Hi Lovely Simplerista,

I've been thinking about deep work recently. The idea is that the really interesting work requires concentrated focus and effort over extended periods of time. Writing a book. Writing software. Creating a great information product, or product of any kind. Writing songs. Learning to sing or play the guitar. Learning to dance.

A lot of things are being automated, but the demand for things that require deep work is greater than ever.

And at the same time, the number of things offering us constant distraction and preventing us from doing deep work is going up, up, up. Email. Facebook. Twitter. iPhones. Snapchat. Open office layouts. We're constantly being interrupted and distracted. Squirrel!

It's one of the things that I really care about and I strive to leave my calendar open with lots of free space to do deep work. Recently, it's become more of a challenge because at the same time I want to work with more people and meet more people, and see coaching clients, and make more connections, and work with my coaches and employees and other helpers, and I still want to exercise, and all of that creates little blocks in my calendar, where we meet and talk, and then more blocks in-between that are just too short to do much deep work in.

So I know pretty soon the pendulum has to swing back and I have to make myself a recluse for a while again. It's just necessary for me to function and for me to achieve the things I want to achieve that I have a pretty sparse calendar.

How are you managing that? Are you honoring the need for time to do deep work? Are you setting the boundaries that you need for yourself, so you have the time? Do you allow yourself to focus and really get into it?

Sometimes we fill up our calendar with busywork so we don't have to get to the really hard part.

Today I was doing co-writing session with someone. I sat down with a complete stranger and tried to write a song with her about something very vulnerable and intimate to me. And many times throughout the session, I could feel that desire to open up Google News or go distract myself, because it was hard. The not knowing what to do or write or say next was painful. The not knowing where this song is headed and how it's going to turn out is uncomfortable. But we need to go through it in order to get to the other side. That's what being creative is all about.

Take a look at your calendar and see if it's time to make a change.

New Features in Simplero

I've completely revamped the way we do video encoding. We used to use a service called zencoder. They were great back in the day, started by a guy named Jonas around the same time I started, back when Simplero was called zenbilling. Seemed like a natural fit. They were always expensive, but they were good and fast. A few years ago, they got bought by Brightcove, a publicly traded company. They did nothing discernible to improve the product, and instead worked hard to lock their customers into long-term contracts and meet quarterly financial goals for themselves. Needless to say it wasn't a setup I was happy with.

So I was really happy when I realized this whole video encoding business isn't all that hard. There's an open source software package called ffmpeg that everybody uses. It's pretty much the only game in town. And it's free to use. All I had to do was figure out exactly how to configure and use it, and then get the fastest server that Amazon has to offer so the encodings run as fast as possible. That's what I did, and over the weekend we switched to the new encoding system. Bye-bye Brightcove. So glad to give you the boot.

The good news is that it allows us to do much better quality encoding, now that we control it ourselves. I can automatically detect Call Recorder for Skype type videos, which has two separate audio channels, and merge them into one, so you don't have to run the video through their encoder first.

I also spent quite some time using Carsten Borch's slides (hello, Carsten), to test out which of the scaling algorithms ffmpeg offers gives the sharpest, most readable text. That's the thing about rolling our own solution. Our use-case is much more likely to be a powerpoint presentation with text you want people to read than the average video. So someone like zencoder is not going to optimize for our use-case. But I can.

I'm also encoding to HLS now, which is the streaming format that iOS devices can use. We didn't do that before, because it would simply be much to expensive. But now we have pretty much a fixed cost structure versus a variable one before, so we can afford the luxury. We're not using them yet for playback, but we will be soon.

And then yesterday, I changed a small thing, and it took the whole process down. I ended up spending hours with Amazon's customer service trying to track down why their system behaved so strangely, and found out. It's always the things that you don't even think could be an issue at all that end up killing ya.

Also, you can now use external landing pages for your 1-click upsells.

Random Links from Around the Interwebs

The big story this week is Apple vs. the FBI on whether we have a right to security and privacy or not. Make no mistake. It is not possible to devise a system that lets the "good guys" circumvent security without also letting "bad guys" do the same. Can't be done. If Apple loses this one, it means we fundamentally cannot trust that we can secure out data from anyone. You can probably tell where I stand on this. The internet is such an insecure place. We need as strong encryption as we can get.

John Oliver takes on US abortion laws.

Billboard top hip hop through time.

Lots of love,
–Calvin