Danny McClelland

We've all seen them: those productivity YouTubers with perfectly lit home offices explaining how they maintain "deep work" for 12+ hours a day. They sit there, looking impossibly serene, selling us a vision of superhuman concentration that I've come to believe is complete nonsense. I used to buy into this. I'd feel like a failure when my brain checked out after three solid hours of work. I'd push myself to match these claimed productivity marathons, only to end up exhausted and wondering what w...

We like to believe we’re in control. That privacy is something we can protect if we just check the right boxes, read the fine print, toggle the right settings. But that belief is crumbling. In 2025, privacy isn’t something we manage — it’s something we quietly surrender, one tap, click, and scroll at a time. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much I rely on Google. Not in an abstract way, but in a daily, tangible, everything-I-do-is-somehow-Google-enabled kind of way. Google Photos, for insta...

The line between privacy and security isn’t always clear — and in tech, it’s often treated like they’re the same thing. But they’re not. Security is about control — making sure only authorised people (read: me) can access my data. Privacy is different. It’s about intent. It dictates how that data gets used, and whether the companies that hold it stick to the promises they made. Over the past few months, I’ve been re-evaluating the tools I use daily, nudging my setup toward services that take b...

Tucked away in a parenting book I read nearly two decades ago — title and author long lost to time — was a metaphor that lodged itself in my brain and never left. “Life is a balance, or rather, a juggle of balls. Some are glass. Some are plastic.” The idea is simple but enduring: drop a plastic ball, and it bounces. Drop a glass one, and it shatters. The trick — the real tightrope act — is knowing which is which. Here’s where it gets interesting. The author warned against falling into the t...

Is there some magic in writing every day for 100 days? Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s not quite the right question. A better one might be: What would I hope to get out of writing every day for 100 days? For starters, I’d get better at clarity — saying what I mean without losing the thread halfway through. I’d build speed: less dithering, more straight-from-brain-to-fingers. And maybe, just maybe, I’d find a rhythm. Writing not as a task, but as a mindfulness habit. A check-in. A creative exhale....