20 January 2010 |
 |
Productivity-O-Rama |
 |
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:00 AM   
Writing Five-Year Goals: John Drake tells us why we should know our five-year goals -- and how to formulate them. Then he tells us how he wrote his. Writing my own five-year goals is on my to-do list!
Jason Crawford has a new-ish blog "about startups, technology, entrepreneurship, business, leadership, and management." I really liked his November post entitled Query for Judgment.
Prepare for 2010 by learning from failed experiments: "This month, I'm trying out new stuff, going back and doing maintenance on previous failures, and watching things explode fairly spectacularly. Why? Because if I figure out all the failure points now, while I can mentally group all the failures in the bucket of 2009, then by the time I move into 2010, I'll already have figured out where the landmines are." I'm a bit slow in starting 2010, so I think that February will be my January. Or something like that.
GTD for Academics by Aeon Skoble. I implemented GTD in much the same way he outlines while in graduate school.Labels: Link-O-Rama, Productivity
| |  E-mail Diana Hsieh PermaLink |
|
| |
Subscribe to Rationally Selfish Radio  M4A Podcasts in iTunes MP3 Podcasts in iTunes
Subscribe to Rationally Selfish Life  Blog Posts via Feed Reader  Blog Posts via E-mail
|
|
|
26 October 2009 |
|
The Complexity of the Conceptual Mind |
|
By Diana Hsieh @ 5:00 AM
A few months ago, Kevin McAllister posted a really stellar analysis of the roots of his problem with work-avoidance on his blog, Logical Disconnect. The post is entitled Overload and a Coke. I'd planned to comment on it, but much of what I had to say ended up in my podcast on cultivating concentration.
In any case, the post is well worth reading in its entirety, as it's an excellent example of the importance of introspection about such problems -- and the good results thereof. Happily, Kevin gave me permission to repost it. So that's what I'm doing. (Thanks, Kevin! My Monday morning bacon is hereby saved!)
Without further ado, here is Kevin's post: Overload and a Coke:
I have just made an important discovery about my mental limitations and my response to them. I've confirmed something I had already known, that my mental stack for sub-tasks is finite. For a while I've been troubled occasionally by a nearly overwhelming emotional need to do anything else besides my current work. For a few months now I have been seeking, opportunistically, to understand this emotional state because it seemed completely at odds with my goals and my usual relentless need to understand things.
The idea here is there are often tasks that have hidden or unrealized requirements. An example is you start out to vacuum the rug, and you need to clean up the clutter and move furniture, but when you move the furniture you discover that the leg on the chair is so loose that it is unsafe, so you go to repair it only to find that your out of wood glue and finishing nails. And to make it to the hardware store you need to stop and get gas and go to the ATM for cash. So when you originally set out to vacuum the rug you never would have said, okay well I'd better go get gas and some cash before I get started. I've heard this phenomena referred to as yak shaving. But I think most people have experienced this, and typically the stacks of additional tasks don't get too deep. However, in my work it is nearly a daily occurrence that my projects uncover things I could never have known until the work was begun. Some block your progress and some don't, some are big, but some are small. I've found it's the small ones that block your progress that were really stacking up on me and causing a problem.
If it is a big problem, meaning a full project in it's own right, and is not blocking my current progress, I simply make a note that this new thing needs to be done too and continue on my way. Even if it blocks my progress, I'll go ahead and shelve the first task and take on the second one. But if it is a small problem and blocking my progress, I just switch to this new task, and try to mentally retain all the context that got me there. Generally this works, but, often my extra tasks go down so deep that I reach a point where it is impossible to retain the whole context. This mental overload is real, and painful, and I've been dealing with it all wrong.
When I reach this point of mental overload I run away screaming! Well not literally, but I certainly do try and do anything else. Suddenly it seems like checking my email, or going to get a coke at the vending machine is the most important thing in the world. I think there are other factors in play as well, such as, if the driving project behind these sub-tasks is something that is only mildly interesting or something I loathe then the threshold for the number of sub-tasks I am willing to endure is much smaller.
The breakthrough in my thinking was realizing that this overwhelming need to go find and clean my white tennis shoes was in direct response to learning I had yet another task to be pushed onto the stack. So the emotional response was because I was no longer able to hold the whole of my current task in my head, and I have now set up a contradiction.
