Unruly Rambling - management category

Time Management

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:47:37 GMT

This post is a response to a friends blog post on the subject of time management.

I've found the following items to be helpful aids in maintaining focus and elevating productivity. Before diving into the meat of this post, there is one more thing I wanted to mention. My approach is heavily influenced by David Allen's Getting Things Done Framework (GTD for short). For more information on GTD please check out David Allen's blockbuster book titled Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

1) Own Your Destiny
Be decisive and conservative when determining how to spend your day. Every day presents the same economic challenge: time is a limited resource that must be actively managed or it risks being squandered. To be more specific, if you receive an invitation to a meeting where the topic is not on your critical path, you should probably think twice before attending. Declining is a perfectly acceptable response to the invite. If you want to know the outcome, ask for the meeting minutes once it concludes. Also, you should never get into the habit of putting your goals on hold for the good of someone else's. It will likely be detrimental to your status within the company.

2) High Priority Means High Priority
Make sure you work on the highest priority, highest return items first. Only in very specific cases should you stray from this pattern (industry compliance comes to mind as an example of when it's okay). Marginalizing your time on high priority items so you can exceed expectations on lower priority items will probably lead to your exceeding expectations in a different role or company.

3) Don't Do What You Shouldn't
Are you doing something you should not be doing? I don't mean criminal or unethical, I mean something that you should delegate. If so, you could be robbing valuable experience from your team, which could affect their advancement as well as your own. Finally, if you are using your authority only to delegate mundane tasks that you do not want to do, go ahead and assign yourself an F as a leader. You've earned it!

4) Be Purposeful
Don't end up somewhere. Significant accomplishments resemble marathons not sprints (See my post on The Dip if you would like to delve deeper into this topic). Just like a marathon, you will need to subdivide your end goal into measurable chunks or milestones. Without measurability, you risk getting off track and wasting valuable time and effort. So planning is good, right? It is, but if you are planning out the next 5 years before executing on anything, you might be wasting time also. I'd suggest only performing lower level planning for the next milestone or two. The time it takes to produce detailed long term plans will be squandered if something blindsides your plan at 4pm on some idle Tuesday(Trivia Challenge: Name the song that contains these lyrics?). At each milestone you can always reevaluate your position and correct course if needed.

5) Sharpen Your Tools
Figure out how to process email proficiently in an expedited manner! If you are a slave to Microsoft Outlook, your mind will not be engaged in the next big thing. Tip: If you send less email, you will receive less email. Last time I checked the telephone still works!! If you find yourself frequently sending email for CYA purposes, you might be in the wrong position and/or company.

6) Use The Right Tool For The Job
Your brain, yes yours and mine to, stinks at keeping track of things. On the flip side, your brain is ~~really good~~ more proficient at critical thinking. A supporting example might be this. Have you ever been thinking about a wildly important topic and in from left field comes an idea about picking up milk on the way home(feel free to swap in any arbitrary honeydoo item). If you answered yes, do you know why this happens? It is because you don't have a trusted place to keep track of it. Subconsciously you are worried that you will forget to pick up milk so it will continually interrupt you at the most inopportune time. You could avoid this debilitating context switching by having a trusted storage place outside your brain. Don't steal cycles from higher priority threads any longer. Log these items on your ToDo list, palm pilot, or at an online site like RememberTheMilk.com where it can be text messaged to you at the right time. If you get good at working in this manner , start tagging each item with contextual information so you can squeeze out extra productivity during brief periods of idle time. More details on this can be found in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

7) Organization
Get organized. If your desk is a wreck you will be less efficient. Clear the nonessential items, file what you will need later, and discard what you don't need... Immediately! Every second you spend looking at something you don't need is a wasted second. Looking at that same thing a second time is downright foolish. At first you won't prune enough. With practice you will perfect this skill.

