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.

This hockey rink is a remnant of first Internet bubble. Built by Netscape, the rink has held a game every Saturday since 1998. A majority of the folks who show up know each other, so the game is mellow. Finesse, not fighting. A fight is an unusual once a year thing.

When Philly, who I believed was at fault for this whole situation, got the bench, someone asked him what happened. His answer, "Anaheim ran into me and I protected myself."

One Eighth of a Second

I want you to think of the last time you were surprised. Good, bad, I don't care. When was the last time you were really surprised? Got it? Ok, now think about the very first thing that you thought about the surprise. I don't want to know how you eventually handled it; I want you to think about your instantaneous first reaction.

How do you react when you're surprised? Is this how you always react when a surprise lands? My guess is yes.

On the hockey rink, Philadelphia puts up his shields when he's surprised. It's a natural reaction, protecting yourself, but what's interesting isn't Philly's very sensible reaction to the perception of being attacked, it's everyone else's interpretation. We all saw him hold up his arms in defense of Anaheim's unintentional attack and we all thought, "Man, Philly. What a goon."

In any group of people larger than one, these instantaneous reactions to unexpected situations happen a lot, and understanding their range and impact is important to navigating awkward, tension-filled, and professionally tricky situations.

The Jerks

These are knee jerk reactions, and the first thing you need to know about them is that they should be first viewed without judgement. I'm not a psychologist and I don't know why some people are aggressive knee jerkers and others are passive. I don't know if these reactions are a function of upbringing or genetics, but I do know that we as a species have little control over these initial reactions and there are many of them.

In my head, the complete set of reactions fit on a spectrum that is labeled Fight or Flight. The first step in understanding a knee jerk reaction is first figuring out where on this spectrum the reaction lies. Is this a person who is going to take on the surprise or are they going to let it wash over them? Will they bolt? Will they wilt? If there is one thing you want to know quickly about those around you, it's their penchant to fight the surprise or flee it.

Again, no judgement. A person who automatically has the fight instinct is not necessarily a jerk -- it's just the default instinct when the world unexpectedly and rapidly changes. I know who on my team will attack a surprise. They'll leap on it. I also know the ones who will silently digest the surprise. I know who is going to come back three hours or three days later with a totally different attitude because they'll have actually processed the surprise.

The base assessment of fight or flight gives you a starting point regarding what might first happen when a surprise lands, but there are other instantaneous reactions that occur and understanding them gives you an idea of what you need to do next, if anything.

For the sake of this article, my assumption is a surprise has landed and it's bad news. These reactions apply regardless of the type of surprise, but let's assume it's professionally bad news with negative consequences and it's being delivered in a group setting. Here's whom you might see across the table:

Dr. No. Denial. That's the reaction. Doesn't matter if the surprise is reasonable, understandable, or well explained. Dr. No's only reaction is a fighting "No".

• "No, I'm not going let her go."
• "No, I'm not moving organizations."
• "No, we're not shutting down this group."

Remember, knee jerk reactions are not rational, they are not considered, and while they are tactically interesting, they are not strategically useful. Dr. No's denial is not her actual thoughts on that topic, it's her reptilian brain reaction to a surprise.

No.

If this is a group surprise and Dr. No is sitting in a conference room full of people throwing down the No, there's a chance for everyone to go off the rails. Well, Dr. No said no and I agree, so NO AS WELL. The time immediately after the surprise goes down is not the time to take any action except to allow folks to react. There are going to be Nos as well as a bevy of other reactions and your job, if it's your meeting, is to let folks talk -- let them react. The goal with Dr. No and everyone else in the room is to get their reaction out so that we can figure out what to do next.

The follow-up: The good news is that Dr. No has got it out of her system. She's expressed her displeasure, which is half of the game. The next time you chat, there will be residual No, but Dr. No knows that she's been heard and will be willing to brainstorm what to do next about the surprise.

Raging Bull. Perhaps the most dangerous of the reactions, Raging Bull wants to fight. They're taking the surprise personally, they're going to say No, and they're going to pick a fight. The Raging Bull is Dr. No with attitude.

The move with the Raging Bull is to know that it's coming, to know that you've got a Raging Bull on your hands. If you have any control over the surprise, you want to put the Raging Bull in a safe situation where they can react to their heart's content without afflicting psychological damage on others or sparking a mob mentality where they infect a mindless horde of mini-Raging Bulls. If it's a pure surprise and it's a group setting, my advice is to end the meeting as quickly as possible. Like Dr. No, Raging Bull is expressing his shock. Unlike Dr. No, the Raging Bull isn't going to feel complete until they've got the emotional satisfaction of picking a fight with someone else.

The follow-up: Everyone needs time to contemplate a surprise, but no one needs time more than Raging Bull. Each knee jerk reaction scratches a particular psychological itch and in the case of Raging Bull, they believe that getting someone else to participate in their mental and verbal freak-out is somehow going to help.

It's not.

Of all the reactions, Raging Bull's behavior is the one that I've found to likely to repeat itself after the fact. Raging Bull will often continue to pick fights days after the initial surprise, which is why it's your move to get them thinking, as quickly as possible, about what's next. What are we going to do about the surprise? What specific thought does Raging Bull have which is crucial to successfully navigating this surprise?

Still Water. This reaction reads like flight because they're not fighting. In fact, they're just sitting there, but Sill Water is taking it all in. They're not missing a thing and in their complete silence, wearing their poker face, they are meticulously processing, they're evaluating all possible permutations, best and worst case scenarios, and potential impact on their day to day.

