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B.A.B.

My management team was bickering. Two managers in particular: Leo and Vincent. Both of their projects were fine. Both of their teams were producing, but in any meeting where they were both representing their teams, they just started pushing each other’s buttons. Every meeting on some trivial topic:

Leo: “Vincent, are you on track to ship the tool on Wednesday?”

Vincent: “We’re on schedule.”

Leo: “For Wednesday?”

Vincent: “We’ll hit our schedule.”

Leo: “Wednesday?”

Endless passive aggressive verbal warfare. Two type A personalities who absolutely hated to be told what to do. My 1:1s with each of them were productive meetings and when I brought up the last Leo’n’Vincent battle of the wills, they immediately started pointing at their counterpart: “I really don’t know what his problem is.”

I do. They didn’t trust each other.

On the Topic of Trust

There’s a question out there regarding how close you want to get with your co-workers in your job. There’s a camp out there that employs a policy of “professional distance”. This camp believes it is appropriate to keep those they work with at arm’s length.

The managerial reason here is more concrete than the individual reasoning. Managers are representatives or officers of the company and, as such, may be asked to randomly enforce the will of the business. Who gets laid off? Why doesn’t this person get a raise? How much more does this person get? Profession distance or not, these responsibilities will always give managers an air of otherness.

Here’s my question: do you or do you not want be the person someone trusts when they need help? Manager or not, do you see the act of someone trusting you as fitting with who you are?

Yes, there’s a line that needs to be drawn between you and your co-workers, but artificially distancing yourself from the people you spend all day every day with seems like a good way to put artificial barriers between yourself the people you need to get your job done.

Is that who you are or who you want to work for?

The topic of trust is where I draw a line in both my personal and management philosophy. My belief is that a team built on trust and respect is vastly more productive and efficient than the one where managers are distant supervisors and co-workers are 9-to-5 people you occasionally see in meetings. You’re not striving to be everyone’s pal; that’s not the goal. The goal is a set of relationships where there is a mutual belief in each other’s reliability, truth, ability, and strengths.

It’s awesome.

And it’s something you can build with a card game.

BAB

It’s pronounced how you think. Rhymes with crab. It’s an acronym for a game which, with practice, will knit your team together in unexpected ways. It’s Back Alley Bridge. Here are the rules, but before I explain why this game is a great team building exercise, you need to understand a few of the rules.

BAB isn’t bridge. The game does have a few important similarities. First, it’s a game for four players, involving two teams — the folks facing each other are on the same team and share their score. Second, it’s a trick-based game where the goal is for each team to get as many tricks as possible. A trick is won when each player turns up a card and the highest wins, unless someone plays a trump suit, which, in the case of BAB, is always spades.

Bidding. Also like bridge, BAB has bidding, meaning each team bids how many tricks they think they’re going to get after the cards have been dealt. Scoring is optimized to reward teams who get the number of tricks they bid and heavily punishes those who don’t get their bid. Bidding is a blind team effort — you have no idea what your teammate has in their hand other than what you can infer from their bid.

Decreasing hand count. Unlike bridge, the number of cards each player gets decreases with each hand. Each player gets 13 cards in the first hand, 12 in the second, and so on. Play continues down to a single card and then heads back up to 13. A work-friendly modification I’ve made is to only play every other hand (13-11-9, etc.) This number of hands fits nicely into a lunch hour.

Hail Mary. There are two special bids: Board and Boston. A bid of Board indicates the team is going to take every single trick. A board of Boston indicates the team intends to take the first six. Achieving a Board or Boston can be an impressive feat and is rewarded handsomely from a scoring perspective. Failure results in a scoring beat-down. Both of these special bids allow for wild variances in the score, which can be handy for teams who are falling behind.

Scoring, game play, and other information are in the complete rules. Now, let me explain why I picked this game as a recurring weekly lunch meeting.

In BAB, you talk shit. I’ve landed BAB in three different teams now and in each case, the amount of trash talking that showed up once players became comfortable with the game was impressive. This is a function of my personality, but it’s also a byproduct of any healthy competition amongst bright people. It’s also a sign of a healthy team. I’ll explain.

Trash talking is improvisational critical thinking — it’s the art of building comedy in the moment with only the immediate materials provided. As I’m looking for candidates for my next BAB game, I’m looking for two things: who will be able to talk trash and who needs to receive it?

The art in talking trash is the careful exploration of the edges of truth. When someone effectively lays it down, they say something honest and slightly uncomfortable. The ever-present risk with trash talking is when that line is crossed. It’s that one thing that is said that goes too far and offends, but it’s the presence of that line which makes talking trash so much fun.

It’s these honest and dangerous observations that form the basis of trust. When a co-worker makes a big observation about you and shares it with the other players, you take note - someone is watching. It sounds problematic, but remember, we’re just sitting here playing cards. It’s safe.

In a new BAB game, it takes players time to get used to the trash talking, especially in a situation like Leo and Vincent’s. Adversarial co-workers playing on the same team need to learn to ditch the business for the game. They need to understand there is a relationship outside of the daily work and there’s nothing like a comedic verbal beat-down to remind them to lighten up.

In BAB, you learn things unintentionally. Once you’ve got an established game with regular players who all know the rules, you’ll learn two things: people get better at trash talking with practice, and information travels in unpredictable ways in groups of people.

It goes like this:

• Player #1: “I bid 3.”
• Player #2: “I bid 1.”
• Player #3: “Pass.”
• Player #4: “Kevin’s quitting. I’m sure of it.”
• Player #1: “Yeah, I know.”
• Player #2: “Sucks to be you.”

Out of nowhere, in the middle of the game, you’re suddenly assessing the departure of a co-worker. I see this as a sign of a thriving, healthy BAB game because the team has begun to trust each other more. In the safety of the game, they’re letting the worries of the moment spill onto the table for all to see, which is impressive, since everyone knows that anything on the table at BAB is fair game for talking shit.

In BAB, you’re having work experiences without the work. Relationships need time to bake. Trust doesn’t magically appear; it’s cautiously built over time via shared experience. The majority of these experiences are created during the regular work day and I’m certain there are a great many healthy professional relationships that are defined and maintained in this manner, but I want my teams closer. I’m not suggesting group hugs and voices united singing Kumbaya. I’m looking for each team member to have the opportunity to understand each other slightly more than what they see when they’re at work.

The more you understand how your co-workers tick, the better you’re able to work with them. You’ll stop seeing them as the role, the title, or the keeper of a particular political agenda. They are just… Phillip. And you know what I know about Phillip? He’s the manager who used to wait too long to speak in a meeting. He had plenty to say that mattered, but he used to be too shy to say it.

Two months of trash talking over BAB showed me his reservations, so I learned to pull Phillip into the meeting conversations as quickly as possible. After a few pulls, he started to do it himself. After a few weeks, you couldn’t get him to shut up.

The Second Staff Meeting

The inspiration for the game came from a regularly scheduled bridge game at Netscape, and there’s nothing special about BAB that makes it the perfect lunchtime game. I chose BAB because a team-based game that fits nicely in a lunch hour.

You bet I maneuvered Leo and Vincent onto the same team for weeks on end. There was no magical moment during one game where they suddenly understood each other. Leo and Vincent continued to bicker in meetings, but over time the tone changed from the passive aggressive to the playful talking of trash. They turned competition into something healthy and fun.

In the safe competition that is BAB, you learn not only how to work better together by understanding that winning doesn’t always mean hitting your dates, getting paid, or receiving a promotion. Winning can be a simple, playful thing, “We were awesome as we kicked your ass.”

More importantly, BAB is a regular forum for experiencing that relationships are not defined just by the work we do together, but who we become with each other when we aren’t looking.

A Story Culture

The Editor and I don’t argue, we discuss.

We’re arguing… discussing over a glass of red wine my concern over our collective attention spans. Not just she and I, but everyone. The whole damned planet.

I say, “Information just keeps getting smaller. We’re sharing our bright ideas in 140 characters now and no one is taking the time to construct a strategic thought. All these micro-ideas are free and everyone is taking them for granted. We’re just tactically stumbling through a day full of intellectual sound bites stuffed with shortened URLs. There’s no deep now. Just shallow passing seconds.”

“No one is learning. There’s no work involved in knowing a thing, so we’re becoming mentally flabby. I want people to read more.”

To which the Editor retorts: “I don’t think you know what information is.”

Hmmmm.

Information has a Hierarchy

So I looked it up. According to Ray R. Larson at Berkeley, information has a hierarchy that looks like this:

• Data - The raw material of information
• Information — Data organized and presented by someone
• Knowledge — Information read, heard or seen and understood
• Wisdom — Distilled and integrated knowledge and understanding.

If you ignore the fact that the word information is used to define a hierarchy about information, this hierarchy makes sense, but it dances around a key point.

Another version of this hierarchy describes the same categories as above but focuses more on what happens to information once we get a hold of it. Not just consumption, but synthesis.

• Data — Raw material. Facts. Got it.
• Information - Organized data. See what happens here? Someone showed up and organized the data into something else. Why’d they do this? How’d they know it was the right thing to do? Let’s keep moving.
• Knowledge — Information seen, heard or read and understood. To me this is when information is transformed by the understanding of why. Our data is organized into information and that is passed onto someone else who can now recognize the value in the information and thinks, “Oh, wow. Now I understand how a trash compactor works. Slick.”
• Wisdom — Distilled, integrated knowledge and understanding. The idea here is that higher order constructions of information are based beyond our ability to consume, combine, evaluate, and interpret information. The information becomes a catalyst for creation. Think of it like this: maybe a lot of people understand trash compactors, but you know so much about trash compactors that you could build one yourself and perhaps advance the art of trash compacting in the process.

Still with me? This is going to take more than 140 characters and there’s a point. Just wait a tick.

Take a look at this list:

• New York is a city.
• It takes me about five hours to fly to New York.
• I’ve been to New York three times this year
• I never believe I’m in New York until I’m in a cab or smoking a cigarette.

Is this data, information, or knowledge? Or just four boring tweets? That would depend on whether or not you’re interested in my experiences in New York. But what I provide in this list is the opportunity for increasing amounts of understanding, and understanding is the progression through, and synthesis of, increasingly complex pieces of information. Right?

There’s another thread that ties this information together, and you may not initially see it, but if you’ve started mentally asking questions - Why does Rands go to New York? What does he do there? Did I know that he smoked? - you have started to find it.

I’ve begun to tell you a story.

A Shattered Narrative

The reason no one watches or cares about the evening news anymore is because there are a great many other ways to find your news. A weblog here, a Twitter status update there. In the deluge of information variety we’ve realized that the evening news is just one set of facts and just one carefully constructed story, and increasingly one with its own specific agenda. Who wants to be spoon-fed 30 minutes of ad-infested evening news when I can figure out what my world thinks is important by glancing at The Daily Show, Twitter, and NetNewsWire?

The traditional narrative has been shattered into bits of well-indexed information. Google wasn’t the first indexing tool, but it’s certainly the best. Still, Google is powerfully dumb. Yes, I can find whatever piece of information I’m looking for, but what’s more interesting are all the related pieces of information. How do you query for knowledge via Google? How about wisdom?

If you’re buying my definitions of the informational hierarchy, there’s no replacing the process of understanding if you want to delve into more interesting forms of information. There’s no replacing a human being combing through seemingly disparate pieces of information to evaluate, interpret, and combine it into something unexpected; into a new work. Into a story.

Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.

This is what is going on all day. It will start with a random tweet about conferences and you’ll think, “I don’t understand why everyone goes to conferences”. You won’t act on this thought; you’ll leave it buried in your head until you see that link on del.icio.us where someone important rails on the lack of women presenters at conferences. And in that moment, you’ll remember that drunken thought you had at that conference last March when you discovered the basic truth about conferences: it’s not what you learn, it’s who you find.

From a disparate set of information, you continually find your own arc, your own story, and my question is: What are you going to do with it? You’re an information nerd, you’re adept at consuming massive amounts of micro-information, and those who watch you do this are saying you’ve got a short attention span, and you might.

But I think all this micro-information has macro-story potential.

Rands’ Story Hierarchy

As we’ve established, there’s information. Like everywhere. You, as a consumer of information, fall into one of three progressively complex buckets regarding this data:

• You can understand the information — What does it mean? Why is it important? How does it relate to other things I care about?
• You can explain the information to someone else — Hey Bob, this is what this means. I can explain it to you and impart my understanding.
• You can create more information, building something new and telling a story - Hey Jim, actually, we discovered a better way to do X. Bob and I were working on Y one time and realized that…

But Rands, I’m not a writer.

This is a poor excuse and the death of many a worthy story. The construction of a story has very little to do with writing. It has to do with the semi-magical process of you taking disparate pieces of information, combining them into something new, which includes your experience and understanding, and then giving them to someone else. Look around the walls of wherever you’re reading this and pick two random objects. Got ‘em? Ok, now tell me how they relate. No, you can’t say, “They’re both in the coffee shop”. What’s the first novel thing that crosses your mind about the intersection of these two items?

But you don’t have a story, yet. Just like information isn’t knowledge until it’s understood, your tale isn’t a story until you give it someone else — until they have a chance to see what they think about your inspiration.

But Rands, my thought is really, really stupid.

I understand what you’re saying but I don’t think that’s what you mean. I think what you’re saying is, “I don’t think that anyone will find anything of value in my thought,” and you’re wrong. You’ve got two things going for you. You’ve got the inexplicable moment of inspiration that created your idea, and it’s the closest thing to magic you’ll experience in your life. Second, you’ve got the entire planet listening and there’s just no telling what any of those folks are looking for.

The value of the idea is one part that it is yours and one part that you gave it to someone else. It’s you and something new.

Information Is Getting Smaller and Faster

Look at the historic progression of popular personal written information containers over the past 10+ years:

Home pages > Blogs > Lists of Links > Tumblr > Twitter

I see two symbiotic trends. First, I see a reduction in the average size of a piece of information. I see information that feeds our short attention spans. Second, and more important, I see our tools increasingly removing barriers from producing information. Remember when you needed a nerd friend to set up a weblog? Did you have any issue figuring out how to publish a thought with Twitter? I hope not.

