The living contradiction is a concept I first encountered in my days as a teacher. Through my professor and friend Tom Russell I learned of Jack Whitehead, who was very interested in action research, reflective practice and living educational theory.

Jack talks about experiencing oneself as a living contradiction — when we experience our actions being at odds with our beliefs and values — as the impetus to improve. When we experience that feeling, we are motivated to act. To change. To iterate.

This is different than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the when we pretend to have certain beliefs and values, when we don’t really have them. With hypocrisy, we are lying.

A living contradiction, however, is about the truth. Finding a way to live true to what we believe — both personally and professionally.

Feeling the Pain

In the final two months of 2009, I did precisely the opposite of what I should have been doing. In October, I wrote two posts “What Gives?” and “Needs More Whitespace” — both of which explored the need to give things up, to slow down, to create space in our personal and professional lives in order to achieve a better balance between the personal and professional parts of our lives as part of long term “success” and happiness.

I wrote the words, but I couldn’t live the ideals. I slept less per night than I had for the last 2.5 years. I didn’t log my hours of sleep, but I know that more often than not, my alarm woke me only 3 or 4 hours after my head hit the pillow. Not healthy.

I believe, like Jack, that I can make a positive change after feeling and experiencing this dissonance. Feeling it so acutely is certainly more than enough to provoke me. I need to reflect, plan, act and evaluate. I am a living contradiction, and I’m okay with that, as long as I do something about it.

What are you doing — right now — that shows you are a living contradiction? What are you going to do to make a change to bring your actions in line with your ideals and beliefs?

We both need to change this now, while we’re still in the tone-setting, habit-building infancy of 2010.

Know your banker. That kind of changed in the era of electronic banking. I didn’t need to actually go into the bank did I? We have drive thru banking/ATMs everywhere. Just let me stay in my car, drive thru and carry on with my day — I’m extremely busy, dontcha know?

The Inconvenience of Convenience

It all worked well. Until ATM deposits started having a hold on the funds until they could actually be verified.

This bothered me to no end — the electronic transactions that are supposed to travel at the speed of electrons were actually slowing things down. It meant that I got access to money later rather than sooner.

So I talked to my bank’s manager about it one day, and she explained to me how it worked. And now, every time I have a cheque, I take in to see the real, live people that work at the bank. Because they know who I am. They can see my banking history. They can ask me if I’ve had cheques from that particular client before or if they are a new account. They can look me in the eyes and we can TALK.

That’s something that a machine can’t do.

Going Backward to Move Forward

The electronic has become (or maybe always has been) impersonal.

So I need to take it back to the beginning. Talk with my banker. Take an extra 30 minutes to have a face to face chat with clients about new ideas for their businesses and ours. Take 30 minutes to pick up the phone and talk with friends that run other businesses — yes, some will be with friends that in similar businesses to us, but some will be with those that are most definitely NOT in the web design/development or UX business.

As a business owner, as part of my business strategy, one of my big goals for 2010 is simply this: spend more time talking with people face to face or over the telephone instead of via email.

Your life needs more whitespace. You told me so in your comments on “What Gives?” When you have no whitespace in your life — like a design — it doesn’t feel right. Crowded. Sub-optimal. You can get the job done, but something just doesn’t feel right.

To create more whitespace in a design, we take things away. We create margins. Padding. We add more line-spacing. How can we do that in our lives?

Quit working through lunch. I’m not talking about time here. I’m talking about the activity. Stop eating your lunch at your computer. You may need to eat at your computer once in a while, but when it becomes every meal of every day, a vital part of your whitespace is gone.

Meetings take up your whitespace. Get rid of any that you can. Yes, other people have written this before. I write it here because I feel the sharp pains of them being right. And if you can’t get rid of them, work hard to avoid back to back to back meetings.

Boxes must go. You know how you want to draw attention to something in a design? You draw a box around it. Then, you want to draw attention to something else and you draw a box around it too. Pretty soon everything has a box around it. And when everything has a box around it, nothing does. Don’t draw attention to or separate various aspects of your life with boxes. Separate them with whitespace.

The beauty of whitespace is contrast. Whitespace accentuates contrasting elements and allows them to stand out based on what they are and aren’t, rather than what visual treatment they have to make them stand out.

Like the elements of a great design the elements of your life don’t need a visual treatment. They just need some room to stand on their own. The elements of your life need more whitespace.

A few weeks ago I was feeling particularly rough about what direction life was headed between work, friends, our crazy passion for endurance events as a hobby, family, and everything else that needs to find a place in our lives. I actually felt like things might have been unraveling at the seams.

So I asked a very simple question on Twitter — are we all just burning out?

The responses people posted had one common thread: YES. Either people were feeling that they were burning out, or that they were already there, or were actually engaged in achieving multiple burnout.

