Looking back at my twitter history (mainly links to GIFs and frivolous comments) and delicious (nothing of substance) I turned to my Readability list (just articles).

I’ve done posts in the past (https://paulrandall.com/2010/01/23/condensed-type-1/ and https://paulrandall.com/2012/04/25/linkspiration/) that collate what I have consumed over the week, and I think it is much better way of documenting what is going on, because otherwise I just forget!

I watched a talk by Gavin Strange (@jamfactory) http://vimeo.com/61248847 where he had a page full of things that interested/inpired him recently. Braun watches, old sticker packets and wicked-awesome camera rigs. I’d like to play with creating one of these a week/month as a visual representation for the things that I have consumed.

The notifications bing, ring and flash. All techniques to draw your attention away from your actual ‘work’.

This isn’t a one-way thing either. We are all guilty of these.

An answer to help improve the environment: Don’t have these systems notify you. Turn them off, and only turn them on when it suits you. Is your second screen used for email and IM? Use it for something else.

Seclude yourself if possible. Close a door, find a quiet space, put some headphones on. It’ll reduce office distractions even more. Plus, you’ll ‘look’ busier and people may be less likely to come over and distract you. I’ve used this technique in the past with great effect.

You see that sign, you don’t disturb that person. Feel the wrath if you do, like a spectator stopping a marathon runner!

Meetings are harder to avoid, and probably the subject for another time. The only advatage to these are that they are scheduled so you can plan your productive time around them.

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

I think this ex-Googler has it spot on: You can’t force people to use your stuff. How many of us have a Google account? And how many times did we use Google Wave, or Google+?

Giving Google some credit, they saw Google Wave was a complete flop and scrapped it; something Kevin Rose’s company Milk did today with Oink. Having only launched 3 months ago, they have decided to shut the service down for good.

Scrapping things takes guts (and a ton of money) but ultimately admitting you are wrong and moving on is a better thing to do then leaving it to turn into a ghost town.

Now I must state that as primarily a designer, the developer role doesn’t come as easy to me. The main reason I use WordPress on this blog is that is was so quick and easy to set up.

However with speed being a major factor with mobile web, Google rankings and the complexity of WordPress, I’m pretty sure that a billy-basic CMS would load a lot quicker. But do people really care?

Reality probably means that I’ll stick with WordPress, upgrade to v3 and be able to write blog posts like I am now on my iPhone.

So, have you ever written your own CMS, or wanted to, or do you think that off-the-shelf systems are more than capable?