It’s the height of hubris to assume that your contribution is so valuable that you’re too good for the other levels of civic society and *have* to go right for the top job.

The Presidency is not a place to cut your teeth in politics. If you want to contribute to society, there’s lots of places you can start off. Run for council, work at a NGO, heck run for the Dáil if you want.

It’s reasonable to say that it’s perhaps too hard to get on the ballot for President in Ireland, but I think it’s also reasonable to say that constitutionally the highest office in the land, and maybe it should be hard to get on that ballot.

It also subtlety elevates these non-runner candidates to the same level as people with a reasonable chance of winning, which then means realistic candidates are forced by the media to engage with the talking points of these fringe candidates.

It’s giving airtime to people who are doing it solely to get airtime and I doubt ever actually believed they realistically were going to win the election.

It’s hard to describe how much of a step up from my old approach of markdown files and google docs this is. It’s what I imagine having a chief of staff is like.

If that sounds appealing to you, sign up below so you’re first to get access when I roll out these features soon.

clonra.com

Finally, if someone asks me about a specific project or workstream, I have a chat interface where I can ask questions of my logs, and Clonra will answer me with links to the relevant log.

Whenever I need a summary of the last week/month/quarter or whatever, I can run a summary action and it will produce one in a few seconds.

Every day at 5pm, Clonra sends me a reminder to log. I spend 5 minutes writing down a summary of my day. Notable actions, things to follow up on, things I learned. Clonra then parses the log, and identifies concrete action items based on what I’ve written.

I’m talking about pro/semi-pro photographers here. Obviously Facebook and Instagram ate their lunch for random party snaps long ago.

That roundabout doesn’t look all that complicated to me, unless I’m missing something massive…