Week 3: Getting to know Our Members, Largo, and Better Productivity

This week I spent a lot of time on our member sites getting to know our members and the work they’re producing. There is a lot of fantastic journalism happening here!

Member Stories

I found the Sunlight Foundation asking readers to "Help us find political dark money in your state”. I found Mongabay reporting on illegally sourced lumber from Peru. I even found journalism directly influencing policy in PineTreeWatchdog’s piece on "State to reconsider hiding oil train data" - and that’s just 3 articles out of the hundreds of stories that our members are reporting on each week!

Largo

In addition to diving into our member sites, I’ve also been getting more acquainted with our Largo theme framework that’s powering a lot of these news sites.

As I explore how our members and community users are using Largo to build their news sites, I’m gaining a lot of insight and ideas for the future of Largo. You’ll likely see my name pop up a lot more in the Largo github repo in the coming weeks, but in the meantime if you have any ideas or feedback for Largo, I’d love hear them!

Working Remotely

Il_pomodoroI’ve been really enjoying the transition to remote work, but I also spent a lot of time reading about the pros and cons before I jumped in. The one thing I read over and over again about working remotely is the importance of planning your day with structure. While I’ve tried to keep a decent schedule for starting and ending the workday, I did find that I felt like I needed a little more structure. To help, I turned back to a strategy I had tried out a few months ago - the Pomodoro Technique.

The Pomodoro Technique has you break up tasks into 25-minute segments, and schedules short breaks in-between to give your brain a chance to rest and recharge. The idea here is that you can heighten your focus during your work times, and compile your distractions and the mental rest you need into a smaller window, resulting in much higher productivity. I’ve been trying this out for a few days and it’s really helped - even just in allowing me to better plan how long I’ll spend on each task. If you’ve never heard of the Pomodoro Technique, or have but haven’t tried it out yourself, I’d highly recommend it!