Tech Life So nothing can eat my shoes

The Quirkbook

It all started with a tweet:

“Making a list of superstitions / foolish consistencies / lightweight OCD behaviors e.g. I always put my RIGHT shoe on first. You?”

This right shoe behavior started during ice hockey. The team was bad… like 0-10 bad. Last game of the season against the best team in the league who slaughtered us in a previous match-up. As I sat in the locker room considering a perfect beat-down of a season, I decided to become zen about situation… deliberate. Rather than stressing about the size of the beating, I considered the small parts of manageable reality sitting immediately in front of me.

“In what order shall I put my gear on? What is practical? What feels right? You know, I like putting my right skate on first. I can’t tell you why, but the order feels important. Right skate, then left.”

We killed them. 9-3. Sure, they started by playing half their game because they were already in the playoffs, but after I scored that hat trick in the first period, they woke up. We slapped them around for another two periods. It was glorious.

I credit the skates. No, I credit the skate application process.

It’s that story that goes through my head each morning as I stare down. I remember deciding to care about how I put things on my feet. It’s a silly superstitious quirk transformed into an unavoidable daily routine and that’s why I twittered it. I wanted to know who else was saddled with these foolish consistencies.

Steven Frank took the time to write me a lengthy mail on my tweet. He mentioned, “For a while I used to semi-believe that if I could tap out a certain rhythm on my desk while the modem was dialing, I’d get through to the BBS instead of a busy signal. Never actually worked in reality.”

I did that, too.

Steven continued, “Anxiety, OCD behaviors, and depression almost always come as a package deal. I’m sure that anyone who reports one has the others. And for some reason, they always seem to affect a lot of folks in tech. I’m not sure which way ‘round the causality is, though.”

There’s a risk with giving a clever name to neuro-behaviorial developmental disorders. I wrote the original NADD (“Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder”) article expecting the inevitable comment, “You, sir, are making fun of people with legitimate disabilities. Jerk.”

Mostly those comments never arrived. Readers understood the meaning of NADD was not to belittle those with a disability, but rather to see the clever ways we’ve adapted our perceived deficiencies into distinct abilities.

It is with this thought that I present the following responses to my original tweet. I find them informative, sometimes hilarious, but mostly comforting.

# July 18, 2008 : Comments (92)
Tech Life The creative posse

The Coffee Mug Affair

At my favorite local coffee shop, Lorraine gives me shit when I purchase coffee in a paper cup, “You… are not saving the world.”

She’s right. I’m not, and it’s actually worse. Each time I reach for a sip and this sad little corpse of tree flesh greets me with its pathetic weight and palpable sense of Al Gore guilt, I’m lonely.

I’m missing a key member of my creative posse.

A Box Full of Fail

The next chapter in documenting the accessorizing of my obsessions was an investigative report on paper. I’ve got 27 links regarding the history of paper queued up and ready to be read, but I don’t honestly care a lot about paper. I can’t separate the notebook from the paper.

In fact, I’m pissed at paper. Forget about the environmental guilt, cups made of paper are a sure fire way to ruin any cup of coffee because they change the taste. Coffee mugs are the only way to go and I’ve spent a lot more time fretting about mugs than paper. That’s the other thing Lorraine doesn’t know: I’ve got a box full of failed coffee mugs.

Unlike prior excursions, with coffee mugs, we can brief. There is no need for comparison tables. There are just two use cases that define a great coffee mug: Driving and Writing.

Driving

The Driving case is tactical. How do I move from point A to point B without spilling scalding liquid over me and the car? Technology has provided a bevy of James Bondian metal travel mugs guaranteed to safely transport a hot beverage, but this technology comes with a cost. After three uses, like paper, your coffee tastes like whatever material your mug is made of.

This means I’m paying two bucks for the privilege of not being scalded by a cup of coffee that tastes like old aluminum.

No.

Plastic, while less hip, suffers from the same taste degradation over time. Glass-lined or not, three uses and the taste of old coffee and angry plastic permeates every sip. This conveniently leads us to the first key construction point for the perfect mug:

It must be made of ceramic. After years of foul tasting cups of coffee, I’ve discovered a ceramic travel mug, while a hazard if dropped, is the only material that doesn’t affect the taste of the coffee. Combine this with the cleverly designed removable plastic top and you have the Pottery Barn travel mug:

Pottery Barn Travel Mug

Will it last? I don’t know. Can it survive a drop? Probably not. Will I lose the top? Probably. Does it deliver my coffee as intended? Yes. I have six.

Writing

The Writing use case is strategic because it’s an essential part of my writing process. Right this second, I’m editing this article and, as you might expect, there is a process. First, I sit up. Writing is serious business for which your spine must be straight. I also lean my head slightly downward, looking up at my words as I write. Occasionally I mumble what I’m typing… no clue why.

And then I stop and I take a sip of something from a ginormous coffee cup… which is when I really start writing. The sip of coffee is a pause with weight. As I described in I Don’t Multitask, these moments of silence are invaluable. They are when I step out of what I’m doing to consider what I’m going to do, and for this brief journey I need a companion, and that’s my coffee mug.

To understand this relationship, you have to consider the sip. It’s a conversation and that conversation has two elements:

It must begin with character. The appearance of the coffee cup needs to speak.

A black cup of coffee


A black cup of coffee

It must continue with weight. A full coffee cup is a two-handed affair. The coffee must be blistering hot and a threat sitting three inches to the left of my keyboard. Reaching for my mug is a commitment. It is a reminder that, “Hey, we’re focusing elsewhere for moment. Don’t screw this up. I’m hot.” My coffee mugs are ginormous. My sips — carefully orchestrated.

It’s a brief conversation and it has only one goal: a creative elsewhere.

The Posse

I’m only addressing half of this situation. There’s a coffee bean article to be written, but it’s time to get back to management and design, so I’ll cut to the chase: whole bean + grind at home + French press = FTW.

A great cup of coffee is not just a gorgeous caffeine administration vehicle; it’s part of your creative posse. On my desk, all within a 12 inches my hands, I have the iPhone, the Zebra Sarasa gel pen, a sweetly decaying Field Notes, and the Life is Short coffee mug. None of these items are required for me to write — they are conveniences — but they are essential to accessorizing a moment of creative, companionable silence.

# June 24, 2008 : Comments (38)
Tech Life The Rubik’s Epiphany

Sweet Decay

I sidestepped the evaluation notebook issue in The Gel Dilemma, but this omission has bugged me because I’ve cared about what I’ve written on for a lot longer than I’ve cared what I’ve written with.

A stack of books

The Mom is to blame here. When I was 10 she gave me a journal entitled “Moments Worth Remembering”. There was a rainbow on front. I asked the Mom:

“What’s this?”

“It’s a journal.”

“For?”

“Writing down what you think.”

“About rainbows?”

The idea had never occurred to me… writing for myself rather than for Ms. Ockerman, the 3rd grade teacher.

Every five years, I go back and reread portions of that journal, looking for the same transition. I start the journal and it’s clear that I’m still writing for school; assuming that someone is going to read and grade my journal. Then, halfway through those pages of horrible cursive, I stopped expecting to be graded and started writing for myself. It was a treatise on the coolness of the Rubik’s Cube and it was just for me.

Since the Rubik’s epiphany, I’ve been writing constantly in journals. During college, I spent two years drunkenly plunking down my thoughts on the computer, but I gradually moved back to the handwritten word since, well, notebook computers weren’t there yet and I wanted to write wherever I damn well pleased.

The Goal

The primary goal of a notebook is to get out of the way… to disappear. It does this by perfectly fitting into your writing situation. How accessible does it need to be? What notebook tangibles do you need? How will it withstand a beating? By fitting into how you write, a notebook becomes invisible. It wastes none of your time because any moment you spend noticing the notebook is a moment you could be noticing something else, and writing about it.

But that’s not what makes a notebook truly sexy.

I have years of experience with some notebooks, weeks with others. As you can see, I’ve explored a wide variety of notebooks. The photo above is ordered chronologically, with my oldest journal on the bottom and my newest discovery, the Field Notes brand, the notebook in which I’m writing the first draft of this article, on the top. Like The Gel Dilemma, I’ve evaluated notebooks according to specific buckets of criteria.

My collection represents a wide variety of the notebooks out there, but they are merely the ones I’ve stumbled upon or had recommended. It is by no means a complete or representative collection. But know this: when I see a store with notebooks for sale, I always stop. I examine. I flip the pages and figure out if there is anything new. I do this regardless of current company, country, or convenience. I am a social introvert, but will stop a complete stranger on the street if they’re sporting an unknown notebook.