Yes, these frictionless tools make it so anyone can say anything about any topic, but these tools are built with you in mind and I do mean you. Imagine if Twitter forced you to follow certain people. What if Facebook randomly added folks to your friends list? You know what you’d have? The evening news. Random stories from folks you don’t know and probably don’t trust.

We’re in a share everything world and you get to choose your role. You can be overwhelmed and sit in the coffee shop with your friends and say, “Twitter: what’s the point?” Or, you can jump in with both feet, grab those three random ideas and tie them into a story that no one has ever seen.

An Essential Skill

I wrote, edited, and published an entire book without physically interacting with a single person at my publisher. The t-shirt I produced last year and the one I’m doing this year were entirely designed, developed, and shipped by interacting with two different organizations that I never met. Paradoxically, it’s never been easier to share or meaningfully interact with more people with less physical, in-person effort.

Your ability to compose and convey information as well as express yourself through your fingertips is a skill that is only going to increase — and increase in value — as people become more comfortable with their place in communities that span the planet, and as the tools to connect them become more commonplace.

In this digitally distant world full of information that appears to only be moving faster and faster, you get to choose: how much will I consume and how much will I create?

Up to Nothing

In Silicon Valley, you burn a lot of calories.

It’s not just the daily burn of your gig, it’s everything else involved in staying afloat in a valley which is constantly reinventing itself. You sign up for every new service and spend the prerequisite 3.7 minutes to determine “Does this matter?” You surf the web, you tweet, you update your Facebook, all of which brings a constant flood of new data that needs to be sifted, sorted, and assessed.

You have compatriots in this caloric consumption. They randomly walk into your office or your life and with them they bring additional reasons to burn more calories. Have you seen this? You have to try it. In fact, I’m not leaving until you’re jumping up and down excited about this very important thing.

We are part of an industry that is addicted to enthusiasm, to getting things done, and discovering the new, but sometimes the right move is stopping and putting this world on hold. You need to learn how to build quiet moments of nothing as a measure of balance.

… Which is why I go to a bookstore.

An Essential Exercise in Inactivity

The moment I walk into a bookstore I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it’s the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it’s the social reverence for the library-like quiet — you don’t yell in a bookstore, you’ll piss off the books.

A bookstore is where I rediscover that while I might be addicted to the non-stop calorie burning Silicon Valley lifestyle, I also need the serenity only found in the deep quiet of the consideration of nothing. Considering nothing takes work and practice, and the act contains a contradiction: the more I think about what I need to do, the less I’ll discover the thing that I don’t know that I’m looking for.

It’s confusing, but you need these skills because you have days full of somethings. Your day is probably spent at one of two sides of a spectrum. You’re either reacting to whatever is showing up on your doorstep or you’re proactively looking for new things to place on your doorstep so you can figure out what to do with them. Reactive. Proactive. It’s how you spend your entire day.

Excursions to the bookstore are essential exercises in inactivity where the whole world stops being a thing to do.

My most recent trip to my local Borders was in the middle of a two-week period where I’d spent time in both Tokyo and London. Forty hours of flying resulting in five days of meetings which required constant thought, creativity, and focus. During a brief stint back in normality in the States, I had instructions to acquire a children’s book for a nephew.

Now.

The children’s book section at my local Border’s has been voted “Most Likely to be a Total Fucking Disaster” for three years running. Combining this unique cluttered chaos with a head full of jetlag means my head is overflowing with disorganized somethings and I’m predisposed to be annoyed. Even worse, I’m not looking for a specific book. I’m running on “get something he’d like” orders, which means I need a modicum of inspiration in order to be successful.

I need to discard everything in my head that’s preventing me from looking and being inspired.

This is a surprisingly hard mental maneuver because you and I are both used to days that are not only full, but full with well-defined things to do. A lack of structure, direction, and measures throws your brain into fits and this usually when I throw my hands up in frustration and walk out of the bookstore. My brain is rejecting the unstructured ambiguity involved in the search for the unknown.

Look in my head when I start: Where I am? This looks like the children’s section, but this part is full of toys and I need books. I haven’t read a good book in forever. Ok, keep moving until something looks right. Since when did they sell candy at a bookstore? Edward Cullen Sweet Tarts? Please. You know, I don’t even know what day it is. Ok, dinosaurs, he likes dinosaurs. Wait, can he read?

My analysis is: “this place is fucking confusing” and I think I’m talking about the bookstore, but I’m actually talking about my brain.

Up To Nothing

Go back to work and think about your average day. How often are you not clear what you’re doing? How often is the goal of the next 30 minutes completely undefined? Yes, you’ve suffered through meetings where there was no clear agenda and you felt like you were wasting your time, but that’s still a known quantity — I’m currently in the poorly run meeting scenario. Been there, done that.

What happens when there is no meeting, no burning task, no one in your office? You wander, you surf the web, you stare at that calendar on the wall and think, “Why do we have leap years again? I forget.” And then you feel bad. I should be working. I should be doing something. They’re not paying me to reverse engineer leap years. I have things to do.

You’ve built this guilt into your office. It’s why your screen is not facing folks who walk through your door. You’re worried: “They might see me doing nothing”.

You’re not up to nothing. You’re aimlessly mentally wandering — an act made famous by every bright idea ever had in the shower. Think of that moment. Your body is busily on task with the cleaning and what does your brain do? Sure, if you’re stressed about layoffs, you’re going to worry about layoffs, but those mornings when nothing is pressing — what happens?

Your brain builds something from whatever mental flotsam and jetsam is in your head. Perhaps it’s a useful thing, an answer to a question you didn’t know you needed. Perhaps it’s just an interesting combination of thoughts put into a story. It’s dreaming, but you’re awake.

Back to the bookstore. Remember my orders, a good book for the nephew…

If I survive the mental rejection of ambiguity, the next moment I need is one of discovery. In order to ground myself in the silence, I need to discover a single bright and shiny thing and there’s absolutely no telling what that thing is until it shows up. It might be based on my mood, the last ten things I cared about, a random word someone said to me, my favorite color… the list is endless, indefinable, and entirely locked in my head.

But there is nothing ambiguous or unclear about the discovery. It’s obvious. It fills an immediate gap I did not know I had.

In this bookstore excursion, it’s a black book. It’s odd to see a black book in the endless rainbow of the children’s section, but there it is. Black cover with masking tape surrounding what looks like a handwritten title: Wreck This Journal. Ok, interesting. I flip the book open to the handwritten instructions:

1. Carry this with you everywhere you go.
2. Follow the instructions on every page.
3. Order is not important.
4. Instructions are open to interpretation.
5. Experiment. (Work against your better judgment)

And there it. Exactly what I needed. A reminder of why I go to the bookstore in the first place — to mentally stumble around, defying my better judgment, in a nourishing environment of nothing.

Wreck This Journal was created by Keri Smith, who calls herself a guerilla artist, and I’ve no idea what her book is doing in the clutter of the children section. It’s a journal dedicated to its own destruction. One pages instructs you to Rub Dirt Here. Another asks you to scribble wildly using only borrowed pens (document where they were borrowed from). The journal is full of ideas to create unstructured moments of seemingly meaningless activity designed to get you to stop and let something else in.

Don’t Look For It

Stop and let something else in. It’s a confusing skill, which starts with a question: how are you going to find what you don’t know you need by not looking for it?

A day in high tech rarely encourages the activity of doing nothing. Nothing is not cost effective. Nothing is not something you’ll put in your review. Nothing gets a bad rap and the more I attempt to define it, the less useful it will be to you because what I need out of nothing is different than you.

Moments of nothing are not moments of creativity or consideration. (They might be.) These moments don’t last long because your brain can’t sit still; it’s been trained to burn calories all the time. (The longer it sits still, the better.)

Your brain instinctively and naturally attempts to build something given whatever world it’s currently in. In a bookstore, with effort, I can shed the somethings of my everyday and find the nothing that I don’t know I’m looking for. (And that rules.)

The Foamy Rules for Rabid Tools

The brother-in-law lives in the ‘burbs and needed five trees removed. Not big trees — 10 to 15 feet tall, six-inch trunks. Not a problem.

I live on the edge of a redwood forest in Northern California. There are sturdy oaks, playful maples, lovely madrones, weed-like bay laurels, and, of course, giant redwoods. But the pleasure of living in a forest has a tax. Trees fall and trees die, and in a forest of any significant size, this is always happening.

You need a chainsaw. In my case, I need three. There’s Junior, who is great at handling the small jobs. He’s light and ladder friendly.

Then there’s Marty. He’s the everyday mid-sized saw that is enough to handle almost any job. Marty would be perfect for a job in the ‘burbs.

Last, there’s the Rocket. Any tree is the Rocket’s nemesis.

Even if you’ve never handled a chainsaw, you’ve probably used a handsaw. It’s a physical, grinding affair. It’s fun for about three minutes and then you start wondering… am I making progress? The brother-in-law had taken it on himself to use a handsaw on one of the trees. In his three minutes he’d sawed off… a branch.

When Marty and I showed up, we dropped all five trees, cut up the trunks and branches, and stacked them into disposable piles in an hour.

The lesson: the correct tool is exponentially more productive.

That’s a long introduction to say an obvious thing, but I’m going to make it even longer. Take a moment and step inside the mind of the brother-in-law. I’ve got several trees I want to get rid of… and what do I have in the garage? Two hammers, a paint can full of nails, some leftover wood and… a saw. Perfect. A saw.

Context shapes perspective, so thanks to the contents of his garage, he knows of no universe where there are chainsaws. He’s heard of them and suspects they’re much faster than the laborious sweaty grind of this sawing, but there’s no chainsaw here, so he’s semi-happily hacking away. To me, standing there with my arsenal of chainsaws, it’s absurd. It’s a criminal waste of his time.

The lesson again: the correct tool is going to make you exponentially more productive.

The Foamy Rules

As an engineer, there is a short list of tools that you must be rabid about. Rabid. Foaming at the mouth crazy.

This is an obvious list of tools and there’s nothing here that you haven’t heard before. The news is that you need to care. You need to be able to explain in great detail why using green-colored text on a black background is THE ONLY WAY TO CODE. You need to be a zealot about your tools and zealotry starts with fit.

I was a database guy then I was a shrink-wrap guy and then I became a web applications guy. Each of those professions came with their own set of bright and shiny tools, but the tools were not important. Even a specific feature inside of that tool is not that interesting. I believe you can be just as productive sitting inside of a rich development environment such as Xcode as you can inside of TextMate and a slew of terminal windows. The point is not which tool, the point is that the way that tool - your tool — looks, feels, and functions fits how you see, move, and work.

These are my foamy rules and they may differ wildly from your list. That’s cool. My development experience is different than yours. I started working with computers before the mouse which means I trust my keyboard more. Integrated debuggers had just landed when I began developing which means, yeah, I like debugging at the command line. Again, the point is to get foamy, because what makes you foamy makes you your best.

My foamy rules:

My tools appear deceptively simple. TextMate. Terminal. Transmit, LaunchBar, DropBox. The mean time to get one of those tools set up is just a few minutes. I can build out my development environment on a new machine in a half-hour. This has a couple of handy implications. My tools are readily available and lightweight. I can download and install everything except for an operating system in a short amount of time. Similarly, setup and configuration of these tools is close to zero.

You might think this setup means I’m expecting my computer to randomly explode. No. These tools are not simple; they are well-tuned. A TextMate user knows it’s an onion application. You can keep pulling back the layers and finding new functionality, which is going to make your development experience faster. The same goes for Terminal and LaunchBar. The base functionality just works and if you have a particular development itch you want to scratch, the tool can scratch it.

My tools do not care where my work is. How many times have you experienced this? You write a quick script on your local machine to do something clever. You fine tune it and then plop it on your server and rediscover the rule — there’s nothing quite like production.

Any tool that does not allow me to develop live in production is slowing me down. When someone showed me how to set up Transmit to do editing on remote files, I saw hours of heretofore unknown production debugging issues vanish.

Yes, editing locally is fast, especially when you live on the edge of a redwood forest where DSL latency blows, but a tool which doesn’t allow me to develop over the wire isn’t a tool, it’s a debilitating hindrance.

Rands, edit? In production? Are you insane?

No. The tangential background rule is: “If you don’t know what you’re doing in production, you don’t belong there”.

There’s a corollary, which is: “I don’t care where my work is”. This is recent foaminess brought on by Dropbox. For non-production work, like, say, writing a book, I don’t want to think about where the most recent version of the work is sitting. Yes, I’m talking about version control — but shh, don’t call it version control — just call it Dropbox. Providing I have a network connection, this tool magically refreshes a shared directory sitting on each of my machines. I can’t think of the last time I worried about which version of a document I was on, and that means I’m spending more time working than worrying.

My tools are designed to remove repetitive motion. One of my first algorithmic holy shits was during my second computer science class as we were learning sorting algorithms. The professor elegantly walked us through the construction of different algorithms, explaining the pros and the cons, and then he landed Quicksort. Holy shit.

It wasn’t just the elegance. It wasn’t the recursive simplicity, it was the discovery that with imagination there were approaches that were wildly more efficient — and simpler. Whether you’re formally trained as a computer science nerd or not, you’ve learned the value of efficiency — to make each action that you take mean something. You know that when you’re efficient, you have more time to do what you love.

This is why I have a simple requirement that any tool I rely on has complete keyboard support. I will fall back on the using the mouse for one-off activities, but for any action I take that I know I’m going to do again, my question is, “How do I make this action cost less?”

Think of it like this. What if I told you that each time you wanted to save a file, you had to stand up, climb up on your chair, and jump up and down, yelling, “I would like to save my stuff now!” The first time you had to do it, it’d be kind’a fun, but after that it’d drive you bat shit crazy. It’s a similar feeling each time I reach for my mouse. I feel I’m engaging in an unnecessary task, which is always going to waste my time, because with a mouse sometimes you miss and missing is a tremendous waste of time.

Finding any file or application is, ideally, four keystrokes. Cmd-Space (LaunchBar), Letter #1, Letter #2, Return. Sometimes I get lucky; sometimes it’s three and you know that puts a smile on my face every single time it happens.

