Tag: commentary

Transforming Language

I picked this idea up from Dale Emery, in his excellent “Resistance as a Resource” talk at AYE, which is based on a paper available at his website. He shared a story of an HR manager who spoke with disdain about a group of people at their company as “resistors” to change; in their case to company organizational change. Dale suggested that rather than think about “resistors” who resist all changes, instead think of “people are who resisting this change, now”. Then consider that they are perhaps “responding” to the change, rather than automatically resisting.

Now the point of all this is not to lie to yourself, nor to see others differently from how they truly are. Rather it is to be open to seeing others in more than one way, to learning new information about them and their needs, concerns, goals. Out of that learning, is likely to emerge more useful ways of responding to them and of finding common ground.

It is remarkable how different a situation can seem, based on the words you choose to describe it… so try some variations in the words you use.

The World is My Warehouse

My Old Way of Thinking

Until recently, my strategy for deciding what possessions to keep has been simple: to a first approximation, “keep everything forever”. There is family history in this direction, so I come by this honestly. I have kept many pieces of equipment, cables, books, magazines, tools, office supplies, and much more. There are 200 square feet of shelving in my basement (including my data center), that’s 19 square meters for those of you in the rest of the world. Applied to books, this strategy means that I keep every book forever, in case I ever want to read it. I’ve been building up a library.

I have seen the light, though.

My New Way of Thinking

If it is something unique in the world, or too expensive to replace, or I use at least every couple of years, keep it. Otherwise, give it away, sell it, or discard it. The world is my warehouse. If I need it back I can buy it again; statistically I will buy back only a tiny fraction of what I get rid of, and at low cost. Again, a book example: most older books (including dozens I have gotten rid of recently) are readily available at a fraction of the cover price, if by chance I need them again.

Life (and business) must be about the future. By tossing residues of the past out of the way, more capacity (physical and mental) is available to pursue what matters now.

Update: I thought back to this post when I read Paul Graham’s Stuff essay in July 2007.

A Few Days Away, a Fresh Look at Email

On my office PC, I have a complex, tuned mechanism for processing email: many filters, many folders, etc. I check email at least a couple times per hour (sometimes every few minutes) and tend to send many short replies to message threads.

When I travel, my email processing is much simpler: check email a few times per day (or much less, depend on whether it’s business or pleasure travel). All incoming messages land in the Inbox. I read, I delete anything I won’t need, then file each remaining messages in to one of two folders: “Stuff to file when I get home”, “Stuff to act on when I get home”. (The idea of filing everything in one folder has a lot of merit, which I’ll explore someday when I find a local email client which handles that model as well as Gmail.)

During my trip last week, following the process above, an important aspects of my “email life” became much more obvious: I receive an enormous number of messages that only peripherally relate to me – mailing lists, automatic notifications, etc.; and dealing with those messages takes too much time. This fact, so obvious when it all lands in the Inbox a few times per day, had been hidden by my filing system and rules, and by spending a few minutes time all through the day and evening on email.

So I trimmed, radically: I unsubscribed from lists, I turned off automatic email notification systems, etc. I now aim to let several messages build up about a topic, them write one well-considered reply instead of multiple fast replies, seeking quality over quantity.

On a related note, I also let the many RSS feeds in my reader (FeedDemon – a great product) build up while away, so that when I return, I have N days worth, rather than reading every day. In the past I’ve slowly caught up over several days. This time, I used the large buildup as an opportunity to more clearly see which feeds have the most value to me… and unsubscribed from many others.

I wrote the above in the first person, but I think it is good advice in general: guard your inputs, periodically take stock of overall incoming quality and quantity in to your inboxes. What enormous time sinks are hiding in your email rules/filters/folder system?