Purpose

The Purpose section represents the hard facts regarding this selection of notebooks. As a means of simplification, I’m going to use the word notebook to describe the bevy of different writing receptacles I’m going to evaluate. I could have just as easily used the word notepad, journal, workbook, or sketchbook.

As you can see above from the variety of notebooks I’ve used, there are widely differing intended uses. Anything pocket-sized works better than anything else when you’re sitting on a 16-hour flight to New Zealand. Given that intended use significantly affects value, there is no clear winner regarding Purpose, but there is judgment.

Brand Size Binding Cover Paper Weight Pages
Cachet Sketchbook 10.5 x 13.5 Stitched Hard Heavy (70#) ~150
Watson-Guptill Sketchbook 8.5 x 11 Stitched Hard Heavy (70#) ~200
Moleskin Cahier Notebook 7.5 x 9.75 Stitched Soft Medium (20#) 60
Moleskine Reporter Notebook 8 x 5 Stitched Hard Medium (20#) 192
Paperchase Notebook 5.75 x 4 Glue Pleather Thin (20#) ~250
Moleskine Japanese Notebook 3.75 x 5.5 Stitched Hard Medium (20#) 60
Moleskine Notebook 3.75 x 5.5 Stitched Hard Medium (20#) 60
Field Notes Notebook 3.5 x 5.5 Saddle-Stitch Soft Heavy-Medium (50#) 48
Moleskine Cahier Notebook 3.5 x 5.5 Stitched Soft Medium (20#) 64

Intangibles and Accessories

Getting into the more esoteric aspects of individual notebooks. These features tend to be where folks start to foam at the mouth with regards to their favorite notebook.

Brand Lines Detachable Color (Cover/Paper) Availability Pocket Band
Cachet Sketchbook None No Shiny Black / White Art store No No
Watson-Guptill Sketchbook None No Matte Black / White Art store No No
Moleskin Cahier Notebook None Partial Brown / Off-White Everywhere Yes No
Moleskine Reporter Notebook None No Shiny Black / White Everywhere Yes Yes
Paperchase Notebook Grid No Shiny Black / White Borders No No
Moleskine Japanese Notebook None No Shiny Black / White Everywhere Yes Yes
Moleskine Notebook None No Shiny Black / White Everywhere Yes Yes
Field Notes Notebook Grid No Brown / White Mail Order No No
Moleskine Cahier Notebook None Partial Brown / Off-White Everywhere Yes No

Sweet Decay

This section was originally titled “durability” because any notebook evaluation must analyze how a notebook is going to survive. We need to understand how a notebook can take a beating because what’s sexy about a notebook is how it survives.

Scars are stories. What I want out of my notebook is that it looks better after three months of beatings. A great notebook decays gracefully. A great notebook weathers its use and becomes more than what it began as. As a notebook is beaten up, its character improves. Therefore, the ratings in this table are different. They explain how, after heavy usage, the various aspects of the notebook survived.

There is additional measure on this table, Character. Character is a purely personal opinion of how the entire notebook looked after three months. As I’m not going to anoint an overall winner, consider Character to be the best gauge of my overall opinion of Purpose, Intangibles, and Decay.

Brand Binding Cover Paper Character
Cachet Sketchbook Poor Good Excellent Unremarkable
Watson-Guptill Sketchbook Good Good Excellent Unremarkable
Moleskin Cahier Notebook Excellent Good Good Wanna-be
Moleskine Reporter Notebook Excellent Excellent Good Hip
Paperchase Notebook Poor Good Poor Embarrassing
Moleskine Japanese Notebook Excellent Excellent Good Hip
Moleskine Notebook Excellentt Excellent Good Hip
Field Notes Notebook Good Excellent Excellent Hip
Moleskine Cahier Notebook Excellent Excellent Excellent Hip

The Whole Story

There’s no obvious winner here because there are far too many uses for a good notebook. For me, notebooks are the home for the primal drafts of my articles. Right now, I’m finishing a draft of this piece on a flight to New York. There are two notebooks sitting in my lap that I’m using for source material because both are my New York notebooks.

How do you want to remember something you’ve done or thought? Your memory, while vast, is apt to alter itself according to your mood, your opinion, the time of day. And it fades and loses things over time. This is why we take pictures. Memory, while often comprehensive in terms of storage, is lousy at reconstruction.

Any context you can capture aids in reconstruction, which is why I write it all down. But better yet, my notebook, through its design, captures context as well. This is why New York looks like this:

A stack of New York books

There’s a story within a story here. It’s not just what I wrote down, it’s how what I wrote in captured what I didn’t consciously see.

# June 1, 2008 : Comments (58)
Tech Life You choose who you follow

We Travel in Tribes

The rumor that Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails comes as no surprise to those familiar with Twitter’s shaky uptime record and its tendency to lose its mind in increasingly impressive and creative ways.

So, new platform. Fine. Saw that coming. What continues to surprise me is this: why aren’t we more pissed when Twitter goes mute for three hours? How about when those tweets you sent just vanished? How come delete only works 50% of the time? Why aren’t the Twitterati bolting to Pownce?

The answer comes down to value. In the time that I’ve been using Twitter, it’s transformed from a curiosity to an essential service. What were seemingly random status updates have now become organized into organic conversational threads that bring a steady flow of relevant content across my desktop.

“Rands, you mean, just like an RSS reader?”

Yeah yeah yeah, that’s not the key value. The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know.

Don’t Give Me What I Asked For, Give Me What I Want

When I ask a question, I’m looking for an answer in one of three ways:

  1. Specifics. Just answer the question directly and cleanly. I am the king of finding specifics. Average rainfall in Honokaa, HI? Yeah, that took three seconds to find.

  2. Like or Related. Rather than answer the specific question, how about a related answer? I’m in a Sigur Ros mood — what should I listen to? Ratatat. Google can help with related answers, but useful discovery rates begin to drop here because relation is subjective. It’s influenced by personal preference — a judgment call. It helps if you know me before you suggest that this is like that and you think I’ll like it.

  3. Rock My World. Fuck my question. Rands, here’s a random thing I know you need to know. There is no technological solution to knowing when or how to rock my world. Well, there is, but the technology is far less interesting than the people who use the technology, which brings us back to Twitter.

Affinity is the opposite of Infinity

Twitter is a social network, yes, but it’s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I’m thankful, because I’ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to what end? I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss.

I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me.

I’ve already described how I maintain a healthy Twitter equilibrium. This lightweight following protocol keeps the average amount of content I receive at any given time to a readable volume and shields me from the increasing and poorly named problem of Twitter spam. As an aside, I don’t understand folks who are complaining about Twitter spam when it’s a fundamental tenet of Twitter: “You choose who you follow”.

There are two immediate networks that I care equally about. First, there are the folks I follow. I actually know or have met a majority of the people on my followed list, but there is also an increasing healthy dose of strangers.

The second list is the folks who are following me. Now, there are functional differences in how these two groups are treated by Twitter and its supporting cadre of third party applications, but, to me, there is no difference between those I choose to follow and those who choose to follow me. Both groups have amazingly high information value because of a simple choice: “By choosing to follow this person, I am acknowledging we may have something in common / an interesting intersection.”

The act of one human being choosing to follow another is a big deal. As long as nefarious intent is not in play, the connection creates what the social science nerds like to call an affinity map; by drawing a line between you and me, we can infer that we’re somehow connected. How are we connected? Who knows? Maybe you like nerd culture? How about gel pens? We’re not really going to know until we test that link by asking a question.

Via the LazyWeb convention, I expect reasonable, informed, and quick answers to most any question. Where I used to use Google, I now use Twitter for questions, because not only do I get the answer, I also get the opinion. And sometimes I get my world rocked with random, psychic, off-the-cuff, tangential information that Google will never give me because Google doesn’t know who I am.

We Travel in Tribes

I’m eagerly watching Twitter evolve and organize itself. I’m dazzled as third parties are giving Twitter memory and context. But what I care about, and what has value to me, is the tribe of people in my ecosystem. Twitter is the best social network out there; it’s a great social search engine; and it’s a short strategic hop from being a terrific next generation address book.

My tribe is not your tribe because you’re not using Twitter how I do. You wrote an Academy Award-winning screenplay, only follow a few people, but have thousands following you. You sell shoes and follow each of the thousands of people who follow you. You are a major airline, but sound surprisingly human.

Twitter’s value has nothing to do with the technology.

Measuring uptime is an interesting nerd exercise, but Twitter’s value lies in how it stays out of the way and allows people to easily connect so they can share their thoughts and, more importantly, explore their differences.