My tools only do what I’ve told them to do. Back when Dreamweaver first landed, I wanted to love it. I was so tired of the repetitive motion of developing HTML pages and the idea of a tool that was going to visually handle that laborious process was appealing. Problem was, Dreamweaver changed my code… without asking.

It what?

Dreamweaver was attempting to be helpful, but the moment it reformatted my code, I threw a fit. YOU TOUCHED MY CODE. Dreamweaver never recovered from that horrendous first impression.

My impression and my opinion of robust integrated development environments is that they can do a lot of good in terms of helping you visualize what the hell is going on. Borland developed some of the best environments for building code back in the day, but I still find myself with extremely primitive development environments where I’m tweaking code in TextMate and debugging inside of a couple of Terminal windows.

Yeah, I know all about the glory of integrated debugging and I see all you Eclipse guys having a ball, but what I found in many years of development is that embracing the fancy tools means spending time tinkering with your tools to get them to behave how you want.

The corollary to this rule is: “My tools don’t have a lot of moving parts”. Dreamweaver-grade code offenses are few and far between with solid development tools, but the fancy still comes with a cost. You may be fully willing and foamy to embrace that cost, but I’m not.

Am I more efficient than you? Maybe. Do I know where I stand relative to my tools? Yes. Do I have to relearn my development process when the people behind an elegant tool shoot for more elegance? Nope.

My tools are my tools. Choosing a thing makes it yours. The choice is the result of that unique mix of logic, superstition, stubbornness, and experience that fits you.

You read that right. Green text. Black background. I’ll tell you why right now. I’m an old school DOS guy. My first word processor was Wordstar and that’s the word processing program I came to associate with the fugue-like state of maximum productivity: the Zone. This is why I continue to favor colored text on a black background in my current favorite editor, Textmate. The coloring reminds me of an primal safe place where the tool is serving its purpose — to get the hell out of the way so I can go be exponentially more productive.

This is why, as engineers, we stick with something that works for us. This is why the ancient likes of vi and Emacs continue to flourish. Once we find a tool that works for us, once we’ve chosen that tool, it becomes ours and remains ours. It allows us to get foamy.

An Evolving Foaminess

My brother-in-law doesn’t need a chainsaw. When I took out his five trees, I eliminated half of the population of trees on his property. While a chainsaw is a delicious combination of sound, power, and sawdust, my brother-in-law didn’t choose a home where the trees are on the offensive, so he doesn’t need defensive weaponry.

He does need to know about a universe where chainsaws exist because every moment of his time is valuable. What differentiates us from the monkeys is not our ability to pick the right tool for the right job, but to pick the best tool.

And you never stop looking — this is why the last foamy rule is the most important: my tools are always fighting for their life.

My current tool set is influenced by all of my experience. Yeah, the elegant simplicity of vi is attractive to me — it reminds me of the uncomplicated early days of development, but vi can’t compete with the holy shit I experienced when I first ran into TextMate. This tool is always five steps ahead of me. I love that.

But TextMate, like all of my tools, must evolve.

Try this right now. Stand up and walk into the office of the best developer in the building. I promise two things: they will be happy to, at length, foamily show you their development set-up and you are guaranteed to learn, at least, one thing about moving faster. Perhaps it’s a tool you’ve never heard of or maybe it’s the way they deftly manage a tool you’ve taken for granted.

I don’t know what you’re going to learn, but I do know you’ll see one thing that will instantly and obviously make your universe a smaller, more productive place.

The Leaper

On my short list of professional competitive differentiators, I would list my inbox strategy. I have a zero tolerance policy for unread mails. Zero. Any mail, however big or small, which lands in my inbox, is instantly read. There is an industrial strength set of mail filters that move mailing list noise out of the way, and yes, that means I ignore a good portion of my incoming mail, but most mail addressed directly to me is consistently and expediently read.

There are other inbox strategies I employ to figure out when and how I respond, too, but I admit the combination of these strategies is not foolproof. I read mails and never respond, despite having good intentions to do so. I passively aggressively ignore mails I just don’t want to answer, and sometimes I just forget to respond. I have a carefully constructed excuse when I’m called on these mail transgressions. It’s a standard preface in all emails and phone conversations where there needs to be an acknowledgement of neglect and it’s…

“Sorry, I’ve been swamped…”

This isn’t a lie; it’s an excuse.

Now, there is a bit of pride in that I have a life where I’m scrambling. Yes, I’m proud that I’m busy. I’m a happy member of the busy club because I’ve been to the bored club meetings and, well, they’re boring.

The pride vanishes in the guilt that there was neglect. I forget to respond, I fucked up in some manner, and here I am with my standard disclaimer: “swamped”. The guilt is the emotion that lingers. I just checked my Sent box of 20,483 messages and found the word swamped 712 times… in the last year. How unoriginal and pathetic.

And then I remember the worst part. It’s pathetic because when I use the excuse that I’m swamped, I’m telling you absolutely nothing.

On Excuses

I had a boss — we’ll call him The Leaper for reasons you’ll understand in a moment. The Leaper was a bright guy, a worthy mentor, politically savvy, and generally a person who would look out for his team. The Leaper had a lot of responsibility as VP, so his management strategy was to randomly sample his teams looking for — you guessed it — places to leap.

The Leaper’s skill lay in his ability to detect bullshit. Being bright, a former engineer, and familiar with the problem space, he could tell when he was being spun. He knew when he was hearing less than the truth. Generally he was understanding when he sampled ambiguity, but there was one sure way to get him to leap: answer a question with an excuse.

The Leaper attacked excuses as a personal affront. He wouldn’t let anyone leave the room until it was painfully clear that the excuse card had been played, that it was unacceptable, and that the proper steps were taken to make sure it would never happen again.

For first time excusers, it was a painful perspective adjustment. See, when The Leaper asked a question where the answerer wasn’t comfortable answering, they did what I did when I ignored a mail — they made an excuse. It’s a knee-jerk reaction with seemingly little consequence, but that’s not what The Leaper saw. He saw the lame diffusion of blame and a weak defense.

An excuse is an abdication of responsibility. There are no healthy excuses. I’ll explain.

On Delivery

“But Rands, it’s really Antonio’s fault! He owns the deliverable, he missed the date, it’s his fuck-up.” Calm down. You’re arguing about the wrong part of the excuse.

An excuse has two parts: the content and the delivery. Your Antonio content may be spot on, but the reason The Leaper is going to leap on you is your delivery. It sounds like you’re diffusing, it sounds like you’re spinning. You’re not delivering the facts, you’re delivering emotion and weak opinion. The best data in the world is useless if your means of conveyance is suspect.

Yes, with confidence, you can deliver weak content and not trigger a leap, but this only delays the inevitable. Your chutzpah may disguise the content, but since your content is weak and you don’t actually know what you’re talking about, you’re eventually going to take the reputation hit… twice. First, when the crap content is discovered and then again when everyone realizes you were pitching your facts on false confidence.

Well done there.

The irony is thick. In order to avoid looking like you didn’t know what you were talking about, you opened your mouth and only added to the confusion. If you told The Leaper, “I don’t know, but I will know tomorrow,” he’d be cool.

Life in a big or small company is an information game where you are judged by the amount and accuracy of your information. This game becomes more complex as you leave the individual contributor role for management, but even as an individual, you are expected to be aware of your surroundings and able to describe them to others.

I know that feeling when someone in authority spends 30 seconds looking at something you’ve been working on for six months and immediately finds a painfully obvious flaw. The mental conversation starts with, “There’s no way he could…” and it finishes with “Holy crap, how could I miss that?” It’s disorientating, and when the question is asked of you: “Why didn’t you think of that?” I know where the excuse comes from. It’s alarmed spin, it’s poor marketing, it’s the uncomfortable admission of guilt.

So, what are you going to do? Clearly, there’s a reputation hit here, so what’s the right move?

My advice is to take a small amount of time to say something real. Honest, clear, and brief. Sure, these are executives and they might be pissed, but the last thing to do in that scenario is to add fuel to the fire by actively demonstrating your discomfort.

There are executives who like to see you squirm, who revel in the discovery of flaws. While they might be right, this does not give them the right to be cruel. I’m talking about that deliberate dead silence after the flaw has been exposed, and everyone sees it now and everyone is wondering, “How could we miss that?” In that moment, someone is expected to say something. This is your opportunity to say something of value.

An Opportunity to Communicate

Working for The Leaper for years, I can now sense the moment before I’m about to employ an excuse. I can feel the chain of events that are about to occur as I construct my weak redirection of responsibility. I hear what I’m about to say in my head — It’s not my fault — and then I stop.

I want you think of the very last conversation you had and I want you to think of one thing that you did not say. Maybe you were in a hurry and you blew off someone’s question. Maybe you were in a great conversation. Perhaps you were talking to your Dad. What is the topic you should have brought up? What is the small thing you could have said to make that conversation more valuable?

This is everything that crosses my mind after I stop with the excuse. I think about all the throw-away phrases I use where I could have actually said something valuable. I once wrote, “Every time you say blah blah blah, a creative writing teacher dies,” and I meant it. Each time you open your mouth, you have an opportunity to build something. That’s the perspective you want during the uncomfortable dead silence, not the victim-based emotion of excuse.

I’m in a hurry, but being in a hurry isn’t an excuse for not taking a small amount of time to say something real.

Hurry

Most interesting ideas come to me between 8am and 10am. This is sacred time. The day is young, I am rested, and the coffee is fresh. I spend most of this time in the car driving to work. The music is providing a creative, catalyzing ambiance to structure my thinking. I create two or three start-ups during the average drive to work.

And then I get to work and I google my ideas. “How about a service that adds threading to Twitter?”

Fuck.

“Wait wait wait, what we need is people feeds. An RSS-type thing that shows me the relevant events for the people I care about.”

Goddammit.

You’re in a hurry.

Do the math. We are all staring at the same set of data. Yes, there is a lot of data and there is a very low probability that you’re able to surf it all, but here’s the rub: There’s a lot of us. In fact, there’s a shitload of us, and when you combine all of us with the equally huge amount of data, you understand that when I arrive at work and google my great ideas, I’m no longer surprised when my precisely designed drive-to-work business model is already in play.

Fuckers.

You’re in a hurry.

The epiphany I want to talk about is this: What are you waiting for? Seriously. I know you’ve got a mortgage and 1.5 kids, but during your sacred time when you discover that bright idea and subsequently discover that no established competitor exists… why aren’t you making the leap?

I know what you’re waiting for.

See, you’ve been doing the same comfortable thing I’ve been doing for twenty years. You’re obeying the structure of the organization where there are charts that describe who owns what and who owns whom. I am intimately familiar with the mindset that reads:

“We will complete our work by following the rules of mediocrity.”

Do just enough. Don’t rock the boat. Make yourself indispensable without being noticeable.

And it works. There is absolutely no way to argue that following the rules doesn’t result in a comfortable life, but…

You’re in a hurry

Maybe you’re waiting for validation. You’re waiting for that someone you respect to say, “Yes, you bright person, you should do that thing.” It was your parents when you were a kid and then it was your first boss, but now it simply needs to be you.

What you need to understand about these people that support you is that they’re not here to slow you down, they’re here to get the hell out of your way so you can be brilliant. You need to discover the moment when you actually know better than everyone around you — when you make the first move without asking permission.

Try it. You don’t need to quit your job and go build the next Twitter. Try it with something small. A thing where you’d normally preflight it with your boss, bounce the idea around the hallway a bit, and then move forward. Skip the preflight. Skip the hallway and move on your idea.

Don’t worry if someone else is already working on your idea. I’m certain they are, but they are decidedly not you and it’s the you that makes your idea unique.

Whether you’re successful or not, it’s a terrific way to get in a lot of trouble. There’s a long list of established rules and regulations that you violate with your creative impertinence, but it feels great, right?

Trusting your gut and charging forward. It can be addictive.

It’s not your only operating procedure. There are teams to communicate with and strategic corporate alignment that needs to be maintained, but then there’s you, on the subway to work, drinking a Starbucks when inspiration strikes, and rather than just soaking in that brief moment of illumination, I want you to do something about it because…

You’re in a hurry.

The Crisis and the Creative

If you polled my team about my daily agenda, they’d say, “He’s either running to meetings or in meetings.” Glancing at my calendar confirms this: 14 meetings this coming Monday - double-booked for five of them. Sweet.

Yes, I go to meetings all day, but it’s more than that. I’m also managing a constant distracting flood of interesting decisions that find me no matter where I’m sitting. When they arrive, I must make an instant prioritization call: Crisis or Creative?

A Spectrum for Everything

This will be the third system I’ve described regarding prioritization. The Taste of the Day describes how I deal with tactics, identifying and recording tasks that need to be done, as well as a system for punting tasks that are lingering aimlessly. The Trickle List goes strategic and imparts direction for my day — what are the daily investments I want to make in my people and myself?

The Crisis and the Creative is less a system and more a mental model for all of the work on my plate. It’s similar to The Taste of the Day in that it’s a lens by which I look at the health of everything I’m responsible for. The model looks like this:

As my day moves by in a rapid progression of people, tasks, and meetings, I often need to stop and make a snap decision regarding whether or not to engage in whatever is sitting in front of me. In that moment, I place this thing in the model and assess. This is what I’m thinking:

The Crisis — This is any item I’m responsible for which is in Crisis. The definition of Crisis varies on a daily basis and can mean anything from “Word on the street is the quality of this feature blows” to “The program managers say we’re going to miss our date”. Crisis means it’s not working and I need to pay constant attention. Oddly (or sadly), there’s always something in this category. More on this aspect of management in a moment.

The Creative — The title for the other side of the spectrum should be The Strategy, but I’m incapable of not using alliteration, so it’s The Creative. This is anything I’m responsible for which, by investing in or completing, means I’m growing, I built something, I took the team towards new. The Creative are my responsibilities, which take us places either because I have the experience to recognize that they will or because through pure force of will I will make them so. They rule.

