Multiplexity

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I know a lot of people through my personal life and a lot of people through my work life, but there’s an important third group — people that are in both. In the book “Friend of Friend“, author David Burkus calls this “multiplexity”. He explains:

“While we may want to categorize people into just work and personal buckets, real social networks do not seem to operate that way. And that is to our benefit. Research shows that not only does multiplexity help us become more aware of real-life opportunities, but it enhances our performance on the job—and can even enhance the performance of an entire organization.”

Contacts

I first noticed this a long time ago when trying to sort out my contact list and realized that a lot of people couldn’t be put into a single bucket. Eventually I decided that I just wanted one list of contacts, and to have it sync between my personal and business accounts. I shared this method back in 2017, but these days I essentially just use ContactsPlus to handle it.

With ContactsPlus, anyone in my personal contacts gets synced to my G Suite contacts and vice-versa. They include some other features for cleaning up the contact list, but my main concern is just keeping them synced. As a general rule, I add everyone I meet into my contacts so that if I get an inbound call I almost always know who it is. Space isn’t a concern, so I load it up!

As of now I have around 6,500 contacts in there; I certainly don’t know/remember everyone, but it’s nice to have those old ones in there just in case they reach out. I mean, why not?

Obsidian

I have a similar approach with Obsidian for my notes. Within Obsidian you can create different “vaults” for different purposes, and keep your notes completely separate. Rather than do that, I just keep all of my notes in a single vault, because too many are difficult to categorize. I mentioned this a few years ago when showing the content from one note that contained:

  • A business-related person
  • A quote from a book
  • A quote from Zig Ziglar
  • A reference to a Bible verse

I had tried to keep things in separate vaults, some of those would have been split out. Instead, I can just keep them all in one place and reference around as needed.

Multiplexity can create a mess if you’re not careful, but I think choosing that route in many aspects of life is likely the best way to go.

What keyboard do you use on your phone?

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When asked “what keyboard do you use on your phone?”, I’m guessing the answer that most people give is “the one it came with”, but you may be surprised to learn that there are ton of different keyboards that you can use on your phone/tablet.

I’ve talked about great desktop keyboards before, as well as tools like text expanders to help with efficiency, but digging into your mobile keyboard options can be good as well.

I’ve used Google’s “GBoard” for years, but as I slow try to de-Google my life I’ve taken another look at the options out there. Ultimately, I’ve settled for SwiftKey for now, which is a fantastic keyboard. It’s owned by Microsoft, so I’m still more connected to big tech than I’d like, but it’s a solid option. It works on Android and iOS, so I can have it on all of my mobile devices so that they can sync patterns and custom words to help make it better over time.

At the end of the day it’s not a huge difference, but it’s something to look into. Plus, if you move between platforms at all (I use an Android phone, but also an iPad), having the consistent keyboard in there is a nice thing to have.

You can find more about SwiftKey here, and I encourage you to look at all of the various keyboard options that are out there.

What keyboard do you use on mobile?

Niagara Launcher for Android

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One of the popular features on Android phones over the years is the ability to change to a different launcher. The “launcher” is essentially the software that controls your home screen and app layout — the main grid of icons that you swipe through.

Years ago I used to experiment with different launchers quite a lot, but lately I’ve been content to stick with the default Android launcher. However, two things recently happened that caused me to give a different launcher a try.

First, I’m trying to de-Google things as much as I can. While I’m not going crazy on that, and I’ll likely purchase the new Google phone later this year, moving to things like the Brave browser and ProtonMail have been good moves.

One thing that I was unable to solve on Android was changing the Google-powered search box at the bottom area of the phone. While you can change many of the default search actions on Android, you literally can’t change or remove that box without a large amount of work. The easier solution is just to use a different launcher, which is as easy as just loading an app from the app store.

I came across one called Niagara Launcher and had to give it a shot. Most launchers are fairly similar to one another, with the familiar grid of icons. Niagara, on the other hand, changes things up quite a lot. At it’s core, it lets you choose up to eight icons on the home screen, along with a few small optional widgets (calendar and weather), and then you can scroll down the home page to find all of the other apps.

Here is a before and after example from a user on Reddit:

If you want to find another app, just scroll and they’re right there. You can even just tap a letter on the side of the screen to jump to that section. For example, if I wanted the “Truist” app, I could just tap the “T” on the right and get to it quickly. Here is a screenshot of that kind of scrolling:

It’s quite a change from how I’ve used my phone for years, so we’ll see if it sticks or not.

You can find Niagara Launcher here. It’s free to use, and has a premium version that is just $9.99/year and has some nice features. We’ll see how it works out.

If you’re Android user, do you ever use alternative launchers?

Consolidating my messages with Beeper

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I’d heard about the Beeper app a while ago, but didn’t actually check it out until recently. I should have looked earlier, as it’s fantastic.

Beeper app screenshot

Very simply, it’s an app that puts almost all of your messaging apps in one place, in one stream of content. This includes WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, Signal, Instagram, Google Messages, and many others. I intentionally said “almost all of your messaging apps” because it can’t handle Apple’s iMessage despite their best efforts. iMessage support aside, it’s a fantastic app.

For me, I primarily use it to handle my text messages, LinkedIn messages, and Facebook Messenger. However, I’m also in a new WhatsApp group (and I don’t often use WhatsApp), so it’s great to just tuck that in here too.

As another bonus, it solves a minor frustration with Google Messages. Google Messages only handles text messages, but they have a nice desktop tool to sync them. The problem is that it can only connect to one computer at a time, so as I’d jump around a bit throughout the day, I often saw this message:

It was merely a click to “fix” it, but if that window was buried I wouldn’t be getting those notifications. Beeper can be live on as many computers as needed, so that small annoyance has gone away.

It’s everywhere

Beeper has apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, macOS, Windows, Linux and ChromeOS, so it can literally be on every device. All of your messages in one app. It’s beautiful.

There are three other great things to know:

  1. It’s end-to-end encrypted, which means that the Beeper folks literally can’t read any of your messages, even if they wanted to.
  2. It’s owned by Automattic (the company behind WordPress), who I trust more than most companies.
  3. It’s free to use and will always be free to use. They plan on adding new features in the future at a paid tier, but the features we have today will always be free.

If you find yourself jumping between different messaging apps, give Beeper a try. Even without the iMessage integration, it’s still likely worthwhile for Apple users too.

Do you use Beeper or anything similar to it?

A Brave new browser

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As I’m slowly shedding the Google services in my life, I recently made a fairly big move and switched from Google Chrome to the Brave browser. If you’re wanting something more privacy-focused, Brave is likely the best way to go because it’s very similar to Chrome.

There are other great browsers, including Arc and Firefox (and many more), but they all have their own special features. That’s not a bad thing, but if you’ve used Chrome for many years Brave will feel awfully close to home.

Brave runs on Chromium, the open-source software that powers Chrome, but they use it in a very privacy-focused way. It can import all of your bookmarks and passwords, and it’s really a very easy transition.

I encourage you to download it and give it a shot, as it’s free to use and there’s no downside to giving it a test drive. Your privacy will thank you for it.

Have you moved to Brave or any alternative browser yet?

There’s still a world outside these walls

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For those of you over 40, you can likely still remember the “good old days” on the internet, back when people set up their own places to visit, rather than relying on a handful of huge companies trying to lock your attention inside of their walls (which is very likely how you found this post).

Molly White recently wrote an amazing piece about the history of the web, but she’s not giving up hope that we can return there. Here is some of what she said:

Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”.

She goes on to explain how things have changed, but then offered some encouragement:

The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

The challenge is that the more time people spend inside of the “tall and increasingly reinforced walls” (social media networks), the harder is it to be willing to venture outside of them. For businesses, working inside of these walls makes life easier, but also can choke you out. You’re limited in what you’re able to do and you can’t take that stuff with you if you decide to leave:

If a tenant decided they were sick of their spot within a walled garden, well, they could leave — but it meant they abandoned what they had built, and the path for friends or admirers of their work to come visit them became a lot more arduous to traverse.

The great thing is that while it feels arduous to venture outside of the walls and set up your own space on the internet, it’s literally never been easier to do.

And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was. In the early days, people had to fight to enter the expanse at all, and those who did were starting with little. Now, the expanse feels ubiquitous in some countries, and is becoming ever more accessible in the others. Sophisticated tools and techniques are available even to novices. Where once the walled gardens were the only viable option for novice gardeners or those without many resources, that is no longer so much the case — and the skills and resources required to establish one’s own sovereign plot become more accessible by the day.

