Why do people start projects and don’t finish them? Why does something seem so much more fun when you first start doing it. Do we get that quickly jaded? Or is it just how humans are pre-programmed to operate?
Remember when you purchased your first car? You drove it around the block a couple times before you came home (I remember I almost got a speeding ticket on my first ride home). The point is that you were super excited about your newly acquired vehicle. The first weekend came around and you spend an entire morning washing it, vacuuming and waxing your new toy. A couple months went by and suddenly you lost interest. Washing the car became a chore, you no longer looked forward to driving it. You took the quickest route home, as the goal shifted from enjoying the ride to arriving at your final destination.
How did that happen? What changed so drastically that made you shift priorities? I don’t know exactly but I suspect it has to do with focusing on the outcome instead of the journey. Before you purchased the car, you spent a lot of time thinking about it, comparing prices, looking up reviews and pros & cons. All of these tasks kept you focused on the desired outcome. When the outcome was achieved, you quickly started losing focus and interest.
The same can be said for completing projects. You decide to refinish your kitchen table, you focus on the outcome: having a nicely re-stained table. You start building a new web application or a piece of desktop software, and your focus is on the final product. How nice it will be when your application is being used by 2,000 people. What you are gonna do with your time when you have hundreds of users purchasing your iPhone app for $2.99 a piece. There is great power in visualizing the outcome, as something to strive for but the focus should be on the journey. How are you going to start? How will you market it? When will you ship version one? Who will likely be your first customer? Focusing on the journey will hopefully keep you motivated the whole way.
Achieving small daily goals goes a long way towards renewing your energy. Starting is easy, because you focus on the end result. You tell your friends about a new idea, and it makes you feel like you have already started. You spend a ton of time selecting a name, and this part is fun, but in reality you are no closer than you were when you first began.
Next project you start, try to focus on the steps and daily goals necessary to achieve the outcome, instead of focusing on the end result.
Sometimes it takes an extreme measure to change something, for better or worse.
I have reached my limit regarding time wasters. This rant is not about being productive, achieving the most amount of stuff in the least amount of time. This is about ‘less’.
Ridding life of things that create open loops in the brain, things that feed distractions. I have been dabbling with the idea that some of the goals I would like to achieve have been put on hold because of useless stuff I decide to spend my time on. Albeit usually fun, these sort of activities are not rewarding in the sense that I search for at this moment.
I cringe every time I hear people praise being busy, or proud themselves regarding their workaholic ways of living. Trust me I know the feeling, I used to answer: “Busy” to the commonly asked question of: “How are you?” - I now find that to be the absolute most ridiculous answer.
Achieving productivity to me at this point is more about effectiveness than efficiency. Someone who reads 10,000 emails a day can theoretically be highly efficient, but terribly ineffective. And that is just one example. Being busy is out of style, I want to bethe opposite of busy, which in my book is: focused.
How much can I really accomplish by focusing, one thing at a time?
Expending all my energy into a narrow channel with the expectancy of a pre-calculated outcome? That is my current question. I have touched on the subject on this blog before. How much time I find myself spending on “necessary” (notice the quotes) daily distractions such as RSS, E-mail, Twitter, IM; the total is exorbitant, upwards of 60% of the day.
Over the past couple years I have tried to achieve certain goals on a personal/professional level and feel that I have come short on certain ones. I will not blame online A.D.D for it all but I see it as a major contributing factor. For this reason I will be conduction an experiment for the entire month of September as such:
- Time wasters such as RSS feeds are to be completely excluded.
- I will excuse myself from IM and only use Skype at work and keep the conversations as succinct as humanly possibly.
- Keep campfire usage to absolute minimum (I use campfire at work).
- Twitter will be checked once in the morning when I wake up and before bed (This will give me a nice overview of each day).
- Stick to reading fiction books which relax the mind.
- Spend my 2 hour daily commute listening to fiction audio books or music which excite the brain and boost creativity.
- Drastically limit the amount of email I send and limit email checking to once per day.
- Disable ALL notifications (growl) to prevent distractions.