These edges are the main reason I’m running to all of those double-booked meetings. Whether it’s Crisis or Creative, activities in these buckets run hot. Whether I’m making sure that someone isn’t going to quit or I’m jump-starting a brand new project at a time when no one has a free second, when I’m working the edges, it’s fast and furious. The issue is that I’m responsible for a lot more than just the work that’s running hot.

See those boring lines in the middle between Crisis and Creative? That’s an important part of the model. Items in the middle are the silent non-Crisis, non-Creative responsibilities that are my team just making it happen. It’s all very important work, but it’s work that occurs with very little investment from me because I’ve hired, manage, and work with competent people who excel at what they do. The middle isn’t responsibilities that I’ve delegated and need to check up on, this is work the team just does, and to understand how to get the work there, you need to understand the edges.

The Crisis

There are those who love the panic associated with the Crisis. They love the motivating threat of imminent disaster. This is especially true for managers because a Crisis gives them super powers. When it hits the fan, the team can be freaked to the point that they are incapable of making a decision because they don’t want to make it worse. This is why, when the manager shows up and starts making decisions, the decisions are often followed without question. The team is happy, they’re thinking, “Whew, ok, good — someone is driving us out of this mess.”

The larger question is — where’d the mess come from?

There are two standing goals when managing work that is in Crisis. Goal #1: Make sure the sky doesn’t fall. Goal #2: Figure out how to prevent future sky falling situations. It’s a balance. You can’t truly perform a post-mortem while holding the sky up, but, then again, you can’t truly remember what it’s like to hold the sky up a month after it happens.

When I’m standing in the middle of a Crisis, I’m doing two things at the same time. First, I’m frantically trying to fix the issue by any means possible. I’m also carefully looking to identify the root cause of the Crisis. This is information that vanishes in the joy of no longer being screwed once the Crisis has passed. Sure, we’ll still have a debrief once everyone’s caught their breath, but I’m going to learn more about what actually happened by asking questions at 10pm on a Saturday night after two weeks of not having a day off.

The thing I remind myself of throughout the Crisis is: if I’m responsible for resolving this Crisis, there’s a good chance I’m just as responsible for its creation. I don’t want to be grilling anyone at 10pm on Saturday. I want the Crisis to never occur again, which means being Creative.

The Creative

The panic junkie is the person who is addicted to Crisis and, in the absence of it, will manufacture drama in order to create additional Crisis. Their intent was originally good; they wanted to get stuff done quickly and discovered that the umbrella of a Crisis removed traditional organizational roadblocks. Problem is, they’ve becoming addicted to the power and momentum granted to them by driving the crisis. As soon as the current Crisis appears to have passed, they deflate, thinking, “Blah, back to the normal,” and immediately start looking for another Crisis. If they don’t find one, they create it.

I was one of these people and burned a lot of calories getting a lot done, but management by Crisis is a losing strategy. You become a corporate arsonist — burning through people and process in your apparent endless hurry, but you aren’t actually building anything.

There’s always a Crisis in progress. It’s a statistical fact that in any decent-sized group of people there is one person who needs help with some part of a Crisis. Get used to it. The question I ask myself each morning as I stare at the day’s selection of Crises is: “Am I going to play in the Crisis or the Creative?”

I’m not talking about being Creative about solving a Crisis such that it never occurs again, I’m talking about work that is purely Creative — where you’re actively improving or building a thing. It’s writing that piece of code that nobody but you wants; it’s spending two hours recruiting that guy you’re never going to get; it’s standing in the design room with a variety of dry erase markers and just filling that whiteboard with random.

I’m not talking about impossible tasks; I’m talking about Creative ones. I’m talking about inspired investments in an uncertain future. These are often hard tasks to measure, which means they are equally hard to justify to those sitting around you, but they occasionally, infrequently hit. You get the guy. You find the idea. You build something new.

Given the constant presence of Crisis and things to do, the act of choosing to devote part of your time to a purely Creative activity can be rough, but if you’re going to grow, there have got to be times where you let things go further to hell in the now because you’re choosing to invest in the Creative for the future.

That’s right. You are going to actively ignore a burning Crisis so that you can hide in the design room and doodle on a whiteboard. The panic junkies are going to be pissed. They’re going to walk by, laptops in hand, and wonder, “Why the hell isn’t he all over the Crisis? Doesn’t he know it’s, ya’know, A CRISIS?”

Yes, it’s a risky move. Yes, there are crises that can’t be ignored. Yes, if you piss off the wrong panic junkie, you’re going to hear about it — quickly — but the bigger risk is a panic-filled career reacting to disasters versus one where you’re recognized for what you’ve built versus what you’ve fixed.

A Personal Model

The Crisis and the Creative isn’t a productivity system, it’s an identification system — it’s your personal view of your world and, for me, it’s a set of reminders. First, I choose how I invest my time. Second, that a Crisis is an opportunity not only to save the day, but to make certain that future days never see this Crisis again by Creatively moving something into the predictable Middle.

And I want more Middle.

The more Middle, the happier I am because that’s more time for the edges and undiscovered opportunity always hides at the edges.

Your People

In your career as a geek, there’s a list of essential career intangibles. These are the things you need to do in order to be successful, which are also maddeningly difficult to measure. There is no direct correlation between completing these activities and a raise. It’s unlikely that accomplishing these indefinite tasks will end up in your review, but via organizational and social osmosis, you’ve learned these intangibles are essential in order to grow.

I want to talk about one: networking.

There are two types of networking. Basic networking is what you do at work. It’s a target rich environment with co-workers, your boss, and those of interest in close proximity. It’s work, but it’s easy work because your day is full of those you depend on and you’ve learned that professionally befriending these people keeps you comfortably in the know.

The other type of networking I’m going to call people networking and it’s harder work. This is when you put yourself out there. It’s attending a conference where you know no one. It’s driving to the city to sit in a coffee shop with ten strangers bonded by a programming language. It’s a leap for the socially awkward, but the infrequent reward is that you discover Your People.

I don’t have a good definition for these people, so I made a list. My hope is that as you read this list you’ll think of at least one person you know who is already Your People:

• Your connection with Your People instant and obvious; it transcends age and experience.
• The best way to discover if someone is Your People is absence. If, when they return, it’s as if they never left, they are Your People.
• There are more of them than you expect, but their number is disguised by the ebb and flow of their presence in your life.
• An investment of time with them will be repaid, but not in a way you can predict or expect. That is the point.
• Your People will piss you off because the relationship is genuine. They do not coddle and they do not spin. Consequently, Your People error-correct you in ways that others cannot.
• You may call on each other without reason, randomly. During these random visits, hours of time will vanish and neither you nor Your People will notice.
• Conversely, long silences are also acceptable and comfortable.
• Your People have a knack for showing up when you need them, even if you didn’t know you needed them prior to their arrival. I don’t know how they do this, but the more People you have, the more likely it is that this will happen.
• Your People rarely demand anything. But when either you or they make a request, neither the request nor the agreement to do it is ever in question.
• Your People keep in you in balance. Their presence reminds you first that that you’re never flying solo and, second, that there are two sides to every story.
• Your People instinctively know who you are and are able to say accurate and valuable things to you and about you with stunningly little data.
• You get mail all day from everyone, but you always stop to read mail from Your People.
• Your People will always be Your People — even if they leave and never return.

When I’m talking about Your People, I am not thinking of your best friend. Sure, your best friend might be Your People, but I’m talking about a larger population who aren’t necessarily your friends and who isn’t your family. These are a strange lot of people you’ve discovered in a motley array of places because you were searching for them.

Furthermore, I am not suggesting that those who are not Your People are somehow less valuable. In fact, the majority of the folks in your life are going to be extraordinarily more work than those who are instantly familiar. The work in bridging the gap between you and those who are harder to know is also an essential intangible skill.

Lastly, while Your People may be less work, they are harder people to have in your life. These are not people that let you sit in place, these are people who hold a mirror up to your fuck-ups, and who explain, in excruciating detail, exactly what you don’t want to hear. If they did not do these things, they would not be Your People.

You Tell Stories

All day. It’s a constant story being composed in your head. You’re doing it right now. You think you’re reading this paragraph that I’ve written, but what you’re actually doing is telling yourself the story of reading this paragraph. It’s your inner dialogue and it’s often full of shit.

I’m not saying you deliberately lie to yourself. Ok, maybe I am, but we’re all doing it. We’re all gathering data through the course of the day and creating a story based on that data, our experience, and our moods. It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon to guide the narrative in our favor. We see the world how we want. A carpenter sees all problems as a nail. I see problems as finite state machines.

As we edit our days into these stories, there is always a risk of fiction. This is why you need to identify and nurture Your People.

You tell these stories to Your People without reservation. Your People love your stories — fiction and all. They love how you tell them, they laugh about the lies you tell yourself, and then they stop and they tell you the truth.

Networking is the art of finding those who are willing to listen to and critique your stories, so go look at your Inbox. Better yet, go look at your Sent box. Check your phone and see who you call the most and who calls you. I’m certain that, right now, one of Your People wants to hear a story and they have one for you, too.

The Book Stalker

The recent creepy incident involving Amazon remotely removing purchased content from the Kindle has me back on the fence regarding purchasing one. There are contradictory forces at work here.

First, as a geek, I’m unable to sleep when I do not own the latest cool. The first Kindle’s industrial design was intriguing, but the second version nailed it. The second generation is a pleasure to hold and to read and I’m a fan of anything that gives me a reason to read more.

But here’s the contradiction:

My office bookshelf. Slightly in disarray, but a massive visual reminder of what I love about books… you hold them.

When a Kindle-maniac is running down their list of compelling reasons to purchase, they inevitably invoke the “that’s what your parents said about CDs” argument. Remember that? A generation of music lovers decrying the death of vinyl because the CD’s size didn’t do justice to the cover art?

The cover is part of music.

Sure.

It’s not about the song; it’s about the album as a WHOLE.

Maybe. Ok, yes, I love listening to the entire Dark Side of the Moon, and yeah, that prism cover is bitchin’, but the main difference between a book and an album or a CD is you hold a book when you read it. If you want something from a book, you need to touch it. Part of the reason I read Catcher in the Rye once a year has to do with the ratty, dusty-smelling version I own. Part of the character of a book is how it is read.

But a technological evolution away from books, for me, presents an even larger social problem.

More People Less

The name is Rands. It’s not my real name; it’s a leftover from the mid-90s when everyone was still freaked out about typing their real name into the computer, let alone the Internet.

A quick scan of my Twitter stream reveals that apparently real names have replaced nicknames as a means of identification, but this doesn’t change the fact that never in our history have we known more people less.

We spend the day swimming in the 10% of the information that others have deliberately chosen to share with us and while it is overwhelming in volume, it’s only so because there are so many people… who are actually sharing very little.

There is a time and a place that I want to know more, and no amount of Facebook updates is going to placate this curiosity. Perhaps this is a function of my generation, but there are two defining moments for me in the getting-to-know-you phase of a relationship:

#1 Can you talk shit? I’m not talking bland sarcasm, I’m talking about a full court comedy offensive that demonstrates not only that you are aware of your surroundings, but you have a gift for improvisation and the courage to use it.

#2 Where’s your bookshelf? It’s this awkward moment whenever I first walk into your home. Where is it? Everyone has one. It might not be huge. It might be hidden in a closet, but in decades of meeting new people, I’ve never failed in finding one and when I do I consume it.

See, I don’t really trust you until we talk a little shit and then I see your bookshelf.

The Book Stalking Process

This is my process and this is not a process of judgment, but one of assessment, and it proceeds in three phases:

Phase 1: Where are they?

• Where does you bookshelf live in your home? Is it in an obvious place or are you hiding it? Why are you hiding your books?
• Is the bookshelf built around the room or vice versa?
• Do you have a room specifically for books? Hot.
• Can I see your bookshelf after you’ve sat me down with a glass of wine? Even better.
• Did you spend money on your bookshelf or is it an IKEA atrocity? Wait, you built that? Awesome.

Phase 2: How are they arranged?

• Have you committed to a pure bookshelf? What’s the breakdown between books and non-books? This isn’t where I store books; it’s where I demonstrate that I love books.
• Is the arrangement chaotic or calm? Is this is a shrine or a utility?
• Vertical or horizontal stacking? What’s the rule? Is there a rule?
• Is it full? I read. A lot.
• Does your book arrangement tell a story? Can I find that story quickly or do I need you to tell it? Do you offer it?
• Do you use bookends? Are they functional or ornate? What’s their story?

Phase 3: And what do you read?

• Are these the books I expect based on what I know about you?
• Do these books represent your entire life or just right now?
• Can I tell, at a glance, the three most important books?
• Which books are you… hiding?
• How do you react when you see me stalking your bookshelf? What’s the first story you’re going to tell?
• Is there a glaringly obvious book that does not belong? When do I get to ask you about it?

What I’m learning during this stalking is my deal. The intricacies of my assessment aren’t the point. You are decidedly and blissfully not me, which is why I’m standing, wine glass in hand, totally and completely lost in your bookshelf. Dr. Seuss and Calvin and Hobbes… interspersed on single shelf. That… is fucking brilliant.

Seven Precious Books

As you grow up, the guarantee is that the world will change, often faster than you are comfortable with. There are two approaches to handling change: either you embrace the change because the change has something to teach you, or you can dig your heels in and say, “Nope, not changing. What worked for me then works for me now and will work for me later.”

It’s my job to observe and embrace change, but I’ve always wondered when I’d grow stubborn enough to hold onto something the next generation had begun to view as an antique.

This is what you need to know. I have three shelves. There’s one in the closet that you’ll never see. It’s full of trashy science fiction, gifts I’ve never read, and an embarrassingly large collection of Far Side books. The second shelf is the one you see above, a place of honor. These are the books that I read once a year, these are the books that I’ll have for the rest of my life. And then there’s the small shelf next to the bed. Seven precious books. A few I’m reading right now and a few… I just need nearby.

See, I can’t imagine a world without books.

The Words You Wear

In business, words are like fashion. You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means.

Every group in the company has their own unique set of words and every group uses these words to verbally define who they are, what they know, and what they own. These words, these phrases, have value when everyone is in agreement as to what they mean, but used outside of your part of the organization, their value decreases, especially the closer you get to engineering.