# May 15, 2008 : Comments (20)
Tech Life Meh. I can do better.

Saving Seconds

I’ve been ripping on the mouse for years.

The argument is one of precision. The mouse, while incredibly useful as a casual means of interacting with a computer, is not a productivity tool, because when you use a mouse you sometimes miss and missing isn’t productive.

WAIT WHOA RANDS. PHOTOSHOP MAN. PHOTOSHOP LOVES THE MOUSE.

Calm down, yes, when it comes to art, to replicating the natural brushstroke, there is nothing better than the mouse (except a Wacom tablet), but do this for me. Go find the Photoshop guru on your floor and watch him or her work. Yes, the mouse is in play, but did you have any idea how much manipulation he did via the keyboard? Want to know why? Because anyone who has a deep, meaningful relationship with a computer is constantly looking for a way to save a few seconds.

The Learning Contradiction

Most of the time when you’re sitting at your computer, you’re doing exactly the same things. Your brain protects you from this mundane observation because your brain is really good at repetition. This is both a blessing and a curse. I’ll explain via an example.

Application switching inside of an operating system is the foundation of NADD. The ability to quickly context switch between apps is so common a task that they’ve developed a keyboard command just for us. In Windows, it’s Alt-Tab, and in Mac OS X, it’s Cmd-Tab. Problem was, when I made the move from Windows to Mac OS X, there was no Cmd-Tab equivalent, so my first moment inside of Mac OS X felt like this…

The pathway I’d learned to do a simple, essential task was blocked. A task I’d taken for granted was now a mental hangnail, which threw off all my timing.

A quick search of the Internet revealed a fine shareware replacement for application switching. After the install of the new system preference, the hangnail vanished. I didn’t think about app switching again. Was my new solution faster? I don’t know. All I know is I’d unblocked the path to do what I needed to do so that I could forget it was there.

The blessing of learning a thing is also a curse. By learning to do a thing, you also forget it’s there, which means as new, improved means of doing things show up, you remain blissfully ignorant. I’m a fan of this ignorance because I’ve got other crap I need to do, and I don’t want to sweat the details, but here’s the rub: the details might be wasting a huge amount of your time.

Saving Seconds

Let’s try a test. From this article, I want you to count the number of discrete steps it takes you to compose a new mail message. Each key or key combination you click is 1 point. A mouse drag is one point. A mouse click is another point.

Ready? Go.

There are two types of people. The ones who waited for me to say Go to compose a new mail and the ones who read “compose a new mail message” and pressed the three keys that are necessary, from anywhere in the OS, to fire up a new compose window.

Anything more than three points to compose a new mail is a massive waste of your time.

“Rands, you are a nerd. I am not. I enjoy the slow gracefulness by which the mouse glides over to my dock and I select the mail application, after which I select the File menu, followed by New Message. Aaaaaaaah.”

All I’m reading is 5 points. All I’m thinking about is the 37 mails you send each day multiplied by 5 points = 185. Let’s multiply that by 30 days in a month, which is 5550 points. Finally, let’s multiply that by the number of other micro-tasks you’re doing where you’re doubling the amount of necessary effort. Ok, I can’t even do the math; I’ve got the productivity shakes here.

Ok, deep breath. Whooooooooooo.

You’re likely not in as a big a hurry as I, that’s fine. You may have an extremely casual, informal relationship with your computer and that’s cool, too. Perhaps this article is not for you, but my question is this: do you want to spend your time heading towards doing stuff, or doing stuff?

This article is for the folks who, when they discover a simpler way to get something done, a shortcut, they get a rush because they know simplicity is elegant and efficiency is a turn-on. The target audience for this article is people who, when presented with some else’s desktop, can’t help but stare and size it up. Their question is, “What is this person doing that will make my world move faster?”

Welcome.

Triage

How many fingers are sitting on the keyboard right now? Go type something. Looks like I’ve got all ten in play, but as I watch myself type, I’m really only using six or so. Yes, my form is crap, but I’m still hitting 90 words a minute on most typing tests.

Would you rather have ten smart fingers or one big, dumb thumb? Ten fingers, of course. Then why in the world are you holding onto that mouse right now?

The first thing we need to do is get you to understand the degree of your mouse addiction, so I’m going to ask you to unplug your mouse. It’s important to leave the mouse in the same familiar spot on your desk, but it must be unplugged.

Ok, now go work for 10 minutes. No cheating.

At some point during these 10 minutes, you’re going to forget the mouse isn’t connected to your computer and you’re going to grab it and the pointer is not going to move. You’re going to think, “Huh?”

Good. Jot yourself a note about what you were doing:

Each of these represents a second or two you can save. Each task that you jotted is a task where some maniacal productivity nerd has already stared at and figured out a way to make it faster. This leads to the second part of your exercise.

For each note on your list, I want you to discover a non-mouse-based equivalent. Start with the local help system. Better yet, let someone else do the work for you and search Google for “Must have keyboard shortcuts for YOUR FAVORITE APP”.

You might not find a shortcut for every task, and even if you do there’s no telling whether that particular shortcut is going to stick in your head, but my guess is… one will stick. It will stick because its value to you will become instantly apparent. I made fun of the Windows Start key for months until the key showed up on my keyboard and I realized it was the simple starting point for EVERYTHING I DID ON MY PC. I’m on a Mac now, but I can still close my eyes and imagine firing up Word: START-RUN-“Word”-Return. Four points… meh. I can do better.

The point of this exercise is awareness. Once you’ve found one or two shortcuts that shave a micro-second here and there, you’ll become more aware of other places where you’re repeating yourself. You’ll start looking for time-saving shortcuts elsewhere because there is bliss in saving time.

Practice Productivity Minimalism

Like your desktop, you’re going to construct your own version of productivity nerdery. Still, here are some of my favorite moves and observations.

As much as possible, I keep my system of shortcuts as simple as possible. My ideal is that I should be able to sit down at any vanilla Mac OS X system and fly. The primary reason has to do with my personality. I’m a nerd and I know that without constraints I’d tweak my productivity system endlessly. I’ll explain.

I recently pinged the Twittersphere regarding how many folks actively maintain their Address Books. As expected, the graph of the responses formed a pleasant bell curve with most folks responding with a healthy “I maintain it as I need it”.

Then there’s the guy who sent me the 700-word email describing, in detail, the precise process he uses to maintain his Address Book. This mail included AppleScripts and shell scripts. I read the whole mail. I ran the scripts, too, because I can appreciate the obsessive nerd personality.

I’m that guy.

I’m the guy who will spend the entire goddamned weekend reorganizing my tagging system because I didn’t like the tone or the tense of my previous tagging system.

Paying attention to productivity is a slippery slope. The system efficiency addiction associated with saving time can become so compelling that your process begins to control more of your time than your product.

Only Essential Additional Tools

Given my minimalist approach, I keep my list of required productivity apps short. In additional to the feverish use of Cmd-Tab for application switching, I also use LaunchBar.

This is the cornerstone of my interaction with the operating system. This is a utility that allows access to just about anything in your hardware and on the Internet via a simple Cmd-Space-application/URL/whatever. Your question is, “Does LaunchBar do my_favorite_task?” And the answer is, “Yes, it does. And if it doesn’t do it out of the box, it’s probably a five-minute configuration exercise to make it happen.” In the past ten minutes, I’ve used LaunchBar to: make a TinyURL for Twitter, search for the LaunchBar website, look up John Adams on Wikipedia, and fire up a half-dozen applications. My favorite game to play with LaunchBar is: “I wonder if…?” where I just start typing “I wonder if…it looks up maps”.

Yeah, it does.

Many folks prefer Quicksilver to LaunchBar and want to argue endlessly about the pros and cons of each. Realize this debate has nothing to do with the strengths of the respective tools, but is merely a manifestation of the zealotry of the nerd personality when it comes to defining, defending, and fretting about the inessential details of their favorite tools.

There are a bevy of other tools you can obsess over. TextExpander is popular with heavy email users in my crowd. There’s also a healthy sprinkling of AppleScript on most of my friends’ desktops. Everyone has his or her own system for productivity, which leads me to my last thought.

We’re All Wasting Seconds

This is the presentation I want to see at the next conference: in a room full of people, anyone is welcome to walk up to the mic and plug their laptop in to the projector. They’ll be asked to complete three simple tasks:

  1. Send a mail to a friend
  2. Find something on the Internet
  3. Save a bookmark or an image.

I would be fixated.

After the presenter was done with the tasks, we’d be able to pepper them with questions: “You did that too fast, what were you doing?” or “What haxie are you using on your dock?” or “I smell AppleScript… what the hell was that AppleScript?”