While it’s easier than ever to set up your own space on the internet, many people simply feel less inclined to do so. This is in part due to how easy it is to set up an Instagram account versus building your own site, and the other challenge is that the majority of people spend their time inside of those big walls.

The web doesn’t have to exist entirely within those walls, and it’s completely up to us to make the web the way we want it.

Do you have any kind of website or presence outside of social media? If so, drop a link here so we can check it out and then take a few minutes to read Molly’s full, amazing post.

The internet isn’t getting worse either

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Over the past few years I’ve shared thoughts on how the world is much better than people think. Murder rates are down, reports of missing children are down, school shootings are down, the economy is doing great, etc. Things are far from perfect, and we always need to be working to make things even better, but it’s not too bad right now.

At the same time, I’ve essentially taken the angle that the internet is getting worse — but perhaps I was wrong about that. Maybe it’s just nostalgia for the “good old days”, but statistically the internet is still just as good (or bad?) as it’s always been.

Techdirt recently shared a great study with the title “Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time“. Included in the study is this brief summary:

There’s something deeply unfashionable and counterintuitive about all of this. The suggestion that online platforms have not single-handedly poisoned public life is entirely out of step with the very political discourse the internet is said to have polluted.

Always this bad?

Put better was a post from Caitlin Dewey with the accurate summary title of “Actually, the internet’s always been this bad“.

The conclusion of the study essentially said that people aren’t behaving worse online overall, though the longer any given conversation goes, the worse it tends to get (which has always been true online). It reminds me of Godwin’s Law, which simply states “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1“. Or, as Dewey put it:

It’s like a certain kind of Buffalo bar around last call: Most people have gone home for the night, but the stragglers are loud, uninhibited and prone to a certain level of mischief and/or aggression.

Moderation

However, because things haven’t gotten appreciably worse online over time, maybe we don’t need to worry as much about moderation? The study disagrees with that, saying:

Quattrociocchi said it would be a mistake to assume his team’s findings suggest that moderation policies or other platform dynamics don’t matter — they absolutely “influence the visibility and spread of toxic content,” he said. But if “the root behaviors driving toxicity are more deeply ingrained in human interaction,” than effective moderation might involve both removing toxic content and implementing larger strategies to “encourage positive discourse,” he added.

It’s your choice whether to take it all as “it’s always been this bad” or the more optimistic “it’s not really getting worse”, but either way it’s nice to see some data to show that it’s not declining in the way that I thought it was.

Really owning your email

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In all of my talk over the years about owning your website with WordPress and owning your notes with Obsidian, I’m well-aware that I had a big hole in that philosophy when it came to my email. It was all in Gmail, where I have zero actual ownership of my account.

The problem is that taking ownership of your email can be really hard. Using WordPress and Obsidian can be tricky in some cases, but really owning your email can be much more difficult. However, a recent conversation with Sanjay Parekh showed me that I was looking at it all wrong.

The two parts of email

I always saw it as “my email”. One thing. One service. My email account.

That’s sort of true, but Sanjay explained that when it comes to ownership and control, there are really two pieces.

  • Your address
  • Your emails

They certainly are related, but there is a big difference. While I save pretty much all of my old emails, it’s access to the address itself that is far more valuable, and I had never really considered those two separate pieces before.

As I first shared nearly 15 years ago, the goal of using email is to mine the content out of each message and move on.

Add the event to your calendar. Download the file. Do the task. Answer the question.

When you’re done, the email should essentially be an empty husk. I still save it “just in case”, and I certainly search through my email for reference quite a bit, but in theory they’ve all been mined.

On the flip side, future access to that address is critical. People need to reach me. I need to reset my passwords. I need to do dual-factor authentication at times.

Losing access to my old messages would be awful. Losing access to the address itself would be critical.

Just set up a new address

With that in mind, I was no longer as worried about losing my old messages. Granted, I’ll do my very best to keep access to all of them forever, but my primary concern about ownership should be about the address itself and not the historical messages. In my case specifically, I don’t ultimately control gmail.com, so my future is in Google’s hands there, but I have full control of mickmel.com.

With that in mind, I signed up for a paid Proton Mail account and created [email protected]. Creating an address with a custom domain is a paid feature with Proton, but it’s only like $3.99/mo. Proton Mail is well-regarded for their privacy and should be a solid solution for years to come.

This leads to a much more secure future.