- Keep non work related web surfing to a minimum.
I have chosen to take a relatively strict approach but have kept it realistic and achievable. The goal of this experiment is to track how much more I can achieve with distractions and time wasters turned off. I do realize this will be relatively difficult to measure as the ‘control’ is subjective. I will however have a very good gut feeling of my level of personal/professional accomplishments at the end of the month. Here is what I will be looking at:
- Have I done more focused work and accomplished tangible results?
- How do those results compare to the previous months?
- How is my general mood towards work, software development?
- How happy I feel on a general level? How does that compare to the previous months?
- How easy has it been to stick to the information diet?
- Have I achieved my clearly defined goals more quickly and with higher quality?
I will be putting the items above to the test by setting a clear path to action. One important thing to remember is to not force anything. If I don’t feel like doing something, I will simply not do it.
If you need to have your employee sitting at his cubicle daily to trust that he or she is accomplishing their job properly, you may have a bigger problem. Perhaps the issue here is hiring competent and trustworthy adults. When that is the case they rarely need to be babysat. Of course common sense plays a big part on this subject. If you are hiring an anesthesiologist, it is very unlikely he would be able to do his work remotely. Obviously he knew this going into school for the chosen profession. The same applies to any other professions restrained by virtue of the basic differences between atoms and bits.
This post has been a long time in the making. Perhaps not in the shape of words and sentences, but in my head. I spend about 2 hours per day in the car driving to and from work. I often use the time efficiently to make phone calls or to listen to an audiobook. Regardless of the actual activity at hand I am always expending brain cycles around a vast array of topics. Most recently one topic that aggravates any awaken neurons in my head related to outdated company policies. Allow me to elaborate.
Two distinct approaches came to mind. First, there are common excuses as to why remote workforce does not work. Secondly often simple misconceptions as to why it is simply not as effective. A common argumentative response I hear too often: “Well if you get to work from your front porch, so will John, and Mary, and Susan.” As I mentioned above, Susan, the office’s receptionist, may have a difficult time teleporting herself every time someone rings the doorbell; just guessing. Need I say more? Obviously if your physical presence is required in the office because your daily activities can’t be performed while removed from the building, stop reading right now.
Another interesting response I have heard in the past comes in the form of a question. “How will I know people are actually working if I can’t see them?” This is when transparency plays a huge part. If your technology department works inside a cave (cave mode), with no transparency into what they are accomplishing, it will become very difficult for the director/boss/manager/chief to know what is getting done. It starts with accountability. To me, a person is either accountable by nature or not. There is no in-between. Picking up the phone when your seven year old calls you from school is not being accountable. Accountability is about “following-through” with your commitments in a timely manner, attention to detail and proper communication with the involved parties. That may be very far from the dictionary definition but I am OK with that.
Transparency in the other hand is the responsibility of those in charge. Providing your department with an easy way and a clear channel into the current status/progress of a given project/task is imperative. This is by far one of the most important initiatives towards a decentralized office environment.
With the proper level of transparency it becomes very easy to measure effectiveness. You know you have that gut feeling about how effective a person is. At least to me, I can quickly tell if someone is slacking or performing fruitful work. Be honest with yourself. If you feel like subpar work is getting accomplished, approach the person, remotely or not, and have a one-to-one discussion.
I do see value of “face time”. In the past I have worked with teams where developers were 100% remote, 100% of the time. Water-cooler conversations in that case are held around the digital watercooler and online such as Campfire or daily phone call.
Meetings tend to be another topic most managers seem to bring up. How could I possible have a meeting with both collocated staff and remote staff? I will let a good friend of mine, and ex-coworker explain as he puts it best:
http://twitter.com/cwsaylor/status/2804309361
Chris Saylor is the Director of Development at Todobebe. While working at Todobebe, we hired two very talented remote developers in Brazil (Roberto and Dante). The entire experience proved to be a great success. We had just adopted to conduct development in a more Agile manner. This experience goes to show that the proof is in the pudding, and hiring competent and committed people is more important that their physical location.