The engineering burden is that when it comes to the product, we know how it works. Everyone else outside of engineering has vastly less working knowledge of the product; they don’t need that depth for their job. The engineers know the intricate details of the system, the people who built it, and what it is capable of.

This is why, when fashionable words show up in our day, we grind our teeth. We’re cynical because we don’t trust fashionable words. They sound important, but over the years we’ve found they obfuscate our product’s capabilities, they portray our development process as trivial, and they create productivity destroying expectations elsewhere in the building.

I’m guilty of using these words. I’ve written about them before, but they still stand out in my day. They hang in the air sounding like buzzing rather than communication.

This is not what you think you’re saying, but this is what we’re hearing:

• Actionable — A label applied to an idea or plan to make it sound achievable.
• Alignment — “I’ve yet to convince people that I am correct.”
• Best Practices — A phrase used to convince you to do something different that assumes you don’t actually want to know why it’s a better approach.
• Business Critical — “You are fired if this fails.” (See also: Mission Critical.)
• Capacity — How MBAs measure your productivity. I’m not kidding.
• Cross-functional — A hyphenated word everyone starts using when they decide to not fail alone.
• Executive Summary — A brief assessment given to executives. If this summary were shown to those who actually do the work, they would giggle.
• Future Proofing — Architecting a product so that it accounts for things that don’t yet exist and can’t be predicted.
• Key Takeaways — The three bullets of information you actually needed in that two-hour meeting.
• Heads-up — “You’re screwed.”
• Initiative — A new process designed by someone who doesn’t understand the old process.
• Lock-in — Designing a product to be both indispensable to your customer while also screwing them.
• Milestones — Magically created dates that mean nothing, but give executives the impression that progress is being made.
• Mission Critical — “We are out of business if this fails.” (See also: Business Critical.)
• Offline — A tactic to delay a decision until they can say no in private. “Let’s take this offline.”
• Organic — An adjective used to attempt to avoid actual planning. “We’re using an organic process.”
• Paradigm — A model you need in your head to explain something very complex to someone else.
• Social Media — Two words used to kill newspapers.
• Sanity Check — The meeting just before the meeting when you explain that things are going badly.
• Silver Bullet — The last ditch strategy to beat up another company who is currently kicking the shit out of you.
• Socialization — The process by which an idea that no one wants to do is forced on others.
• Solution — “I don’t know what your product does.”
• Stretch Goal — Engineering speak for “if it makes you feel better that we might get this done, that’s cool, but there is no way this is happening.”
• Taking One for the Team — Announcing that you’re doing something exceptional after you’ve fucked up.
• Thought Leadership — The act of talking rather than doing.

Cutting edge fashion looks freakish to me. When I see a model walking down the runway wearing a black and white geometric monstrosity, I wonder, “How does anyone make money doing this?” These aren’t the designs that end up in your local department stores. They’ve traveled through many different designers who have watered them down and made them palatable versions of the cutting edge.

New ideas, like fashion, have to start somewhere. When Jordan in Marketing lays down an energetic thirty minutes of incomprehensible marketing buzz-speak, I take a deep breath and attempt to hear his enthusiasm rather than his seemingly meaningless words. I remind myself of the time I walked to his office and threw down twenty minutes of arcane engineering reality and he gave me the benefit of the doubt. He clarified and we found a comfortable place to communicate.

The Screw-Me Scenario

It had all the signs of a good meeting. And I hate meetings. We were:

• Talking about a product we loved
• In great shape from a feature, quality, and schedule standpoint
• A group that historically did not kick ass
• A group that was kicking ass.

The slides looked great and the dry-run was flawless, so why hadn’t I slept in two nights?

I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t see the Screw-Me.

You Might Be Lying

There’s an article to be written about the different kinds of meetings you’re going to be exposed to, but for now I want to talk about the executive cross-pollination communication clusterfuck. The point of this meeting is alignment. Big alignment. You’ve likely got several different groups who don’t normally spend a lot of time together being forced to sit in the same room so the execs can compare stories, measure reality, and figure out who is lying.

Before I explain how to get your head around this meeting, I want to talk about intent. Intent starts with a question: “Why does this meeting exist?” If you’re responsible for the presentation in this meeting, it exists because someone hates you.

It’s not personal hate. It’s professional hate and it’s exacerbated by a simple fact of organization: different groups speak different languages. Marketing speaks marketing, Legal speaks legal, and Engineering speaks engineering. There’s a fundamental communication breakdown somewhere in the building and someone is feeling wronged. They’re feeling bullied and since they don’t speak your dialect, they’re complaining up rather than across.

Normally, we deal with these Tower of Babel situations with the direct application of middle management, program managers, and other folks we pay big bucks to sit in meetings and translate between organizations. However, translation has not worked in this case. Someone high up on the org chart is hearing two very different stories and wondering which is true. Story reconciliation is certainly on the top of your list of items to resolve in this meeting, but job #1 is to figure out who hates you.

A Rubber Stamp Affair

For these critical meetings, your goal is to make them a rubber stamp affair. In the week before the meeting, you will have personally vetted your slides with each of the meeting invitees. You will have heard their concerns and made the appropriate adjustments to your deck. When the cross-pollination meeting arrives, your goal is an utter lack of drama and the finishing pronouncement of, “Yeah, we should do that and you know how.”

It never happens like this.

We’re “busy” and we have “things to do”, but mostly we’re “looking forward to blindsiding you with a Screw-Me at the least convenient moment in front of your executive team.”

It’s a disappointing trait of human nature that folks who feel wronged like to exact their revenge by flaunting their knowledge and dishing out the Screw-Me at the worst possible time, but, roll with it, you’re already a step ahead just expecting to be screwed. Besides, your enemy is working more with emotion than content and that will turn into their own personal Screw-Me Scenario at a later date.

Right now, your job is data.

No Guilt, No Doubts, No Fear

Ideas get better with eyeballs and before this meeting goes down, your job is to get as many eyeballs on your presentation as possible. You’re not going to get everyone in the meeting, but that’s not the point. The task is cross-pollination. Casting the information net as wide as possible and incessantly asking:

• Does this make sense?
• What is missing?
• How am I going to get screwed?

I’ve got the Russian Lit Major for vetting my strategy; who do you have? I’m not talking about your boss or your co-worker, I’m talking about the person who can objectively look at your presentation and start poking holes. These people are rare because it’s another disappointing trait of human nature that we often think we’re doing each other a favor by listening well, but then tell each other what we want to hear.

You lose yourself in any significant project. You’ve long forgotten your strategic initial assumptions, but, more importantly, you’ve forgotten what other people need because you’re furiously worrying about the daily tactical fire drills. A fresh perspective is a chance to test your entire idea and find the Screw-Me. You need someone to poke holes. You need to find and fill the gaps, and as each gap is filled, you’re going to build confidence around your pitch because, well, that’s one less potential Screw-Me entry point.

You’re not going to find them all. That’s ok, because in the process of constantly refining your pitch, you’re mentally refining yourself. You’re preparing yourself by seeing each of the different perspectives in your deck,. That improves the chances that you’ll know what to do when someone starts dishing out the hate.

Game On

The meeting’s on. You’re walking in with a head full of data and my hope is that through your constant cross-pollination you are legitimately the most informed person on this particular topic in the room. There’s still work to do.

Size the room. Who is here? What groups do they represent? What do they want? Any unexpected visitors? Really? Why would they randomly show up? Who brought them? What possible Screw-Mes could they represent? Ok, let’s get started.

Carry the room. Start your deck. You’ve got it memorized, right? They can tell this is the 32nd time you’ve done it, right? Good. It’s smooth. You’ve already diffused two Screw-Mes by slide 12. Really well done there. Amanda, you have a question?

Manage the room. Questions aren’t Screw-mes. You can clarify and stay on track. You know that Amanda is going to ask about hard data, right? Don’t let her take over the conversation. Say, “I’ve got your data in the appendix, but let me get through this first, ok?” Yeah, you just shut down a Senior VP. Nicely done. No way you can do that without serious confidence in your preparation. Yes, Tim?

Tim’s got the Screw-Me and you didn’t see it coming. Total left field. Completely valid strategic observation and you don’t have a clue how to answer. Shit.

You will recognize the Screw-Me by the complete silence that fills both the room and your head. That’s the realization everyone is having that you’re Screwed. First, let’s not make it worse…

The Unforgivable Spin

Tim: “Rands, what about THIS?”

I’m a poker player and an experienced meeting surfer, so the room will not immediately know from the look on my face that This has Screwed me, but what I choose to do next will define my ongoing relationship with the room.

There are two options when you are cornered by This. Your animal brain, when cornered, will try to find a way out. You can taste this approach even before you begin. I am going to spin. I am going to talk quickly and confidently about This and I am going to hope that in my furious verbal scurrying they are going to believe I’ve got This handled.

That’s not what they’re seeing or hearing.

This is not your staff meeting where a little verbal soft shoe is going to entertain and delight. These are the execs and no matter how many meetings you’ve surfed, they see straight through spin, they know this dance, and the longer you sit there spinning, the longer you give your boss an opportunity to step in, try to make the diving save, and make you look like a blithering fool.

It takes a little practice to make the correct move when you feel the spin coming. You are going to do three things:

1. Acknowledge the Screw-Me.
2. Admit “I don’t know.”
3. Concretely explain the steps you’re going to take to find out and give yourself a deadline.

You have completely defused Tim. See, Tim was pissed which is why he waited until precisely the wrong moment to throw down the Screw-Me. He wanted to see you spin and make a fool of yourself in front of your management team and what you did with the instant acknowledgement was crush emotion with structured sanity.

You can get lucky with spin sometimes. There are times when you spin so hard that you actually talk yourself into a Screw-Me solution that actually makes sense. But this is rare and unreliable and in my experience this frenetic verbal journey erodes confidence and wastes time.

The only question on everyone’s mind during the cross-pollination clusterfuck is, “Do you know what you’re talking about?” It’s lame that Tim doesn’t speak engineer and waited until precisely the wrong moment to Screw you, but my hope is that through your incessant vetting of your slides that you can deliver the “I don’t know” with confidence. Tim just knows what he’s pissed about and you, through your preparation, can see the entire picture.

A Screw-Me Detection Policy

An aggressive Screw-Me detection policy is, I believe, essential to navigating groups of people. It’s not just constantly knowing the potential worst case scenario in any situation, it’s that you are instinctively always looking for it. When I am looking at any situation, I’m always trying to figure out what sequence of events could occur that will screw me.

This strategy sounds a lot like paranoia and yes, an unchecked Screw-Me detection policy can result in a conspiracy theory lifestyle where THEY are out to GET YOU.

Yes, only the paranoid survive, but paranoia is a lot of work. You can burn a lot of calories worrying about all possibilities, but this is not an approach I recommend. What I’m asking is that you look at specific key events strategically. Step back and look at the whole board. Ask “What sequence of moves is going to benefit me? Can I see what is coming? And how could I get screwed?” because teams which kick ass aren’t just ones that deliver, it’s that they deliver when they’re screwed.

An Aspirational Twitter

Big couple of weeks for Twitter. Biz was on Colbert. Ashton got a million followers and bought a bunch of mosquito nets. Oprah showed up sans shift key. Twitter seems to be on the front page of everything but, curiously, has done nothing functionally interesting. They’re just sitting there keeping the lights on.

Not everyone is just sitting there. Some are wondering, “What’s next?”

Birdhouse (Adam Lisagor and Cameron Hunt)

The best explanation (and compliment) I can give Birdhouse is that it’s just like Twitter — the more I attempt to explain what it is, the less you’ll understand. You’re not really going to get it until you use it, but here goes…

Before I begin, a quick reminder. My opinion regarding tweets can be summarized thusly: “I don’t give a fuck what you had for lunch unless you give me reason.” This colorful opinion has already been well documented in The Art of the Tweet.

Described by its creators as “A Notepad for Twitter”, Birdhouse is precisely the application you should be using if you want to bring some art to your tweets.

Let’s say that art is one part consideration and one part timing. Birdhouse supports both parts by providing a temporary safe haven for your partially formed thoughts.

I’ve got an approximate tweet rate of six tweets per day. That’s my thing. The rate at which I discover tweets varies as a function of time and caffeination, but almost always exceeds the publishing rate, which means I’ve often got a tweet pile-up somewhere. Birdhouse is a perfect place to park a thought or link.

While Birdhouse has a clean, usable interface, it’s the act of parking an idea that’s where the innovation lies. Birdhouse separates the act of creation from the act of publication. It replaces the unnecessary rush between “I just thought of this” and “I need to publish this” with calm consideration. This replacement, in my opinion, is essential to developing tweet content of value.

Try it. I know your quip tastes mentally delicious when it shows up, but is now the precise time to share it? Maybe it needs the larger Monday morning audience? Maybe you’ve already unleashed enough of the funny for that day? Your Twitter-schtick is your deal, but my belief is an idea gets better both by letting it ferment as well choosing the right time to open it.

Tweetie (Atebits)

When I first heard of Tweetie for iPhone, I sighed. The problem with explaining Twitter to the uninitiated is, well, you have to say Twitter. A lot. Then you end up saying “tweet” or “twittersphere” or “twoot” and then you flash back to the embarrassing conversation with your Mom when you tried to explain what a blog was.

“No no no Mom… it’s an important thing.”

“What is?”

Sigh. “A blog.”

Tweetie takes dorky, uncomfortable names to the next level. And it does so with stunning visuals and clean interaction design that will change how you use Twitter on your desktop. I mean it.

My measure for compelling visual design is, after installation, whether or not, in the first five minutes, I fire up xScope to see the pixel-by-pixel construction of a particular piece of UI. Exactly 12 seconds after I fired up Tweetie, I was applying the microscope to the breadcrumb bar in Tweetie because I wanted to know “How’d he build that?”

Build products that speak for themselves. It’s simple. The teaser video for Tweetie had no feature lists, it had no spin; it was a simple, kickin’ video with nouns and verbs where using the product was the best pitch. Take a look at the application window below and tell me how many words you can find that describe the functionality. I count one. How many do you count here?