Like it is normal. An expectation of our industry.

That is not acceptable.

I’m tired of seeing my friends across the globe at the wrong times. I shouldn’t be awake and neither should they! My friends on the west coast of North America? If you’re still awake and working at 3am when I’m waking up at 6 or 7 am, then something is wrong. Those in the UK and Europe? When I’m doing a bit of extra work at 9pm at night and its 3am for you? Not cool. My Kiwi and Aussie friends? Get. To. Bed.

I was honoured to speak at Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand in February this year. I was incredibly motivated by Mike Brown’s words. I’m paraphrasing, but Mike’s  opening address resonated with me:

The work we are doing on the web is critically important. We’re working at building the most important communications network in history. What we do today matters. It matters for today, for tomorrow, forever – and it deserves our very best work. We owe it to each other, to ourselves, to everyone.

Doing our best means not burning out. That should be the accepted norm in our industry.

If you’re burning out (yes, I’m talking to you) something has to give — because if it doesn’t, we won’t be producing our best work. Be conscious in your choice of what gives though — if it is family, personal health and well-being, or our relationships with friends, we’re in a lot of trouble. Those are supposed to be the most important things. It seems that they are the ones that we take for granted or sacrifice first.

Over the past few months I’ve realized that the sacrifices I have made haven’t always been the right ones — partly because I’m conflicted. I’m sure we all feel this pressure in some way: in order to provide for my family I feel more pressure for the business to do more — take on more work, expand what we’re doing, have more income so that I can provide more comfort, more food, more whatever. more. more. more. But at the end of the day, it just feels like less and less and less.

I don’t know what everyone else is feeling right now, but I know where I am. So the question is, what gives? I have no clue. But it can’t be family or me. Those are the wrong things to compromise. I owe family and me, my very best, because what I do with them, matters.

It was this:

When this piece first arrived in the mail, I looked at the time (1:59:18), but didn’t think much of it. Then I read the text below it:

Derek,

This is not just any time. It is yours. A time that represents your goals, your determination, your journey. A time that represents a destination reached in May 2008.

Now the question is: What will your time be in 2009?

Oh! That’s my time! Brilliant. You got me. Count me in.

Why? I think it is because this piece speaks directly to me — not just that it is addressed to me, and personalized with my name and time. But it speaks directly to what motivates me as an athlete. They hit this on the head with their copy: “your goals, your determination, your journey” and then the call to action — the implied invitation to register — “What will your time be in 2009?” They really know how to push the right buttons!

This simple mailout really nails it as far as I’m concerned. If you can think of any other examples off hand, I’d love to know about them. It doesn’t need to be about direct marketing copy either, it could be anything.

You can donate via the Australian Red Cross.

The fine folks at SitePoint have put together a significant deal whereby you can purchase 5 PDF versions of SitePoint books for the price of one. This really is a great deal and an opportunity to learn more about creating a better web for everyone.

After having just come back from Web Directions North and the complementary Education focused Ed Directions North, my mind is buzzing with education. Teaching and learning best practices for web design and development has been my passion for the last 10 years. It only seems logical to combine these two things together.

I donated online via the Australian Red Cross, but I thought maybe there was something more we could do via the SitePoint book sale. I have many of those books though — either because I bought my own copy or was involved in reviewing them or making other contributions. So, to support both the Australian relief efforts and education of the next generation of professionals, I just tweeted that the next 12 students/teachers to tell me which book you need and where you teach/go to school its on me.

The first one goes to William Price III (despite the fact that his name includes Roman numerals! just kidding. not really. ok, yes, I’m kidding), who replied by tweet. He’s an Interactive Media student at Art Institute International Minnesota in Minneapolis and he chose “Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS” by my friend Ian Lloyd (I’m not just saying that either, he really is a friend!).

So, if you’re a student or a teacher in need of resources on doing things the right way, the SitePoint books are a great start, and for 11 more people, they’re on me. Get in touch, leave a comment below or reply back to me on Twitter.

I took some water from the shower into my mouth and spat it out. It didn’t feel right. I did it again — still, didn’t feel right. I couldn’t quite place what was different, and carried on. As I exited the shower, Kathryn handed me a glass of juice. I brought the glass to my lips and took a sip, at which point I found myself covered in OJ. Something was wrong. I thought that maybe my face was just asleep — similar to when a foot, or hand falls asleep. I tried to tell Kathryn something was wrong, but I couldn’t speak properly.

The entire left side of my head from the neck up was completely paralyzed. No movement. Nothing at all.

I remembered at the visitation the night before telling my best friend in the entire world, Graham Turner, and my family that I felt a bizarre headache behind my left ear. It wasn’t like any headache I’d felt before, but I didn’t have any other way to describe it. And why was it behind my left ear? I attributed it simply to me being tired and stressed and thought nothing more of it. Until the next morning when I thought I had experienced a stroke.

