Unworking Issue 10 — Optimism is a feature of resilience. Optimistic people are considered better at handling challenging circumstances and setbacks than those who are not. To be optimistic is to feel generally positive about one’s future. It suggests that tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year will be better than today. We…

1st May is International Workers’ Day — Today is 1st May or May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day or Labour Day. It is an annual celebration of labourers and the working class (everyone except the political, financial and corporate elite to me and you). The origins of May Day date back to the European spring…

An extract from the book, Workplace Leadership: A field guide to effective leadership in the contemporary workplace — A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’m working on some new non-fiction titles for self-publication later this year. The first one in the series is Workplace Leadership: A field guide to effective leadership in the contemporary workplace. It is an account of how our concepts of leadership in the…

Unworking Issue 008 — Expanding on a thought on work by author Joan Didion. “I’m not telling you to make the world better because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not…

Unworking Issue 007 — The time I spend in the morning in the kitchen, house empty except for me and the hum of the fridge in the background, is priceless. I fail to take it as my own too often, though, and I fall foul of busyness. …

Unworking Issue 006 — There’s less fat in milk. Slowly but surely, they’ve been stripping it out to the point where we don’t realise their stealth. They call it full-fat, but it’s not. And not every milk supplier gives you the same fat content. I know nothing of the regulations around milk production, but…

Unworking Issue 005 — The Bald Barista, 68 Aungier St, Dublin The Bald Barista is a coffee shop on Aungier Street in Dublin. It’s a small place with seating for about 20 people and a somewhat inefficiently arranged service area to the front. Inefficient because takeaway customers don’t have a reliable flow space in…

Unworking Issue 004 — I am leaving social media behind — for now. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and so on — they wear me out. They are an irritant and a distraction from the important work I should be doing, work that we all should be doing. They take up space in our minds…

A new place to connect and share thoughts and ideas — I just published my first few notes on Substack Notes. It’s a feed, like a social media feed but doesn’t throw ads and other crap at you. It’s early days, but it could be good. …