This processing results in one of two very different Still Waters. There's the true Still Water who is going to maintain the calm demeanor for the entire duration of the surprise. See, this Still Water's processing has resulted in a comfortable plan. They believe they know what to do about the surprise and this realization has brought them peace.

The second Still Water is mentally losing their shit. Sure, externally they look calm, but internally their processing has resulted in increasingly loony nightmare scenarios regarding the surprise. Without quick action, Insane Still Water will find reason to become a Raging Bull.

The follow-up: You want to get to Still Water as quickly as possible in a safe location after the surprise because Still Water isn't still. Unlike Dr. No and the Raging Bull who had their opportunities to weigh in, Still Water is still in their head and the longer they remain in the head, the higher the probability they'll tell themselves a tale that will drive them insane.

You need Still Water to say out loud how they feel about the world suddenly changing. Like Raging Bull, you need to engage Still Water in the surprise and move the problem out of their heads and onto the table where everyone can take action.

Distiller. This is my favorite knee jerk reaction because the Distiller attacks the surprise with questions. Why did this happen? How come we didn't see it coming? Ok, what's the impact? Right, what are we going to do?

This is a fight reaction, but a constructive one. The Distiller is as uncomfortable as anyone with the surprise, but their coping mechanism is aggressive understanding. They're not going to stop asking questions until they feel they've got a complete understanding of what actually happened.

In a group setting, I let the Distiller have free-reign during the landing of the surprise because their incessant questions are helping everyone in the room contemplate what actually happened. They focus the surprise on facts rather than feel.

The follow-up: You're going to feel you've got a good idea where the Distiller is at because of their endless questions, but now's a good time to explain that everyone comes down from a surprise in different ways, which is why everyone needs that personal follow-up. Yeah, a Distiller can turn into Raging Bull after a night's sleep. Still Water might go Distiller. You just don't know who is going to walk into the building 24 hours after the surprise. This is why most surprises are engineered to occur late in the week; there's a belief that all the knee jerks are going to calm down over the weekend. Maybe. More on this in a bit.

The Handler. The first flight reaction sure doesn't feel like flight. The Handler is not surprised. In fact, they're fired up to handle whatever the surprise might be. They make it appear that they knew this surprise was going to occur. How'd they do that?

The Handler is a calm facade. Where the Distiller understands via questions, The Handler's coping mechanism is the illusion they've got it all figured out -- that they're 10 steps ahead of everyone else. This is a convenient reaction when you've got the Raging Bull standing on the conference table challenging anyone to hand-to-hand combat, but The Handler needs help.

The follow-up: The Handler crumbles hardest. The Handler is actually Dr. No except without the denial. There will be a quiet moment in the middle of the night when The Handler realizes absolutely nothing has been handled and then you'll see their actual reaction.

My Bad. This flight reaction is one of accountability. My Bad's impression is that they've personally done something to incur this particular surprise. They believe that if only they had done just one thing different, no one would've had to deal with the surprise.

There's hope inside of My Bad's reaction. Their empathy regarding the surprise is constructive, as opposed to the destructive social tendencies of Dr. No or Raging Bull, but you don't want them wallowing in their overdeveloped sense of accountability.

The follow-up: My Bad is not responsible for the surprise. While their sense of responsibility is admirable, My Bad needs to understand the actual cause behind the surprise. They didn't cause it, so they shouldn't feel it. They more they focus on feeling responsible, the less energy and focus they have for making progress.

We're Doomed. The most common flight reaction is also the reaction that, I believe, everyone is going to experience as they digest the surprise. Despair.

In a room full of geeks hearing a surprise for the first time, one of their first thoughts is, "How does this surprise fit into my mental system of how things work?" Failure to map the surprise into the mental model results in an uncomfortable realization: "The world does not work as I expected. Therefore, other surprises are guaranteed to happen randomly. QED. I have no control whatsoever. Shit."

The follow-up: A perceived lack of control or understanding of our world is a confidence shattering experience for the geek, and the best way to attack this despair is with a project. Doesn't matter if the project is surprise-related or not, the geek needs something to do. They need the blissful distraction of building something. It's during this constructive distraction that they'll actually figure out how they feel about the surprise.

I Quit. The last knee jerk is our strongest flight reaction. An extreme version of We're Doomed, I Quit does exactly what you'd expect: they threaten to quit on the spot.

They're not quitting. Well, they might, but not right now. You need to translate "I quit" into what they're actually saying: "I am very surprised and I don't like being this surprised." It's unfortunate that this is their reaction, especially in a group setting, because I Quit's attitude can create mass professional hysteria, which means this needs to be handled immediately. You can't wait until after the weekend to explain to I Quit that their reaction at this moment might be vastly different after a night's sleep. You need to hold up a mirror in front of them and ask, "No matter the surprise, why in the world would you eliminate so many options by quitting on the spot?"

The follow-up: I Quit will calm down and land on another opinion, but their knee jerk reaction is a sign of a larger problem. I don't know what your surprise is, but I know if someone wants to quit that, first, it's a big surprise, and second, they value their job second to their peace of mind.

Stages of Jerk

With people, it's never as easy as just a name. These labels for the knee jerk reactions are deliberately simple, but people are conspicuously complex.

As I hinted earlier, I've found it commonplace that you're going to see multiple knee jerk reactions as a corporate surprise is comprehended. These reactions, like grief, have stages, and your job as a manager or a concerned co-worker is actually not comparably complex. Your job is to listen.