Employee will not be around to be appreciated/reprimanded. Sure they will. Just as a distance family member would when you want to wish them a happy birthday or collect the money he owns you. More often than not, email and phone conversations are more effective than in person meetings. You do have to be careful with this one. I tend to prefer to chat over phone or skype if the topic is even slightly off-topic. People tend to be slightly more bravado over email/chat than over voice.
I hear of the old days, when computers were as big as a house, and every time you placed a long distance phone call a mental clock ticked to remind you how expensive the call was. Fortunately for us, that is no longer the case.
There is a wealth of highly qualified resources out there, limiting yourself to a tiny local radius seems foolish and counterproductive. There are very few obstacles that can’t be dealt with. Communication barriers, time-zone differences and lack of physical presence are not enough to justify passing out on extremely talented team members.
Finally, if you do come to terms with your demons, here are a couple tips that will help you and your remote employees succeed:
Have a quiet home office. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of having a quiet place to work. Somewhere you can go, close the door and concentrate.This means you get to avoid interruptions that are commonplace in the traditional office space. Developers tend to take about 30-45 minutes to get in the zone, a simple co-worker interruption can knock them out of the zone. If this happens once an hour, you can literally lose an entire day. It has happened to me, I am sure it has happened to you as well. Arrive at the office, engage co-workers, help them with their questions and issues and by the time you realize it is six o’clock and it it’s time to go home.
Establish a stable schedule that includes at least 70% of shared core hours between remote and collocated staff. Make sure everybody is in the same virtual “room” and can be reached at all times.
Campfire is great for team collaboration chating. At Hoodiny, we have all of our tools posting regular status updates into our campfire room. The team’s standup is at 10:30am. Git commit notifications are posted into campfire. Deployments and Continuous Integration results are also automatically posted into the room. We use NewRelic’s RPM tool to track our application’s performance or potential abnormalities. Performance stats are brought up side-by-side and a list of current referrer links is posted into campfire so that we can keep track of daily patterns. At any point, company executives can access the campfire room and catch up on all the work that has been done, current status of the build, performance and analytics information. This works beautifully. Developers are only notified of new messages when someone mentions their names. The chat room’s log is persistance and it always there, if you are late, or happened to miss a day, you can always read the log. Periodically during the day at your own pace, you can pull up the chat room window and catch up on the team’s progress.
I could go on for days on personal experiences and my opinion about hiring the best regardless of where they are. I realize this is not one-size-fits-all but I hope to shed some light into the subject. In this global market, don’t limit yourself to your own backyard. Get out there and prosper.
I just got back a few days ago from an incredible vacation to London, France and Barcelona. It is though to adapt to the daily grind again.
One of the most predominant things I have noticed is how much time and attention I spend daily on online communication. Some will say “necessary evil”, or even include it in the “cost of doing business”, does that mean it is good?
Between Skype, Campfire, AIM and email roughly 70% of the day is consumed with communicating. Is it the message that is so complex? Or are we spending time going in circles in order to achieve a sense of self-fulfillment?
Let’s spend a few seconds thinking about a car factory assembly line. By virtue of the loud machinery, employees rarely communicate with each other. An unwelcome interruption on the factory floor could become life threatening. How much more are they accomplishing by concentrating on the task ahead instead of randomly attending to pop-us on each corner of a computer screen?
This post will come to it’s demise with no clear solution, I truly wish I had one. Other than: “Close all communication tools and get some work done” I draw a blank.
What could you possibly be doing now that the website you visit and hit refresh 40 times per minute is down for maintenance.
Use the time wisely to get some work done.
PS. Let me tweet that, o wait :-)
Be honest with yourself, you shouldn’t be spending so much time reading feeds.
Yes, I know, you are thinking to yourself, why would I give up reading my feeds. I can’t do that. Yes you can. Don’t you want to be more productive?
Anyways, if you can’t drop them ‘cold turkey’ at least compromise. I used to spend 30-45 minutes each day reading my feeds, that is way too much time in week. I started to consider ways in which I could gain some of that time back. The first option and what I did for the first month of my experiment was to trim the feeds. Initially this worked out nicely, but after a week I realized I was missing a lot of important news from blogs I enjoyed. That was not acceptable, so I re-subscribed to the ones I enjoyed the most.
