Breather Planner A monthly planner with space for notes

The 2019 edition of the Breather Planner is ready in both English and French. Get a month’s view on an aspect of your life, or on all of it.

Sharpen.page A Product Sharpening Service, based on the Jobs-To-Be-Done Toolkit

Coming soon, be notified when it’s announced

Bloop, Bloop, Shop! A tweaking service for your Shopify Store.

I’m offering a tweaking service to make your Shopify Store faster to load.

The Change Anything Kit Learn two mental reprogramming techniques I use, or let’s have a call

If it’s up to you to make that important change happen, I offer coaching and learning material to help you prepare to make that change happen. Learn more

My work

• Product Development - focusing a product or service using Jobs-To-Be-Done
• Coaching - preparing your impact on changing a situation
• Web Development - improving the performance of e-commerce sites

Previous work

Before my move to freelancing I was at the startup called FarmLead, a marketplace for farmers to sell their grain. My role was in leading a re-design of the application (Web, Android, iOS) and in re-writing the web app.

Before that, I worked at the University of Ottawa. I helped bring user-centered design thinking. I did that by supporting the web development community by giving talks, by building tools like the central web templates and by writing documentation. I also built apps and web sites there too. In the last years, I was at the Faculty of Medicine where I directed the creation of Learn.med, an online learning platform.

Some of my beliefs

• Design is best when done in tandem with the implementation. Knowing the limits of the material you work with makes for a better design.
• There’s a particular urgency to surpass ourselves and to become mature about our choices, so that we know how to handle the fast pace of life.
• Most times when we hit an either/or mindset, there’s usually a third way.
• We’re complicated people, and we’re full of paradoxes. Learning to bridge those paradoxes helps us be better with others.
• There’s a way to achieve multiple things at once, so long as you ruthlessly put things in the right order. That way, the first thing will feed into the second one and into the third, and all the way down, letting you achieve them all.
• To-do lists are only a little helpful, because they’re usually written as wish-for lists. I found that writing have-done lists to be the most helpful kind of list to write.

Areas of interest

My main areas of interest are:

• The Jobs-To-Be-Done theory, which is on what causes people to purchase a product. I gave a talk on May 25 on the Jobs-To-Be-Done theory;
• Personal development coaching

When building products, I use these technologies: For crafting web interfaces, I’ve been really liking Stimulus (see a presentation I gave) and Vue.js (see presentation about that one too). When using Wordpress, I use the lovely Roots kit (see presentation). When the site I’m building is small or if I’m doing prototyping work, Jekyll is my go-to static-site generator. When designing, I prefer building real UIs through code, and I use Sketch for mocking them up.

What I value most

• I value being intentional and thorough, getting to the bottom of things and doing the right thing. Going deep brings joy.
• I value starting small, iterating, doing what matters, betting on the long-haul and respecting the natural rhythm of things. Instead of taking a big ambitious bite out of life, why not bet on what will always be true, like the power of compound interest and doing stuff that’s a little scary but at your level?
• In relationships, I value authenticity, complicity, openness and truth. Open up. It’s scary but it matters.
• And I value improving myself and making a good environment for others to grow in. Stepping on some toes? Better to step on your own first.

A blog on modern Christianity

In this care for growth and relationships and depth, I continue to be drawn to Christianity. Although deeply skeptical, I joyfully believe. Learning to bridge modernity and faith has been good for me, and so I write a blog on Leading a modern life while living the Gospel, sharing the ways for achieving both, fully. Let’s grow towards more maturity, and to a more subtle faith.

Here are a few articles from the blog:

• Surviving a crisis of faith and living the Gospel fully
• God, cocreator
• Away from the family
• Go deep in everything
• Free your beliefs

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Lecteurs français: le blogue est également disponible en français. De plus, j’ai créé le site lectures.page, offrant les lectures du dimanche qui vient du missel romain (textes de l’AELF), utile pour une lecture personnelle ou pour des partages bibliques de groupe.

In closing, two questions I think are helpful

These questions help me stay true, and they help me make good choices. I hope they’re useful to you too:

1. What am I so convinced of? Any time I feel conflicted, agitated, or that my options are limited, I inspect and identify my mental models, those invisible lenses through which we distort how we see reality. I make it a habit to put my finger on my mental models, so I drive them and they don’t drive me. Every time I did this, I was able to solve the right problem, build the right thing, and help people in the way they needed the help. And the second question is:
2. What will I be celebrating? Instead of writing lists of things to do, or of things I want to achieve, I write lists of things I’ll have achieved in a future place in time. I call these have-done lists. That subtle change of position helps me visualize what’s essential, what’s central and what to ship first, and also what’s a distraction and what to ignore until after that date. To write these lists, I use Taskmator for iOS and Taskpaper for Mac with a custom stylesheet.

Hope they help.

Thanks for reading

What about you? What do you care about? What are you working on? What are your tricks? Let me know: I’m @pascallaliberte on Twitter.