The reason there's a knee jerk reaction is because the unexpected occurred. It kicks off the process of assimilation and that's what we care about -- the understanding of the surprise, not the reaction to it. While everyone has a different reaction, they're all going to end up trying to figure out what just happened, and part of that process is having someone they trust sit there and listen to their assessment. Verbally walking through our thoughts is one of the ways we organize and understand them and begin the process of finding a comfortable constructive conclusion.

I'm just as uncomfortable with a Raging Bull as anyone, but I know this knee jerk reaction is not who they are, this is just how they react. Understanding these varied potential reactions is just the first part of digesting a surprise - it helps you understand what to expect so you can begin to figure out what to do next.

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?

Monday is the day we set aside for new hires. All the new hires spend the morning learning about the company, figuring out how to create accounts, and becoming indoctrinated in company culture. When lunch time arrives, managers pick up their new employees and take them to lunch.

Their morning starts at 9am, and at 9:15 I got a call from HR: "Jesse's not here".

Bad traffic, miscommunication, there were a dozen good reasons he wasn't there, but I instantly felt a rock in my stomach: "Jesse walked".

A quick call to my recruiter and the mystery began to unfold, "Oh, yeah, he called just before 5pm on Friday and said he wanted to chat. I was off Friday, should I call him now?"

Yeah, call him. Tell me what I already know.

The recruiter discovered that Jesse was firmly ensconced in a cone of silence because his Friday call was his cold feet call. After three months of phone screens, interviews, offer negotiations, and acceptance of said offer, Jesse was calling to tell us that while he had resigned two weeks ago, a last minute counter-offer had shown up, and he'd decided to stay... at 4:45pm on his last day.

Jesse walked.

As I sat at my desk, lightly tapping the phone headset against my forehead, I thought how simple it would be to be pissed. In terms of respect, trust, and professionalism, Jesse had screwed me in just about every manner possible, but, in this case, the fault would be mine.

I had not explained to Jesse that he was wanted.

The Requisition Situation

This article is going to talk about the beginning and the end of the hiring process. I'm going to make sure you know two things. First, that you understand how urgent it is that you hire, and second, how to make sure those you hire actually show up. There's a huge pile work in the middle of this process involving phone screens, interviews, and offers, but for this article we'll just focus on the beginning and the end.

Let's start by understanding where this whole hiring process starts. We need to talk about requisitions.

In many companies, jobs are ruled by requisitions ("reqs"). These imaginary pieces of paper give you, the hiring manager, the permission to hire, but they serve two other purposes. First, they document and formalize the process of hiring a new full-time person, and more importantly, they give executives visibility into the state of the company's growth.

It varies by company, but reqs, specifically open, approved reqs, are one of the more popular organizational levers the execs have to control of the growth of the company. In software development, one of your larger corporate expenses is base salary, which means the moment uncertainty appears on you company's horizon, reqs (read: potential large expenses) are one of the first things to vanish.

This leads to the most important rule regarding requisitions:

Reqs vanish randomly, often without notice, without reason, and at the least convenient time.

In larger companies, the bureaucracy involved in actually getting an approved req is impressive. When the req is finally approved by the 17th person you don't know, you have a false sense of accomplishment. You believe this req is yours, but there is really only one way to make it yours -- make the hire.

It's not just corporate nervousness that causes reqs to vanish. Your boss, who you love, is a likely req stealing culprit. Anton's got a guy right now who is perfect for his team and we've only got one req. He can hire him right now and I swear we'll get you a req when you find someone.

You believe your boss. You trust your boss, so you give him your req and Anton's a happy guy and you feel like you've done the team a solid. Except when you actually find someone, guess what, you don't have a req. Neither does your boss because some time between when you gave your req and actually found someone for your position the first rule was invoked: every single req in the company was frozen.

I'm guessing 50% of the reqs I've managed to get approved in my career have resulted in a hire. Meaning, a flip of a coin would as accurately predict whether or not I'd be able to hire someone.

From the moment there's a hint of an idea of a req in your future, you need to work on improving your chances that you'll be able to hire. And that means, as quickly as possible, you need to: find the person, phone screen them, interview them, interview them again, negotiate an offer, get that offer accepted, and get them in the building. Think of that as you're staring at your shiny new req. Think that the industry average for hiring against an approved req is 90 days -- three months -- and each of those days represents a day that someone, somewhere can steal your req. This is why you need to...

Spend an hour a day on each req you have

We'll talk about how to make sure they'll show up in a bit, but to start you need to get the pump primed. A former boss helpfully suggested, "Spend an hour a day on each req on your plate".

An hour?

If you've got an approved req, you have approval to grow you team. To add new skill sets. To build more stuff. In your role as a manager, I ask: "What's more important than growing your team?" No, this isn't a draconian hour; this is a daily reminder that you need to grind away at this req until you've hired someone.

Rands, I have no candidates yet. The req was just approved. I...

Again, reqs vanish. Randomly. At the end of each workday, you need to think, "Phew, no one stole my req."

Here's how to start:

• Search the web for candidates. -- Show me a stranger who will be perfect.
• Mail friends who might know the perfect person. -- Know anyone? How about you?
• Annoy your recruiter. -- Where are my resumes?
• Ping folks who have turned you down in the past. -- Are you ready now?
• Scan your inbox and sent folders for folks you need, but may have forgotten. -- Really, are you ready now?
• Read your job description for additional inspiration. -- Do I actually know who I'm looking for?

But isn't this why I have a recruiter?

It's terrific that you've got a recruiter. They're going to streamline your entire hiring process, but you still need to spend an hour a day for each req. A quality recruiter is going to find candidates, do time-saving phone screens, and they can keep in-flight candidates warm. When it comes to offer negotiation, they're great at providing you essential compensation telemetry and they're good at playing bad cop, but as we'll see, it's your job to demonstrate that the candidate is wanted.