  • If things change with Proton Mail, I’ll move my address. I can likely bring my messages with me, but I’m 100% sure I can bring my address with me.
  • If things change with Google (or they ban my account or anything else that would remove my access), my Gmail account is toast and I’m in big trouble.

Moving around thousands of historical messages isn’t easy, but keeping access to an address on a custom domain isn’t too bad. I’ll focus there, and be confident that I have much more solid control over the part of email that really matters most — the address.

Gmail –> Proton

The other nice thing is that Proton makes it very easy to forward your Gmail account over to your new account with them. It was something I planned to do anyhow, but they did it almost automatically. Now I can live in Proton mail with my new [email protected] address, but still get all of my Gmail forwarded over there and very slowly begin switching over.

They also have a tool to import all of your historical Gmail messages over, which I’ll likely do soon.

Whether or not this is a better day-to-day solution remains to be seen, but it’s undoubtedly putting me in a more secure position for the future and finally giving me a bit more actual ownership of the email address that I rely on so much.

Stay focused or stay available?

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I’ve noticed that when I meet someone for coffee or lunch, they behave in one of two ways:

  1. Ignore their phone/watch and stay engaged with me.
  2. Look at every notification and apologize when they need to respond quickly.

I also see some of this from the other side:

  1. Some people are hard to reach when they’re out.
  2. Some are able to respond no matter what the situation.

It’s a matter of deciding what’s important. I certainly hate to not respond to people while I’m in the middle of a meeting, but it’s almost always the right thing to do. If two of us are going to take time out of our day to meet, it’s worth focusing 100% on the meeting.

Do I want people to get my attention or do I want people to be able to keep my attention?

There are exceptions, of course. I’ve seen a few times over the years where we’ll sit down and the other person says “Our system crashed this morning, so I may need to take a quick call from my IT person in a few minutes“. Things happen, and that’s fine.

Uber

While I strive to be the kind of person that stays 100% focused on the person I’m with, I’ve struggled at times over the years. One small shift I make from time to time is to take Uber/Lyft to and from some of those meetings. This has two big advantages:

  • Before I start the meeting, I’ve had ~15 minutes in the car to stay on top of emails/texts to make sure all is in good shape.
  • If something were to come up during the meeting, I know I’ll have some time in the car (not driving) to respond on the way back.

In addition, mostly in larger settings, you can create the appearance of not paying attention if you’re looking at your phone instead of paying attention to the speaker (which is partly why I use a writing tablet for situations like that). I was at an event a few years ago where the speaker called out someone in the room for playing on their phone during the talk, and it turned out that the guy was taking notes on it! This exception aside, simply being on your phone tends to signal that you’re not really paying attention.

If you’re reading this and wonder if I’m talking about you specifically, I’m almost certainly not. The last year or two has been full of great meetings, and the inattentive behavior seems to be fading away, but it’s always something that I’ll be working to improve for myself.

Gmail turns 20

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I mentioned a few days ago that I’m not super happy with Google lately, but a few days before that I shared how I just can’t shake Gmail. The math says I shouldn’t use it, but that’s much easier said than done.

It was exactly 20 years ago today, April 1, 2004, that Google introduced Gmail to the world. Because Google is well-known for April Fools jokes, it took some time for people to believe that it was real. Most free email services offered perhaps 4MB of storage, and Google was offering 1,000MB of storage, completely for free! It was incredible.

Conversations

They also helped to pioneer the concept of “conversations”, with emails lumped together in threads. It had been done before, but they brought it to the masses and I’m sure you can appreciate how amazingly useful that feature is (if not, go into your Gmail settings and turn “conversation view off” and see how it goes).

Since then…

In the time between, Google has done some awesome things with Gmail. Storage is now 15GB for free, and the cost to buy more space is very minimal ($1.99/mo to go to 100GB).

They’ve added little things like “Send & Archive” (my favorite!) and bigger things like “inbox types” to let you see things in very different ways.

Because of the massive storage and ease of use, I just checked and I have just over 780,000 messages between my two Gmail accounts (not counting those that I’ve deleted + spam over the years), so it’s clear that I’ve found it to be very valuable for the last 20 years

It started as a relatively small invite-only system, and today hosts roughly 1.8 billion active accounts. Gmail has helped shape the internet in a great direction, and I hope they can keep it going for another 20 years.

Here is Google’s original press release from 2004 touting the great new service.

Do you still use Gmail? How do you feel about it these days?