Easy travel, finishing a book, and avoiding interruptions

Welcome!

This is an email I send to keep in touch with people and share a bit about what I'm doing and thinking about.

This month, I'm:

• Finishing my book
• Not answering the phone
• Making travel easier

You're receiving this monthly email because you signed up for it at robdix.com, or you opted in after reading my book The Price Of Money, or I added you manually because we've spoken one-to-one.

If you don't enjoy it, feel free to unsubscribe at the bottom – I won't be notified and I'll never even know!

📗 OMG my book is DONE

I can barely believe it, but my next book is DONE. I'd love to tell you the title and what it's about, but that's a "key event" in a "campaign" so I can't do that until my Gantt chart says it's time. Bestsellers don't just happen by themselves, y'know.

What I can tell you is that I've learned from my previous mistakes and made very sure of two things in the edit:

• There's nothing that ties the book to a certain time, or refers to rules/rates/ situations that may change. Having felt the pain of writing three books that I need to update every year, it's "timeless principles" only from now on.
• It comes across as a global rather than British book, so my agent has an easier time selling the rights overseas. I even cut an excellent joke about Hamleys.

It looks like it'll be coming out in January, which is a mercifully short run-up by publishing standards – "mercifully" because the promo stage is not one I enjoy. I'm trying to figure out which activities will generate the best return on effort so I can focus on those, rather than going nuts doing absolutely everything.

If you have any book launch experience, can intro me to someone who does or have any insights about where you tend to hear about new books, I'd love to hear from you!

I love my editor because he leaves comments about the bits he found funny, to soften the blow of all the much more frequent "didn't you just say all this?" and "you've lost me" parts.

☀️ My top tips for travel with kids

We've just got back from a couple of weeks in Bilbao. Overall city rating: meh. But big plus points for great museums, possibly the best public transport of any city we've visited, extreme cheapness, and (the unexpected highlight) the Athletic Bilbao stadium tour.

In response to a reader question my wife and I brainstormed our top "travel with kids" tips, which seem worth sharing here:

• For the airport, we alway pay for fast-track security, speedy boarding, and anything else that can get us through faster. Then we book a lounge (through Priority Pass) to load up on snacks while waiting.

• On the flight, when we had a baby we always bought an extra seat even though kids under 2 fly free on your lap. Having more space to spread out was totally worth it, especially for the under-seat space (saves competing for the overhead bins).

• Airbnbs or home exchanges that are already set up for kids are the best. In Bilbao we stayed in a place where they had kids the same age as ours, so they had a whole bunch of toys to keep them busy.

• If the place we’re staying doesn’t have toys already, we get them delivered in advance to a local shop or Amazon locker. We then leave them for the next people, or donate them through a local group.

• We book a grocery order to arrive when we do – or ideally beforehand if someone is available to take delivery – to avoid that dreaded first "big shop".

• For trips longer than a week, we get a babysitter for every afternoon (through a local agency or app). That way we can get work done in the afternoon, and do family activities in the mornings.

Don't worry Watford, you'll always be my #1 – but I do have a soft spot for Los Leones now.

☎️ My foolproof method for avoiding phone calls

The last time I heard my phone ring was January 2023. That's when I decided to put my phone on silent as an experiment... and as nothing bad happened, I never went back.

(In fact, the other day I turned notifications on because I was expecting something super important, and when it pinged my whole family looked around in confusion trying to work out where the noise came from.)

Here's my setup:

1. No voicemail. If someone can't leave a message and they really want to get in touch, they'll follow up with a text. I've never been remotely inconvenienced by not having voicemail.
2. Ringer silenced. I use the little switch on the side of the iPhone to have it permanently silenced, BUT...
3. Starred contacts. There's an "emergency bypass" option to allow the phone to ring for starred contacts even if it's silenced or in Do Not Disturb mode – so my mum, wife and business partner get VIP treatment.
4. Do Not Disturb. To save turning off notifications for every app, I just have my phone in permanent DND.
5. Google incoming calls. If I happen to spot my phone ringing and it's a number I don't know, I quickly Google it. If it comes up as something I want to answer (like the doctor) I do. If it comes up as something spammy, I'll block – and if it doesn't come up at all, I ignore it and see if anyone follows up.

Result: I check my phone whenever I feel like it, and don't get interrupted unless it's by one of the three people I'm happy to be interrupted by.

🔗 Odds and ends

• I'm preparing for a half marathon, which isn't going badly considering I miscounted my weeks and started training six weeks into a fourteen week programme 🤦‍♂️ The aim of signing up was to force myself to do some cardio – so in that respect it's already been a success.

• For hard-to-explain reasons, our electricity at home was randomly disconnected and I spent at least eight hours on the phone to Scottish Power over the course of a couple of weeks trying to permanently sort it out. From a business owner perspective, the striking aspect has been the lack of uniformity in knowledge: everyone I've spoken to has known random different pieces of information which I've had to piece together to figure out the underlying problem and solution myself. I don't blame them – it's hard – but maybe in future AI will be able to mine everyone's call recordings, then listen in live and make proactive suggestions to the agents.

• I'll leave you with my ever-unpopular music recommendations section. If you like Argentinian female-fronted post-rock, may I recommend Fin Del Mundo. If you don't like Argentinian female-fronted post-rock, I hear Charli XCX has a new album out.

That’s it for now! Feel free to write back and let me know what you've been up to.

Cheers!

Rob

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