Kimb Jones

Making and Doing with WordPress

Ditch the Moleskin

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I recently picked up a new Moleskin to take to meetings in place of my somewhat tatty ‘classroom’ style notepads and soon realised it’s too late, I can’t go back.

Notepads

£7 Moleskin verses 60p ‘school’ notepad

It was around two years ago when I switched from Moleskin and Moleskin-esq notepads to plain old basic classroom style notepads.

It’s just paper

This wasn’t a deliberate change. Story goes that I was out of notepads for a meeting and had to buy something new on-the-run so I hopped into a local stationary supplier and picked up the simplest thing going.

Soon my love affair for these cheap somewhat disposable notepads started:

A recent collection from the past 6 months

A recent collection from the past 12 months

They may look tatty but these agile little notepads are better than a Moleskin in many, many ways:

  • Malleable and easy to hold
  • Lighter and thinner
  • Cheap (60p each!)
  • You can make as much mess as you like

Going back to a rigid, expensive and “premium” Moleskin notepad feels all wrong. It’s difficult to hold, heavy and unwieldy and the paper no longer “feels right” and worst of all I find that I judge myself on any mistake or bad sketch I make as if I’ve desecrated the paper!

My advice – ditch the Moleskin, free your notes.

Taking a year off event speaking

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I decided just before the weekend of WordCamp London that I was getting exhausted with the process of applying & speaking at events. I had applied to speak in the ‘business’ track at London and for the first time in forever rather than write up a new talk I simply re-hashed my WordCamp Europe talk from a few months before for the application.

If you’ve not seen it yet, give it a watch on WordPress.tv:

Long story short – I wasn’t chosen to speak, and rightly so, my lazy application was pretty pathetic. I also didn’t apply to volunteer or be involved in any way making this the first UK-based WordCamp since 2009 that I had not had some sort of involvement with (although we did sponsor as Make Do).

Not giving up, just giving it a rest

The main stage of WordCamp Europe

The main stage of WordCamp Europe

Why? Well, it’s mixed. First up and I know it’s a shitty excuse but the more work we get as a WordPress agency the drive I have to pour my time into speaking at events grows less as my time is spent doing other things.

Next is experience. I always try and tell a story which is based on my own experience with my talks at events and honestly, the pool of ‘useful’ memories is growing smaller every time I put a talk together.

My WordCamp Europe talk in Sofia was a great example of this. I went over how we founded Make Do, became an agency & the mistakes we made.

By taking a year off I can re-evaluate and organise what experiences would be useful to an audience rather than simply throwing together some of my anecdotes and advice.

For example – I’d like to better document the working practices we use at Make Do (development workflows, remote working, project management etc) and put this into a talk. This will be useful for developers and business owners alike and will be a far better use of my time as a speaker.

Finally, I just need a break. Going to a conference and not speaking or helping hand out t-shirts or clean up or feed people has been a revelation. I’d like to just attend events as a standard attendee for a while and soak up some of the atmosphere.

See you in 12 months

I’ll still be involved in event organisation. We will be having another FrontEndNorth conference late in 2015 and if the mumblings of WordCamp Yorkshire ever come to anything then of course I’ll be involved in making that happen.

Other than that I’ll start looking for new speaking gigs early 2016, see ya then 🙂