If each speaker had five minutes, in an hour we’d have 12 different speakers doing the same tasks completely differently, and I promise you’d find a small fix that you’d forget immediately that would forever have added a few seconds to your life.

# April 21, 2008 : Comments (54)
Tech Life How much might I love this gig?

The Business

You’ve had a small number of career defining moments. These are the select few moments in time when the trajectory of your career changed instantly and drastically. I have two buckets of these: ones I expected and ones that completely blindsided me. While the surprise and subsequent scrambling involved in being blindsided are chock full of delicious adrenaline, I highly recommend the moments you can predict.

One such predictable moment is the first glimpse of the offer letter for your new gig. This is the culmination of hours of resume tweakage, a series of phone screen gymnastics, and two grueling days of in-person interviews. This is the moment where you can answer the question, “How much do they think I’m worth?”

Fact is, you should already know. You’re the business.

the businesses

Pre-Game

The offer letter negotiation process starts earlier than you think. Think back to your first phone screen. The recruiter was asking you warm-up feeler questions like, “Why do you want to leave your current gig?” and “What’s your ideal job?”, when they slide in a casual, “So, what are you making now?”

You stop. You sense that this seemingly off-the-cuff question is important. Your inner dialog goes something like, “I’m making 64k, buUUut, I’m going to round up to 70k because, well, I’m worth it.”

Yes, you are, but it’s a lie and it’s not a very good lie. You also broke the number one rule in negotiation: be informed. You don’t make 70k; you don’t make 64k, either. You make closer to 90k. HOLY RAISE RANDS.

I’ll explain where this magical raise comes from as well as the other rules in a bit, but first let’s understand how to answer the question “What are you making now?” Your answer: “I’m full-time and I’m making 64k. I’m getting a review in October, and my last raise was 4% plus a 2k bonus. I’d be walking away from 500 unvested options with a strike price currently 12 bucks under market, and all of which are going to be totally vested in 12 months.”

Expect an uncomfortable pause on the other end of the phone. That’s the sound of the recruiter furiously scribbling “Candidate knows their compensation shit” on the top of your resume. What you’re saying with this lengthy informed answer is complex, yet simple. You’re saying, “There are many ways to be compensated. I’m aware of all of them and, when the time is right, I’m ready to negotiate.”

How I’m Doing?

Whether you’re expecting an offer letter imminently or simply wondering how I’m going to make the offer negotiation process entertaining, I have an exercise for you. Let’s figure out what you actually make.

Like frequent resume updates, this career maintenance exercise is designed as a professional checkpoint, which answers the simple question, “How am I doing?”

First, I’ll explain how I calculated your hypothetical yearly compensation above:

There are two fuzzy areas in this calculation. First, if you haven’t worked for yourself, you probably haven’t considered benefits as part of your compensation before. That 25% is an educated swag that most companies use to account for health and life insurance and 401k. You spend a lot of time ignoring this 25% because it involves things like retirement and health benefits and — duh — you’re immortal. There will, however, be a time, probably sooner than you’d like, that you’ll fully appreciate this portion of your compensation.

The other fuzzy area is stock. This example assumes you got 2000 options when you were hired and these options vest at 25% each year. I’m making an optimistic wild-ass leap and saying that you’re grossing 6k a year using the idea that you are making 12 dollars per option per year. Congrats.

Now, grab a piece of paper and figure out what you make. Don’t sweat perfection. You just need to be close.

The Swag

Fast forward. You’ve just finished the second round of interviews. Traditionally in high-tech, the recruiter is the last interview of the day and their job is to get inside your head and see what you think about the gig. They might throw in some compensation questions regarding your current gig as well. My advice is simple: the more they know you want the gig, the less they need to offer you.

And they haven’t offered you a thing yet.

There’s a time and place for negotiation, and it’s not at the end of six hours of interviews on a Friday when you don’t even know if you’re getting an offer letter.

So you wait. You send off a set of references, sit in bed replaying interviews in your head, and send thank you e-mails to the interview team. All professional karma-aligning activities, but what you really need to do is build your own offer letter. Let’s swag it:

Salary

The business model everyone loves is a business built on recurring revenue streams. This is why you can get a good cell phone for absolutely nothing. You’re going to pay for that phone many times over with your monthly subscription of $39.95. You’re still happy paying $40 a month because that feels like a deal, but carriers don’t see $40; they see the $1500 you’re going to spend over that three-year contract.

Your base salary is your recurring revenue stream. It’s your financial life blood and we’re going to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get it as high as possible because a 1% increase doesn’t affect just this year, it affects every year after it. For the swag, you need to figure out what you want to be paid in the new gig, and my first question is, “For someone doing exactly the same job as you, how much are they being paid?”

For a question that everyone wants to know the answer to, the Internet is surprisingly useless here. In preparation for this article I spent a solid day researching various salary information sites and couldn’t find a single site that contained a job description that remotely described my current gig.

Go ahead and check out those salary info sites and confuse yourself a bit, but I’ve got two pieces of advice for your swag. First, talk to friends with similar jobs. Remember that salaries for similar jobs vary greatly depending on the industry, geographic location, and specific company. Second, take your current salary and add 10% — that’s your salary swag.

Title

Titles, like salaries, vary from company to company, but what you’re looking for in a new job is a sign that you are growing. Associate software engineer now? Ok, drop that associate title from your business cards. Stuck as a software engineer for three years? I’d be looking for that senior prefix when I jumped ship.

Think of your new title like this: what title needs to be added to your resume for this new job to demonstrate that you’re actively growing in your career?

Sign-on Bonus

It’s difficult to swag a sign-on bonus because this type of incentive is often used to augment weak parts of an offer, and you don’t have an offer letter yet. If a recruiter knows you’re keen on stock and that you’ll be disappointed with a low-ball stock offer, they might dazzle you with a large sign-on bonus. Sign-on bonuses are one-time cash windfalls that may never show up again. For now, all you need to know is that they’re often a band-aid, and the question will be: what are they hiding?

Stock

While representing the largest potential for unexpected financial gain, stock and stock options are also the hardest to swag. Rather than focusing on a hard number here, the question you should first ask is, “How much do I believe in this company?” If your answer is, “I like the company, but I don’t see a lot of growth” then focus your negotiation energy on base salary. If your answer is, “I love this start-up; it’s the next Google” then stock grants are clearly going to play a major role in your negotiation.

In terms of valuing the stock, whether we’re talking about a start-up or an established public company, you’re speculating. For a publicly traded company, take a look at the past 5 years. What’s the average stock price? For the start-up, well, my rule of thumb for stock is no different than a venture capitalist’s success rate. A VC’s expectation is that one out of every ten of their companies is going to hit it big and that will cover the investment for the other nine. My expectation is that one out of every ten jobs will result in a stock windfall. This should depress you.

Any value you place on stock or options is a wild-ass guess, but it’s still an important piece of data. The value you put on stock is a measure of your belief in the company.

The Offer

“… and the team is really excited to have you onboard and we have an offer letter for you.”

And then it lands.

Before we digest what the recruiter is saying, I want to reset your head. Yes, you’ve made it this far. Yes, you want the job. Yes, you love the company. But here’s the reality: You are the business. If you take this gig, I think you should pour your heart into it, but I want you to remember that you’re going to have another five to ten other jobs in your lifetime just like this one. This means that for each moment you spend being pumped about the new gig, you’ll have an equal and opposite moment at the end of the gig where you can’t wait to get the hell out.

Amongst these five to ten jobs that you’ll have there is one constant: you. You’re the one who has to pay rent, ride the subway, buy a condo, get married, have some kids, and build your dream house. Your welfare is not your employer’s first priority. It takes one layoff to figure that out.

You are the business and the one consistent metric business is measured by is growth. A new gig represents a rare opportunity where you can drastically change the trajectory of that growth.

The Counter-Offer

As a hiring manager who has been involved in many offer negotiations, the safest way to get me to ignore any counter-offer is to make it without data.

Recruiter: “The candidate wants a higher base.”

Me: “Really? Why?”

Recruiter: “He just does.”

Me: “Grrrrrrr.”

Negotiation is a discussion of facts. Any counter-offer needs to be constructed with the impression that it’s based on data. “I want a 10% raise because, based on my research, that represents the average salary for this gig elsewhere in the industry.”

Sure, it’s still a swag, but your swag demonstrates effort/research/desire and in an interrupt-driven industry full of bright people racing around doing nothing in particular, I’m a fan of research. It demonstrates that you care about your career and that’s someone I want to work with.