Disconnecting to Keep Distraction Away

I’m back from AYE. The last session I attended was Dwayne Phillips‘s on “Distraction”. Distraction is a recurring enemy here, always ready to strike, to divert me from the task at hand. I’ve recently been using “disconnection” to fight distraction and focus on an intense task for a few hours, and noticed the same notion on the 37 Signals’ blog, a post by Matt entitled “Get Off”.

There is an ongoing flow of incoming data in our online lives. Hundreds of emails per day. Hundreds of RSS feed items. Dozens of IM contacts. Phone calls. Voice mail. The “water cooler”, physical or virtual. The disconnection idea is simple: Go offline, physically and network-wise. Leave your office and go somewhere away from your normal environment, away from email, RSS, instant messaging, the web, etc. Reduce your inputs, to make room for more output.

My implementation is to go to restaurant or cafe, in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon (out of politeness, to avoid disrupting their business by using up a table during peak times); preferable one without “WiFi” to remove that temptation. Then I sit, sip, and Just Work on something important. I write code; I write text; I review documents; I brainstorm. I use my notebook PC with a 12” screen, a stark contrast to my 2560×1024 resolution desktop configuration. The latter is wonderful for many kinds of work; but it is also more distraction-prone.

If you find yourself struggling to task on large important tasks, instead distracted by a thousand smaller things, give disconnection a try.

Software Development Team = Marketplace?

Some months ago, when deciding how to structure a software development project team, I lamented (offline) that what I’d really like the project to resemble is a marketplace – a community of developers all eager to find their niche. As the market clears, each developer would end up doing what they do best, maximizing their comparative advantage while also maximizing overall productivity. We know this works well on a national scale (capitalism), but in a sense, many companies are (internally) little islands of non-capitalism. By saying a team would work this way, I mean internally, in terms of how the various parts of each project are divided up.

Today I read that TopCoder, in addition to their well known programming contests, does something very close to this:

“TopCoder assesses a client’s needs, breaks the project into 30 or so components, and opens the design and development work to a series of online competitions. The coder with the best finished product wins “prize money,” as does the runner-up, which usually amounts to a few thousand dollars. The small pieces are “sewn” together, usually by TopCoder, and delivered to the client.”

Two issues come to mind though, one negative and one positive:

  • In the kind of complex “enterprise” projects we sometimes take on at Oasis Digital, binding together the pieces in to a coherent solution, tends to be a major aspect of the work. Sewing together disparate pieces could easily dominate the schedule.
  • A bunch of separate, talented developers, committing to building a system in this fashion, are likely to produce a highly modular system. It is hard to overstate the benefits of modularity in large projects.

Update… in my next 2 minutes of browsing feeds, I cames across a relevant post about another “industry” far outside my expertise.

Dreamhost Out, TextDrive In

You might have noticed that this site is much faster than it used to be. The reason? I moved it from DreamHost to TextDrive.

TextDrive costs more, its “control panel” is not as good as DreamHost’s, and its bandwidth/storage limits are lower. But my site is far faster, hasn’t had any downtime or email downtime since the switch (during which DreamHost had an email outage), and TextDrive support responds much sooner.

I have a few TextDrive nitpicks though: there is no built in web-stats system (I’ll need to install one), and they apparently don’t have a backup system working at the moment (!). I’ve set up a nightly rsync to a machine here for backup purposes, but I sure hope they don’t intend this as a long term situation.

Update: Jason at Joyent/Textdrive noticed this post, and added a comment that the backup problem is long fixed.

Update: A complaint without data risks sounding like a whine. So I’ll add some data. Today I noticed that sites I still have on DreamHost are slow. Why? let’s look:

$ date
Fri Sep 8 15:56:14 PDT 2006
$ uptime
15:56:18 up 5:31, 3 users, load average: 103.41, 95.54, 181.86

Update: Some months later, TextDrive has turned out to have approximately at much, or more, downtime as DreamHost. It’s still fast when it’s up, and the TextDrive guys are helpful, friendly, and responsive. But the shared hosting they offer has frequent downtime.