Month: October 2021

A consideration for meetings

by Kevin Xu

Consider an in-person meeting with another individual:

If it can be done in person, could it be done over a phone call?

If it can be done over a phone call, could it be done over an email?

If it can be done over email, could it be done over a text?

 

The impetus for this post comes after attending a not-too-productive meeting, in which all the information could have been as effectively shared over email. Had it been so, the time together could have been more meaningful, or at least the collective energy to organize could have been saved.

 

Now, to how many clubs and organizations does this apply? How are you leading your tribe?

 

When others have trusted you with their time, life’s most precious asset, it’s in our own best interest to reciprocate that recognition of value.

A Blog on Blogs

by Kevin Xu

Are blogs for old people? Maybe. In all honesty, I only recently learned what RSS feeds are. Nevertheless, the following are some newsletters and blogs I follow, mostly falling under the themes of mindfulness, optimism, and productivity, and that can hopefully can be of value to you.

  1. Seth’s Blog (Seth Godin) – Author, blogger, marketer. Has one of the largest following by all bloggers. Maintains a daily blog that questions the status quo and advocates for the meaningful, creative work. Favorite blog: Throwing and Catching
  2. Notes to Inspire (Simon Sinek) – Author, public speaker. Provides daily bits on leadership and serving others. Favorite quote: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
  3. Daily Stoic (Ryan Holiday) – Author, media strategist. A daily blog on stoicism through an anecdote and resulting application to daily life. Despite being hesitant on the whole philosophy stigma, I’ve found this school of thought quite practical, particularly during these volatile times (COVID, Senior year, the like). Favorite post: Memento Mori
  4. James Clear – Author. Weekly newsletter with a compilation of quotes, mental models, and a question for thought. recently subscribed, has some good stuff on mental models. Favorite quote: “An hour of thinking can save you a decade of work”
  5. Tim Urban – Blogger. Has longer-form content that AP Lit Teachers (cough) like. Ideas range from social media stereotypes to the Fermi paradox. You might recognize him as the guy who did the Ted Talk on Procrastination. Favorite post: Religion for the Nonreligious
  6. Gabe Anderson – Musician, blogger. Relatively random guy who plays guitar who has the occasional good insight on decision-making. Favorite post: Getting that parking spot

In the hike to the top of the mountain, we often encounter signposts, breadcrumbs, signs of civilization, from other travelers on their way to their own summit. In recognizing the past journeys that align, even if for just a while, we can find guidance and optimism for our own path ahead.

Kevin’s Keyboard Shortkuts: GDoc Headers

by Kevin Xu

Too many lab reports and lengthy docs in my high school career have suffered from a lack of visual hierarchy. Which titles should be bolded, underlined, italicized? What about subtitles? What about sub-subtitles? This lack of structure within the document made navigating and understanding it only that much more difficult.

In Google Docs, I’ve adopted the built-in hierarchy system of “paragraph styles” and their “Heading” formatting. To readily access these features, you can highlight your heading text and type,

ctrl+alt+num

where num is a digit 0-9. I tend to stick with 0 (for normal text), 1 (for Heading 1), and occasionally 2 (for Heading 2).

The added bonus of using Headings is that sections are automatically added in the “Document Outline”.

As often, the structuring of ideas is not just for ourselves, but for the benefit of others.

Sharing a photographer’s images (on Instagram)

by Kevin Xu

After taking photos for my group during homecoming, I saw a gap in expectations between the shooter and the “clients”. Alongside my experiences delivering photos from sports events, here are two common practices that most creatives will appreciate people for.

  1. Don’t modify the posted image. Photographers spend a considerable amount of thought and time into the feel of a photo, and this includes the aspect ratio¹. If you want the photo adjusted, you could ask them to make adjustments. The most irksome thing for a photographer is to have some oversaturated filter slapped on or limbs awkwardly cut off in the image.
  2. Give credit, whether it be tagging them (which I prefer) or putting them in the description. Especially when the work is for free, there isn’t necessarily an obligation to tag people, but it helps get their name out there and creatives take notice of who does and doesn’t.

Moral of the story: Be nice.

¹A case for posting in 4×5 ratio: If the goal of posting to Instagram is to get the attention of your followers, setting your image to a 4×5 aspect ratio to maximize your post’s real estate on your viewer’s screen is one way to do this.

Kevin’s Keyboard Shortkuts: Chrome custom search engines

by Kevin Xu

This sounds fancier than what it actually is, but can help reduce some daily friction using the internet. This hack allows you to make queries to websites straight from the search bar. For example, rather than going to https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/my-drive and then typing into the search “blog”, you can do this in one motion with custom search engines.

  1. Go to chrome://settings.
  2. Go to “Manage search engines”.
  3. Scroll down and “Add” “Other search engines”. You should see three empty fields.
  4. Give your Search engine whatever name you like.
  5. Set your keyword to something quick and easy, but also something you wouldn’t type in a normal Google search. The keyword is what you will be typing before your future search bar queries.
    • For Google Drive, I have it as “dv”.
  6. For the third field, paste the URL you would be at for the search. An easy way to find this is to do a query via the website and copy the URL after the results appear, and then replace the text in the URL that match your query with “%s”.
    • For example, when I make a search for documents that have the word “blog” on my Google Drive, the resulting URL is “https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/search?q=blog”. Noticing how “blog” appears after “q=”, it would then be a reasonable prediction that other queries would follow the same pattern, so I type in the third field, “https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/search?q=%s”.

Chrome does this automatically for some websites, but you can do this for other websites you frequent, as well as change the keyword for existing sites.

Note: this requires being able to navigate to chrome://settings.

 

Kevin’s Keyboard Shortkuts: bookmarking multi-sheet and multi-slide documents

by Kevin Xu

There is a unique suffering reserved just for when you have to navigate to the top-most Google Slide or left-most Google Sheet, waiting for things to load.

Luckily, you can be automatically redirected to the “top-most” document by navigating to the url without the text from “#” and after. For example, my bookmark to Trow’s slides looks like this:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10sl0VBN38z3LapJurrtIcvy8Z-lIxpKqxN5Frh3AtIM/edit

Rather than:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10sl0VBN38z3LapJurrtIcvy8Z-lIxpKqxN5Frh3AtIM/edit#slide=id.gf029418572_0_33

For all the programming nerds, this seems similar to the function of anchor tags but with a bit more JavaScript involved here.

Kevin’s Keyboard Shortkuts: create new Google Drive files

by Kevin Xu

I stumbled across these url shortcuts a while ago to create some of the different Google Drive file types:

1. doc.new
2. slides.new
3. form.new or forms.new

By typing any of these strings into the search bar and hitting enter, a Doc, Slides, or Form is automatically created and opened in your browser tab, without having to navigate to the buttons on the Google Drive homepage. Given the particularly relatively load times for Google Drive, this might just save you a month or two off of your life. But today, we start with that one percent.