The rest of the real estate is an elegant distillation of the four most important Twitter features:

• Updates — who said what?
• Mention — did they say it about me? to me?
• Direct Messages — only me?
• Search — if they’re not talking about me, what they hell are they talking about?

Twitter has been tidying up the layout of the site to focus on these features, but I don’t want to visit the website — that’s why I installed a rich client. After two weeks of regular usage, Tweetie has eliminated my daily visits to the website by providing simple access to all of the features I need and it does so by borrowing from the future.

Tweetie is a desktop version of an application of the same name for the iPhone which, in my limited experience, is the first time an application has migrated from the phone to the desktop. As a friend mentioned, “Platform merge in progress!” and he’s right.

The navigation in the desktop version of Tweetie feels… like the iPhone. Jumping from Updates to Mentions (via the essential and deliciously obvious keyboard shortcuts) feels like a flick of your index finger. Drilling down on an avatar accesses the user information with a clean horizontal scroll, again, inspired by iPhone navigation.

It’s delightful to navigate Tweetie. The application seamlessly integrates Twitter users, their information, and their conversations into a mesh of information that feels like more than the sum of their parts. And I believe Tweetie, like Twitter, is just getting started. Quick, look at the Tweetie interface and tell me exactly where a future Groups feature lands.

When I use Tweetie, I’m reminded that a maniacal attention to detail not only makes you want to reach out and touch the digitally untouchable, it describes the familiar as the new, and, most importantly, it speaks of an aspirational future.

Keynote Kung-fu Two

You’ve taken some hits. Being taken apart by the execs because they could smell you weren’t prepared. The slide deck you loved that the audience ignored. That guy… snoring. In the front row.

However, you’ve also hit it out of the park. The unexpected standing ovation. That seven-slide deck that turned into an hour of ad-libbed brilliance. The moment you know you’ve deeply connected with your audience.

Admit it, you’ve got some presentation-fu.

The original Keynote Kung-fu article describes how to set up and use Keynote for the first time, but once you’ve done a couple of presentations, you’re going to want more. How To Not Throw Up and Out Loud walk you through the basics of constructing and practicing your presentation, but there’s more to say about Keynote because, as with any well-designed tool, the more you use it, the better you get and the more layers of awesomeness you will find.

Pre-Game

Advanced Keynote Kung-fu starts in pre-game. Before you’ve written a single slide, you need to pick a theme. This process has been simplified in the latest Keynote with the new, ginormous theme picker chock full of interesting templates, but I almost always start with standard black.

I don’t want to worry about anything except the ideas and basic flow. Black is pleasantly generic. The rule is: if you’re starting a presentation by endlessly fussing with your presentation design, you probably don’t have anything to say.

With theme in hand, I follow all of the workspace setup advice I gave in the prior article, including the addition that turns on Master Slides via View | Master Slides. This puts the different types of base slides available in the black template at the top of the slide navigator. Rather than building a custom layout for each new slide, I stick to using this default layout as much as possible for early drafts. There’s a great reason why which I’ll explain shortly.

And then I create slides. Lots of them. More than I’ll ever need. It’s a slide explosion.

I’m an outlining zealot, so I’m going to repeat another piece of advice from the original Fu article. In Keynote’s slide navigator, hitting tab will indent the current slide and create a collapsible group under the prior slide. This simple, convenient feature breaks the linearity of my endless list of slides and is the first indication that I’m headed down an organized path to a well-constructed presentation.

A prior version of Keynote introduced a Light Table view to allow you see just thumbnails of your slides, but this view confuses me. In my head, my deck is linear, with a beginning, middle, and end. While looking at your complete deck is visually stimulating, the wrapping of slides destroys the shape of my deck that I have I my head. The Light Table view is useful only after my deck is done when I’m looking to poach bright ideas for other decks. See?

Organize and Design

The point when organization rather than creation becomes the primary activity is when I start to worry about design and layout. This presentation is far from done, but a design exercise is a great mental break from working on the message. If you haven’t already, take a look at the original Keynote article regarding preparing your workspace. In addition to the preferences tweaks and enabling the color and font inspectors, I enable the following:

• Rulers: you’re going to start worrying about spacing at some point.
• Presenter Notes: as you go through this first part of organization, you won’t be able to ignore the content, and rather than getting stuck endlessly rewriting your deck, use the presenter notes to capture your random inspiration so that you can focus on the organizational task at hand.
• Multiple inspectors: Keynote added an additional mini-toolbar, which includes many of the common inspector options, and I use it a ton, but I still need the inspector window. Actually, I need a couple. Option-Clicking on any of the inspector tabs creates additional windows and I usually have the Slide, Build, and Graphic inspectors open.

With your workspace prepared, let’s begin the deck design transformation. If you’ve stuck with the basic black or any of the base slides for any template, you’re about to discover that you’ve already saved yourself a tremendous amount of time.

Which Master slide did you use the most? I tend to riff on Title & Bullets quite a bit, but the Gill Sans has just gotta go. I also despise the spacing on the bullets, so how do I go back and change the 19 slides that use Title & Bullets? Just change the Master. Typography, artwork, animations, transitions — it can be all be changed at the Master Slide level.

If you ignored my Master Slide advice, you can slap the palm of your hand firmly against your forehead. Like CSS, Keynote slides inherit styles from the Master Slides, and while this is hardly revolutionary, it’s a presentation development must-do to avoid repetitive design tasks. By working with a base set of slides, you give yourself the flexibility to change your mind as much as you want.

Even better, once you’ve developed your personal base set of slides, you can save those slides as a Theme which then shows as up as one of the options in the Theme chooser.

Designing for Failure

At the end of this process, the slides should have a shape and a cadence. Go glance through all your slides. How does it sound in your head? Is it tap tap tap or taptaptappitylet’smovetap? What should it sound like? I don’t know; it’s your deck.

In order to effectively present you need to have a love affair with your clicks. You need to know them intimately not only so you can cleanly step through the slides, but for when something goes wrong. And something will go wrong.

Try walking through your deck backwards and forwards. In your practicing, you’re going to know the regular flow of your deck, but what about when you screw up? I love that multi-stage build-out you’ve got on slide 12 — it’s 32 seconds of transition goodness — but what happens when you accidentally hit Back after it’s done? That’s another painful 32 seconds that you’re going to need to improvise.

Your presentation is not a movie. Each presentation, while structured, is you standing up there waiting for disaster to strike, and when it does, where I want your head at is: “Disaster… failure… is only going to make this presentation better.”

Practicing for the unpredictable, improvising, is covered in How to Not Throw Up, but Keynote also provides a variety of disaster recovery tools.

URL Jump. Available via the inspectors, this feature allows you link any object on a slide to jump forwards, backwards, or to any other slide. My move is to hide these jumps in the navigation of the deck for unexpected moment when I need them.

Presentation Mode. Once you’ve fired up presentation mode, you have a slew of features to help you navigate disaster. All of these features are available by hitting the ? in this mode and here are are few of my favorites:

• Slide Switcher Overlay. You’ve probably already triggered this without knowing because clicking on a number will fire up this handy feature. Just type any number and the overlay will appear.
• Jump to Slide. When you accidentally back up over an animation-rich slide, you can simply jump over the slide rather than stepping through each build using the bracket keys.
• White Out / Black Out. There are moments when you want them to pay attention to you. Keynote provides two features which achieve this effect: white-out (via W) and black-out (via B) do exactly what they describe. Blank the screen with your favorite color so that the spotlight moves completely to you.
• Swap Displays. In presentation mode, X toggles the display and presenter screens while in presentation mode. Handy for those tense first few seconds where it’s not clear which display is showing up where.

Even with adept usage of these tools you’re going to screw-up. I like when a presenter stumbles. I like to see how they react to the unpredictable because non-catastrophic failure humanizes a presentation. I’m there to hear what you think, but when you stumble over that slide and attempt to recover, I get a glimpse of how you think.

A Slice of You

In the past year, I’ve seen two amazing presentations where there was a total absence of slides. One was, essentially, an author reading his essay. Another was two of my favorite people talking about finding your obsession and following it. Both parties, I’m sure, spent a tremendous amount of time constructing their talks, and the results of that work were a scathing critique of Web 2.0 and an intelligent, clever romp into why you should simply focus on building things you love.

You don’t need slides to say something big.

I’m not there yet. Yes, over the past few years I’m finding fewer and fewer actual words on my deck, and I can see a day where I can riff on a single slide for an hour, but I’m not there yet. Not sure if I want to be.

It’s you up there on stage. They paid to see you. If they simply wanted to know what you think, they could have read your weblog or bought your book, but they paid to see you. A presentation is not just the careful construction of your thoughts; it’s a means by which your audience has access to you — pacing, waving your arms, and cleverly recovering from that disaster on slide #32.

Mastery of Keynote can give your deck significant fu, but the slides are a prop. You’re the presentation.

The Pond

“Can I work remote?”

I cringe. It’s Ian and Ian is a senior engineer. He’s a rock. He gets it done. I never have to ask him twice and, after six years, Ian has every right to ask to work remote. But I’m still freaked because my first thought when anyone asks to work remote is, “This fine person is a year away from either quitting or being fired.” Why? Because they’re asking to leave the Pond.

The Pond

When I think of communication in a large group of people, I imagine a pond. Small, round, slightly green water. You can see the edges of this pond and there’s a willow tree over there looking both informed and sad. Metaphorically, all the people in the organization are standing somewhere on this pond. Our positions are based on whom we know and where we are in the organization chart. When something happens in the company, when something noteworthy is said, a drop falls in the pond and creates a ripple.

The ripple is the piece of information traveling from one person to the others. Big drop, big ripple… travels further.

With me so far?

There is a constant flow of information in your company. That means there are constant drips in the Pond, creating various-sized ripples traveling every which way, bumping into each other, and transforming each other into slightly mutated ripples. These mutated ripples are the rumor mill, gossip, and all those small pieces of slightly bizarre information that cross your path during the course of the day.

If you’re in the Pond, you’re gathering data, whether it’s intended for you or not. It’s inevitable. It’s what we do as curious humans; we receive information, digest it, alter it, and then send it on its way tweaked to our own personal wavelengths.

A remote employee is not in the Pond. Yes, he’s on the mailing lists and he aggressively updates the wiki, but the subtle, unintentional, tweaked, quiet information that is transferred throughout the Pond doesn’t leave the Pond. There are those whose jobs it is to look at the Pond and attempt to relay the interesting ripples, but while these program and project managers are well intentioned, they relay poorly because they’re just single observers of ripples. Real information is never conveyed by the individual; we understand by listening as a group.

The group forms a collective picture of the state of the Pond – it’s a distributed picture understood by everyone, but never completely known by one. It is the unspoken royal “we” and this intricate, immeasurable thing is absolutely essential to how a group gets things done well.

Do you mean it?

Remote has to work. It’s not just Ian. There are bright people in your building right now who are going to want to return home to Colorado, and you’re going to let them because losing them is not an option. Also, there’s a planet full of talented people who will always be at a distance, but who represent huge, untapped productivity for your team. Your challenge is how to augment the remote employee’s absence from the Pond.

This article is about how to decrease the risk that you will have to fire your favorite employee who decides to become remote. I’d like to give advice from the other side, on how to work remotely, but I’ve never done it. I don’t have the personality. My professional satisfaction comes from being able to look those I depend on in the eye and ask, “Do you mean it?” There is essential content to be discovered in that stare that will never be fully conveyed in an email, IM, or tweet.

My belief is that without deliberate attention, the remote employee slowly becomes irrelevant to the organization. Through no fault of their own, they can be gradually pushed to the edge of what’s important. And when you’re at the edge, you’re an organizational shudder from falling over it. Failure happens at the edges.

Avoiding failure involves asking four questions before they leave:

1. Do they have the personality?
2. Do they have the right job?
3. Does the culture support it?
4. Do you have a remote friction detection and resolution policy?

The Personality

Whether the employee has the right personality to be a productive remote worker is a tricky call because most of your data about this person is based on working with them. What’s going to happen when you can’t see them? How are they going to react when you forget to include them in the staff call? How are they going to feel when the product launches and they aren’t there to celebrate?

This is what I consider.

Are they eloquent in email? Every bit of communication is more expensive with remote folks, so they’d better be good at it – no matter the medium. Can this person construct and convey a complex argument in a single email? Can this person make an important point… via iChat? Written communication is bereft of much of the intangible value of the Pond. It lacks the nuance of face-to-face communication, which means the author needs to be painfully explicit about the details. Can this person do that?

Are they self-directed? How do they deal with ambiguity? If you’ve given them crap direction, do they bump around for a bit before admitting defeat, or do they immediately ask for clarification? Many of the subtle ways you check in and error correct co-workers leave when they leave. If they’re in the weeds, are they going to ask for help? How long until they ask for help?

How detail-oriented are they? If self-direction indicates how they start a thing, their detail orientation is how well they finish. Is this a person who needs help across the finish line? Do they get lost in nonessential details? When you ask for a thing, are you getting the end result you expect?

How well do they know the Pond? We’ll talk about their job in a moment, but whatever that job is, it will have dependencies on people they are leaving behind. Does this person know how the organization communicates? Do they know both the organizational structure as well as the social structure? Are they asking you who to follow up with or are you asking them? Are they instinctively aware of whom they might piss off and proactively account for this in the first mail rather than after the flame-o-gram?

Do they need the Pond? Knowledge of the Pond is great, but does this person thrive because of the Pond? How much of their day are they spending talking with co-workers? Is this conversation essential to what they do or purely social? Which part of them are you going to socially amputate when they’re no longer in the building?

Are they reliable? I imply at the beginning of this article that it’s a senior employee who has a better chance at being successful remotely, but that’s not true. The ability to work remotely is not entirely a function of seniority; it’s also genetic. There are those who do it better solo. Their standard operating procedure is to simply get it done. Seniority can improve personal efficiency and the quality of the finished product, but I’ve discovered innate reliability at all levels of experience. There are people who simply do what they say they’re going to do.