The real problem is…

This Offer Blows

There’s some portion of the offer that is disappointing to you, and everyone involved, including your future employer, would prefer that you didn’t walk in the door disappointed. Let’s fix that.

As I don’t know what your problem is with your particular offer, I can’t advise what you need to say, but here are some common frustrations and a plan of attack.

Lower Base Salary: If you’re staying in your industry and you’re staying at an established company, I can’t see how a pay decrease is ever a positive sign. Yes, if you’re moving to a start-up, you’re going to trade salary for stock. You need to figure out if you’re cool with that.

You wanted a 10% increase and they came back with 5%? Why? Sure, your 10% was a pie in the sky swag, but how is the recruiter justifying this base salary? They’re probably saying something about comparable salaries across the company and how you’d be making more than 90% of the people in your grade. That’s a warm fuzzy, but I call bullshit: you’re in the wrong grade.

But It’s Ok, Here’s a Bonus: If the recruiter is pitching this bonus as a fix for your low base, I call bullshit again. A sign-on bonus, like a bonus plan, is a finicky thing that has a habit of vanishing when the sky falls. You can’t count on them. There’s nothing like an instant pile of money to distract you from the fact that, over the long term, you’re bringing less money home.

Even Better, Here’s a Pile of Stock: How do you value this stock? Sure, for the public company, you have a stock price, but you’re not going to see a penny of that stock for a year. And what about that start-up? Well, did you know they have a stock price, too? They have to in order to give it some sort of value. This is how a start-up values itself when it goes to a VC. They say, “We’ve issued x amount of shares and we believe they’re worth y per share. How much would you like?”

You can ask about this internal stock price. You can ask about how big their pool of outstanding fully diluted shares is and that will give you some data about how much of the pie you’re getting. But here’s the rub: I assume start-up options have zero financial value, but this doesn’t mean they have zero absolute value. Again, your measure of the stock is merely the measure of your faith.

And This is Our Final Offer: If some part of the offer blows and there’s absolutely no way to fix it, you have two options: walk away or find another way to ease the blow. If you can’t walk away, have you thought about:

Meh

My single worst gig was one where I got everything I wanted out of the offer letter, but in my exuberance for being highly valued, I totally forgot that my first read on the gig was “meh”. 90 days later, I couldn’t care less that I got a 15% raise and a sign-on bonus. I couldn’t stand the mundanity of the daily work and I happily resigned a few months later, taking both a pay cut and returning my sign-on bonus for the opportunity to work at Netscape.

All of this discussion of compensation ignores a simple question you need to be able to answer: “How much might I love this gig?”

For any new job, you should be able to quickly explain to anyone why the new job is bigger than the last and why you might love it. Whether they believe you or not is irrelevant. You’ve got to believe it because you’re the business.

# April 11, 2008 : Comments (17)
Tech Life IT'S A TIME TRAVEL MOVIE, RIGHT?

Nerdfotainment

I was introduced to Ask A Ninja via this podcast. In the podcast, the Ninja complains extensively about the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. The gist: “Every single character has their own damned plot line and it’s incredibly hard to figure out what the hell is going on”.

The third movie, At World’s End, only compounded the complexity problem. More characters, more plot lines, and more confusion. I just watched the third movie for the third time and discovered another subtle moment of “Oh, that’s why Calypso said that random thing in the second movie. I get it now.”

Back to the Ninja. His final pitch was: “Movies shouldn’t be this much work”. He’s wrong. Movies can be this hard, especially when they’re designed for nerds.

Nerd Generation Theory

According to my math, there is a huge pile of nerds who are traipsing around their 30s. This is the Apple ][ generation and they’re making some bucks. Financial types call this decade of life “the accumulation years” because, traditionally, this is the time of life when you start gathering piles of cash for use during the rest of your life. You’ve found your ideal gig and you’re hitting your stride.

Advertisers love these 30-somethings because they have large disposable incomes. Consequently, content creators love them as well, which means that for content creators to generate their own piles of cash, they need to develop entertainment targeted at the nerd demographic.

What do we know about nerds? Well, we know a lot. They need a project, are systematic thinkers, and they love puzzles and games. This brings me to a whole pile of entertainment that has shown up over the past ten years. All of which, I believe, is specifically designed for the nerd demographic, since all of the content shares a common characteristic: it’s terribly complex and nerds enjoy making it more so.

J.J. Abrams is a Big Nerd.

One of the more prominent recent examples of nerd entertainment is J.J. Abrams’ Lost. If you don’t follow the show, here’s the pitch: “A plane leaving Sydney, Australia, headed for Los Angeles, crashes in the middle of the Pacific. The survivors end up on a mysterious island where an endless stream of bizarre, unexplained shit goes down.”

I’ve just told you the basic premise of Lost, but I’ve actually told you absolutely nothing about the show. This is because Abrams has constructed a seemingly infinite set of intersecting plot lines involving all the major characters, both on the island and before they got to the island. Combine these elements with the usual science fiction elements such as immortality, time travel, and a creepy black smoke monster and you’ll quickly realize that one of the biggest criticisms of the show is “I have no fucking clue what is going on”.

That’s right. That’s the point. That’s why nerds created the Lost Wiki. That’s why we replay all the trailers in slow motion. We’re looking for that tattoo on the shark in the third episode of the second season because AH HAH! That explains something. I’m just not sure what… yet.

Nerds are systematic thinkers, which means, for entertainment, we want to exercise our systemic comprehension muscles. We want to stare at a thing and figure out what rules define it. In the case of Lost, Abrams get this. He sprinkles hints of systems within the system of the show. He tinkers with time and with personalities to paint brief glimpses of clues. And then he changes everything because he knows that if we ever feel we’ve figured it out, we’ll bail.

Captain Kirk doesn’t know he’s a Big Nerd.

Our search for entertaining complexity is not new; it’s just gone mainstream. In fact, if systemic complexity doesn’t exist in a nerd-appropriate show, we’ll go ahead and create it. Think about the original Star Trek series, which, in my opinion, was one of the first pieces of serious nerd entertainment.

Like Lost, the amount of content and discussion regarding the original series, which hasn’t seen production in FORTY YEARS is mind-boggling. Yes, we’re still arguing about whether Captain Kirk could actually build a cannon to kill that lizard-guy . “In a battle between the Enterprise and a Star Destroyer, who would win?” (cough: Enterprise, duh, Star Destroyers can’t fucking steer.)

I’ve no idea how much backstory Gene Roddenberry constructed behind his characters and his stories. But I know that nerds, with their love of this show, have forced systemic complexity on it. Because if there is no project, no problem to solve, it’s not engaging.

Feluf, also a Big Nerd.

Feluf is my Level 70 Night Elf in World of Warcraft. I was running Karazhan with my guild the other night and I landed two sweet Epics: Ferocious Swift Kicker boots and the Steelhawk Crossbow.

Many of you have no clue what I just said. Some nerd crap about World of Warcraft. If you have no clue whether World of Warcraft would float your boat or not, my question is: what’d you do when you read the previous paragraph? Did you Google Karazhan? How about Epics? If you did, you learned that Karazhan is a dungeon and Epics are apparently really good gear.

Unlike popular TV and movies, World of Warcraft is clearly targeted at the nerd mind set, which means it’s designed with brutal system complexity in mind. Sure, they’ve designed the beginning of the game to be simple and approachable, but that’s how any good drug dealer builds his business: the first hit is free.

Significant engagement in World of Warcraft reveals a world chock full of complexity. You want to stop running all over the place? Well, you need a mount, and those guys show up at Level 40. To get there, you’re going to have to figure out what gear is good for your class. You’re going to have to learn how to make money to buy your mount, either via your profession or via building and selling goods at your local auction house. And once you get your mount at Level 40, you’re already going to know there are faster Epic mounts out there. Shit.

There’s a point where all this complex game drudgery sounds like life, and yeah, there is a lot of social interaction between players and guilds. But it’s intersections within the system to support the system. Warcraft is built to be impossibly complex, but every player is always secretly thinking, “I can totally figure this out”. Which is why Blizzard changes the system every few months.

Kaiser Soze. Unpronounceable Big Nerd.

The Usual Suspects, Memento, and Donnie Darko. These movies represent some of the best of nerd entertainment, and two of these movies didn’t do great at the box office. Yet all of them eventually made a pile of money because of the unique system puzzles they presented. Most folks walked out of those movies thinking, “I’m, uh, not sure quite sure what just happened to my brain”. Whereas we nerds rushed home to the Internet to begin the quest of figuring out the system. IT’S A TIME TRAVEL MOVIE, RIGHT?