I found them! I'm done!

No, you didn't, and no, you aren't.

No really! He verbally accepted, he starts in two weeks. It's a done deal.

No, it's not. If randomly vanishing reqs are painful lesson #1 of hiring, painful lesson #2 is: people lose their flippin' minds during job transitions.

Think back to your last job transition. Think about the mental turmoil. When did you actually fully believe that you were going to accept the new gig? For me, it's about two months after I started.

You keep recruiting; you keep searching for the perfect employee until your new hire is sitting in their office. It's not common for an accepted offer to be declined, but it needs to happen once for you to learn the lesson, to suddenly realize, "Oh, I need to start over. Crap."

Until he's sitting in the seat, in the building, badge hanging from his belt, you haven't hired anyone.

Deliberate Want

Michele's team was embarking on a new technology direction and while she had the basic talent in place, she needed two more hires and we had the reqs. In a recruiting brainstorm, I sketched out the type of person we needed. "Ok, we need Alex. He's the Sr. Architect at this other company, but he's the right combination of technical brilliance and architectural jerk. We need someone with that technical ability and the will to enforce it because we're starting from the ground up."

Her: "Why not hire Alex?"

Me: "He'll never leave his start-up."

"Have you asked?"

"No."

"I'll ask."

She did, and while it took six months, Alex, the perfect fit for the team and for the project, joined the team. Halfway through the recruiting stint with Alex, when it looked like he might not budge, I threw another perfect candidate on her plate and said, "Maybe ask him, too?" Sean was on the team a month after Alex.

Two hires I thought we had absolutely no chance of hiring. Both on the team in a matter of months. Your question is, "What's her secret?" and the answer is dangerously simple - deliberate, consistently expressed and reinforced want.

Both of the positions we had were attractive. Senior engineering gigs working on a 1.0 product in a name brand company. But these guys were the top of the field. Recognized names. There were any number of opportunities across the Valley that would be attractive. How'd we win?

We continually and consistently explained that they were wanted.

The idea of a new gig, a fresh start, is appealing because of its simplicity. You know nothing about your future team; you have no idea about potential death marches, or that guy down the hall that just bugs you for no particular reason. It's simple to think about the future optimistically because the future hasn't screwed you, yet.

This optimism fades in the middle of the night when you open your eyes, startled, and think, "Why in the world would I leave a solid gig with people I know and a bright future?" The reasons are myriad, but that's not the point. The point is for any big decision, you're going to question it from every single angle. You're going to have endless inner dialogues with yourself. You're going to talk yourself into the gig and then you're going to talk yourself out of it.

It's exhausting.

Michele's message during the entire hiring process was, "You are the best person for this gig. We want you." Remember that we're not talking about random, anonymous candidates; we're talking about handpicked candidates.

Before any interview, she'd drive to them, explain the gig, and begin, "You are the best person for this gig. We want you." After the first round of interviews, her message was the same, "See, this gig is perfect for you. We want you."

When we started the offer negotiations, she'd worked with the recruiter and knew exactly what we'd need to do to lure the candidates. She knew that base salary was a big deal for Alex. She knew Sean was going to be a stickler about stock. There was no offer negotiation because Michele constructed offers that were going to be accepted. She presented them: "This is the offer you wanted. This gig is perfect for you. We want you."

Once the offers were accepted, Michele didn't change her tone or message a bit. She'd had rockstars walk before and she knew the slippery inner dialogues that were going on. She knew that change begets more change and that the easiest time to lose someone was during that post-courtship purgatory between gigs. She had her team take them to drinks. She planted seeds of future work that would need to be done. She reminded them, "We want you".

This strategy reads like a massive ego-stroke for an attention-starved engineering rockstar, but it's not. Whether you have pre-identified a candidate for your gig or you're lucky enough to randomly find a great fit in a pile of anonymous resumes, the strategy is the same -- you consistently remind the candidate that they are wanted. In the mental chaos that is a career change, you and your gig are unchanging in your message. You're not coddling them; you're a constant amongst mental chaos.

Hire for Your Career

The strategy I'm proposing steps on a lot of recruiter toes. Recruiters are professional relationship people and their instinctive reads on candidates can be eerily accurate, but their job is the hire and once the hire shows up, the recruiter vanishes. The relationship is ended because the job is done.

Your professional relationship with those that you hire is never over.

If you're hiring well, you're hiring people not just for this job, but for your career. These are the people who, for better or worse, will explain to others what it is like to work with you. They'll explain your quirks, your weaknesses, and your strengths. When they eventually leave the group, they're taking your reputation with them. You may never talk to them again, but they'll continue to talk and my question is: what stories are they going to tell?

Your daily hands-on management of your hiring isn't just going to improve your hiring process, it's going to improve your career because you'll demonstrate from the first moment you interact with your future employee that you care.

Jesse didn't decide to turn us down at 4:45pm on his last day. The decision began long before that and I wasn't listening. I didn't hear the parts of his current job he loved because I didn't do the phone screen. I didn't understand his concerns about leaving the first job he loved since college because I didn't build enough trust in the interview. I didn't hear him drifting away during the offer negotiation. The last thing I heard about Jesse is he walked.

As the creative burst subsided, I stared at those seven pages in the word processor -- Wordstar -- and I began to fret about line spacing, page numbers, and other formatting decisions. I was silently asking myself, "How am I going to make this palatable to the editor? To the publisher?"

