Some months ago, I had to lead people from different teams to complete a unified goal. A goal that nobody had budgeted for or had pretty big stakes in. Yet, I committed to making this happen. For the sake of readability, I decided to split this article into two pieces. If you want to know more about what happened before, check this.

Part two, this article, will focus on what happened next.

Background

(If you did read the first article, feel free to jump this section.)

You might wonder why I dedicate two entries to this topic anyhow. People around the world are completing projects on a daily base. …

Several months ago, I found myself in a challenging situation. The company I was working for got acquired in late 2019. When we were about to put the next major release (developed from the ground, yes!) of our software solution out into the market. Unfortunately, our new owners were not eager to make this happen, for valid reasons. Yes, it was an MVP and did not have all the boxes checked yet. It was a new product-focused at a new market segment the damage of not going to market was not considered big. It was a big thing for me and several of my teammates though. We had been working on this project for years. …

So… I had a week off. Woohoo! I can recommend it to anybody. I know it is too bad that you can’t fly away to the holiday destination of your dreams but really, take some days off. You deserved it, looking at your performance under COVID working from home during the past few months. Now whenever I go on holiday, I tend to bring my laptop (okay, I had one call I had to attend) to hobby around on some web/app development. Usually, that would likely be some PHP and MySQL, or a simple todo manager but this time, I wanted to explore Microsoft’s Power Platform. And it didn’t take long to decide what I wanted to build this time: how about a COVID-19 work station bookings app? …

Upfront note: I am not writing this article to curse the airline concerned. I understand these are strange times and strange things happen as such. I hope we can all learn from it and reconsider how we approach the ones we care about, both in personal and business relations.

We had planned a trip to Italy in June.
We really looked forward to it.
We had to cancel it.

Okay, Corona is way worse for many people but I hated the fact I had to cancel that holiday. We had honestly been looking forward to it for months. I even had to come up with a story for our two-year-old son about that we couldn’t go and buy ice creams in Italy since there were many sick people and they closed the country as such. …

For months now, probably even years, my website (williamvanzweeden.nl) has been running as a WordPress application, hosted on my NAS. In order to get it up and running, I installed the pretty-much-one-click-install-package that is available in Package Center. Works like a charm! For sure, the response rates of my webserver weren’t always super fast but hey, since this was mostly a hobby-project, nobody cared about it. I was happy too until I decided to make some improvements, including the installation of several plugins.

• All the sudden, my WordPress install told me two things:
  The version of WordPress I was running was the latest one available. …

Here are the books I learned a lot from!

Okay, I’ll keep this one short, but I do want to share a quick overview of some of the most valuable books that I have read over the past few months. I’ll admit it straight away that the majority of them are probably known to you by know but that doesn’t mean they still can’t be on my list of favourite books.

Before we dive into the list of books, I do like to mention I have read most of the book below on paper. Although I tried to read ebooks on my iPad for several years, I have recently moved back to paper and started to like it over reading from a screen. Flipping back and forth through pages is easier, it is calmer to the eyes (yes, I promised myself to buy an e-reader sometime sone) and I don’t get distracted that much compared to when I would read on my iPad. …

The topic of this article has been on my list of articles to write for a long time. So, the fact that you are actually seeing this is, to me, quite an achievement. I think the reason it took so long to get it out was because I feel I touch on quite a structural problem in society. Here’s the thing:

I believe today’s western society is structurally broken and individualism is one of the major causes.

When talking about the western society, I am primarily talking about Western Europe and North America, since those are the regions I am most familiar with. …

I know what you’re thinking. Not another COVID-19 blog. Yet, if I drew your attention, feel free to carry on as I describe how I used COVID-19, and the whole working from home period to gear up my life in ways I had not expected.

First of all, I have to admit I sometimes feel left out of the rain while scrolling through Medium. I am an avid productivity geek and read as many productivity-improving articles as one could possibly read. I sometimes wonder if that is pure procrastination or a true journey towards productivity. As I said though, I often feel I am not part of the target group. Typically, the persons that write these productivity and habit related articles seem to be successful independent professionals (or: Entrepreneurs!), in their thirties, without kids, or a mortgage. I am 33 years old of age and happily married to the woman I dearly love, have been with the same employer for over a decade, am also ludicrously in love with our two-year-old son, and two years ago, my wife and I bought the house we want to live in for at least the next 15 to 20 years. But here’s the good news (and why I include this part): we, ‘the ordinary people’ (pun intended), can also do cool stuff. …