Usually when people ask 'so, what are you up to at the moment?', my mind goes bland. (Ha! bland was a typo! Meant to write blank. Gonna leave it. Totally works.) So I've put together a 'now' page.
Updated March 2026 + +
🚀 Turning my Tone Knob newsletter into a book. I’ve been writing my Tone Knob Substack for three or four years now. I notice I’m producing them at a slower rate, and the subjects are getting more various. Feels like the right time to capture the best ones in a collection. Also, because I think it will look cool and I am also a masochist, I am turning all the screenshots I used in the original newsletters into hand-drawn illustrations. (A process so excruciatingly slow and unecessary that it reminds me of something the designer Frank Chimero said once, about doing things the ‘long, hard, stupid way’.)
🤔 Figuring out how to do more ‘writing as reflective practice’ work. There was a time when my creative workshops were loud and playful. That was back when what people needed was ‘shaking up’. More often these days my writing workshops tend to be quieter, more contemplative. I’m just responding to what people seem to want and need in the moment. What’s ‘refreshing’ now is undistracted, contemplative time. I run a couple of these sessions every year on the OSLP (Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme) – using poems, extracts, prompts and creative constraints to help people see themselves, their ideas, and their lives differently. These sessions seem to give people something unique, and there’s often a feeling of magic in the air. I’d like to do more of this work.
💡 Making an ‘organisation for analog brains’ mini-course. I’ve tried every organisational system, tool, app and digital platform there is, and all failed me. I have a modified Kanban-style system that I use for organising my work, projects and life. I’ve used it for nearly 3 years now. It’s very simple and uses a big white board and post-it notes, and it really bloody works. A surprising amount of people want to know all the detail. (They tend to spot it in the background when we’re Zooming!)
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The ‘Now’ page was the brainchild of Derek Sivers.
You can find out more about it here.
(You should totally have one. All the finest people do ;-)