My first story ever. Seven pages in and I'm worried that double-spacing is going have an impact on whether I get published.

Ambition. The great blind motivator. You gotta love it.

To God and Back Again was never finished, let alone published. It's sitting on a 3.5-inch floppy somewhere in a file format I'm certain will prevent me from ever reading it again, and, that's probably best. Old writing is like an old girlfriend: the memory is better than the reality.

Since high school, I've continued to write constantly. Journals, physical and online. There was a weblog way back when, and then there is this one, which, 15 years after my first foray into independent writing, actually resulted in published work.

The lessons I've learned in that time are myriad, but today I'm thinking about simplicity.

The Writing Tools

For first drafts, I use one of two tools: a Moleskine notebook or TextEdit.

The choice of which to use often comes down to location. Is where I'm currently sitting MacBook Pro friendly or not? If that answer is yes, I'll fire up TextEdit and get started. As sophisticated tools go, TextEdit is bare bones. It's just a simple text editor (Sentinel, 15 pt, FTW) that allows me to do rich text editing, search and replace, bold, italics, and the occasional underline.

That's it. No macros, no line numbers, no revision control, just pure writing simplicity.

This requirement of simplicity is rooted in my belief that choices are distractions and distractions are the leading cause of you not writing. And I think you should write more, which is why my holiday present for you is OmmWriter.

Let It Begin

Let me start by saying that I didn't write this draft in OmmWriter. I used that fine tool for a good two weeks before I returned to my pleasant, vanilla TextEdit, but that two-week journey is worth understanding.

OmmWriter is a full-screen text editor with an intense focus on simplicity, and when I say intense focus, I mean a maniacal focus on stripping away every distraction that might prevent you from writing... and then providing a subtle set of new distractions. Briefly:

• There's no menu bar. You must be in full-screen mode. If you leave full-screen mode, the full-screen window calmly fades away.
• In full-screen mode, there are three gorgeous white backgrounds to choose from: snow, white, and white-pattern. That's it.
• Applications preferences are built right into the writing area and are represented with glyphs. These minimalist preferences allow you to choose a serif, sans serif, or script typeface, and one of three typeface sizes.

My favorite feature of OmmWriter is the soundtrack. The application comes with seven chill songs, which are designed to stay the hell out of your writing way. More importantly, the application provides seven keyboard soundtracks. You pick the sound that occurs when you're typing, and it's not a solid, repetitive sound. The keyboard sounds have variation and generally don't annoy. My favorite is #7, which I call: "My old school typewriter and I sitting at the bottom of a well".

OmmWriter leads with a simple idea: creativity has a soundtrack. Think about how you begin an intensely creative act. You get your environment just so. You brew the coffee, grab the right mug, which you then place in precisely the correct location on your desk. Your feet flat on the floor in front of you, your spine is straight, and you look directly the screen. Let it begin.

And sometimes it does. It just starts flowing, and the number one rule regarding flow is: "Ignore it," because any observation of flow risks that flow making a run for it. Your goal is to just sit there and not listen to the music.

The folks behind OmmWriter are aware of this ephemeral soundtrack, and they've done everything in their power to give you a fighting chance to get in the creative flow. The experience of first firing up and using OmmWriter is akin to the sensation of putting your head on a down pillow; you can't help but say, "Ahhhhhhhh".

This divine experience, even if you're not a writer, is worth the download of the free beta of OmmWriter, but it's also the reason I've stopped using it.

A Peculiar Creative Flow

My test of OmmWriter was a holiday letter to a friend. After some tinkering, I settled on a clear white background and the bottom-of-the-well typewriter soundtrack. I sat cross-legged on my couch and began. The full-screen editing made sure I wasn't distracted by icons dancing around in my dock. The delicate soundtrack gently nudged me along when I stared at a half-written paragraph too long. An hour later, I had a comfortable first draft.

As I'm apt to do, I let this draft sit for a day. During this lull, I continue to write in my head. I know what paragraphs suck and I'm instinctually aware of what I have not yet written. My issue during this time was that I could not get the OmmWriter soundtrack out of my head. Rather than thinking about how bad the end of my letter was, I was craving the calming clickity-clack sounds produced by my keyboard while in OmmWriter. Rather than thinking about the writing, I was thinking about the tool.

Having been writing for close to two decades, I've learned that the more I write, the less I need. Every feature, preference, or choice that your application gives you is a ripe opportunity to think about writing rather than actually writing.

OmmWriter is a gorgeous experience that you can't miss. What they've chosen to strip away from a traditional word processor is impressive, but what they've designed to surround you in as a comforting, artistic, and inspiring experience is even more impressive. It's not a tool for everyone, but it's worth, at least, a first draft.

Happy Holidays.

The rolling whiteboard was a curiosity at the start-up. Not a full size whiteboard, but a door-sized whiteboard on wheels, suitable for rolling into conference rooms and cubicles alike. I never knew who owned it; I just grabbed it in a moment of desperation.

It was end game. The time in the project where you pay for every single shortcut you've taken, for every specification you didn't write, and for all the warnings from engineers that you've ignored. All the data is grim. Bug arrival rates are skyrocketing while bug resolution rates are pathetic because, uh, well, engineers are still finishing features.

Like I said, grim.

The endless stream of bad news was grating on everyone. We were already three weeks into working weekends with no end in sight. A normally pleasantly pessimistic engineering staff had gone uncomfortably quiet. Everyone was staring at "the date we can't miss" and thinking, "I guarantee we're missing it".

I needed a game.

