Life with Tim

 I'm trying out Substack for my leadership ideas and practices, have a look! I'll still share posts here that don't fit into my leadership practices. https://open.substack.com/pub/timlevett  

 I run in a racing league for Sim Racing in Assetto Corsa called ACRL for the TTL Racing team. The team was co-founded by myself and Tony L. The next season of AC is going back in time to the mid-90s and we are going to be touring the BTCC , touring cars! I set out for a 60 minute test session to try out these cars, here is my debrief. Note that I didn't tune the car for Blackwood other than adjusting the final gear so I didn't have a boring back stretch. BMW - Oversteering by default, felt very similar to the BMW M4 as far as oversteer, overall easy to control and predictable, 1.53L/lap, 1:17.151 after 15 minutes of lapping. Felt confident I could go a wee bit faster. S40 - Traditional gearbox, makes shifting with pedals a little awkward, but do-able. Good handling feels quick and predictable. 1.5L/Lap, 1:16.430 after 20 minutes. Fun to drive. 10kg added weight for BoP. Primera - What a POS - honestly. It oversteers under braking like a dog, it has 15kg of weight, probably in ...

It happened again. I missed something critical on Slack—a message buried beneath the flood of notifications that should have been front and center. This was the wake-up call I needed. Despite all the efforts to stay organized, Slack’s constant stream of notifications, unread messages, and channels I don’t even remember joining were drowning out the important stuff. Sound familiar? That’s when I turned to an old, yet effective, decision-making tool: Eisenhower’s Matrix . You may know it as the framework that helps prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance, separating what's truly critical from what can wait—or what shouldn’t even be on your plate at all. But how does this tool apply to Slack? Let me explain. Understanding Eisenhower’s Matrix If you’re not familiar, the Eisenhower Matrix categorizes tasks into four quadrants: Urgent and Important : Do it now. Important but Not Urgent : Schedule it for later. Urgent but Not Important : Delegate it. Neither Urgent nor Important ...

Together with the coffee-at-tea expert, ChatGPT, as the expert witness to the effects, both positive and warnings, minus the funny bits, like figuring out how to do the 💩emoji 🤣. 1 & 7. Yerba Mate Loosely translated by some Argentinians as "The Herb". This savory tea beverage is not for those who need that sugar rush in the morning, but enjoy the smoky flavor of a dark tea. Yerba has about the same level of caffeine as your standard cup of joe, but without the shakiness that comes with your double-pump latte from the Bux. Yerba water is set to the same as the green tea setting on the #3 temperature-controlled water heater, also known as 175F. That water heater is amazing, it even has a button that says "hold temp", which when pressed, keeps the temp steady for up to 30 minutes. Brilliant. You then take the hot water and pour it slowly over the herb that is in the mate cup pointed to in 7.1. If you are on the go you can pour it into the thermos with the Grafana...

  I love a good todo list, and I’ve tried a lot of apps, and none of them stuck, until I found Google Tasks. I think it stuck, unlike the others, because Grafana uses Google Business Suite. Google Tasks is an application that is fully embedded with all other Google work suite products (docs, gmail, sheets, slides, etc…) and it’s very powerful! I wanted to write a small post about it to share what I’ve found useful. Tasks is available in the right sidebar of most Google Applications: When you click that icon then a new sidebar appears, you can quickly add tasks manually, like every other todo list. The little arrow circle is a way you can set tasks as recurring. Need a way to remember to fill out your TPS report every Friday, here ya go. You can also make multiple lists, if you want to do that. I’ve found it’s useful to just have 1 for work and 1 for personal stuff but everyone is different here. Google Docs Integration In google docs, Tasks is also embedded.  By clicking that ...

 In the more global world that we live in, people are not only working remotely, but people are working across the globe and critically across many time zones. Due to our global reach even within a team, we have less daylight that we share with our coworkers. In the past, I’ve been part of very successful remote standups, but I noticed they only really work well if you are in close time zones. If you only have 1 hour of overlap with your coworker, do you really want to be going over high-level status with your broader team? I’ve asked my teams about this, and I got a very loud “NO!” We all use Slack as a communication tool, so I started an experiment with a team where a bot posts in the channel at the beginning of the earliest person on the team’s day. It asks a few simple questions: @team-name welcome to today and good morning! What did you work on yesterday? What are you intending to work on today? What blockers do you have on your priorities? What help do you need? As people tri...