there's still plenty of opportunities for doing more creative stuff, whether that be with layout or typography or the way we present images or whatever.

Yeah.

And the thing that I do, I mean, there's lots of things that I like to play with within the realms of the inverted commas day job, but I've had to learn that it's not just about there's no immediacy. You come up with an idea, people go, yeah, that's great, and then it gets built within a short time frame. When you're working on a product or you're working on a big service or wherever, things can take months or years before they ever kind of reach any kind of fruition. So what I've been doing is I've been taking on the odd other project here and there, and I've been very lucky with the day job because they're great people, the work is interesting, they pay well, and I'm flexible with time. So that means that if I want to take on a job, I can actually now I'm in a position where I can say, I'll do that job. If a website that I've been working on for the past couple of weeks, which is for a very old client of mine. She's a film and TV producer. So she worked on Brookside and she works on Hollyoaks. She came and said, but listen, I'm shifting areas. I want to concentrate more on TV and I need new website. And I said, well, it's not the sort of thing that I usually do these days, but I'll do it if you give me complete creative freedom and you don't mind taking some risks. And she's like, yeah, absolutely. So I've had enormous fun working on this job. And it does take me back to what Dan was talking about earlier on, which is like, I sit here in an evening scuba, go and have a bath and sit and watch Law and Order, and I might sort of disappear into the office and start going, that's a better way of doing those Svgs. And then I'll fiddle with it. And that's how I kind of keep enthusiasm going, find projects that allow me to really play and experiment and do the things that we used to do.

But creativity is not something that you can really structure and control. It comes when you least expect it. And normally those Eureka moments are when you're not on your computer or on a phone or wherever you work is in those most difficult points. But the fact you have that flexibility andy to kind of go, actually, I'm just going to stick around for the evening and see what I'll come out with. And that's the kind of mindset I miss in the way that I work. In my day job, I have to kind of go from meeting to meeting to meeting with some ideas or an agenda or something that's got to be output from that meeting. I'm not feeling creative, but I'll do stuff like this in the evening. Instead, I'll jump on a call and meet some people and play around with some code or some graphics and see how it comes out.

We're quite lucky that what we do is still a hobby, isn't it? I still, for some reason, still do web design. When I finish work, I'll tinker and I'll try different things. And my job is my life. As sad as it sounds, it is what I do. So I want to maintain that for as long as I possibly can.

It's a creativity bits hard I've talked about this before, but I went through a real crisis of confidence five or six plus years ago where I just couldn't do the job anymore. I was literally completely wrung out and whether it was working for myself and having to find work and do work and chase payment for work and all of this stuff on a cycle, as Dan will know, I just hit rock bottom, which essentially just culminated me going, Crap, I'm going to go to Australia. And that's what we did for 18 months or something. And one of the things that I was determined to do while I was out there was to try to find something which really got my enthusiasm for design back, because I was rung out of ideas. And it worries me that it's kind of got to be such an industry that there isn't really room for people to either learn about or produce creative digital work, because you're working in ecommerce, you're working on a big store, you're working on a cybersecurity product, or whatever it might be. And we call ourselves web designers, but actually, I wonder how much design we actually do.

Not much anymore. I manage people that do all the clever stuff. Now in the tech. I don't necessarily get my hands dirty on any code anymore, which is quite depressing at times. So I got to be honest, it's not what came into this to do, but through circumstances and career changes and stuff like that, I'm in a good place. Like the my roles. I mean, I'm I feel like I'm getting value out of it, and people are benefiting from that. But I do miss those early days of finding my Mac, playing around with some CSS and JavaScript, making something look right, or fixing some book that I've found. That's the stuff I do miss nowadays.

It's really hard. I think it's a confidence thing with me. Even the simplest things I really struggle at the moment. That could be lack of sleep, could be anything. I don't know. But I've definitely got a confidence problem at the moment, and I'm going to have to get through it somehow.

What will give you that confidence back?

Don't know. A change in circumstance, maybe. I don't know. Sorry.

So this is just like me and Dan doing one of our typical Thursday afternoon or Thursday morning coffee shop chat.

