Looker Studio, batching and filtering news – meeting notes from 23rd April 2025
Posted by Paul Silver
On 23rd April, eight freelancers met in the Lord Nelson Inn to discuss all things self employment and tech. This is some of what we talked about:
- What you can claim as an expense
- Using GnuCash as a UK company
- Clients who are picky about costs like WordPress plugins, but spend more on devs to duplicate the functionality
- Working on a messy codebase
- Looker Studio reports to simplify checking Google Analytics
- Coworking spaces
- Using the various Soho Houses
- Listening bars
- Modding your phone case
- Working from a high end Samsung phone for a day
- The Samsung stretching phone patent
- Shared projects catch up
- Drag racing Teslas
- A Different Bias – Phil Moorhouse’s YouTube channel
- The effects of America on the world economy
- Batching news from America to deliberately reduce consumption of negativity
- Filling your time in retirement is surprisingly easy
Looker Studio
If you have clients who find Google Analytics too complicated now it has moved to GA4, consider learning how to make them some reports in Looker Studio. This is a report building tool by Google which takes information from various Google services and some other places and lets you build simple report dashboards from them. It’s pretty simple to learn, especially compared to Google Analytics, so is a good opportunity for some extra work from existing clients.
Looker Studio is useful, but relatively limited, so pros and cons.
Pros:
- Quick to build reports
- Imports Google info very easily
- Good, or at least acceptable, looking and has some help so you can keep reports looking alright (e.g. with lining up different charts in your report)
- Easy to share with your clients
Cons:
- Charting is limited – e.g. they can only compare two time periods
- Customisation is very limited – really only a small number of charts on offer and limited options for restyling them
- I’ve heard it can be unreliable getting it to absorb your data, i.e. non-Google services
I’ve been using it a bunch with one of my clients so they can have dashboards of just the information they want from Google Analytics, and they’ve now learnt enough to be building up straightforward reports for themselves. Very handy.
Batching news
When you’re self employed, looking after your mental health is paramount as you won’t be covered for taking time off ill. (This is over-simplified, there is insurance for taking time off sick, but most freelancers don’t have it.)
It’s fair to say that while the news always has depressing stories, at the moment it and social media are full of reactions to news coming from the United States and much of it is very depressing. As we’re based in Brighton in the UK, we are not in the position to effect change to what’s happening in the States, apart from giving limited support to affected people there.
This gives us a bad situation – we cannot do anything to change the situation, but are hit by upsetting news and takes on the news. If you find you’re often losing chunks of time to social media or news sites and getting depressed by what’s there, it is worth looking at batching your news consumption. Basically: give yourself some time each day to check the news and social media, preferably after you’ve got some or all of your planned work done, but do not look at it otherwise.
This can be hard to start with, especially if you’re a heavy social media user, which can be a way of getting some life into your work day when you work on your own a lot. If you really can’t stop using social media, look at filtering what you see. Most of the services have keyword filters to block posts with certain words in them.
Since I set up filters for trump, musk, fascist and various other words, and limited down my news podcasts to one that posts twice a week about general political news, and one that posts once a week specifically about American news for a British audience, I find I’m getting a lot more work done as I’m not getting sucked into a negative spiral of scrolling social media looking for hope among the grimness. I still use social media occasionally during the day (although I have cut down over time) and with the filtering, I’m seeing less negative stories as I have to click to see them.
Some people would say I’m retreating into my filter bubble. I would agree, and it’s great! I’m a person trying to run my business, look after my family and look out for my friends. I signed up to social media to swap personal news and daft stuff with my friends. I don’t get paid to read posts by random idiots about whatever news a narcissistic bully has caused that day. Avoiding that crap improves my day and productivity, and has no impact on the situations happening, which I will find out about when I’m ready.
Controlling consumption is making my life much better and doesn’t take much set up, give it a try!