An Entertaining System

As I said before, geeks are system thinkers. We see the world as a very complex but knowable flowchart where there are a finite number of inputs, which cause a similarly finite set of outputs. This impossible flowchart gives us a comfortable illusion of control and an understanding of a chaotic word, but its existence is a handy side effect of a life staring at, deducing, and building systems. It's also why we love games -- they're just dolled up systems -- and the more you understand this fascination with games, the better you'll be at managing us.

As with all mental excursions with geeks, there's a well-defined process by which we consume a game, and it goes like this:

• Discovery
• Optimization, Repetition, and Win
• Achievement

Discovery -- From confusion to control

The initial joy of a game for the geek is discovery. This is a delicate balance of confusion and progressive disclosure. A game is initially attractive because it starts chaotic and unknowable, but even in the chaos, there's always a hint of the rules... of structure. What are the specific rules that govern this game? And how might I learn them?

A geek is searching for a single source of joy in this initial state. It's the sense of discovery and progress toward a currently unknown goal. I want to see the engine that defines this particular universe... I want to see its edges. We're looking for those edges because as soon as we find this wall, we know this is a containable and knowable place and that is comforting because the game becomes a controllable thing.

There's creative flexibility in rule discovery and pacing, and it tends to be a function of the size and the intent of the game. The beauty of Tetris is that the initial rules are immediately obvious. But the wonderful curse of a massive online game like World of Warcraft is that while there are rules, they are vast and, as we'll see in a moment, they are changeable.

This discovery is the hook where a geek is going to know in just a few minutes whether this particular game suits their particular appetite. But getting past the initial phases of discovery doesn't mean you've successfully engaged the geek. The real test is...

Optimization, Repetition, and Win -- A paradox and a warning

With the basic rule set discovered and defined, the process of optimization begins. Ok, I get how it's played, how do I win? This is the phase where, now equipped with the rules, the geek attempts to use them to their advantage.

There's a discoverable structure to the rules. There's a correct order, which, when followed, offers a type of reward. It's the advantage of thinking three blocks ahead in Tetris or holding onto those beguiling hypercubes in Bejeweled. This is the advanced discovery of the system around the rules that leads to exponential geek joy.

There's a paradox and a warning inside of optimization and repetition.

The paradox involves the implications of winning. Geeks will furiously work to uncover the rules of a game and then use those rules to determine how they might win. But the actual discovery of how to win is a buzz kill. The thrill, the adrenalin, comes from the discovery, hunt, and eventual mastery of the unknown, which, confusingly, means if you want to keep a geek engaged in a game you can't let them win, even though that's exactly what they think they want.

Think of it like this -- does it bug you that there's an absolute high score to Pac-Man? It bugs me.

To get around this entertainment-killing paradox in subscription-based games like World of Warcraft, game designers freely change rule sets as part of regular updates. The spin is, "We're improving playability" which translates into, "The geeks are close to figuring it out and we can't have that because they'll stop paying."

This paradox does not apply to all games. It's hard to argue that there is much more to learn about Tetris, but folks continue to play it incessantly, which leads to the warning.

There's a socially frightening act inside of optimization that normal humans don't get and it's the calming inanity of intense repetition. In a game like World of Warcraft, many of the tasks involve an exceptional amount of repetition. Repetition like, "Hey, go kill 1,000 of these guys and come back and I'll give you something cool." Yeah, 1,000. If each kill take a minute, you're talking about sixteen hours of mindless hacking and slashing. This is not a task that requires skill or thought... and that's the point.

If you walked in and looked over my shoulder at troll kill #653, you'd think I'd dropped into a twitchy-fugue-like mental state and I have. I am... a machine. Machines don't have a care in the world, and that's a fine place to be. This is the act of mentally removing ourselves from a troubled planet full of messy people, combined with our ability to find pleasure in the act of completing a small, well-defined task. This is our ability to lose ourselves in repetition and it is task at which we are highly effective.

In the defense of game designers, there are no quests that read "Go waste sixteen hours of your life doing nothing". They are more elegant with their descriptions; they splice all sorts of different tasks together to distract you from the dull inanity of large, laborious tasks. But they know that part of what makes us tick is the micro-pleasure we get from obsessively scratching the task itch in pursuit of the achievement.

As I've never designed and shipped a game, I can confidently and ignorantly say the compelling magic in games comes from the design in optimization and repetition. This is the portion of the game where we spend the most time and effort and derive the most pleasure. It is this abstract mental state we long for when we're not playing.

But there is one last phase to consider, achievement.

Achievement -- Who cares if you win by yourself?

Once a geek has learned the game by discovering how to win, they become interested in advanced winning. They're interested in how their win fits into the rest of the world. They want to compare and measure and answer the social question, "Is my pile of win bigger than yours?" They believe they've mastered the game, but reputation -- achievement -- is nothing unless someone else can see and acknowledge it.

Before the Internet, winning was a private thing. You entered your three-letter name into the local Pac-Man machine and then anonymously stumbled off in search of Donkey Kong. In an interconnected world, games became social, and once we discovered each other in these virtual worlds, we looked for a means to compare our feats. We began to understand that achievement was not just becoming great at a game, but being recognized for being great.

Achievement can be as simple as a score, a numeric means of comparison, but the more sophisticated the game, the more complex the achievements. In World of Warcraft, you'll be busily into your seventh hour of mind-numbing troll extinction when you see that night elf run by with... what's that? A staff... where the hell did she get that staff? It's sweet. My world will not be complete until I own that staff. Now, what was four more hours of troll killing becomes the quest for the staff.