It took me three months away from my full-time, high school teaching job to recover from what was termed Bell’s Palsy. The doctors said my immune system was vulnerable due to lack of sleep, and several other factors. When Granny passed away, my body wasn’t able to properly fight a viral infection I had picked up, and my 7th cranial nerve was completely destroyed — eaten through by what must have been the most carnivorous virus known to humans.

Eventually I got better and was able to return to teaching. But really, from that point on, I questioned everything about what was important in life and what I wanted to do with mine. With great clarity I pronounced that relative health is one of our most precious gifts, and that I was going to take steps to ensure that I held on to mine.

And with that I left teaching to start my own business — first, as a contract trainer (putting my teaching background to good use was a logical first step) and, second, as a web developer to scratch that itch I initially felt when I was building web based resources for colleagues and students starting in about 1994.

I simply wouldn’t be where I am today if Granny hadn’t passed away ten years ago, on January 20th, 1999. Her passing was, quite literally, a life-changing experience.

As I sit here, in Toronto, my father’s mother (we called her Nen-nen) having just passed away early in the morning on January 23rd, 2009 (almost 10 years to the day after Granny died) I can’t help but wonder what the next ten years will hold for each of us.

Not only do I have the ability to view my Flickr photos through the Apple TV, but also those of my contacts. At the time, I simply thought “cool!” and went to the list of my contacts.

First up? Ben Buchanan, who I’d just had the chance to see at Web Directions South. I pushed play to view a slideshow of Ben’s photos from Web Directions South. The photoset starts playing and is set to music — I didn’t realize it would do that, but the tune seems very appropriate: Three Little Birds from Sean Paul and Ziggy Marley (“Don’t worry… ’bout a thing… ‘cos every little thing… is gonna be alright”). As the photos play, I see my friends. I see Ben. I see Chaals. Lisa and Lisa and Lachlan, John and Maxine, Scott and Cheryl. My head and heart both started racing.

Next up was Jeremy Keith. Scrolling through his sets I see dConstruct 2008 and push play. I see photos of speakers, attendees, conference organizers — and friends in each category. It starts happening again. I see Jessica, Paul Duncan, Andy Budd, James Box and more. Heart racing, fitting with the music. What is happening?

I need to see something else.

I get down to the J’s. And I find Jason Santa Maria.

I push play. It happens again. The music is perfect. Iris, from the Goo Goo Dolls.

Picture this: a Ryan Irelan flap ‘n snap comes across the screen and the lyrics play… “And I don’t want the world to see me, because I don’t think that they’d understand.” Yes, it was perfect.

And then it happens. Again. Jason Santa Maria, frozen in my TV, staring at me as I’m sitting on the couch. In all his flap ‘n snap glory, Jason sings to me: “I just want you to know who I am…”

I completely froze.

Partly because it was a great flap ‘n snap, but mostly in the realization that this experience was something completely different than any photo browsing I’d ever done before. I wasn’t in front of my computer — my usual conduit to my friends. I was in my family room.

Family room. Where I sit and watch movies with my wife and three children. Where we LIVE.

And I realize that for the past 20 minutes, I’ve been immersed in the lives of my friends, but in my home. Not at a conference at some far reaching corner of the world. I’m in my home. And my friends are there with me.

After a week we’d decided to get a new dishwasher. We researched the various brands, and then models within the brand to find the best features for us.

• adjustable top rack
• extra quiet operation
• tall tub model to allow us to put in our larger water jugs and sport water bottles
• stainless steel tub (we’d stained our last one something horrible)

Yes, this model cost a bit more, but there was no doubt that it was the right one for us.

Installation

Installing it was a pain, but we finally got it setup and ready to go. Proudly I open the dishwasher door to fill it with the breakfast dishes I’d purposely set aside for her maiden voyage. I reach down with a plate to put it in the rack. And then it hits me.

I can see it so clearly now, the dishwasher is packed with the features we wanted and needed. The allure of the shiny newness of it all was blinding. The price was right. But it fails the simplest test of all: it doesn’t fit our dishes.

They just. Don’t. Fit. No matter which combination of direction and adjustable racks, they simply don’t fit. Nor do our bowls. If ever we shop for a dishwasher again, I will take some of our dishes with me to the store to try it out first.

The obvious solution, now that it is installed, paid for, and we’ve committed to that entire line of appliances? Buy new dishes, of course.

I can’t help but feel an uncanny parallel to buying software — all the way from the initial need, to doing things by hand and being frustrated by all the small details, to the research, to the unfulfilled needs with something that is feature-rich, gorgeous to look at, but just doesn’t fix the problem that we were originally trying to solve.