Sometimes it just could be one project. For me, it was learning about CSS grid that suddenly got my interest back, and it just clicked. Maybe something else needs to change. Maybe a change in circumstances where I'm living. I don't know. There was definitely a lack of confidence in my work, and I know that, and I can see that, but I know others can see that too. That's something I need to address. But imposter syndrome? No, I don't know.

I don't really think that's it no.

I think it is just I think I feel as if I'm not being effective and I need to come out of that. And I know I can come out of it. I've done it before. But it just takes one little change and it could be fine.

You could have said it's not really imposter syndrome. What else could it be?

Yeah, okay, so if it's not impostor syndrome, which I'm sure is technically a thing, but people like Dyslexia, people just like it's a quick and easy label to apply to myself. I must have impostor syndrome. I think a lot of it is self confidence, and I don't think that Impostor syndrome would be applied to dan would be, hey, here's me just sat at home doing web design stuff. I've only been doing it for so long. I've not been formally trained or whatever, all of these things. So why am I in this job? Why am I getting paid what I'm getting paid? All of this kind of stuff. The fact is that Dan thinks differently to a great number of other designers that are doing the same thing, and he's come up with some really innovative work over the years and has come up with some really innovative ways to try to bring that aspect of design into areas which would be commonly thought of as just cookie cutter, out of the box, framework driven crap. So actually, in terms of your accomplishments, there's an awful lot for you to be confident about. But the confidence often comes it often comes from some form of positive affirmation, which doesn't happen often when you are a working in your conservatory and you don't see people from week to week, but also when you're just putting stuff into figma, right? It's like you're feeding the figma machine. And that doesn't give you that sense of almost satisfaction where you think, wow, I made that. I built that. I can look back at the end of the week and go, I did a really good job for that person. So if you're not finding that in the ecommerce stuff and you're still sitting there in the evenings because it is what you enjoy doing and you want to learn some new stuff, go find somebody that really needs that and do some work for them. The local food bank or a dog's home or I don't know who else, but go and find someone where you can actually do that work for free if need be, or for less money than you might normally think of charging and go and do that because they will be insanely grateful. You'll be doing a really good service to them. But you might also get that interaction which you're not getting one to one, but you're also getting the satisfaction of them saying great job and also you knowing that you've built something really worthwhile.

Yeah, that's a good chance. I think that's the thing with ecommerce and work, you don't know you've done a good job until it goes live, but then it might look really good, but it might be absolutely shy to transactional results.

That's the problem, isn't it? All the measures are based on value added cost and sales and click to book kick to actions and all that sort of stuff. It's not actually rewarding from a personal perspective, it's just, hey, I don't know the customer.

Yeah, it's really to fix it's.

Good shout though. Andy I like the idea of doing some non commercial work just to get a satisfaction of making something for someone and getting a little bit of feedback, even if it's like Cheers. That's always better than nothing from a customer that you don't even hear.

Yeah, well, I've got one thing, this site for Emma that I was telling you about, which by the time this goes out, I don't know how quick you are to edit things, but it might even be live cool. In which point I'll ping you a link for any show notes, but she's going to pay me a little bit of money. I'm going to get satisfaction out of actually working on it and doing some cool things with Svg that I haven't done before. But there is a third component to how I'm going to get paid for this job.

You're going to be in Hollyoaks?

I've told her that. Yes, I want a cameo in Hollyoaks. I want to be a beggar with no legs.

Proper effects going on as well.

So amazing. I was joking. I didn't really think you'd want to be and I didn't know how long we're still going oh, it's still going to catch it occasionally back now, but it's a rerun. But yeah, I can see you on the streets of Chester.

I would like to be a beggar on the streets of Chester with no legs.

So we'll keep your eye out for that.

I don't know. Do I have to join Equity, the actors union, just to be in the back? This could be my break. This could be my break into television.

Yeah. I never thought we'd go that far. Like getting some of these web people into TV. Maybe that's what we're calling for now. Just doing nonsense of cool TV content.

That's what I think you should do, Dan, is put this talent of yours to some use where you get some satisfaction.

Yeah.

What have you got going on, andy just bring it back to you a little bit beyond being in Hollywood. Have you got any of the plans for this year?

Yes, well, I'm actually starring in a movie with I can't say, but no, I've decided we had a really shit year last year. In fact, it's been a really shit couple of years. My wife's dad died last year and you get all the repercussions that kind of come from that. And it's still on the same topic. But more than that, I find myself kind of drifting into a bit more of a rut and finding it hard to stay enthusiastic or whatever. Not with the day job and not with kind of projects like Emma's and stuff like that, but just general kind of what it's like with routine, I think it's not really a rut, it's more of a routine. And we talked before the pandemic about traveling more and actually doing the thing that people always say, well, I'm sure you can work from anywhere and we never do. I work from this room for 99.9% of my time. So what we're going to do is we're going to get on a plane and we're going to fly to Los Angeles and we are going to meet up with Paul and Kath Boag, who spend half of their time in America now. And we are going to go and stay with them and do a little bit of a road trip into Arizona and New Mexico and I'm going to work along the way, going to do my normal stuff. I have to get up at 05:00 A.m. To do a couple of scheduled meetings, but generally speaking, it's like a 06:00 start and an 1112 o'clock midday finish and that's going to leave us the rest of the day to go off and explore or do things or take pictures or whatever. And the reason for doing it is we've done trips like this before, it's not a new thing, but it's that trying to break out of a routine and not knowing where you're going to be at the end of the week and I find that really interesting and exciting.

That sounds wonderful though, the fact you get in a couple of months quality time with the misses in a different country, with some friends, no plan, really. Just a very loose guide of what you might want to do and still have the flexibility to get a bit of work done as well.

Yeah, I'll be doing my regular job, I'll be feeding the figma machine.

There it is.

But it's kind of interesting with the time zones that it is going to allow us to have those kind of afternoons, evenings that are a lot freer than they are in this particular time zone. And like you say, not having a plan, just having a loose kind of direction and a few things that we think we want to go and visit. Like I really want to go to Tombstone in Arizona and go to Where the Gunfight at the OK corral was, because I've never been there. And a few other things. I'd like to go to Roswell in New Mexico because apart from Down, I've never seen an alien.

There it is.

So that's my plan for the next couple of months.

Sounds wonderful. I think it was on prime with it's like a musician young lad, and he did like a trip, walking all the way up from London to Johnny Gropes and he said it and he went, actually, it wasn't the destination that was important, it was the journey. It really hit home for me. It was just like, it doesn't matter where you go in, it's just how you get there. And I feel like you've got this agenda with your route around the States going, don't care what happened, where I'm going, really, I just want to enjoy myself while I'm there.

What are you going to be doing, Dan?

I would drive around the UK, these different places like Stoke, Waldsaw, all these other places, and work from a holiday in or something like that. No, I'm doing nothing.

Well, I was going to ask you if you could look after my house plants while I'm away. I'll need to bring them around. I need to know where you live so I can bring them.

Well, yeah, I can look after your plants, no pressure. I can barely keep some kids alive, let alone plants in the house. Yeah, okay, right.

I'll have to bring them around. We'll never get them in your mini.

Are they that big?

Got a couple of big palms. But sadly, a lot of my plants that I had died in the cold weather because it was so flipping freezing in this house. The room underneath me here, which is where most of the plants were, was eight degrees in December. So my tropical big eared, elephant eared things just didn't survive, which was very sad. So I am only left with a couple of palms and mostly cacti. Dan. So even you can't kill a cacti.

Oh, trust me, I can. Mission accepted.

That's the plan for the year. Then. You kill Pants and nandigos and enjoys America.

That's me. Yeah, house sitting.

Sounds like we've got a few loose agendas here, but I'm loving the stories, boys. It's been great to hear where you're at and hopefully we can help you down, get into find that spark again.

Just shoot me. Some days just waking up is nice. Waking up thinking, yeah, I've woken up. I can do it all again for another day. Yeah, no, we'll get through it.

Well, let's embark on Project Dan. Let's do a makeover.

I lost two stone.

You've lost weight.

I lost two stone by cutting out sugar. So that's been one good thing. I'm eating it again now and I'll probably put it back on again. But two stone, impressive.

That's what we need to do. That's what we need to start thinking about. Put some calls out, that's it. Get Dan something to get him fired up again, because you can do it and it's not like you.

Need some support around you. Maybe you can social network behind you. That will actually be helpful rather than bad.

Thing is, that Macedon's awful account, can never get on it.

What do you mean you can never get on it?

Never works. It's always crashing.

What are you using? What, using Web or using an app?

Yeah, browser.

Yeah. You need to get an app that works better.

Anyway, I'm not going to start pushing social media platforms on here.

Okay, so don't reach out to Dan. That's the answer to that one, yes.

Don't reach out to Dan. Don't bother him in any way.

Just leave him alone.

Don't poke the bear.

If you want any plants looking at it, don't come to me, okay?

Maybe a mini guide to the UK would be more useful.

I drove to Gloucester the other day in the middle. That was really nice journey. I quite enjoyed that.

That was quite cross country.

My Subaru has started doing that stupid stereo thing again. Now, when we come back, how is it I'm going to have to go and replace the stereo in the Subaru? You haven't heard this side, but I've got a Subaru forester, which I love, and it has one fault, which is the head unit, and they've replaced it several times and it still does the same thing, where what it will do is all of a sudden it will start randomly selecting the source. So it'll sort of switch and then all of a sudden you'll be listening to a little bit of Taylor Swift and all of a sudden it will change to the radio and then when it lands on a source, then occasionally it will then start randomly selecting a channel. Then you have to go and switch back and sometimes it doesn't respond. The worst thing is when it lands on the phone as a Bluetooth source and it makes random calls to people.

Brilliant.

Why not?

So I'll be driving along and the phone will go calling Paul Bowek, and I'm like, no, so I need to get my Subaru fixed.

But just the hi fi. That's it.

Just the hi fi. The rest of it.

There you go. Maybe we can give that to Danny. Can give her go around the country in that as well.

I'm not driving a Sebrew Forest.

Come on.

I'm not that at all.

Well, you're not an Australian lesbian either. This is the thing. In Australia, they are actively marketed towards lesbians. Yeah, because Subaru Foresters are very popular with Australian lesbians. So they've cottoned onto this and they market them. I don't know what makes a Subaru particularly appropriate for a lesbian. No idea. But they seem to like them.

Wonderful. Now we know.

On that note, on that note, that bombshell go.

Bit of genuine pleasure, boys. Thanks for the chat, thanks for the updates and everything, and I hope you both have a wonderful year.

Yeah, thanks, mate.

What's left of it.

What's left of it? It's the 14 march, Dan. There's still quite a lot of the year left.

Project Dan. We're on it.

We're on it. Well, listen, thanks for thanks for having us on site. It's a very nice distraction from painting my bathroom ceiling.

Massive. Thank you to Andy and Dan for their time today. I hope you enjoyed their thoughts and ramblings as much as I did. And I hope that we can all help Dan on Project Dan to rekindle that old spark of web design that we all fell in love with those many years ago. Do reach out to Andy and Dan on their preferred social networks. Details are in the show notes. That actually concludes season ten of the Makelife Work podcast. I would like to thank all the previous guests that have been on this podcast. Mike Street, Sam Hardaker, Adrian Lanstown, Montserrat Kano, Ian Lurie, Andy Clark and Dan Davis and all the other previous guests of the last nine episodes before that, too. And let me know if there's anyone else you would like to hear from in the future. If you want to listen back, please do. All the show archives are on the website makelifeworkpodcast.com and you can listen back to all that content that I've been making over the last three years. I will be back later in the year with a brand new format to be confirmed, so keep following along and get in touch if you want to be part of that conversation. Give us a love like follow and all that good stuff in your favorite podcast app. Email me [email protected] and hopefully we have helped you find that better work life balance over the past few years.