There's no well-defined rule that says, "To win, you need this staff". Sure, it might make those next 200 kills easier, but that is not your entire motivation. For you, the staff is your own personal badge of mastery, and you don't wear a badge for yourself, you wear it for others to see.

Most achievements do have an empirical value, but that's not what makes them important. The point of an achievement is to have someone you know or don't know look at your Violet Proto-Drake and say, "Holy crap, do you know what he had to do to pull that off?" It's wondering exactly how far you'll go to get the Legendary badge on Stack Overflow.

In a world where we spend a ton of time with people we'll never meet, achievements are the currency of respect and identity.

The Rules of the Game

Now that we understand how games float the geek boat, we can tease out rules you can use to build your own business-centric games. This is will take a creative leap on your part because I don't know how your particular situation is grim. Perhaps your bug count is crap like mine? Maybe you can't hire fast enough? Maybe you can't measure how screwed you are? I don't know what game you need, but I know you need to follow the universal rules of games:

The rules need to be clear. Whatever game you design must stand up to scrutiny. Test the rules with selected geeks before you roll it out. Find the holes in your game before you're standing in front of the team describing a game that makes no sense. Ambiguity, contradiction and omission are the death of any good game.

The rules must be inviolable. Enforce rules with an iron fist. A rule not followed is twice as bad as a poorly defined one. A violation of the rules is an affront to a geek. They react violently to violations of the rules because it's an indication that the system is not working. Rules make a game fair, and when they stop being followed, the geeks stop playing.

The playing of the game must be inclusive, visible, and broadcasted. Include everyone on the team. Those not on the team should be aware of the progress and implications.

Only use money as a reward as a last resort. It's a knee-jerk management move to use money as an incentive. Problem is, money creates drama. Money makes everyone serious, and while you may be in dire straits as you design your game, you don't want the team stressing about who is getting paid; you want them to stress about the work.

This is not to say that rewards in a motivational game are verboten, but step away from the money and think about achievements. One of the best trophies I've awarded was a horrifically ugly ceramic blue rhino the size of a pit bull. The winner proudly displayed the rhino achievement in his office for years.

It's not a game. Just because I'm using the word game all over this article doesn't mean it's trivial, simple, or something not to be taken seriously. Your geeks will treat the game as a motivational tool as seriously as you choose to treat it in building and rolling it out -- because they want to win.

The Whiteboard Game

Everyone was working on a Sunday night as I stared at the blank portable whiteboard in my office. A weekend of hallway conversations, bug scrubbing, and informal testing confirmed what I already knew: the product was shaky, the bugs we were discovering were alarmingly bad, and there were too many of them.

Ok, a game. The game will be called Focus and it will concentrate and structure our attention on the worst parts of the product. I listed the 10 worst bugs I'd found during the weekend on the board. Next to each bug, I drew four boxes:

• Root cause
• Fix identified
• Fixed
• Tested

I grabbed a handful of dry erase pens and rolled the board into the architect's office and said, "This is all we're working on".

He stared at the board for 10 minutes and finally nodded, "Good, but each person needs their own color and you should assign points for each of the boxes. 10 points for root cause and fix identification, 5 for fixes and tests."

"Points for what?"

"Points for points. We're geeks."

"And everyone has their own color?"

"Yeah, so we know who has the most points. Give me a blue pen, I've already got root cause on bug #3."

"Blue?"

"Yeah, I'm always blue."

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In my ideal management world, a review is simply a documentation of well-known facts, your performance over the year. It also contains constructive advice and insight regarding how your boss believes you can improve on that performance. My dream is that you already know all of this information because you've been getting year-round feedback from your boss.

I wish.

Whether your manager is consistently delivering this information or not, the feedback, written down, is completely different from receiving it verbally. The path to your brain via the written word is dramatically different than for the spoken word. Reading the highs and lows of the past year makes them permanent and makes them real.

And then there's the surprise.

Show Me the Money

Bad news. The surprise has nothing to do with money. We're not talking about compensation here. Yes, you did a splendid job this year and I think they should be throwing raises, bonuses, and stock your way. But it's even better if it's clear why you think you did a splendid job. Can you articulate it? And you might know, but does your boss? Can he explain to you, in detail, how well you kicked ass?

I didn't think so.

See, your boss has you and a bunch of other yous who are all allegedly kicking ass, and all of that ass kickery is tricky to monitor, especially over an entire year. It gets even worse when one of your team members is not kicking ass. Legitimately or not, that's actually where a lot of your boss' attention is going. You read that right: someone else's failure is distracting from your phenomenal year.

Let's fix that.

There are three strategies I'd like you to employ when it comes to your yearly review. They are:

1. Ignore the measures, focus on the content.
2. Prepare for the fact a review is a discussion and, sometimes, a negotiation.
3. Deconstruct the surprise.

Measures versus Content

I've experienced a lot of different review formats at different companies, but let's boil it down to three buckets. A review describes:

1. What you did.
2. How you did it.
3. What you need to do next.

This is a massive simplification of your review. Your review has all sorts of other corporate and division focus areas, but these impressive sounding labels are still just lenses through which you understand how you did versus what was expected.

For each of the buckets, there are two classes of information: the content and the measure. I want to explain how you can save yourself a lot of sleepless nights ignoring the measures, but first, a definition.

Sprinkled across your review are measures. These are words like "Needs Improvement", "Satisfactory", or "Excellent". These words grab you because they're easy to understand. They are effectively your grades, and you've spent a lot of your formative years waiting for grades to show up.

If I told you that you got an A on a piece of work, you'd internally translate that letter into a pleasant, "I did about as well as I could. Go me." Grades - measures - are efficient, they do convey information, but they lack essential content. I'll explain via example.