The Right Job

Typical corporate logic dictates that a remote employee should work on a project that is separable from the rest of the team’s. The reasoning here is flawed. The belief is that the inconvenience of communication and decision-making latency around their distance means they should be separated and placed on non-dependent work.

Every part of that reasoning is wrong. Every part is another reason that remote fails.

My most successful remote employee was a perfect anomaly. He wrote standards — protocols. The heart of his job was to define a structured means of communication where the primary goal was the removal of ambiguity. He was a phenomenal communicator. He went out of his way to completely and promptly answer every email. 24 hours a day. When he visited, he took the time to do a complete circumnavigation of the Pond, vetting all the ripples he could find. He instinctively knew that the skill in defining a protocol is creating a structure that is going to meet the needs of right now, but also the unimagined needs of five years from now. And he applied that not only to what he wrote, but also to how he worked. He was a wonderful anomaly and he taught me that a remote job must be perceived, in all ways, as equal to a local one.

There should be absolutely no consideration of a person’s location on the planet Earth when considering the work you need of them. Each time the concern “Well, they’re remote” comes up, you need to turn the concern around and ask, “What about my company, my people, or the work makes remote an issue?” because that is what needs to be considered locally.

The Culture

How are those back in the Pond viewing the remote employee? The means by which Pond-based employees discriminate varies from the discreet to the direct, from the passive to the aggressive. The reason for this discrimination always boils down a single, fundamental tension: remote creates productivity friction.

The friction sounds something like this:

• “I don’t know what the hell this remote person is doing, so I’m going to assume he’s stumbling around the house in his underwear.”
• “This remote person is messing with my deadline or deliverable.”
• “He doesn’t answer his email.”

How long does it take to build a thing of quality? There’s a cost and the question is how is the remote worker affects this cost. Anything higher than the cost of a local employee creates friction. What was a 27-second walk down the hallway to yell at Bob about his crap code is a now 30-minutes constructing an email. Staff meetings start with a wasted 10 minutes trying to get the videoconferencing to connect. Every single communication with a remote worker costs more and generates more ripples in the Pond, and both their job and yours is to either make this cost go away or justify it.

Respect comes from knowledge and the question is: does your culture support a constant and consistent flow of knowledge to and from the remote worker?

Let’s find out:

• Have you created or implemented specific communication media for the team? Wikis? IRC? Are they used? Do different teams need different media? Are there too many and, if so, how are you going to anoint the one true medium?
• Other than the job, how are you encouraging other random interactions between local and remote folks?
• How often are you seeing these remote folks face-to-face? My vote is at least monthly.

Friction Detection

Remote friction is going to crop up. Just like interpersonal tensions randomly appear in the building, so does friction around remote employees. What are you doing not only to detect these, but also fix them? An example.

I hate meetings, but the brilliant thing about a meeting is that it’s full of people, and in a room full of people you never quite know what the hell is going to happen. The knee jerk reaction to bridging this meeting gap when there are remote workers is always, “We need good video conferencing software.”

After 10 years of hearing this argument, I’m calling fail. Video conferencing works when you need to talk to your kids during that trip to Chicago. It fills that visual gap, but all of the video conferencing solutions I’ve been a part of relative to a meeting create friction rather than remove it.

Yes, I can see Anne on the screen, but she’s flat. She’s also got this 1/10th of a second lag on the conversation, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re in the middle of that strategic rant about design and Anne chimes in, mid-sentence, with a bright thought that completely disturbs the creative cadence of your rant. That 1/10th of a second. Her inability to inject her essential thought at precisely the right moment. These micro-disturbances of the Force are a constant reminder that Anne’s not there. She’s being projected on the conference room wall like a well-intentioned screen saver. This isn’t just hurting the tempo of the meeting, it’s eroding her credibility.

In this case, surprisingly, less technology, rather than more, is better. Skype’s proximity to my computer and the usual lack of lag is far superior to video conferencing for 1:1s, and spending a little money on a quality Polycom is a fine solution for the staff meeting, but technology is a tool and never the answer.

Friction detection is paying attention to all the ways a remote employee interacts with the group and constantly asking, “Is this working?”

Another Pond

You, as the manager of people, are responsible for making the remote call regarding a person, putting them in the right job, and making sure the culture supports remote people. But the responsibility of delivering while remote is squarely on the remote employee. Yes, a remote employee answers to himself. At four in the afternoon when they run into an impossible problem, it’s almost entirely up to them to develop their plan of attack.

Working remotely isn’t a privilege; it’s work. And it’s the same work we’re all doing back at the mothership… fully clothed… in the Pond.

The Makers of Things

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

Stunning.

In a good bridge, I see the defiant end result of how some of my favorite engineering stories begin:

• “I’m sure you can arrange an impressive line of people who say it’s impossible. I take personal joy in ignoring those who say no.”
• “Yes, halfway through this project we’ll discover the impossible, but we know how to build through the impossible. Impossible is when we do our best work.”
• “Trust me when I say that I can close my eyes and see the end result, and when you can see it, too, you will be amazed.”

Ignore the No. When Brooklyn and New York’s population was booming at the end of the 19th century, the best way to get to and from Brooklyn was via ferries. As solutions were considered, I’m sure there were those who simply thought, “More boats!” These ardent defenders of the status quo were not engineers — they were the business. Their goal was not to build something great, but to make a profit.

It was an engineer named John Roebling who proposed a suspension bridge. We take bridges for granted now, but back in the 1800s, bridges were in beta. They fell. One out of every four bridges… fell. He convinced them by designing a bridge half again as big as any before it that was six times stronger than he estimated it need to be. Roebling designed the complete specification for the bridge in a mere three months and then died of tetanus from an injury he received surveying the bridge site.

Discover the impossible. Both of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are in the water of the East River. Ever wonder how you dig a big hole in the bottom of a river bed? In the late 1800s? It’s called a caisson, which is a huge, watertight wooden box half the size of a city block. This monstrosity was constructed on the river, sealed with pine tar, and carefully floated to a specific location on the river. It was then slowly sunk to the riverbed by placing stone on top that would eventually become the foundation.

Done, right?

Wrong. With the caisson on the riverbed, it’s time to push it another 45 feet into the riverbed in search of bedrock. Workers did this through the continued application of stone to the top while workers in the caisson dug out the riverbed with shovels, buckets, and, when necessary, dynamite. There was nothing resembling an electrical grid, so there was nothing resembling modern lighting in this watertight pine-tarred box, which was slowly descending through the floor of the East River. There were no jack hammers, so when they hit rock, they used small amounts of dynamite to crack these rocks. In a pine-tarred box, at the bottom of a river, mostly in a very wet dark.

And when the caisson finally hit bedrock 45 feet underground, they had to do it all over again for the New York tower. 30 feet deeper.

You will be amazed. With his father killed via an accident early in the surveying process, it was Washington Roebling, John’s son, who was chief engineer. He did the balance of this work bedridden in Brooklyn Heights, suffering from caisson disease, which he acquired working in the caisson as it descended into the New York-side of the East River. It’s not technically a disease; it’s decompression sickness or the bends, and it forced him to monitor all of the work from a window in his bedroom. He relayed detailed instructions via his wife, Emily, who effectively managed a cadre of politicians, competing engineers, and anyone else working on the bridge for over a decade.

As the New York caisson descended further than its Brooklyn counterpart, the incidents of the bends increased, killing two men. With no bedrock in sight, Roebling used his knowledge of geology and mineralogy to make an amazing decision: stop digging. It wasn’t bedrock, but it was compacted sand.

The New York tower. 78 feet deep into the riverbed. Resting on sand. It hasn’t moved.

We Are Defined By What We Build

The Brooklyn Bridge was built from 1870 until 1883. A quick history refresher: five years after we finished shooting each other in the American Civil War, we started building this:

Three years after that, work started on another:

And before the Williamsburg Bridge was even done, work started on the Manhattan Bridge:

These are the words and the stories I hear in the Brooklyn Bridge: enthusiasm, audacity, impossibility, and amazement. More importantly, I see a work of bare utility with a palpable sense of confidence, an equilibrium with nature, and a beauty that only grows with time.

We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act. I’m happy to report our new President agrees when he says,

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”

Someone, sometime soon is going to start describing the climb out of this impressive hole we’ve dug for ourselves, and they’re going to call it “America 2.0”. Clever, yes. We need a new version of ourselves and that’s going to involve bright, unexpected ideas from those we least expect them from, and they’re going to strike you as impossible. All you need to do to understand these terrifyingly ambitious ideas is to look back at what we’ve already done to understand what we can do.

The Art of the Tweet

In writing an article, I know I’m done when I delete. The process leading to done is chaotic; it’s days, weeks, or months of aggregating writing where I collect and organize paragraphs and sentences. Over time, content creation becomes content shaping as I organize the thoughts into a pleasing coherence.

And then, in a moment, it’s done. It looks nothing like the final product, I still have hours of writing and editing to do, but I know that I’m done because I can see the arc and the shape of the piece. I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but, most importantly, I have the new ability to remove. I can delete. A line here, a paragraph there — I can let go of things of former importance.

It’s one of the biggest writing lessons I’ve learned in the past few years — the art of less — and the appearance of Twitter has only reinforced this lesson’s importance.

Two Tweets, Three Guidelines

There are two kinds of tweets:

Original material. This is you talking to everyone.

Retweets, quotes, and links. This is you forwarding a thing that you find interesting to everyone. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call these retweets.

There’s another type of tweet that I want to talk about briefly and that’s the conversational tweet. What does this tweet tell you?

@commanda No clue

Not a thing. As you’ll see with the three following guidelines, my Twitter expectation is that each time I glance at my Twitterstream that I can something of value in any tweet. While conversational tweets are interesting for you and the recipient, they leave the rest of us in the dark.

Say More with Less

Tweet material just shows up. I’m sitting there in someone’s office when they say something which is, well, twitterable. This identification process has become annoyingly front-of-mind over the past year to the point that I interrupt important meetings with the simple declaration, “That’s twitterable”.

With solid twitterable material on my hands, I ask, “Does it need an edit?” The editing of tweets started out as a practicality for me. I needed to know whether or not my rough tweets were more than 140 characters, so I’d fire up WriteRoom, which conveniently counts characters, words, and paragraphs. Yes, I know Twitteriffic counts characters and so does the Twitter web application, but writing happens in big, open places. I don’t like typing in boxes; I want a canvas.

With the rough tweet dumped into WriteRoom, I start cutting. First to get it under the 140-character limit, but, more importantly, to reduce the idea to the basics. The Elements of Style has advice here. They suggest: “Avoid fancy words”. Why utilize when you can use? My advice is similarly confusing: “Drop words to give them room to think”.

In my head, I’m cutting words from my tweet to give you room to mentally add your own:

BEFORE: If it’s 4am, I know how stressed I am.
AFTER: Stress is how well I know 4am.

Nine to seven words. Slight reorganization, but which says more to you?

The act of editing a tweet seems contradictory to the impulsive nature of tweets, which means this is a good time to remind you that I’m a repeatedly stated firm believer that Twitter is what you make of it. I want my tweets with a bit of art. I want each word considered. You want to share the intimate details of your Battlestar Galactica watching habits. Whatever works for you, but how about…

Don’t Say What You’re Doing, Say Why You’re Doing It

The question Twitter asks is, “What are you doing?” I can’t think of the last time that I followed that direction. Fact is 95% of my day would bore the shit out of you. Really. There’s a chance you might derive some meager inspiration from the fact that, right now, I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing — talking to no one — but what is more interesting is why I’m here. Why I choose to do what I do. The tweet is, “Avoiding a meeting I hate”.

It’s just a mental step further from “What are you doing?” It’s a moment of introspection to transform the boring details of your day into delicious group therapy. This is why I think you should…

Add a Bit of Yourself

Twitter is you. I’m a big fan of the retweet, but I have the same fundamental problem with it that I have with literal answers to “What are you doing?” My question about the zero-add retweet is, “So what?”

Yes, the point of the tweet is the link and, yes, I follow some people because they are experts at finding compelling content on the Web that I probably care about. I don’t want just the content; I want to know what you think about it. Retweeting an article? Great, what’s the one line you love? Think that lolcat is funny? Me too, but why?

BEFORE: NYTimes Graphic: Home Prices in Selected Cities: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi)
AFTER: Ouch. Phoenix: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi)

I’ve already got a bevy of sites that are scrubbing and prioritizing the web for me. I check them four times a day and they serve their purpose well. But these sites lack authenticity. I don’t need another list of interesting links.

In Twitter, you follow people, not content.

140

My brief research into the English language revealed the average character count of a word is eight. Throw together a bunch of a smaller and bigger words, some single spaces and punctuation and you roughly end up with the average 140-character tweet being somewhere between 14 and 20 words. Let’s call it 15.

15 words.

In my opinion, the art of a good tweet is not just how much you can convey using extreme brevity, it’s also how you can take an idea, shape it with a bit of yourself, and give it to someone else who, if you’ve given them reason, will do the same.

A Twitter Decision

In starting a significant project, an engineer knows the first three big design decisions you make are vastly more important than the second three.

The nature of these decisions varies from project to project. They may be choices about look and feel, rules about architecture, or trade offs regarding feature set. Whatever these decisions are, they set a tone that defines the success of the project.

When I look at Twitter, I see three early essential decisions about how Twitter allows you to craft a community. I believe much of Twitter’s continued success is due to definition and execution of these decisions.

Interestingly, some obvious candidates for the Top 3, like “Scales like crazy”, “Will generate money”, and “Needs to be searchable” weren’t initially there.

The decisions were:

• Decision #1: A user chooses whom they follow.
• Decision #2: A user chooses whom they no longer follow.
• Decision #3: A user should be judged only by what they say.

These are simple decisions of empowerment. As Twitter’s popularity grows exponentially, both veteran users and recent arrivals need to remember that these basic decisions mean Twitter is yours to build with however you choose.

Yeah, Britney’s here now. Barack was here for a bit. I hear Shaq is figuring out Twitter as well. Yeah, these folks have an inordinate number of followers and are saying nothing particularly interesting, but they do not embody what makes Twitter great. Twitter is great because of choices made to allow you build whatever you want.