I know the thing I am doing is important and more important than the new thing because it is bigger and implies the new thing, so to prevent myself from losing the broader context I will not work on the new sub-task so I don't lose any of the important details of the super task. But I also know that I cannot proceed on the broader task without working on the sub-task. As this contradiction leaves me nothing to actually do I might as well get a coke and avoid the whole irresolvable mess.
Now this has been a source of guilt and loss of productivity for me for a while because when in that mess I'm not making progress on my project. But from David Allen and Jean Moroney I've already learned the solution to mental overload. That is to write things down.
So the strategy I've just developed is when I recognize this feeling to stop and ask myself, "Are you overloaded?" If the answer is yes, then I simply need to write down the context I am in danger of losing. At this time I suspect that will consist of a list of the outstanding tasks that are standing in my mind.
If the answer to that question is not, yes, I have a backup question that has helped me with procrastination before that is, "What do you want?" I mean this in a broad way, basically, it helps me bring to mind the reasons behind undertaking the tasks in the first place. Any similar stories to tell? Post them in the comments!Labels: Productivity
| | | E-mail Diana Hsieh PermaLink |
|
| |
Subscribe to Rationally Selfish Radio M4A Podcasts in iTunes MP3 Podcasts in iTunes
Subscribe to Rationally Selfish Life Blog Posts via Feed Reader Blog Posts via E-mail
|
|
21 September 2009 |
|
Steve Jobs on Apple |
|
By Diana Hsieh @ 5:00 AM
Wow, this Fortune interview with Steve Jobs is chock full of insightful gems. Here's some of my favorites:
On Apple's connection with the consumer
"We did iTunes because we all love music. We made what we thought was the best jukebox in iTunes. Then we all wanted to carry our whole music libraries around with us. The team worked really hard. And the reason that they worked so hard is because we all wanted one. You know? I mean, the first few hundred customers were us.
"It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do.
"So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse."'" Too often, companies simply chase what consumers already want. The best companies offer us values that we've never dreamed of before. Such new values integrate so well into our lives that, in very short order, we cannot imagine ourselves without them. Apple has done that consistently, most notably with the iPhone. If I gave it up, I'd have to radically change the way I work and live.
On Apple's focus
"Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we've got less than 30 major products. I don't know if that's ever been done before. Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. That same principle applies to individuals too. We have to choose what we do -- and what we don't do -- wisely. We have to choose the activities where we have a competitive advantage -- and outsource or forgo the rest.
On his marathon Monday meetings
"When you hire really good people you have to give them a piece of the business and let them run with it. That doesn't mean I don't get to kibitz a lot. But the reason you're hiring them is because you're going to give them the reins. I want [them] making as good or better decisions than I would. So the way to do that is to have them know everything, not just in their part of the business, but in every part of the business.
"So what we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we're having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week. I put out an agenda -- 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.
"We don't have a lot of process at Apple, but that's one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page." Ah, my favorite remark!
To demand that employees conform to processes is to impose mind-numbing, productivity-killing, self-esteem-crushing bureaucracy on them. A bureaucratic company is focused on enacting certain fixed means -- rather than on accomplishing its goals by the best means possible. The result is much wasted time, effort, and money. In contrast, notice that Jobs focuses on Apple's goals in his Monday review. In fact, his Monday meeting seems like a company level GTD weekly review. It's about production, including giving employees the information they need to solve problems, not about conformity to process.
A bureaucratic company is a company that doesn't trust its employees to make good decisions. The result is stagnation and incompetence. If a company can't trust its employees to exercise good judgment in doing their jobs, then it needs to fire them and hire better employees. Or it needs to learn to trust them to do what they're capable of doing, including learning from mistakes. Bureaucratic focus on "process" and "policy" will drive away the most productive and capable employees -- or crush them. It's not a mode of business appropriate to rational, productive people.
Goals, goals, goals. It's got to be all about the goals.
(Via Bodarko.)Labels: Management, Productivity, Work
| | | E-mail Diana Hsieh PermaLink |
|
| |
Subscribe to Rationally Selfish Radio M4A Podcasts in iTunes MP3 Podcasts in iTunes
Subscribe to Rationally Selfish Life Blog Posts via Feed Reader Blog Posts via E-mail
|
|
|
| | |
|
