Ethan Banks

@ecbanks

You Can’t Do Everything, And That’s Okay

| 5 minutes to read

You’re overwhelmed. You become inefficient. You juggle as many tasks as you can, trying to keep all the projects moving, but you spend more than half your time on administrative tasks around the projects. Meetings. Email. Vendor management. Status updates. You struggle to get the deep work done the project demands of your expertise.

It’s happened again. You’re in over your head, a victim of your own competency. It’s all too much. Despite this, your personality puts enormous pressure on yourself to perform, so you’re constantly anxious and short of temper. Your mind is a grim, emotional hellscape of extremes that leaves you and the others in your life exhausted.

What you’re doing is trading in quality of life for sporadic moments of acknowledgement from others. It’s a cheap trade leaving others with the benefits of your work and yourself a used-up mess. You’ve sacrificed physical and mental health and compromised interpersonal relationships…for what, exactly?

Finding Nuance In A Time Of Negative Noise

| 3 minutes to read

I’ve discovered a few folks having nuanced, engaging discussions that attempt to analyze the difficulties of our world honestly and thoroughly. If these sorts of conversations might be interesting to you, here’s what I’ve found so far.

Using AppleScript To Size A Window To 16×9 On MacOS

| 3 minutes to read

As part of an automation workflow I’m building around Elgato Stream Deck, I needed a way to size an application window to 16×9. This would be one component of a workflow that would allow me to launch an app, size the window, position it on the screen, and hide all the other windows with the push of a Stream Deck button. The easy part was the Stream Deck configuration. The hard part was the AppleScript–I had never written one.

My Adventuring YouTube Channel

| < 1 minute to read

I discovered a bunch of video lurking in an archive folder I’d forgotten about, featuring hiking and other adventures. So, I uploaded several of these to my personal YouTube channel featuring mostly the New Hampshire wilderness & mountains. https://www.youtube.com/user/nh48ecb/

Synology Running Out Of Space? Empty The Recycle Bin.

| 2 minutes to read

While performing end-of-year clean up on lab infrastructure, I discovered my 8 disk Synology array with about 22TB of usable storage was almost out of space. Really? What had I filled all that space with? After a lot of digging around, I found that I had enabled the Recycle Bin on one or more Shared Folders, but had NOT created a Recycle Bin emptying schedule. Here’s how to fix that problem.

Opting Out Of Toxic Culture

| 2 minutes to read

When toxicity spills over into my timeline despite my best filtering efforts, my head goes to a bad place. I lose focus on work, finding myself instead brooding on the dark proclamations of the vocal bitter who wield hashtags as cudgels.

The Mythical Eight Hour Workday

| 3 minutes to read

With more days than I want falling into a pattern of working more hours than I’d like, I’ve gotten serious about determining what the problem is. Do I need to turn away projects? Should I hire someone to handle some of the load? Am I not embracing the life of a stereotypical small business owner? Or is this just a matter of being inefficient?

Improve Productivity. Shut Off Notifications. (YouTube)

| < 1 minute to read

Here’s a short car video where I recommend shutting off notifications as a way to increase productivity. Spoiler alert. That’s pretty much the summary of the entire video, so you can save yourself the four minutes. Or…watch it to get the nuance.