Social Networking Casserole

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:41:00 GMT

So this blog has been basically dead for a couple years. I was average at adding new content when I wore the hat of a software developer. I used it as a place to collect my thoughts and archive interesting tidbits about what I was doing for future reference(by me or others via google). If you plug in "Spring Hibernate" without quotes into google you will still find my write ups ranking in a page or two. Since then, I've moved into managing the folks that do the things I used to write about. Part of me thinks this is a standard path for many but I see other "coders", as managers like to call them, that I have great respect for still plugging away in their IDE of choice. From time to time, I sit back and wonder if the path I've taken is the right one. Their are many perks to each path but how do you know which one is right? Unfortunately I don't think this kind of decision is black and white. I'm pretty sure that I fall into a pseudo gray gradient somewhere between light and darkness. Wow, that's pretty deep for me. I'll assume that came from being on PTO, sitting in front the 80's music channel(And we danced by The Hooters is currently playing), and just having downed my 5th cup a joe since 8am. Enough with this unruly rambling, I'll move on to the topic I wanted to write about today. I may be gone for another two years after this post :)

What added value do you all get from the cornucopia of social networking avenues? A week or two ago I joined facebook and twitter. I don't have many buds yet, but I find both very interesting. The problem is that I don't know why. I've been a linkedin person for several years collecting acquaintances. I've added every tom, dick, and harry that I've worked with over the years. I've also added friends of friends, user group people that I recognize, and many others that I probably wouldn't even talk to if I saw them at the mall. This collection seems to have as much intrinsic value as the rounded edged baseball cards from years past. Maybe they solve a problem I have stumbled on to yet, maybe they are just a way for people to feel better about themselves since they have 499 friends. I don't really know but it's quite interesting to me. Hit me with your best shot(it just started playing) in the comments of this entry. I'd love to hear why I'm wrong.

Here is my one(or 2 or 3) liner on each app.

LinkedIn - A recruiters dream. Maybe it's useful if you are looking for a job.
Facebook - Myspace for adults. A more professional place to promote your electronic personality.
Twitter - Addicting way to keep tabs on what interesting people around you are up to. Not sure I'll continue updating but I'm loving the iPhone app.

Gotta run, Air Supply just came on and the channel must be turned NOW!!!!!

The Dip

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 20:24:00 GMT

The Dip is a sub 100 page book by Seth Godin that offers tremendous insight into challenges that we all face every day. It is not a "How To" book or a book offering a specific recipe for success. Instead this book offers a healthy dose of motivation and some foundational concepts that are applicable to everyday life. It doesn't matter if you live by day in corporate america or spend your nights tending bar, you should be able to relate to the content in this book.

To get things started, it is paramount to set the terminology straight. There are basically two kinds of curves present in almost everything we do.

The Cul-de-sac
This is a type of curve where no matter how hard you try to push forward, you keep hitting a dead end. A situation or job that will not get better regardless of the amount of effort expended.

The Dip
This is a type of curve where near term satisfaction and accomplishments are present shortly after embarking on the journey. Once this initial high has plateaued, the participant is in store for a sizable dip that takes a significant amount of effort and perseverance to fight through. This dip is long enough that the vast majority of people in it will quit before making it out on the other side. Society depends on this. If everyone made it out, there would be no scarcity on the other side. For the scarce few that make it out on the other side, tremendous rewards await them.

While describing these types of curves, Seth mentions that it's important to identify which type of curve you are facing. If you are facing a cul-dec-sac, quitting is not only a good idea, it is the right thing to do. Every minute spent in a cul-de-sac situation is a minute that can't be spent elsewhere. If you find yourself in a dip situation, it is clear that there is light at the end of the tunnel and your perseverance will likely pay off in a big way. It's your job to see through on this. Quitting at the bottom of the dip is a waste of your time and effort.

This book challenges conventional wisdom, especially ideas like "Quitters never win, winners never quit". According to Seth, winners quit all the time, they just quit the right things. This is an important concept and one with concrete examples that occur frequently. If you find something that is a cul-de-sac or a dip that you are not willing to see through, the best action is to not start.

Finally, the book is filled with witty one liners and ideas that spark the imagination. A couple of my favorites are listed below.

Being the best in the world is seriously under rated

The Problem with Infinity is that there is just too much of it

The Wrongest Advice: Being well rounded is the secret to success.
If you had a life threatening illness, would you be seeking a well rounded doctor or one that is highly skilled in the one area you care about? Almost no one would be looking for a doctor that was good at golf, martial arts, and restoring antique cars.