I then realized that most of my feeds were not terribly time sensitive. The next experiment revolved around limiting when and where I read my feeds. Basically devoting downtime and alternative devices for RSS reading. The first portion of the new regime was to read feeds when I am on-the-go such as waiting rooms, restrooms or during exercise, the iPhone + Google Reader makes this a snap.
Whatever items had been left over I would read once or twice a week sitting on the couch which watching TV. This normally took 30 minutes each time. This is working out perfectly, I don’t miss any of my favorite news, and still manage to save 3-4 hours a week which can be put to better use.
I am about to state the obvious. Perhaps the simplest concepts you have ever heard. If Inbox 0 sounds more like a legend than reality, you are doing it wrong. I used to be drowned in email myself, at one point it looked like the reason for my existence was to answer emails.
Here are a couple of concepts to get you out of your misery and make you a more productive person. In other words, have a life outside of your inbox. GTD is greatly overrated so I won’t be talking about that here. Some of these may not apply to you, most will.
Please note, if your inbox has over 500 unread messages at the moment, you will need to declare email bankruptcy (delete all message) and start from scratch. Don’t worry, the important ones will make their way back into the inbox shortly.
Let’s start with the basics:
Stop Sending Email
As crazy as this may sound, the more email you send the more replies you get. Also stop sending “Reply-all” messages. It is very unlikely that all those people need to see your message or your reply. Only include the absolute most necessary recipients.
Unsubscribe from ALL newsletters. Really.
No one needs all that promo stuff. If you need a new cellular phone you will do your own research. If you need a new LCD monitor, you will search for it.
Unsubscribe from Groups
Unsubscribe from 95% of the groups you are currently receiving email notifications from. Groups that you absolutely can’t unsubscribe from, elect to receive the abridged version of the notifications. One per day is usually the case.
Review your Messages for Patterns
Create a folder for receipts, important, clients, travel and action items. Create rules to automatically move mail to those folders. Your folder names may be different from mine, remember you are looking for patterns.
Stop Flagging Email
Flagging is completely useless. You are basically adding yet another reference to something in your memory which leaves an empty node in your brain wasting space, sort of like a rogue process.
Remove the New-mail Sound
Nothing is more disturbing to productivity than that annoying sound mail clients make when you receive a new email. Do you silence your mobile phone when you go inside a church or meeting? Then silence your mail when it is time to work.
Turn off Automatic New Email Check
Imagine if your mailman came by your house every 15 minutes and potentially left new mail for you. You would be much more likely to stop what you are doing and go outside to check for new letters. How many times a day do you check you physical mailbox? Probably once.
Open your Email Reader 1-3 times a Day.
In the beginning this will be difficult. Hide the shortcuts to the application which will make you think about what you are doing every time you hunt to open it. Do this until it becomes second nature.
Make Constant use of Read/Unread Buttons
If you glance at a message and realize you will not be able to action upon it instantly, stop, mark it as unread and move on. One may ask, won’t this create more new email in your inbox? The answer is NO. It gives you the liberty to move on to the next messages, deleting, marking as read or moving them to their final resting places. This will leave behind only the messages you need to act upon at a later time. Move them to a designated folder.
Enable Threads
This compacts a conversation of multiple email messages into a single topic. This gives you the impression you have less pending items. Instead of seeing 10 unread messages under the same topic, you just see that the topic has pending messages to be read. See sample below taken from my receipts folder in Mail.app
Hide Unread Count (if possible)
The new Gmail Labs let’s you do this. No need to see exactly how many unread messages you have in your inbox other than for panic generating purposes. Mail.app unfortunately likes to create panic by showing your unread messages count.
Turn off Notifications
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, whatever it may be, make sure they are only emailing you important messages, and not every time someone browsers your profile.
Delete Button is your Friend
Do not be afraid to delete it, if you think about deleting it, chances are that the best thing to do is delete it.
And lastly rejoice.