We followed that line of questioning up with the immediate purchase of the DVD. In the case of Donnie Darko, this not only made the movie profitable, but also resulted in eventual release of the Director’s Cut of the movie, which only created more mysteries regarding that bunny who is still freaking me out.

Mr. Darcy is a Big Nerd. No, really.

Nerds have no monopoly over mind-bendingly complex plots. Anyone with a girlfriend has already endured multiple adaptations of the Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, I’ve been there. Yeah, I know the A&E version is the only adaption worth anything and I further know it’s because of that annoyingly charming Colin Firth portraying Mr. Darcy.

Yes, Mr. Darcy. Like the plots of J.J. Abrams, the arrogant intensity of Captain Kirk, and the devious hidden intentions of Kaiser Soze, Mr. Darcy is great nerd entertainment. I mean it.

Once you get past all the “doths” and “thous”, and realize there’s a lot more going on than social climbing and gold-digging, in Mr. Darcy you find a complex and nerd-worthy character. Why’s he being such an arrogant prick? SHE’S NEVER GOING TO LOVE THAT… WAIT… WHAT?

Argument about the natures and motivations of the characters in Pride and Prejudice might seem different than those in Lost or The Usual Suspects, but ultimately, we’re yelling about them because they are beautifully crafted unsolvable puzzles.

And that’s nerdfotainment.

# March 11, 2008 : Comments (47)
Tech Life The art of distributing your attention

I Don't Multitask

I’m at the end of a conference week and I’ve just moved hotels. This is normally a hassle, but the broadband in the prior hotel blew, which means I’m a week behind on everything. Once I’ve checked into the room, the first thing I do is fire up Safari and watch the first page load. Nearly instant.

Sweet, sweet broadband.

As we know, high-speed access to the Internet is the key to information bliss in The Cave, but we’re not in our Cave, are we? We’re in New Zealand on the 9th floor of a strange hotel where they tell me the water flushes down the toilet in the opposite direction. I haven’t checked; I’m busy building my Cave away from home.

There are two goals with the process: creating a sense of comfortable familiarity while also managing the interestingness of the surroundings. I start by positioning the desk so I have line of sight to the TV, and then I remove all non-essential, distracting crap from the surface. I turn on the desk lamp and the bathroom light and turn off the rest of the room lights, creating a comfortable blanket of darkness around the desk.

The window stays open unless it’s a significant source of glare. I used to always pull the drapes because I used to see windows as very high-resolution screen savers, which are apt to grab my attention. But, as we’ll see, the interestingness of this natural screen saver outweighs the risk.

Lastly, I need mental background noise to tap into when I’m not focusing on whatever task it is I’m working on. Back at home, my favorite source of white noise is the coffee shop. It’s chock full of people, stories, and familiar, random sounds that fuel my creative forward momentum.

No coffee shop here, so I need to create it. A movie will work, and I get lucky and find Casino Royale, which I’ve already seen.

I spend the next hour and a half doing tasks that don’t require significant attention. I’m scrubbing email, scribbling random thoughts, triaging bugs, tidying articles in progress, and generally doing tasks on the B list. What’s more interesting are my mental breaks. I jump into another tab in Safari and take a glance at del.icio.us, Digg, Google Reader, or other meta-content. I watch the movie for a few moments or glance out the window to see what the world is up to.

These mental breaks share a common trait: they provide rich content, but not rich enough content that I’ll stop working on my B-list tasks.

When Casino Royale is over, the next movie comes on, which is The Majestic, with Jim Carrey. This presents a potential problem. I haven’t seen this movie, and I don’t want to risk it being good and grabbing my attention.

No problem. Wikipedia to the rescue. I spend five minutes reading the plot of The Majestic and I’m done. The summary describes all the plot twists and aspects of the movie that might grab my attention. Reading the Wikipedia summary lobotomizes the interestingness so that the movie becomes structured white noise. I can glance at it for 5 seconds, take my mental content break, and not get lost in wondering where the movie is going because I already know how it’s going to end.

The World is Not a Screen Saver

In Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, he describes how researchers for Sesame Street determined what parts and how much of the show were actually registering with five-year-old kids. What they discovered was that, when presented with toys and quality segments, these children were able to play with toys and remember content from the show just as well as kids who just watched the show.

This research from the late 1960s contradicts a lot of the bitch-slapping directed at multitasking, especially in the recent Autumn of the Multitaskers article. The article summarizes, “we concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on”. This article goes on to say that multitasking-related stress prematurely ages us, hampers our ability to focus and analyze, and, in the long term, causes our brains to atrophy.

Compelling stuff. I especially like the reference to one of the studies where “… researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds.”

Knowing how important having a properly constructed Cave is to me, both at home and remotely, the phrase “listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds” stands out. Think about how the task of listening for specific tones amongst noise would fit into my Cave environment. The answer is: it wouldn’t. In fact, it would drive me batshit crazy and I’d chase the researcher out of my hotel room with a broom or whatever the hell they call a broom in New Zealand. Of course the students listening for tones in random noise learned less; the researchers were bugging the shit out of them.

The Autumn of the Multitaskers actually leads with a story about how the author crashed his car trying to use his cell phone while driving. He implies, but does not explore, the idea that multitasking is a skill and not a generational curse. The hidden contradiction in the article is that you could just be really bad at multitasking. And my guess is that being really bad at anything you need to do often is potentially a recipe for stress and early aging.

It also reminded me of another thing: I don’t multitask.

Multitasking is a convenient descriptive term for what I do. In fact, to the outside observer, multitasking is a perfect description, but because it’s based on outside observation, it’s misleading.

I don’t multitask. Think about it, you can’t concentrate on two things at once. Yes, to the outsider, I am doing many tasks at once, but in my head I can only do one thing at a time. Where the art is, where the skill is, and what the term should describe is what I do between the tasks. What I do well is a combination of timely, adept context switches combined with content-rich breaks. It looks like this:

Deconstructing Multitasking

And it feels like this.

I deeply consider the thing I’m working on. I sit up straight, furrow my brow, talk to myself, and dig into what I’m doing. My environment is meticulously designed to support this, whether it’s the precise, familiar location of my computer, the blanket of darkness surrounding me, or the white noise I select to provide a mental break focal point.

At some point while working, I will reach a mental block. I quickly assess the magnitude of this block (minor cramp or total fucking blockage?) against the priority of the task (need to finish this now or whenever?) Based on that lightning fast assessment, I either stop or grind it out.

This stop may be a context switch to another task, but it’s often a break to soak in the white noise, and it’s in these pauses that I’m brutally creative. When I stare out the window of the hotel, I see a small harbor full of sailboats, and, somehow, the haphazard arrangement of the colorful sails reminds me of a summer in Minnesota where my jerk of a cousin taught me to play Bloody Knuckles after everyone went to bed. Bloody knuckles, now that was a game, and games remind me of the bizarrely different ways human beings have figured out how to communicate, which is the EXACT topic I’m currently writing about, so I jump back to my MacBook and continue writing.

Or perhaps I don’t find my sailboat segue. Perhaps the harbor takes me in a different direction and I’m inspired to switch tasks. Fine, back to that email where I’ve been writing a response to a flame mail from a well-intentioned engineer who has suddenly realized that he’s been ignoring the web for five years. And it turns out the web has changed a bit and his five-year-old mastery of web technologies is now obsolete. His recent discovery of his irrelevance (cough: Fez) has turned into this flame mail, which requires a careful response. And, you know, email is just another bizarre construction by which we communicate AND HEY that’s the topic I was just writing about, so I switch back to my original writing task.

The actual elapsed time that occurred during the previous three paragraphs is about 10 seconds, including my five-second inspirational pace in front of window. And if you were watching me, you’d think, “restless, unfocused, multitasker”. What you can see now, with internal context, is that I’m really only working on one thing: the article about communication.

Yes, I almost made a switch to another task, extinguishing the flame mail, but even if I did, I’d still have the echo of what I was just doing. Tasks get messed up in my head, yes, but mixing shit up is how you build new shit.

Distributed Attention

Back to Gladwell’s research. What they learned was that the five-year-olds were “Attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they were looking at what for them were the most informative parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.”

Multitasking is the art of distributing your attention and, guess what, you’ve instinctively known how to do it since you were five. What have you done since then? You’ve worried about information overload, you’ve devised a new way to get things done, and you’ve thought “That’s me!” when someone has taken the time to describe something you already knew.

Me, I’m watching how I context switch. I’m learning when I need to switch to a new task or just relate what I want to do with what I’m currently doing. I’m figuring out the right environment to seed my tasks and my non-tasks that push my ideas towards a coherent structure. At the same time, I’m acknowledging that documented excessive structure might sell books and provide misleading comfort, but it doesn’t provide much space for inspiration.