Decision #1: A user chooses whom they follow.

This might have been your first Twitter crisis: why am I here?

“Well, I hear so’n’so was on Twitter and I like them, so I followed them so I could figure out what the hell this Twitter thing was all about.”

You added folks. You looked at whom others you respected were following and you added more. Then, someone pissed you off. Someone said something that was not aligned with the vibe of your Twitterstream and you got cranky.

Every couple of weeks, a meme stressing about “an increase in Twitter spam” wanders the Internet. Each time I see this meme appear, I turn away from my keyboard and bang my head against my desk three times.

Twitter spam. Really? Are you even paying attention? I’ll say it again, you choose who you follow. If you’re following a newsbot, you’re going to get news spam. If you follow a good friend who can’t stop RTing, you’re going to to get retweet spam, but complaining about it is like standing the middle of a freeway asking, “Why do these cars keep hitting me?”

“But Rands, I need to follow this person, but they won’t shut up.”

There’s a legitimate complaint here. I’m certain there’s a sensible feature request based on this complaint, like “Please don’t show me tweets contain RT or @” or maybe a feature to put someone you follow on Twitter time-out during that weekend drinking binge where they won’t shut up about their ex-girlfriend. Yes, these features could be added to the base platform, but why complicate a feature you already have? You unfollow. It’s brutally simple and it solves the problem.

Decision #2: A user chooses whom they will no longer follow.

My theory regarding folks who complain about Twitter spam is that they, like me, have been traumatized by decades of email spam. You believe that Twitter spam is inevitable because, well, we lost the war against email spam, so we’re going to loser the Twitter spam war, as well.

You can win this war.

Think if you had the following power over your email inbox. When a piece of spam showed up, you could press a single button and guarantee that you would never receive that type of mail again. Poof. We just eliminated the billion-dollar spam detection and prevention industry with this dream. That’s exactly what Twitter made possible with Decision #2 and they did it with class.

If you choose, you receive a notification when someone starts following you, but have you noticed there is no similar notification when they leave? I find this omission telling. While I can’t confirm the feature omission was deliberate, I hope it was. The simple choice to not broadcast a departing follower strikes me as saying, “We are choosing to focus Twitter’s community conversations on what’s being built, not what’s being taken apart.”

A service like Qwitter quickly appeared to fill the gap, but unless you’re getting paid by your number of followers, getting lost in figuring out why someone is no longer following you is a waste of time. Their departure has nothing to do with you; it has to do with them and the experience they want out of Twitter.

Decision #3: A user should be judged only by what they say.

Take a look at the decisions Twitter made regarding your profile. It’s a spartan, 160-character bio, your location, and a URL. None of which you actually need to fill out. This is decidedly not Facebook. There is no feature in Twitter which tells who in your graduating class has a Twitter account. If you don’t know the person whose account you’re checking out, you’re forced to think. You make a choice to follow not based on where they live, where they went to school, what they do, or whom they know. What matters is what they say.

Yes, this rule says should because there’s no way my hippie utopian vision of a world where bright ideas connect bright people is going to last. Barack hasn’t said much since the election, but still garners thousands of followers a week. Mr. Tweet robotically scrubs your follower list and offers automated helpful advice regarding followers of followers that you might be interested in, and I’ve found some “Well, duh, I should be following them” folks.

Twitter is mainstream and lots of time and energy is being spent analyzing and judging Twitter habits. “He’s got 17,123 followers and only follows THREE PEOPLE. Jerk.” Who cares? Yes, some folks have huge numbers of followers, whereas others have 12. This gives these massively followed people a larger stage for their 140 characters, but because someone has a pile of followers doesn’t mean I ever want my search altered by someone else’s subjective calculation regarding “authority”. I define my own authority. I prioritize.

This is My House

Think of your Twitter account as your house. This is my house. Your house is different. You’re trying to figure out how to use Twitter to monetize eyeballs. Good luck with all that. For me, Twitter remains a place for casual information. For me, a tweet is still a note I tie to a balloon, which I let go and think, “Who is going to read that one?” Sometimes I look and see where it ended up, sometimes I don’t.

In my house, I want to create an illusion of a two-way conversation, which means I continue to prune followers so that content flows at a consumable rate. If I get the sense that I’ve lost control over my Twitterspace, I’ll stop going — the same way my fancy new mail rule files once important messages straight into the well-intentioned To Forget folder.

This is my house and I’m still deciding how I want it built and, thankfully, Twitter decided to be spartan and to stay out of the way. I think they knew the construction of your community is your deal. Bitching about it means you haven’t figured it out for yourself.

Rands in Review 2008

I live in the mountains and in the mountains you need a chainsaw.

Strangely, the time of year it’s the least fun to be outside is when I use the chainsaw the most. This is a result of holiday vacation, trees conveniently falling during winter storms, and short windows of time the county of Santa Cruz allows you to burn in your yard.

The job of the chainsaw is rarely one of actual building. It’s destructive, constructive work where you’re removing dead or live trees in order to make room for others to grow. After an afternoon in the forest, I’m covered in sawdust and sap. I’m bruised, I’m exhausted, and I can barely walk. It’s great.

I’ve been doing the same type of work with the weblog. In preparation for a new design, I’ve been slowly tidying and pruning the site. I’ve also been reflecting on the past year’s writing. Let’s look back at some of my favorite articles from 2008:

Appropriately, 2008 was led off with a Twitter article. Twitter was a recurring theme for the year and it showed up again in May as I talked about what, in my opinion, made a good follower in We Travel in Tribes. The first tweet inspired article was The Quirkbook, which listed a plethora of quirks I gathered via Twitter after admitting a few of my own.

Out Loud was the second half of my reposings on presentations. This article tackled the art of giving a presentation versus writing one. Articles like this appear because of immediate practicality. I was in presentation hell last spring and needed to articulate through my fingers how to prepare for a presentation.

Pixel Rigs documented another visual fascination of mine, namely desktop arrangements. I’m happy to report the Flickr group I created continues to receive a trickle of new desktop set-ups. I’ve recently updated mine, as well.

The FriendDA was an idea that had been kicking around my head that I finally got around to writing and posting. I deliberately disassociated the FriendDA from Rands to see what it could do on its own. Checks of the Twitterstream demonstrate folks seem to find value.

The Coffee Mug Affair was my third obsessive analysis of tools I can’t live without. The “This is seriously fucking black coffee” sits in front of me and is happily serving its purpose as I browse the archives and write this article. The cup also made an appearance on the first piece of Rands schwag, the t-shirt.

The year finished up with this Rands shirt with 100% of the profits go to First Book literacy charity. I’m done printing shirts, but I’ll be leaving what has been printed up in the Buy Olympia store until we’ve sold out.

That’s 23 articles on the year — five less than the year before. Other than some small tweaks, I’m moving into year #4 of the current design — which is unacceptable and currently being rectified.

The fact real work kicks in this week is tempered by the presence of MacWorld, which brings some of my favorite people to San Francisco. This collection of bright minds shows up at a perfect time of year. With the holidays behind us, with the celebration and the cleansing complete, it’s time to ask, “What are we going to build next?”

A Signature Cadence

Early on in the movie Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe constructs one of my favorite getting-to-know-you and let’s-fall-in-love scenes. The lead, William Miller, and the love interest, Penny Lane, stare at each other while lying to each other about their ages:

Penny: “How old are you?”

William: “18.”

Penny: “Me, too. How old are we really?”

William: “17.”

Penny: “Me, too.”

William: “Actually, I’m 16.”

Penny: “Me, too. Isn’t it funny? The truth just sounds different.”

What does a lie sound like? How do we decide to trust? There’s a reason why you can figure out in an instant whether a mail is spam or not. It’s not a single, measurable thing, but a whole set of small, invisible variables with which you can instantly make a judgment — I do not trust this mail.

You have a complex set of analytical mental muscles that help you make critical snap emotional judgments. Whether it’s a mail, a website, or a person, your brain can instantly look at 12 imperceptible aspects of a thing to determine how you should feel.

Truth, love, or lies, human has a signature cadence.

I love Flickr

Really, I love it. My favorite part of designing a presentation is the three hours I get lost slice and dicing the deck and cruising Flickr looking for the perfect image. I always find a photo that changes the way I see my deck.

Flickr pulled my SLR out of my closet and onto my desk. Flickr gives me regular visual insights into friends that I’d never find in Twitter, instant messaging, or even over lunch. I feel as I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what Flickr can offer and you know what? Until recently, I thought Flickr loved me back. Up until a few months ago, this was the Flickr logo:

As far as I could tell, just about every single Flickr page contained this highlighted message, and what I saw in this simple message was that I wasn’t on a web site; I wasn’t using software. I was somewhere else.

Flickr is not a web site. Flickr is a tremendously large group of people constantly throwing their photos at each other and when Flickr said it loved you, it was reminding you that you weren’t at a website, you were part of a community.

You’re Not a Clock

Some time shortly after Web 1.0 was over, an engineer was programming and making a choice regarding wording. He needed to tell the user how long it had been since something had happened — elapsed time. There are well-formatted, structured ways to display this information, but most assume you’re a clock:

3 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes, 3 seconds.

There are a bunch of problems with this format. First, you waste a lot of space saying very little, but the larger issue is that it doesn’t effectively describe the passage of time. You don’t measure time — you feel it. This engineer understood that you’re a human being. He decided that communicating elapsed time should sound like telling you the time over coffee, “When did Michael update his status?”

It’s small. You probably didn’t even see it. It’s not precise, but tells you exactly what you need to know. Moreover, it sounds like someone rather than something is saying it.

It sounds authentic.

Stop for a second and reread any paragraph in this article, but this time, I want you to listen to the voice you’ve constructed in your head. It sounds like you. This is why, when we meet, you’re going to be confused because I don’t sound like you. You do.

You trust this voice and the more a website or an application is designed to imitate that voice, the sooner a user will engage because they’ll make an emotional connection faster.

It’s a Little Thing

Do this. Take a moment to look on one of your favorite websites or weblogs and look for where they choose to sound like a friend you bumped into at the coffee shop. Once you start looking for it, it stands out. My favorite place to look is at the bottom of the page around the copyright:

It’s a little thing. In the huge pile of work building a website, the words chosen to deliver small messages might seem important, but these small words define a personality and both personality and reputation are built on decisions that feel too small to matter.

Here are three ways JetBlue starts the conversation at their kiosks:

Here’s how Twitter used to tell you they saved your information:

And this is how Khoi reminds you to have a conversation, not a flame war:

This conversational tone has a purpose. By sounding like a human, these small wording decisions push the technology out of the way to reveal what we really care about: the people.

Yeah, they’re faking us out. Yeah, it’s a script that is randomly saying “Hi” in every language possible, but look at the design intent. You are being benignly deceived into believe that you aren’t interacting with a computer, you’re staring through a window at other people.

And that’s where your head should be. Not worrying about how it might work, but who you might find on the other side.

I Think Flickr Still Loves Me

I see a lot of guilt inside the term “Web 2.0”. It’s an overused catchall term used to describe a bevy of new technologies and trends, but what I hear is guilt. When someone uses the term, I hear, “Yeah, so we’re not going to fuck-up and flame-out like those Web 1.0 dweebs. We’re Web 2.0.”

My negative reaction is unfortunate because inside of this guilty morass are some brilliant developments. I enjoy watching the ever-blurring line between a web page and an application. I like seeing the web becoming a cloudy platform.

Mostly, I like the authentic tone that came with Web 2.0.

Who knows who removed the authenticity from the Flickr logo. It’s sad, but it served its purpose. Flickr’s old logo was a quiet efficient invitation to join a community and sound like yourself.

A Pleasant Elsewhere

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume is certainly not the first book I read, but when the question of the first book comes up, it’s the first answer because in my fuzzy thirty-something brain, Tales was the first book I was proud of reading.

I picked it out, I lay on the top bunk of the bed, and I read the book for myself. There was no school assignment motivating my endeavor, just the simple joy of enjoying a book I had discovered by myself.

Summers in the Rands house were full of reading. The Mom signed the sister and I up for a reading program at the local library. The game was “Read as much as you possibly can”. 20 books and you got a patch. 100 and there was some type of pizza parlor incentive. At the start of the summer, I’d walk out of the library with my four new books and think 100 books. That’s impossible.

I’d get home, read the four books before lunch, and start to bug the Mom, “Can we go back to the library? When are we going to the library? I need more books.”

“We were just there.”

“Yeah, but I want more to read.”

It’s these intense summer reading periods that I blame for the four unread books sitting on my desk right now. It’s also the reason for the two packed shelves in my closet of to-be-read books, as well as the stack of seven books next to the bed. My belief is: there can never be enough books.

When I have headache, I read and the headache goes away. When I’m pissed at the world, I find a book and a dark cave and chill in a pleasant elsewhere. Forget about the knowledge and ideas passed along via the written word, reading a book brings a calm to my crazy NADD-driven world.

I see the world in terms of words because whenever I have a quiet moment, I fill it with reading.

My Disaster

Roughly a third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and while there are piles of research that indicates literacy leads to a better quality of life, I simply want to promote a pleasant elsewhere. Certainly, there are more urgent disasters in progress than literacy, but this is my disaster and you can support it.

I offer the first Rands in Repose t-shirt.

This shirt is available in limited quantities until the end of the year.

The simple, yet elegant logo for the shirt was designed by the terribly talented Kevin Cornell. The shirt itself is a product of the Continental Clothing Company and is constructed of 70% bamboo, which sounds freaky until you put it on. Bamboo has a high quality, unique, silky feeling, but is durable and machine washable.

Both men’s and women’s sizes are available in a complex brown color named “bitter chocolate”.

100% of the proceeds for each shirt goes to First Book, a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.

I’d like to thank the folks at buyolympia.com for make the process of finding, printing, and selling shirts easy.

I’d also like to thank the folks who take the time to read and comment on my reposing. It’s my honor to play a small part in your pleasant elsewhere.

Happy Holidays.

(c) 2002-2010 Rands  (Made you look)