When I arrived at University of California, Santa Cruz in the 90s, they had no grades. Hippies. At the end of the quarter, you received a written evaluation. For each student in the class, the professor or the teaching assistant would produce a written evaluation -- a plain English description of the type and quality of the work produced over the semester.

I don't know who came up with the idea of ditching grades, but my hope was that they wanted to ditch the measures. The intent of measures are not to derive useful information, they are designed to allow for comparison and, duh, measurement. Am I higher or lower than you? How many As? Are there more As than Bs? It's interesting data and I'm sure if you took a classroom full of data and plotted it on a graph, you'd learn something. Look! A bell curve!

A measure doesn't help you in your career. Your performance review isn't about comparisons to others. They're about what you did and what you could do. What you're looking for is the content.

Tell me which is more useful:

"You did well."

-or-

"You finished the work on schedule, the customer was happy with the results, but there were lingering quality issues with the code. Looking at the last two releases, you had 2x the numbers of bugs than in prior releases. Focus on..."

We get hung up on grades, on measures, because they are so gosh darned digestible. They give us the illusion that they show us where we fit, but they don't tell us what next?

At UCSC, the point of the gradeless report card was to create a vacuum where the professor would actually say something useful. You're not going to get rid of measures -- they serve a distinct purpose -- but when you're first reading your review, I want you to ignore those seductive one-word assessments of your entire year. Their simplicity, while comprehensible, is just going to obscure the complexity of your year.

Rather, look at the content behind the measures. Whatever your particular areas of focus are, does your boss do an effective job of explaining what you did, how you did, and what you could do better? It's a simple set of requirements, but your boss is going to mess it up, which is why you need to be clear that...

A Review is a Conversation

The written word is intimidating. An assessment of a year is a big deal, so what are you going to do when you sit down with your boss and he hands you three poorly crafted paragraphs littered with the word "significant"?

No, you don't ask about the raise. You freak out about the paragraphs. THREE PARAGRAPHS? I'VE WRITTEN MORE IN EMAIL THIS MORNING THAN YOU JUST WASTED ON MY YEAR.

Calm yourself.

Think of this pathetic piece of paper as an opening offer -- a poor offer. Your job is to transform this travesty into an accurate reflection of your year and you're not doing this just out of a sense of self-righteousness, you're doing to set the set the record straight.

This piece of paper is one of the only official documents of your career at this company. If you move, if your boss leaves, if there's a reorg, this is often the first document reviewed to understand the degree of your asskickery and that means you want your boss to comprehend it.

"But Rands, I was just... so pissed. Three paragraphs? I spent my entire winter on the project. I was FURIOUS."

Again, your review will contain surprises, and they will rattle you, which is why you prepare with a self review.

Whether your company asks for it or not, the moment the mail from HR alerts you to the review season, you start cobbling together your self review. Same buckets as above. My move is to keep a yearlong log of significant work as a task in whatever task tracking system I'm currently ignoring. Even if you haven't been paying consistent attention, you'll be surprised by what you can dig up in a weekend of considering your year.

Take a look at your year. How'd you do? No, really, I'm not actually reading it so you can have an honest opinion. Was it a great year or did you just think it was great? Yes, your boss' opinion about your year is key, he does sign the checks, but it's a key surprise reducing technique to walk into the review with an opinion. This moment of personal honesty you're having with yourself is a big deal because that's the foundation you're going to stand on when the three pathetic paragraphs show up. Having a justifiable opinion regarding your year is a powerful, defensible position.

While it's important to send the self review long before your boss writes his review, it's more important that you have this opinion, this well-defined opinion, when sitting down to read your boss' review. Does it document what you did? Everything? Does the description of what you did match your perception? No? Why? Don't tell me, tell your boss, and make sure he gets it because it's these types of historical perception mismatches that form an unhealthy basis for emerging misunderstanding and resentment.

The point of a review is the debate -- to align your perceptions with those of the person who signs the checks, but even with all this structured healthy debate, there's still going to be a...

Surprise!

I don't know what the surprise is. It's your review. Some of the doozies over the years from mine include:

• The total absence of recognition for a multi-month multi-team project that kicked ass.
• A reversal of opinion regarding a piece of work I'd done, usually towards the negative.
• Completely contradictory areas of improvement.

Unfortunately, the surprise is the point. A review not only forces the alignment discussion, it serves as a warning for the coming year: What do I need to do differently to avoid being blindsided when the next review arrives?

Fact is, you're never fully going to get your boss on-board with your year. There are opinions he has which aren't going to change, which means if you don't want another surprise next year, you have to change.

A review's value lies not only in the documentation of what was observed, but also what was not.

The Permanence of the Written

In many years of reviews, the only consistency I've noticed is that they're getting shorter. My unsubstantiated paranoia is that lawyers apply subtle corporate pressure to retain less descriptive documentation of what actually happened in the company. But perhaps it's just a growing professional laziness.

Whatever the reason, a brief review is just sad. If you're staring at three useless paragraphs, you have a couple of problems. You've got a company that allows crappy reviews and you've got a boss who is unable or unwilling to articulate either the quantity or quality of work you've done.

That's all sorts of screwed, but it's only complete breakdown only occurs when you don't react.

The first review I wrote was awful. It was three paragraphs derived from scanning status reports from the past six months. I sat in the room as she read the review and she didn't have to say a thing for me to understand that I'd be spending the weekend actually writing the review. I got an accusing, furious glare. You didn't even try.

So I did.

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.

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.