My Cave, wherever I build it, is a deceptively creative structure. I surround myself with creativity-driving, chaotic-seeming natural order, which is built with the understanding that I can only do one thing at a time, but when I stop, I create.

# March 6, 2008 : Comments (22)
Tech Life A function of the creativity entropy

It’s Windy in Wellington

The presentation season kicked off for me with a week in New Zealand at the Webstock conference. I arrived early, which, as it turns out, wasn’t the best use of my time, as I spent two solid days of what should have been vacation stressing about slides.

Among the many highlights was the speaker dinner held the night before the conference where I met far too many bright people to list here. As I walked back to my hotel room along the waterfront with my head buzzing from the after effects of rapid content acquisition, I heard someone whistling.

No, not someone. Something.

Wellington is at the south end of the North Island, which somehow makes it incredibly windy. The wind varies from a gentle breeze to a hat-removing, lean-into-it, category 4 wind storm. My guess is that residents don’t notice the wind, but I wonder if they notice the whistling lampposts.

Singing LamppostI’ve no idea whether this was intentional design or not, but when the wind hits them just right, I swear the cylindrical holes in the lampposts whistle. In unison. I walked by multiple times during my week in Wellington just to see how the lamp posts were singing that particular day because I wasn’t sure if it was a fluke. It wasn’t.

Whether someone intentionally designed these lampposts or it’s a happy coincidence is irrelevant. It’s a great example of one of the unspoken goals of going to any conference: you travel to discover the truly unexpected.

SXSW is Big

It’s big and becoming notorious for the fact that while everyone goes, many skip the panels because the panel structure provides less content and more rambling conversation where there is no guarantee that a rock star set of panelists are going to say anything useful.

Guess what? I can get the same thing with the same rock star panelists and a higher hit rate of usefulness in the unstructured environment of that random bar on 6th street at two in the morning.

My contribution to fixing the SXSW problem is the following. First, John Gruber and I are following the lead of Jim Coudal and Brenden Dawes, by spending an hour delivering content, not conversation. The topic is Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts and, oddly, I think I’ll lead off with a compelling design story about Mentos. We’ll see how that works out.

Second, I also have the pleasure of moderating a panel titled Designing for Freedom and, as with each year, I have been honored with a rock star set of panelists, which includes:

As an aside, the panel is up against the keynote with Mark Zuckerberg, but my thought is this: “Think of how much time you’ve already wasted on Facebook, why waste more?”

Yes, it’s a panel and I just ripped panels, but my commitment is this: we’ll stay on topic, say something bright, and we’ll be available for yelling at a local bar shortly after the panel.

Whistling Lampposts?

I knew Webstock was a hit when it was 2am and I was standing outside a bar yelling at some bright someone about some bright thing and having a ball.

Webstock is small. 500 or so, but I’ve never been to a conference where the audience had such a sense of community. Sure, it’s a function of the size of the design population of New Zealand, but that doesn’t explain why Webstock had such personality. I can firmly point my finger at the passion, expertise, and professionalism of the organizers, but I think I should also point at their humility and simple goal of “Let’s build the new, which encourages fertile chaos”.

For me, a conference finishes with a list. It’s a combination of names from business cards and names I simply remember. These aren’t necessarily folks that need an immediate follow-up; it’s the “remember this person” list and how I discover these people and why I need to remember them is a function of the creativity entropy of the event.

I don’t know if this entropy is definable, controllable thing. My guess is SXSW has it and will continue to have it as long as the population believes those bars remain an intellectually target rich environment. As for Webstock, it’s on the other side of the world, but they’ve defined an event you must experience simply because you want to find your own whistling lamppost.

# February 21, 2008 : Comments (9)
Tech Life This isn't about slides

Out Loud

It’s the calm before the presentation storm. Over the next three months, I’ve got four different presentations at Webstock and SXSW. I’m also the best man at a wedding in Washington, all of which means I’m spending most of my down-time thinking up things I’m going to say in the future.

If you’re looking for advice on giving a presentation, the Internet is chock full of endless advice. I’ve been here, too. If you’re looking for tips on writing the presentation, the Internet goes dark — for a fairly simply reason. To think about how to write a presentation, you need to think about how you speak, and that’s not what you’re doing when you read or write. I’ll demonstrate. Say the following out loud right now:

I am reading this out loud to no one in particular.

Were you surprised to hear your voice? I was. Did you actually read it out loud? No? Why not? Sitting in a coffee shop? Worried that the guy next to you will think you’re a freak? This basic discomfort is the reason it’s tricky to explain how to present in an article. The skills involved in writing a clever paragraph are completely different from those used for developing and delivering that clever paragraph to a room full of strangers.

You still haven’t read it out loud, have you?

Presentation or Speech?

What's the big idea?Developing a compelling presentation involves a series of decisions and exercises to align your head with the fact that you’re delivering your content directly to people. No internet. No weblog. Just you.

Your first decision: speech or presentation? Wondering about the difference? Take a quick look at these two entirely different appearances by Steve Jobs. The first is his Three Stories speech at Stanford and the second is part of his MacWorld 2007 keynote.

You only need to watch a few minutes of both to get a feel for the difference between a presentation and a speech. My guess is you only viewed the Stanford video because everyone has seen Steve Jobs at MacWorld and the Stanford video is a shocker. Clearly, it’s Steve Jobs. It’s his voice, he’s got his trademark bottle of water, but the delivery is completely anti-Jobs because he’s reading his compelling stories from a piece of a paper.

It freaks me out.

In his autobiography, regarding his stand-up comedy years, Steve Martin writes, “If you don’t dim the lights… the audience won’t laugh.” This subtle, paradoxical observation is the core difference between speeches and presentations. In a presentation, half of the art is figuring out how to create an environment where your audience can actively participate without knowing they are participating. In a speech, the audience may laugh or cry, but they are not required nor encouraged to participate, because, during a speech, the spotlight never leaves the speechmaker.

For a presentation or a speech, you need your audience, otherwise it’s just you in an empty room talking to no one in particular, and we already have a word for that… it’s called writing.

The Unforgivable Mistake

There is one unforgivable mistake when giving a presentation. You’ve heard it before: “Don’t read from your slides.” As you’ll see, my approach for presentation development is designed around avoiding this cardinal mistake, and it starts with picking the right tool.

For all of my presentations during the past three years, I’ve done all my content creation inside of my presentation software, which, thankfully, is Keynote. In the back of my mind, I’ve wondered if this is the right tool to iterate a presentation. Shouldn’t I follow the same process as writing and drop all my thoughts into TextEdit where I can easily slice and dice complex thoughts? No.

Start with and stick with Keynote or whatever presentation software floats your boat. First, presentation software is effectively designed to be outline software and that’s a great tool for organizing and editing your thoughts while not allowing them to become a book. By keeping your presentation in slide format, you’re forcing your content to remain a presentation, not an article. Where each slide is a thought. Where moments of undiscovered brilliance are sitting between bullet points. We’ll talk about how to find this brilliance in a bit, but for now, iterate in the slides.

Your job is to get as much of the meat as possible into outline form so that you can begin to transform it into a presentation. Don’t worry about how you’re going to say something or whether folks are going to get it. If you’re worried that the outline doesn’t allow you to capture the essential detail that you could with a blank piece of paper, start taking notes. I like the stickies in Keynote for random small thoughts. I like the speaker notes for bigger ones.

What’s going to happen as you edit and re-edit is that an initial structure will emerge from your outline. Better yet, since you’ve stuck with presentation software, I’m guessing you’re already starting to hear your voice in your head on certain slides…

Once you’ve got what looks like a rough outline of your presentation, it’s time to invoke The Disaster.

The Disaster

This is the second time I’m going to ask you to do something and the second time I just want you to do it. No questions asked. I want you to go to the first slide of your presentation, stand up, and give your presentation.

Wait what whoa Rands this is rough and it’s missing thoughts and uh…

Quiet. Give it a shot. Beginning to end, each slide, I want to hear your presentation.

Done? How’d it go? There’s a reason I call it The Disaster, you know. There are three reasons you should tough out your rough presentation with zero prep:

  1. Get a feel for how it fits all together.
  2. Hear yourself speaking. This is more reinforcement that you aren’t writing a book, you’re writing a presentation.
  3. Build confidence. You now know the absolute worst case scenario regarding this presentation. There is no way it could be worse than what you just went through.

