Active Projects
Fields of Work
Sam and Max are brothers. One is the oldest. The other is the youngest. One is a corporate consultant. The other one is an organic farmer. What’s up with that? They talk about it on their podcast, Fields of Work.
A brotherly exploration into the world of work, deliberate attention, and living a meaningful life.
The Deliberate
The Deliberate was a weekly-ish newsletter that delved into attention and what it means to cultivate it, protect it, and generally treat it like the scarce resource that it is. It’s currently on hiatus.
Curiosity Conversations
I try to hold a couple of open hours each week to talk to anyone about anything. They tend to be about some combination of the future of work, org design, positive psychology, The Ready, hockey, or consulting but I’m up for whatever. You can book time with me here.
Retired Projects
The Ready’s Newsletter
I used to write The Ready’s newsletter every week. Now, I basically oversee someone else who writes it much better than I ever did. Does that make me a manager? Am I moving up in the world? Or do I represent everything that’s wrong with the modern organization? Oh God.
Anyway, the archive of newsletters I wrote back in the day is Very Good and the current version is Even Better. You should sign up if you care about making the future of work better.
The File Drawer podcast
In 2014 Eric Middleton and Sam Spurlin were PhD students in organizational behavior and organizational psychology. They decided to do a podcast, The File Drawer, that was nominally about what they were learning, studying, and researching. As is often the case, the podcast took on a bit of a life of its own and ended up spanning 63 episodes across roughly two years. The podcast is no longer active development, but the entire archive is available by searching for “The File Drawer” in your podcast player of choice or by clicking the link below.
The Year of Mundane
I was tired of perfectly curated and manicured social media accounts so I decided to take pictures of really boring and totally mundane things instead. I called it the Year of Mundane. It was surprisingly fun. You can follow me on Instagram here. I don’t really use it much, though.
Getting History Done
I read a lot of biographies. I used to take excerpts from those biographies where the author would describe how people worked and I put them on a Tumblr. I called it Getting History Done. It was fun, but I packed up this project many years ago and moved on to new things.
Odd Man Rush
In 2017 I decided to try to write a recap of every single Red Wing game along with a little personal snippet of my own hockey playing life and I called it Odd Man Rush. I only made it 29 games in but I’m actually pretty happy with what I was able to create. I plan on adding future hockey writing to this publication, too.