Sense This Makes NoDid you notice as you stood in your office talking to no one in particular how thoughts in your head sounded different than on the slides? Did you discover flaws in logic? Mysterious new gaps in content on the slides you’ve been staring at all morning? That’s progress.

During the Disaster run-through, I take a ton of notes. I do this on a piece of paper next to the computer because, as much as possible, I want to stick with the idea that I’m giving my presentation. If I stop to edit my slides, I lose track of tempo and momentum, or worse, I end up re-writing my presentation rather than giving it. These handwritten notes look like this:

Your first job after your Disaster is to integrate your notes as quickly as possible. For me, the post-Disaster edit is also the single biggest change I’ll make to the presentation. In addition to major structural changes, I also find new content that needs to be added.

Reduction

This is a good time to remind yourself how to not throw up. This is the topic of an article from last year I wrote on the topic of preparing to give — not develop — your presentation, and there are huge useful intersections between these articles. For those NADD afflictees out there, I present this article in three slightly revised bullet points:

In terms of developing your presentation, I’m going to further modify bullet #1 for this article. It’s now, “Practice and edit endlessly”. This is the largest piece of work where I have the least advice because you need to stare at your slides at 2am for three nights in a row. You need to soak in your presentation. So, mix it up. Invoke another disaster. Pitch a friend. Print your slides and pitch a tree in the woods.

My best piece of advice is a threat: an audience can smell an immature presentation on the very first slide. It has nothing to do with the quality of the content; it’s you standing lamely in front of your slide and silently conveying the “Ok, what I am going to talk about here?” vibe, and it’s presentation death.

During this endless editing and practice, you’re looking for a reduction and consolidation of slides to occur. It’s not that you’re saying less, it’s that you’re beginning to internalize the content so you no longer need all those words to remember your point. It can be disconcerting to delete your fine ideas, so use the speaker notes or stickies if you feel you’re going to forget something important. You aren’t going to need them, but if it makes it emotionally easier to prune, terrific.

This consolidation is one of the reasons I don’t usually send my slides to folks who ask after the presentation. My slides, standing on their own, rarely make sense without me standing in front of the room furiously waving my arms.

Images say moreSecond, as part of your consolidation, you’ll want to start thinking about where you want to use images rather than words. Remember, a presentation is a visual and auditory medium, and a slide covered with words is, well, a cop-out. If you’re only going to use words to describe your fine idea, why don’t you just send everyone an email instead of wasting an hour of their time reading the same thought plastered on the wall behind you.

This presentation is only partially about you and what you think. Yes, you are the guiding force, but the goal is to present an idea with space around it. In this space, your audience is going to pour their own experience and their opinions; they’re going to make your idea their own. Pictures, charts, and graphs create structured, memorable space. I use them in two ways: either to replace an entire thought wholesale or to augment a word slide that needs more space.

A Design Aside: The visual design of your slides is an important topic that is outside the scope of this article, but know this: I’ve seen people lose their minds tweaking animations and transitions on slides. They try every single animation in the hope that just the right transition will add that certain something to their presentation, but what they don’t know is that an animation fixation is usually a sign that your content blows. The same rule for typefaces applies for transitions and animations. The less your audience sees your design decisions, the more impact they’ll have.

Third, you’re looking for an underlying structure to your presentation that you’re going to want to share with your audience. During all of this endless practice, you’re going to develop a feel for how your presentation fits together, but this structure may not be initially obvious to your audience. For any reasonable-sized presentation, you need to design a visual system that allows audience members to instantly know where they are.

Fourth, and lastly, you’re looking for audience participation opportunities in the flow and tempo of your presentation. Where are you going to turn the lights up a little bit and remind the audience that they’re sitting there, soaking in your thoughts? Let’s talk a bit more about this.

Presentation Punctuation

Participation is presentation punctuation. You’re going to use participation to accentuate parts of your presentation. You’re going to use it to break up complex thoughts into digestible, comfortable ideas. But you only have partial control of when folks will actually participate.

The most common participation technique is the show of hands opener. It’s usually done at the beginning of the presentation as a warm-up:

As a warm-up technique, I’m a fan of the opener. It’s an up-front reminder that this is not a speech, it’s just an opening salvo and you’ve got another hour to fill. As you’re endlessly practicing your slides, look for sections that are idea-heavy and give your audience a shot in the arm with a question. You don’t even have to ask for a show of hands, just direct the spotlight at them for a moment.

Tell me exactly what you do with your fingers when you read at your computer.

You’re only going to be able to plan so much of your audience’s participation, and therein lies the beauty of actually giving a presentation: you don’t know when your audience is going to show up. Dull, wordy slides I considered deleting often got the biggest laugh. Visual slides that I’ve poured my heart into are often complete duds. You won’t know until you’re there.

Something for their Pocket

What do you want your audience to remember? I should’ve asked this at the beginning, but I’m asking it now because you’re almost done with your presentation and I want to know what your giving your audience that fits in their pocket. I want to know what part of your presentation is actually going to leave with them.

There’s a really easy and cheap way to do this and it’s the Lessons Learned slide. It’s the bulleted list of important points slide that, when displayed, invariably results in a slew of cameras and iPhones appearing in the audience because they know this slide fits in their pockets.

Regardless of whether or not you use it, the Lessons Learned slide is a handy one to have at the end of your deck during the entire presentation development. It defines the basic structure of your presentation and represents a goal. Could you give your entire presentation from a single slide. 50 minutes, a room full of people, and you with your single slide with six bullet points?

That’s your goal, and you can have a wildly successful presentation without achieving it, but a one-slide presentation represents the ultimate commitment to your audience. It says, “This isn’t about slides. This about me telling you a great story… out loud.”

The Lessons Learned Slide

# February 3, 2008 : Comments (32)
Tech Life The right pixel solution

Pixel Rigs

I have an unnatural fixation with pixels.

For two years I was a stalwart supporter of the 17-inch PowerBook/MacBook Pro. My argument was simple and ignorant: “You need as many pixels as possible because you need to be able to see as much as possible.”

This pixel fundamentalism blinded me to the simple fact that the 17-inch was just too big and heavy. Yes, 17 inches is bigger than 15 inches, but the primary use case for a portable computer is mobility, and lugging around a 6.8 pound gorgeous piece of aluminum is a total mobility buzz kill. A creative tool should never be an anchor.

Yes, when I finally switched to a 15-inch, I was instantly happier. The weight and size elegantly integrated better with my travel habits and I didn’t miss the lack of roughly half a million pixels for a moment.

Besides, NOW WE’VE GOT SPACES AND UNLIMITED PIXELS WOOOOOOOOO! Ok, no, Spaces isn’t the right pixel solution, but that’s a different article.

Now, my desktop computing solutions don’t have the mobility requirement, which means, as frequent readers know, I continue to lose my pixel mind when it comes to screen real estate. What started as a treatise to justify the necessity of 30-inch flat panels has slowly twisted and turned into a seemingly insatiable need for more pixels.

Seriously. One of my current background drive-to-work soak projects is a justification for a second 23” flat panel turned on its side… and you can help.

I’ve created a Flickr group called Pixel Rigs where I’m dying to see your pixel rig. Go grab your favorite camera, take a shot of your desktop, and post it to Flickr. Unlike prior excursions, stage your desktop a bit. Let us see how you’re managing pixels. Go crazy with Flickr’s notes features… like this:

rands morning set-up

Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever… explain to everyone how you’ve tamed your personal pixel fixation.

# January 17, 2008 : Comments (16)
Tech Life The really juicy information

Year in Twitter

I’m a sucker for charts’n’graphs.

The only thing better than data is data about data. Data about data is information that, in quantity, becomes knowledge, which is just a short hop away from wisdom. And when wisdom shows up, you know you’re this close to figuring it all out.

As a nerd who erroneously believes that the world is a knowable system, charts’n’graphs further the illusion that I’m one epiphany away from this complete knowledge.

Twitter’s deliberately spartan feature set has no charts’n’graphs. In fact, most of the information you can learn about your personal Twittersphere is summed up on the front page: following, followers, favorites, direct messages, and updates. That’s it.

Twitter has become a daily social touch point for me. In fact, I’ve started to see the @reply_to_someone convention outside of Twitter particularly in email:

“Did anyone take notes at the design meeting? I saw @markjz and @wenderz scribbling something.”

Given the amount of social energy I’m pouring into Twitter, I’ve been wondering how I’ve been using it. Fortunately, @dacort has written a fine Perl script to suck down all your twits, chew on them a bit, and spit them out into delicious charts’n’graphs in Numbers.

twitter 2008

Staring at this year in review for Twitter has given me the following information: