I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because I’ve been surprised by how useful they are. One of the challenges of being an agreeable, optimistic person is that I’m often tempted to say yes to many opportunities and try all sorts of things. Explicit constraints help me keep things manageable, and they help me remember why I chose them.

For example, this year, I’m experimenting with limiting my presentations to one talk a month, and little or no conference travel. Except for March (always conference/event season), I’ve been pretty good at sticking to that. It’s easy to explain the constraint to people, and they’re happy with either referrals to other speakers or postponement to one of my free months. It means I have more time to think, experiment, write, and draw.

I’ve also been trying a limit of one blog post per day, instead of bursts of two or three posts. One of these days, I’ll crunch numbers to see if I have a significant difference in terms of volume or comments. I like the rhythm, though. It makes me think more about what I want to publish, which posts I want to prioritize. I still write a lot, but that’s more so that I have a buffer for those busy days.

Now that I’ve gotten over the initial disruption of having a Playstation 3 in the house, I’ve been getting back on track with my sleep schedule. Limiting the hours I spend on work and other things forces me to be clear about my priorities and work more efficiently.

I’m getting better at knowing when I need to use constraints. When I pack my life too full, I find myself reshuffling my task list too often. My mind feels like it buzzes. Choices threaten to overwhelm. It’s a good time to step back and ask myself: How can I simplify this? What can I limit?

Yesterday on TWiG, Leo and Jeff and I discussed Facebook integration in Ping--Leo didn't know it was there, but looking at the screenshots on Apple's site, before I got the iTunes 10 download, I said it was there. But even though the Ping web page reads "Find even more music fans...by connecting to your Facebook account" right now, Kara Swisher reports that Steve Jobs told her there's no Facebook in Ping because they wanted "onerous terms that we could not agree to." So, I stand corrected. Ping is a completely walled garden.

The second season of my Work Smart video series at ?FastCompany.com premiered yesterday, with a question from Suhasini Kotcherlakota about how to take better meeting notes, and some answers from me and Brad Isaac, who wrote a great piece on mind-mapping meetings at Lifehacker a few years back.

Despite the fact that I still can't watch and listen to myself on film without cringing, I am so pleased with the results. Adam Barenblat at ?FastCompany did an amazing job on the art and design, which is based on a fun new webapp: Popplet.

Check out the finished clip.

Some production notes: I outlined the script using Popplet, which Adam used to design the video, and that Popplet is available at ?FastCompany.com for you to click and zoom around yourself. We got all the interview footage using Skype and eCamm's ?CallRecorder software, which is cheap and fantastically easy to use. We wanted an informal webcam look, but we wanted "the hostess" to have a plain background and professional lighting, which I set up in my home office relatively inexpensively, thanks to the TWiG headset I already have. It was really fun getting to "meet" and talk with people who sent in their questions from all over the country. Unlike the first season of Work Smart, which was just me talking to the camera, these episodes involve 3 separate shoots--one with the person asking the question, one with the expert, and one with me. Breaking it up that way adds a nice variety, and it also means I don't have to fly to New York to shoot with a director and a production crew. I get to stay home and simply use Skype with my iSight. Fun stuff, plus time and money savings.

If you want to be featured in an upcoming episode, email your question about tech and/or productivity to worksmart@fastcompany.com.

Garrett Murray diffs iTunes 9 versus iTunes 10 user interfaces in rollover screenshots. I like how the volume slider is so much more iPhone 4ish.

I want to get really good at being a fast zebra. The metaphor comes from Leading Outside the Lines, Jon R. Katzenbach and Zia Khan’s book on working with the informal organizational structure. According to Mark Wallace (former US ambassador to the United Nations), fast zebras are people who can absorb information and adapt to challenges quickly. The authors explain, “On the African savannah, it is the fast zebra that survives a visit to the watering hole, drinking quickly and moving on, while the slower herd members fall prey to predators lurking in the shadows. The fast zebra is, in essence, a person who knows how to draw on both the formal and informal organizations with equal facility.”

It seems like a business cliche – who wouldn’t want to absorb information and adapt to challenges quickly? – but Katzenbach and Khan go into more detail. “They help the formal organization get unstuck when surprises come its way, or when it’s time to head in a new direction. They have the ability to understand how the organization works, and the street smarts to figure out how to get around stubborn obstacles. They draw on values and personal relationships to help people make choices that align with overall strategy and get around misguided policy. They draw on networks to form teams that collaborate on problems not owned by any formal structure. They tap into different sources of pride to motivate the behaviors ignored by formal reward systems.”

Like the loneliness facing early adopters, fast zebras can feel isolated. Identifying and connecting fast zebras can help them move faster and make more of a difference.

I can think of many fast zebras in IBM. People like Robi Brunner, John Handy Bosma, and Jean-Francois Chenier work across organizational lines to make things happen. Lotus Connections and other collaboration tools make a big difference in our ability to connect and self-organize around things that need to be done. They also provide informal channels for motivation, which is important because this kind of boundary-spanning work often doesn’t result in formal recognition (at least in the beginning).

The book describes characteristics of organizations that successfully integrate formal and informal structures, and it has practical advice for people at all levels. It also has plenty of stories from organizational role models. My takeaway? Harnessing the informal organization and helping people discover intrinsic motivation for their work can make significant differences in an organization’s ability to react, so it’s worth learning more about that. Recommended reading.

Leading Outside the Lines
Jon R. Katzenbach and Zia Khan
Published by John Wiley and Sons, 2010

Been getting harassed via telephone by some vacation telemarketing place in Las Vegas. At first I set my phone to send calls from that one number directly to voicemail. Then, tonight, I re-discovered you can block callers in Google Voce and automatically give them the official "this number is no longer in service message." Yes. Here's what my blocked call log looks like now.

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, "How can I learn how to code?" Today fluorescentinca showed me Google Code University, a collection of tutorials on Googly languages (like Python, Java and Go) for relative beginners. Some good stuff there. (I also wrote a more general Lifehacker piece last year that can help you decide what language to start in.)

Lifehacker had a recent post with tips on how to remember people’s names – generally useful tips, ground well-covered in networking books. There is one tip I disagree with, though. I realized I don’t often hear disagreement about it, so I thought I’d share. Here’s the tip:

DON’T ever call people by the wrong name

Hearing your name mispronounced can be annoying but forgivable, especially if lots of people find your name hard to pronounce, but hearing someone call you by the wrong name is always infuriating! Out of all facts that someone can possibly misremember about you (e.g., your job, college major, or ethnicity), getting your name wrong is the ultimate insult. It simply leaves a yucky visceral impression that the other person doesn’t give a damn about you.

I disagree with this tip because I think it creates unnecessary fear, anxiety, and expectation. I think there’s a better way to do this.

Let’s look at it from both sides.

If someone has forgotten your name, you could get mad about it… or you could just shrug it off and give the person the benefit of the doubt.  If they consistently get your name wrong, you could bear a grudge, or you could laugh about the possible crossed wires (maybe you really remind them of their great-aunt!). If they sneer while mangling your name so much it sounds like an epithet, something might be up. But in general, people are good people, and they’re not trying to insult you or say that you’re worthless.

When I talk to people, I don’t assume that I’m important to them, or that they should devote precious brainspace to remembering me. If people make an effort and get my name wrong anyway, I’ll still appreciate that. They’re human.

Let’s look at the other side. If you’ve forgotten someone’s name despite your best efforts, go ahead and ‘fess up, or try to see if you can pick it up from the conversation (or from a networking buddy). I prefer the direct confession route over the awkward-standing-around route. It gets the pain over faster, and it makes more of a human connection. I try to make up for any name shortcomings by remembering other little details about people, focusing on creating value, and connecting people with other people.

And if I thought I knew someone’s name but it turns out I was mistaken, well, it happens. I’ll try to remember. Some people’s faces get mixed up in my memory. I’m not going to beat myself up over it, and I hope other people don’t feel permanently offended. (Besides, if they did hold a grudge, that says more about them than about me…)

My only pet peeve when it comes to this, actually, are people who punish you for not knowing their name, those who make you guess or otherwise embarrass you when they detect the faintest whiff of uncertainty from you about who they are. Not cool. People who do that might “score points” in that conversation, but they lose the long-term game. (I remember writing a post about this before this other one, but I can’t find it. Ah well, probably not good to rant too much anyway… =) )

So.

Make it easier for other people to remember your name. (I usually bring my own nametag to events.) Make an effort to remember and use other people’s names, and to remember other details about them. Above all, be human, and let other people be human.

Although I haven’t used ?LaTeX much in the past few years, it was one of the primary tools that hastened my shift to using GNU/Linux full time. Why? I’d grown sick of fighting with document preparation and publishing systems (e.g. Microsoft Word/Open Office), and had started using ?LaTeX on my Mac to produce all of my papers and documents that needed to be output to paper-formats. Why switch? Because after a certain point of having every tool you use be Free software (because it’s better!), it becomes easier and more cost effective to just jump the gun and by commodity hardware and use a system that’s designed to support this kind of software (managing a large selection lots of free software packages on OS X can become cumbersome).

So why ?LaTeX? What’s the big deal? Why do I care now? Well…

LaTeX is a very usable front-end/set of macros for the TeX typesetting engine. Basically, you write text files in a particular way, and then run ?LaTeX (or pdflatex) and it generates the best looking PDF in the world of your document. You get full control over things that matter (layout, look and feel) and you don’t have to worry about things that ought to be standard (titles, headlines, citations with ?BibTeX, page numbering, hyphenation). The best part, however, is that once you figure out how to generate a document correctly once, you never have to figure it out again. Once you realize that most of the things you need to output to paper are in the same format, you can use the same template and be able to generate consistently formated documents automatically. There’s a “compile” step in the document production process, which means changes aren’t often immediately recognizable, but I don’t think this is a major obstacle.

Word processing and document preparation is a critical component of most common computer users. At least, I’d assume so, though I don’t have good numbers on the subject. In any case, I think it might be an interesting project to see how teaching people how to use ?LaTeX might both improve the quality of their work, and also the way that they’re able to work. It’s advanced, and a bit confusing at first, but I’d suspect that once you got over the initial hump ?LaTeX presents a more simple and consistent interface: you only get what you tell it to give you and you only see the functionality that you know about. This might make the discovery of new features more difficult, but it doesn’t limit functionality.

I’m not sure that this post is the right space to begin a lesson or series on getting started with ?LaTeX, but I think as a possible teaser (if there’s interest) that the proper stack for getting started with ?LaTeX would consist of:

• A ?TeXlive distribution. You need the basic tool kit including pdflatex, TeX, Metafont, ?LaTeX, and ?BibTeX.

• A Text Editor with ?LaTeX support: emacs, ?TextMate, etc. Plain text can be difficult and cumbersome to edit unless you have the right tools for the job, which include a real text editor.

• Some sort of macro or snippet expansion system. TeX is great. But it’s also somewhat verbose, and having an easy way to insert text into your editing environment, both for templates but also for general operations (emphasis, notes, etc.) is incredibly useful, and reduces pain greatly.

• A template management system. This probably needn’t be a formal software system, but just something to organize and store the basic templates that you will use.

And the rest is just learning curve and practice. Onward and Upward!

Just completed my first email sweep with Gmail's new "Priority Inbox" feature enabled, and it's a keeper. Over time, if this mechanism proves to be as good as Gmail's top-notch spam filtering, it could be the reason why you only check Gmail in the browser. (Well-played, GOOG.)

Priority Inbox adds an "important messages" section above your inbox. Initially, Priority Inbox decides what messages are important based on your email and chat patterns--a message from someone you often email with will get marked as important automatically. Like the spam filter, you can train it by manually marking messages as important and unimportant as well.

You can also add up to 3 other sections to your inbox. By default it's Priority Inbox, Starred items, and then "everything else." But you can define what's in each section using rules based on read/unread status, stars, and labels. For example, I keep all my unread stuff in the second section. Trusted Trio users could add a section of just items labeled "Followup." I don't love the idea of using my inbox as a to-do list, so I'm still experimenting with what works best for me.

Here's what the Priority Inbox settings look like in my Google Apps account.

As someone who empties my inbox regularly, I was dubious about my need for Priority Inbox. My email pattern is this: I respond and archive/delete messages as I can each day, and then once or twice a week, before the list of conversations exceeds 50 items and goes to the next page in Gmail, do a clean sweep. With a well-trained Priority Inbox, aspirational inbox zero folks have the option to redefine an empty inbox as an empty priority inbox, and just let the rest flow down into the regular inbox. After only a day, already I can feel my eye focusing on the Priority Inbox over anything else on the page, and I'm responding to messages there much more quickly than if they'd fallen down the list with the rest of the bacon and mailing list messages.

The only worry I have about Priority Inbox is the additional complexity it adds to Gmail. As I said this past week on TWiG, Gmail is just getting stuffed with new and more advanced features: phone calling, Buzz, Tasks, and now this, not to mention the (awesome, but huge) buffet of optional features in Labs.

I believe most vanilla Gmail accounts are in the process of getting Priority Inbox now. If you're a Google Apps user, opt your domain into pre-release features to get it sooner rather than later. (Simply opting in won't make Priority Inbox just show up today; just sooner than it would have if you weren't opted in.)

Email overload? Try Priority Inbox [The Official Gmail Blog]

We’re fascinated by choice, almost slaves to keeping our options open. Sometimes it’s better to close doors, impose constraints, ignore possibilities. Focus.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I plan the next step in my career. There are so many paths to choose from: consulting? development? management, perhaps even executive?

Constraints make choosing easier.

I want to build a wonderful relationship with W-. This is easier to do with little or no travel, manageable hours, and low stress at work. That probably rules out the kind of consulting IBM tends to do, and the executive career path as well.

I want to experiment and create new opportunities. I’d like to try product development / consulting / coaching / webinars / e-books. People have made that business model work. But I’ve got a great opportunity to help change the way IBM works, and through IBM, help change the way the world works, so I’m focusing on that. I should make sure that familiarity and comfort don’t take me too far away from what I want to do, though: help people connect, collaborate, and learn.

Between following a formal career path and going where no job title has gone before, I think I’d like to explore the latter. I can take risks. I learn quickly, and I’m good at making things work.

This will be interesting.

SCHEDULED: 2010-08-30 Mon 8:00

• ?AdAware: check the computer for any malware from previous owner’s use – checked out clean
• Dropbox: synchronize my files
• Emacs: note-taking, personal information management, awesomeness
  • Set HOME directory in Control Panel – System – Environment Variables
  • Use mklink to create symbolic links under Windows
  • Write a simple .emacs that loads the dotemacs.el in My Dropbox/elisp
• ?AutoHotkey: map Caps to Control and create all sorts of other useful shortcuts
  • Add My Dropbox/personal/shortcuts.ahk to my startup
• Launchy: quick access to programs
• Inkscape and ?MyPaint: Favourite free drawing programs
  • Set drawing tools to use last selected style
  • Set preferences for transforms: don’t scale strokes, etc.
  • Tinker with smoothing to get something that feels right
• Google Chrome: set up synchronization for bookmarks and extensions
• ?FeedDemon: Feed reader, easier than using Google Reader interface
• ?StrokeIt: Gestures make pen computing even easier
  • Set up custom gestures for Inkscape, ?FeedDemon, and general operation
• Windows Live Writer
• Windows setup: Use a plain black background, turn off unnecessary visual effects, go back to old form of Alt-Tab. (When alt-tabbing, press the other alt key to switch to classic view.)

And that should be enough to get me working smoothly for now. I might dual-boot Ubuntu or run it in a virtual machine, depending on how well this 32-bit version of Windows 7 performs. If I find myself spending more time in Microsoft Windows because of all the tablet-y goodness, I’ll go the VM route, or I’ll give Cygwin another try.

SCHEDULED: 2010-08-29 Sun 08:00

Drawing with my new tablet PC is lots of fun. Instead of being stuck in the basement or near a table large enough to hold a laptop and a regular tablet, I can draw pretty much anywhere – like the couch where Neko loves to nap.

There are plenty of drawing programs for tablets. Some mimic traditional drawing media: pencils, charcoal, even oil paint. Some let you use all sorts of effects. Others take a different approach to drawing, with lines and shapes that you can draw and edit. I like the latter more, because I can tweak my drawings until they look more like what I had in mind.

My favourite drawing program is Inkscape. Using it in full tablet mode isn’t as convenient as working on the Cintiq because I don’t have all the buttons I’m used to, but I’ve been working on my configuration to make it easier to draw. I use mouse gestures to switch between different tools so that I don’t have to click on the toolbox, and I’ve mapped one of the buttons on the tablet frame to “Delete”.

Growing up, I hadn’t really thought of myself as artistic. We’d fallen into the habit of labelling ourselves, I guess. My eldest sister and I were academically and technologically inclined. My middle sister was the one who was good at photography and drama and all that stuff. In high school, the split became even bigger as I compared myself with classmates who created beautiful landscapes and still-life drawings in art and drafting. Gadgets and presentations lured me back into drawing. I got a Nintendo DS to play games and draw on it, discovering along the way that drawing was a lot of fun. I sketched a presentation on it, and the overwhelming response to that told me I’d stumbled across something more fun than illustrating my presentations with impersonal stock photographs. I’m beginning to think of myself as someone who can draw–perhaps not amazingly well, but enough to make me and other people smile.

I have a feeling this will definitely be worth the money I set aside for it. =)

I’ve been saving up for a Lenovo X61 for a while. Drawing had turned out to be tons of fun, and l wanted something more portable than my much-enjoyed Cintiq 12WX. So when l came across a Craigslist ad offering the X61 at a decent price, I went for it.

It’s the computer I thought it would be. And it understands my handwriting! So now l get to experiment with my workflow to figure out what works for me…

By golly, the future is actually here.

This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (85210fb9-5e96-47d1-836b-327100a9450b – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)

On a whim I decided to get Ubuntu 10.04 running on my old Acer One Aspire A110 and while the initial install has been ok I’ve run into a few bugs since then.

1.) Wireless randomly stopped working and would not come up even with a reboot. Apparently, this is a common issue. Even after a year plus the ath5k driver still…well…sucks. Bug 15382 on the ath5k bugzilla is a similar problem to what I had and had the solution. Cold shutdown and boom wireless works again. A possible perm fix is covered here (Unsupported jumbo bug).
EDIT: Ok, it did sorta work after a failed suspend/reboot. Still had to manually “enable” networking under network manager but it fired up without issue at that point

2.) The CPU fan runs non-stop. The fix is actually listed in the /var/log/dmesg entries so not sure why it does run all the time. Basically, you need to get into a root shell and run the following:

chris@twinky:~$ sudo su
root@twinky:/home/chris# echo -n “enabled” > /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/mode
root@twinky:/home/chris#

That should then calm down the whiney noisy fan and spin it up only when actually needed.
EDIT: This apparently doesn’t survive reboot either. Probably will if done in /etc/init/rc.local but haven’t tried that yet

I’ll update this as I run into more issues and fixes down the road

Useful Links: ArchLinux ?AcerOne Wiki | Debian ?AcerOne wiki

SCHEDULED: 2010-08-26 Thu 08:00

Isabelle’s manager wanted her to get better at proactive communication. She’s comfortable e-mailing people, but she has a hard time following up when people don’t respond. Timezone differences between team members in Singapore and in the US compound delays. She reached out to me for advice, and I suggested a few things that might help:

1. Clear, dated requests. When asking for help or a response through e-mail, specify a target date instead of leaving it open-ended, and give a reason for that date if possible. This makes it easier for people to prioritize working on your task. (Don’t always ask people to get back to you TODAY, though. It looks like you don’t plan well.)

2. Clear, dated responses and priorities. If you’re working with other people on some lower-priority tasks, those tasks might never be finished. Clarify the relative priority of a task with your manager: it might turn out to be higher-priority than you thought. If it really is a low-priority project, contact the people you need to collaborate with and get an estimate of when they might be able to work on their part of the project. Find out what other important projects they’re working on, too. This will allow you to:

• give clearer reasons for delays (“We can only work on the report next week because we have to finish the keynote presentation this week”)
• negotiate better solutions (“I can do that part of the presentation if you can do this part of the report”)
• re-negotiate priorities with your manager (“Actually, this report is more important than adding animation to the presentation”), and
• give you dates for following up (“John is working on the presentation now, but he promised to work on the report on Monday, and I’ll follow up with him then”).

3. Status reports. They’re good for your manager and for you. Keep track of where you are on projects: what your next actions are, what you’re waiting for, and what you’ve accomplished. Share this with your manager frequently, so there are no surprises.

4. Concrete follow-ups. When you’re waiting for a response, schedule a follow-up so that it doesn’t slip through the cracks. Follow up by e-mail, and then move up to following up by phone or instant message if needed. I don’t do this for all of my tasks, but I do this for tasks I “own,” and it helps.

Concrete follow-up dates also help you write better status reports. Instead of reporting “Waiting for response”, you can report “Waiting for response; will follow up on ____ by e-mail and _____ by phone.” Clear follow-up plans make people feel more confident that the task won’t be forgotten.

5. Tactful escalation. When people don’t respond, sometimes you need to find other ways to get things going. Isabelle had learned how to cc:ing her manager so that her manager could stay updated, but she wasn’t comfortable with cc:ing the other person’s manager because it felt like escalation. If done tactfully, though, escalation can be a good tool.

How to escalate: Give people the benefit of the doubt, and acknowledge that they might be busy working on priority projects. Send them a gentle reminder, cc:ing their manager. In the note, explain to the manager that you understand that the original contact may be busy or your request might be a better fit for someone on the team, and ask who might be the best person to talk to.

Hope that helps!

2010-08-24 Tue 10:20

SCHEDULED: 2010-08-25 Wed 08:00

Soha wrote:

I’m a long time reader of your blog and I must say it’s pretty amazing and inspiring. I always look forward to your next post and read it over and over for tips and ideas

But there was one thing that I’m not sure if you’ve covered in the past .. It’s about keeping in touch with your networks and freinds

I’m really having a hard time with this issue.. Particularly how to stay in touch.. What do to and what to say and how often… Etc.. Is there a system that u tried that works for u? Or a schedule that You follow to keep yourself on track?

And what about freinds ?? Do u apply the same approach as with your networks or do u so something else ??

Hope I didn’t ask too many questions but any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated

I rarely e-mail or call people just to catch up. I occasionally look for experiences I can share with friends, and I host get-togethers from time to time. I like checking out people’s social networking updates from time to time, and I comment when I’ve got something to share.

I mostly reach out to people when:

• I’ve come across something that they might find useful
• I can answer one of their questions or help them out with something
• I can connect them with someone who has a question they can answer

More about the tools I use to connect

This mostly-passive networking style doesn’t fit the advice of most networking books, which focus on techniques for active networking: making lists of contacts you want to make, cultivating relationships through coffees and lunches, working those network events.

But this works for me.

Part of this might be because I let go of the need to be in close touch with specific people, and I open things up to serendipity instead. I don’t have to stress out about not being in close touch with my friends. I still feel warm and fuzzy about people even if I haven’t seen them in a year, and I hope they feel the same too.

Besides, it’s easy for people to keep in touch with me. I write about life on my blog, and I occasionally post social network updates on Twitter, which is synchronized with Facebook and ?LinkedIn.

Back to diffuse networks. Clouds, if you will.

There’s an oft-quoted limit to social relationships: Dunbar’s number, some 150 people in your “village”, the maximum number of people most people can keep track of, with their interrelationships and quirks. I don’t try.

I want to touch the lives of many more people than I can know, just as I learn from many more people than I can meet. People drift in and out whenever they want. I try to remember as much as I can about people, but it’s okay to re-learn and re-discover.

How do you keep in touch with people? Or perhaps, a different question: How do you cultivate serendipity?

2010-08-23 Mon 20:09

Steve Yegge started blogging again recently and his second post back (which is almost a month old by now) is essentially a parody of Java’s access specifier system and the prevalence of the “private” attribute. The debate over public vs private comes up every now now and then in object-oriented programming and has its fair share of people on either side of the line. So when Steve suggested that private just go away (or seemed to suggest that anyway) he of course got attacked with counter-examples and all sorts of cases where private is helpful.

Saying that everything should be public is certainly an idea that takes getting used to. It’s like saying that you should publish the details of your drunken escapades on your blog. It’s unsettling, but then again, the pictures are probably already on Facebook anyway. I think there are two issues here — one is for fields, and the other is for methods.

Though Steve seems to say that fields should be public (or have getters and setters on them), I personally tend to go the other way: fields should be private by default and only accessible through getters and setters. I like the way Ruby does it — everything is private by default but the accessors are generated by metaprogramming, so you don’t have the junk lines of getWhatever and setWhatever that you do with Java. Direct field accesses like Java and C++ allow are just bad ideas.

For methods things are the other way around. Firstly, I don’t like the idea of invoking methods on an object. I far prefer the Smalltalk notion of sending messages to objects and having them respond. I think it’s a far better conceptual model than methods and the private/public debate goes away in that model. If your object responds to methods, then being able to use private and public means that the object knows of and cares about where about the message is coming from. However, this breaks encapsulation. Ideally an object should respond to a particular message the same way irrespective of where the message comes from.

But, you say, what of the real world where ideals don’t necessarily hold? Hmm… let’s see what happens to software development under the assumption that all your methods and functions are callable from outside. To start off, you have to be careful about what parameters your methods take. You can’t assume that they’ve been pre-sanitized which means that either you’ll have to check them yourself or fail cleanly (and maybe send a stern warning up the chain). This may be a bit annoying, but I’d say it’s on the same level as dynamic typing — you’re never 100% sure of what type the arguments are so you take appropriate measures.

Now let’s talk about safety. One of the arguments in favor of private is that you don’t want methods to be abused and put the object in an unusable state. Again, I don’t think this is as big of a problem as it’s made up to be. It just involves rearranging where checking occurs. Presumably, if you have a private method that makes delicate changes to your object, you have a public method somewhere else that approves the changes and then calls said private method. Why not put the approval inside the private method and dispense with the public method entirely? If you want to make a change to an object, call a method to do it. If it works, fine. If not you get an error back.

I should make it clear at this point, that I don’t have any real world example to back up my claim (at least no examples that aren’t hopelessly contrived). What I’m talking is refactoring to meet a design constraint — that of total publicness. People will kick and scream and say that it breaks their careful separation of functionality into methods, but I think it’s just a design pattern, like dependency injection for example. And the trade-off to that is probably more flexible, more powerful software systems.

If everything is public (and designed from the ground up to be public) you start writing code that’s meant to be used by other code. Which in turn makes it easier to use and extend your code. I think you’ll eventually end up with something like Emacs — lots of public functions that do useful things to an object (the text in the editor) and an awesome array of functionality made possible by using these public functions. There is a fundamental change in programming and building ideology that needs to take place. With full publicness you can’t have a nicely bureaucratic language like Java. You’re going to end up with something that’s far more open and flexible like Ruby, Python or *shudder* Lisp.

I think that a lot of the heightened discussion surrounding Steve’s suggestion stems from the nature of the Java language. It’s certainly meant to be used by large corporate teams and is designed to stop programmers from hurting themselves (or stepping onto someone else’s turf). “Bureaucratic” is perhaps the best way to describe the language. If you take out private from a language like that, you lose most of its raison d’etre. So is private a good thing? Probably not. Does it need to stay in Java? Probably.

I’d like to reiterate that I think that message-passing is a superior way to think about object-orientation and it makes the public/private debate unnecessary. That’s why the language I’m building for my thesis will have message-passing. I’m also stealing Ruby’s private-by-default and metaprogramming for accessors.

My parents are both storytellers.

My dad makes everyday life seem epic, with sound effects and humour. He embellishes tales to make them more dramatic. He tells stories in conversation, and is often the center of attention in a large crowd.

My mom keeps the stories of generations, revealing unexpected connections with grandparents or great-grandparents. She tries to stick as close to the truth as she can remember. She tells stories in intimate conversation and through her writing. I look forward to our weekly Skype conversations because of the mix of stories she shares: some about the past, some about recent adventures.

I’m really lucky that my parents both love telling stories.  Growing up, I saw how the stories they told inspired and energized and connected people. Good stories don’t have to have morals, points, or storybook villains threatening to destroy the universe. Sometimes a slice of life can make an unexpected connection.

I want to learn how to tell stories like that. My sister Kathy tells stories like my dad does, and I tell stories like my mom. I want to get better at saving and telling stories, particularly the difficult ones, and writing is my way of remembering.

Plans from last week:

Work

• [X] Share notes and follow up on action items from training
• [-] Prepare presentation on sharing and workflow – written up, but not yet illustrated
• [X] Organize and run Idea Labs – one down, another to go
• [X] Follow up on expertise pilot – shared with team member, whew!
• [-] Draft follow-up presentations / articles on eminence?
• Started working on bookmark summarization tool
• Reflected on career options
• Prepared ?ThinkLabs information
• Learned about Pickover format for evaluating invention disclosures
• Talked about my community tool and social analytics
• Helped organize non-Innovation-Discovery Idea Labs
• Attended meeting for potential Drupal project

Relationships

• [X] Have dinner with W’s parents – keeping my name, clashing with traditions
• [X] Go to W’s family get-together
• [  ] Plan tea party for end of August or beginning of September
• [-] Sort out accommodations / travel plans for my family – checked out some places
• Helped rescue Maira from temporary housing crisis

Life

• [X] Catch up after busy weekend
• [-] Organize notes
• Finished Scott Pilgrim game on Average Joe setting

Plans for next week:

Work

• [  ] Have several mentoring conversations
• [  ] Run Energy & Utilities Idea Lab
• [  ] Work on bookmark tool for Boz and Yael
• [  ] Prepare presentation on sharing

Relationships

• [  ] Confirm accommodations and photographer
• [  ] Apply for marriage licence
• [  ] Plan tea party

Life

• [  ] Set up twine support for peas
• [  ] Organize my notes
• [  ] Tweak schedule so that weekly reviews go out on Sunday or Monday

People often ask me how I find the time to write, blog, or give presentations, so I’ve put together these tips on how to turn sharing from something that takes up extra time to something that saves you time as you work.

Sharing is intimidating. You might think that you need to master blogs or wikis before you can make the most of Web 2.0 tools to help you share your knowledge and build your network. But even if you never post in public, you’ve got plenty of opportunities to make a bigger difference through sharing.

I’m not going to tell you to start a blog today. Here’s a six-step program to help you save time by making sharing part of the way you work, even if most of what you work with is confidential or lives in e-mail. Give it a try!

Step 1. Review your e-mail for information that you repeatedly send people. Do different people ask you the same questions? Are there links or files you find yourself always looking up and sending? Are there common problems you often solve? Save time by filing those messages in a "Reference" folder so that you can easily find them the next time someone asks that question or needs that file. Save even more time by rewriting your notes so that you can easily cut and paste them into new messages.

You can use your e-mail program to manage this information by saving the e-mails in a "Reference" folder that might be subdivided into more folders, or you can save the information in directories on your hard drive, encrypting it if necessary. The key change is to create a virtual filing cabinet and put useful information in it.

This virtual filing cabinet can save you a lot of time on your own work, too. I often find myself searching for my notes on how I solved a problem six months ago because I have to solve it again, and my notes save me a lot of time.

Step 2. When talking to people, listen for opportunities to take advantage of your reference information. Now that you’ve got an virtual filing cabinet of useful information, keep an ear open for ways you can use that information to help people more efficiently. When people ask you a question you’ve answered before, give them a quick answer and promise to e-mail them the rest of the details.

When you look for ways to reuse the information you already have, you’ll find plenty of opportunities to get a lot more benefit from the effort that you’ve already invested.

Step 3. Reach out. Now that you’ve saved time and helped more people by sharing the information in your virtual filing cabinet when they ask, you’ve got a better sense of which notes are very useful. Take a moment to review your files and think about who might benefit from learning from that information. Reach out to them, sending them a note about what you’ve learned and why it can save them time. It might lead to interesting conversations and good opportunities.

For example, let’s say you e-mailed one of your coworkers an answer to his problem. Think of other team members who might have run into the same problem, and send them a short note about it too. If you do this judiciously, people will feel grateful without feeling overwhelmed by e-mail.

Step 4. Prepare and take notes. Now you’re getting lots of return on the time you invested into organizing your existing information, and you’ve got an idea of what kinds of information help you and other people a lot. Proactively write down information that might be useful instead of waiting until someone asks you about it, because you might not remember all the relevant details by that time. In fact, take notes while you’re working instead of leaving it for the end. File those notes in your virtual filing cabinet as well, and share them with other people who might find this useful.

In addition to helping you save time in the future, writing about what you’re learning or doing can help you think more clearly, catch mistakes, and make better decisions.

Step 5. Look for ways to share your notes with more people. By now, you’ve probably developed a habit of looking for ways to take advantage of what you’re learning or doing: writing and filing your notes, retrieving your notes when people need them, and proactively reaching out. You can stop there and already save a lot of time–or you can learn about sharing your notes more widely, helping you build your network and increase your impact.

Proactively reaching out to people who might find your notes useful has probably helped you develop stronger working relationships with a small investment of time. However, this is limited by who you know, how much you know about what they’re working on, and the timing of the information. On the other hand, if you share some of your notes in public areas where people can search for or browse them, then you can help people you might not think of reaching out to, and they can find your information whenever they need it.

You don’t have to share all your information publicly. Review your virtual filing cabinet for information that can be shared with everyone or with a small group, and look for ways to share it with the appropriate access permissions. You can share different versions of documents, too.

For example, I share public information on my blog because blogs make it easy to publish quick notes, and search engines make it easy for people to find what they need even if I posted those notes several years ago. On the other hand, there are many notes that I post to internal access-controlled repositories. Sometimes, I’ll post a sanitized version publicly, and a more detailed version internally.

This is where you can get exponential return on your time investment. If people can find and benefit from your notes on their own, then you can reach many more people and create much more impact.

People may not find and use your information right away. Keep building that archive, though. You’ll be surprised by how useful people can find your work, and by the number of opportunities and relationships you build along the way.

Step 6. Review your organizational system and look for opportunities for relentless improvement.

You’ve collected useful information from your e-mails and conversations, organized that in your virtual filing cabinet, reached out to people, and shared some of your notes publicly. Congratulations! You’re probably getting your work done faster because you don’t waste time solving problems again. Your coworkers probably look to you for answers because you not only help them solve problems, you do so in a timely and detailed manner. And you might already have discovered how helpful your notes can be for others you wouldn’t have thought of contacting. What’s next?

Review your virtual filing cabinet. Can you organize it for faster access? Can you fill in missing topics? Can you identify and update obsolete information? Look for opportunities to improve your process, and you’ll save even more time and make a bigger impact.

Want to share your experiences? Need help? Please feel free to leave a comment!

Reading

The James Franco Project This has nothing to do with computers, technology or programming. James Franco is an actor who is leading a very full life — he’s acting full time (on multiple projects) while working on multiple graduate degrees at different places around the country. Certainly not something that’s recommended for everyone, but it goes to show just how much one man can do if he puts his mind to it.

Media

Dieter Rams – More is Less The design of technological objects has always fascinated me and Jonathan Ives might be the design man of the current times, but this video shows off Dieter Rams’ work and some of his key insights and you can see them reflected in the modern gadgets that we consider to be attractive.

Software

Foursquare I’ve just recently started using Foursquare (yes, I know after Facebook announced places) which is an iPhone, Android and Blackberry app that lets you “check-in” to places you visit and gather points for traveling and visiting. It’s a fun little utility and makes for interesting games with friends (and probably helps generated revenue for local businesses). I’m hesitant to say if it’s actually useful, but it’s definitely worth trying out.

Note: I find that I’m starting to explore less and less and am considering retiring the software section in upcoming weeks. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

We live in a semi-detached house and often chat with our immediate neighbors, Dan and Jen. Their kids sometimes come over to play with Jessie. When we make jams or jelly, we share it with them, and they share other interesting things with us.

Dan recently bought a smoker because he was pining for the briskets of his Texan youth. He made pulled pork recently, and he brought over some for us. We sprinkled it on pizzas, sandwiches, and other yummy treats. When we finished it, I washed the container and filled it with freshly-picked jalapeno peppers from our garden. (We have too many to eat, and not enough to make jelly.)

It’s nice getting along with your neighbors, particularly when there’s food involved. =)

2010-08-21 Sat 10:13

I remember reading an excerpt from Flatland in Childcraft when I was growing up, and wondering: how would a flat square understand this three-dimensional world we live in? In high school, I read a book about mathematical curiosities. Challenged by the idea of visualizing hypercubes and other higher-dimension objects, I turned to a trick I’d come across while reading: take what you see, use time as the fourth dimension, and imagine all the moments superimposed. Non-existence, birth, life, motion, death, and oblivion collapsed into a single space, further complicated by the rotation and revolution of the earth, the other motions of our galaxy and universe…

I had an existential moment: life is so short and insignificant! 

And then I thought, “Hey, this is pretty cool.” I dipped into this imagined world occasionally, thinking about the past and future of places, objects, and people. It proved to be a useful test for relationships: what would life be like with the grief of losing this person – will it have been worth it? It also helped me let go of stuff. I could see myself before I got whatever it was, and I could see myself after.

You might say it’s an odd sort of happiness that maintains an awareness of death and insignificance, but it’s the sort of calm happiness that’s confident that everything will work out. Why get upset over something that will pass?

So when I came across the ideas of unconditional serenity and emptiness in Joseph Sestito’s Write for Your Lives (an approach that draws on Buddhism), I thought, “Hmm. That’s what they call it.”

It’s still a little strange to look at someone, stretch my imagination, and see them as child and senior. It’s good practice, though, and it reminds me that we’re all in the middle of our own journeys.

Text: Speed-reading

People ask me how I can read so quickly. Here are some things that might help you read and learn faster.

1. Don’t slow yourself down. Do you read aloud? Do you imagine yourself reading aloud? Speech is so much slower than sight. See. In fact, don’t trace the words with your eyes. Jump around. Look at the important words. Skim. Take advantage of peripheral vision.

2. Take advantage of structure. Read tables of content, conclusions. A book is a nonlinear device. How to Read a Book (Adler and van Doren): this book is awesome.

3. Read. A lot. You’ll get lots of practice. You’ll be surprised by how much books repeat themselves or other books. And you’ll find yourself reading for those rare gems, the aha! moments that make reading all the rest worth it. Then people will ask you: How can you read so quickly?

My greatest hope for the hotly-rumored, might-launch-any-day-now social networking app "Google Me" is that it will not merely clone Facebook in a weak attempt at parity, but that it will innovate and solve problems that plague existing social networks.

Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled "The Real Life Social Network." The 224 slides, embedded below, describe some of the problems and common user behavior on existing social web sites, and suggest how to better design that experience. While the presentation is targeted towards businesses who want to use social media to get their message out, it also serves as a roadmap for what Google will attempt to do with Google Me.

According to Adams, the biggest problem for users on social networks like Facebook is that all your "friends" are in one big bucket. Unlike real life, there's no way to differentiate how you act and interact with different groups of people in your life. When you go to Mom's house on Thanksgiving you behave differently than when you're at Hooters with your college friends, but online all those people appear on a single friends list.

Adams also differentiates between strong ties (the 2-4 people you call on the phone at least once a week), weak ties (friends of friends, the co-worker who's two cubicles down) and temporary ties (the person you're buying a cup of coffee from). Collapsing all these different groups and relationships into a single context--like Facebook--and combining them with the permanence of the internet can lead to a lot of awkward situations. Like Debbie, the girls swim coach who realized, to her horror, that her 10-year-old swimmers could see her commenting on wild photos from the gay bar where her adult friends work.

The entire slideshow is embedded above. Adams also compiled reference links in a blog post here: The data behind The Real Life Social Network.

I came across If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged on geekfeminism.org, and I went, “Hmm. They’re right.” I started very early, and the extra years of practice and immersion and love meant that I could run rings around my classmates by the time we got to high school. I also had great role models in my parents, who raised us to follow our passions and not let people’s gender stereotypes get in the way.

This reminds me of the first session we took in a women’s leadership course. During the discussion, I said that I didn’t relate to many of the challenges described in the video, which had been produced a number of years ago. But I’ve been lucky. The challenge, then, is to help more people experience this.

I also enjoy the privilege of working in a mostly-balanced workplace. I feel normal at IBM. I’m not the only woman, not the only immigrant, not the only newbie, not the only Filipino, and definitely not the only geek. I’m surrounded by role models who show me that so many things are possible in both the managerial and professional career paths (and that people don’t have to be confined to one or the other). Sure, there are still some aspects missing from our mix, but it’s cool.

This accepted diversity means that instead of fighting to prove my worth as a human being, I can focus on the fights where I want to make a real difference, like helping people connect, collaborate, and do their best from wherever.

Instead of renouncing this privilege, then, I can do two things. I can use it as a springboard to work on the next challenges. I can be aware of the circumstances that brought me to this point, and help people bridge the gaps instead of thinking that because it was easy for me, it should be easy for most people.

And then there are little tweaks along the way that I can do to help make things even more equitable… These things are worth working on.

I was away for training last week, attending a 3-day learning session organized by IBM. There were around 500 IBMers there. My manager not only suggested that I go, he even gave me a lift. I resolved to make the most of it.

Packing light meant taking my work laptop, leaving my netbook, and bringing a small paper notebook along as a backup for note-taking. I like taking notes. I’d rather slow down and take notes than waste the time and the opportunity by forgetting.

In 2006, I wrote about how taking notes during conversations helps with post-event connection. What’s changed in the last four years? I now take casual notes on my iPod Touch. I’ve been thinking about getting a tablet PC for better note-taking. But for fast-flowing conversations, I still return to paper.

I’ve rediscovered drawing. My notes are punctuated by doodles: quick sketches of presenters, random objects that suggest themselves to a wandering right-brain. I like drawing. It helps me remember what a session felt like, instead of just what it contained.

I no longer bring fountain pens, as they’re all too easy to drop. Instead, I use a fine-point gel pen, which is clearer than pencils when it comes to scanning or review, and which writes more smoothly than a ballpoint pen does. I use a multi-colour ballpoint pen for review and emphasis.

My workflow has improved. While taking notes, I mark action items with a square on the left, particularly interesting topics with a star, ideas with a lightbulb, and thoughts and reflections with a thoughtcloud. This makes it easy to skim my notes for action items during review.

Instead of trying to hold the notebook open as I type thoughts in, I scan new pages at 600dpi full colour. This gives me a digital backup that I can flip through on my computer while I type my notes on a separate screen. As I type, I copy my action items into a separate section. After I finish writing my notes, I review the action items and import them into my task manager.

How can I make this even better?

I can write more neatly. This means slowing down in the beginning, but it will save me time when skimming or reading my notes. (And if I do it really well, maybe Evernote can understand my handwriting!)

I can try using a pad and then scan sheets using the automatic document feeder. Our printer/scanner’s automatic document feeder scans only one side, but I can simply do two passes. This would reduce scanning time.

I can save up for a tablet and see if that works out better for note-taking. I like being able to draw diagrams and icons while taking notes, so it would be good to experiment with a Tablet PC.

From last week’s plans:

Work

• [X] Organize upcoming Idea Labs
• [X] Attend training for Application Innovation Services consultants
• [X] Work on plugin to make it easier for other people to organize Idea Labs
• [X] Contact briefing consultants regarding the expertise pilot
• Scanned my notes
• Did innovation archetype analysis for car company
• Produced slidecast for Communicating Across Cultures session
• Helped more people with stats / community tools

Relationships

• [C] Send a quick note to people I met at VXToronto and in woodworking class
• [-] Mail lots of jam – packed, but not yet sent

Life

• [X] Pick up more travel business wear at the Tilley sale  (yay for wash-and-wear blazer, blouse, and pants for ~$190 total including tax!)
• [X] Outline my “lifeline of books” (see “Write for Your Lives”) – also outlined presentations; looking into posting this online
• Packed lots of frozen lunches

Plans for next week:

Work

• [  ] Share notes and follow up on action items from training
• [  ] Prepare presentation on sharing and workflow
• [  ] Organize and run Idea Labs
• [  ] Follow up on expertise pilot
• [  ] Draft follow-up presentations / articles on eminence?

Relationships

• [  ] Have dinner with W’s parents
• [  ] Go to W’s family get-together
• [  ] Plan tea party for end of August or beginning of September
• [  ] Sort out accommodations / travel plans for my family

Life

• [  ] Catch up after busy weekend
• [  ] Organize notes

Firstly, Happy Indian Indepdence Day! Enjoy your freedom, use it well, it was hard-earned. Moving on…

Reading

The early history of HTML Have you ever wondered how the great World Wide Web came to be? Apparently it’s a bit of a mystery but this article does a good job of piecing things together and giving some insight into how HTML.

What happened to Yahoo! Even though Yahoo still exists and owns some really great websites (like Delicious and Flickr), it seems to have completely dropped off the map in recent years. Paul Graham (whose startup was bought by Yahoo!) takes a look at why Yahoo! seems to have lost its relevance.

Media

Twilio on NY Tech Meetup It’s not that often you see people writing code live during presentations, so when you do see people whipping up live code to create usable webapps and then opening them up to the public, that’s something really worth watching.

Software

Instapaper aims to bring back the practice of reading long-form pieces of the Internet. It lets you save webpages and also helpfully extracts the text from the page. There are iPhone, iPad and Kindle apps to help you read anywhere and anytime.

UPDATE: Fixed PDF.

I turned 27 years old this week. If life as a 25-year-old was about taking small steps to build a wonderful life, life as a 26-year-old was about flourishing. Reviewing the past year’s blog posts to get a sense of how I’ve grown, I realized that life had gotten much deeper and richer. Work gave me plenty of opportunities to learn, share, and make a difference. W- and I have worked out our long-term plans and will be getting married in October. I learned a lot from friends, mentors, and proteges, and I shared tons of thoughts and ideas in blogs, presentations, conversations, and notes.

It’s been a great life. Fewer storms than movies or books had me believe, and plenty of wonderful memories and realizations on which to build a future. On the cusp between the mid-twenties and the late twenties, the most unexpected discovery has been that of unconditional serenity. Now I have more to share, and more to discover along with other people.

I’ve selected my favourite blog posts for Aug 2009-2010 and put them into a PDF so that I can archive them in a three-ring binder. If you’d like to review it too, see sachachua-26.pdf. (184 pages, 353k) Thanks for sharing this year with me!

Here’s how the year stacked up against the goals I shared in last year’s recap:

I’m looking forward to learning even more about my passions and interests, people, and life. When I turn 27, I hope to be able to look back and say that I:

• [X] created another year’s worth of experiences, memories, and dreams – it feels like more than a year’s worth, even!
• [X] helped build innovation networks and shared what I’ve learned with others – we’ve not only scaled up our Idea Labs (virtual brainstorming discussions), I’ve also helped other groups and organizations use the technique to engage people around the world
• [X] helped build Drupal skills within the company – Drupal is well-established in our toolkit, and we’re looking forward to doing even more
• [-] wore something I made every day – I’ve been making more of my clothes and accessories, but I’ve also calculated the my time value of money and decided that some things like technical clothing are well worth the cost.
• [X] enjoyed home cooking and explored new recipes – This was excellent!
• [-] relaxed in improvised situations – I haven’t signed up for further improv classes (low sign-ups for the class I want to take), but I’m looking forward to doing this again
• [-] saved half of my income and donated a tenth – Saved about half, shifting to investing and then donating when that appreciates
• [X] got to the point of having a place for everything, and everything in its place – Progress! After thinking about what gets misplaced and where clutter accumulates, I tried a few tweaks (beltbag, etc.). Haven’t misplaced important things in a while.
• [X] built and deepened more friendships – I’ve been mentoring more people and hosting tea parties, and I really enjoy doing both
• [X] figured out what I know, what I want to learn, and how to share both of those – I’ve been writing and blogging even more, and scaling back on my presentations has given me more time to think and share. Good stuff!
• [X] shared my happiness and enthusiasm with even more people – =)

What will life as a 27-year-old look like? I’m excited about long-term growth: marriage, work, friendships, interests. I’m looking forward to small, constant improvements in the way we live. I want to get even better at learning and sharing. When I turn 28, I hope to be able to look back and say that I:

• helped build an excellent foundation for a loving partnership
• made a difference at work and grew in my career
• experimented with ways of living better and shared my results
• shared lots of ideas, questions, and insights with people
• lived another year of an awesome life.

DEADLINE: 2010-08-03 Tue 08:00

I remember reading, a long time ago, a tip that went like this: During Q&A, don’t say “great question” to fill in the silence while you’re thinking of the answer, because then you’ll have to say something like it for the other questions or making people feel their question isn’t as important as others’.

It reminded me of a tip I’d read in a different book, even longer ago, which went something like this: Introducing one person as “my friend” and omitting that when introducing the other can lead to friction.

One of my friends once anxiously asked me if it was okay if he considered me a best friend, but not his best, best friend. I told him it doesn’t matter to me, and that I’m glad we’re close friends.

The interns helping my mom put together a memory book asked me to rank the top 25 people who have influenced me. I refused, explaining that I felt very uncomfortable doing that.

At the same time, my middle sister can be more particular about sibling ranking than I am (although in a joking way). I’ve opted out of caring about that, I guess.

I have no qualms about praising people in public. In some contexts, though–comparative ones?–status gets odd.

It reminds me of how, at a conference on education that I attended in my sixth grade, I spoke up about cooperation instead of competition.

I try to minimize the distance between me and whoever I want to help. I want people to be able to easily identify with me.

I try to think of people as approachable and human, no matter what their job titles or life situations are, and to let them also interact with other people that way if they want to.

Presenting through web conferences–with full back channels and closer facial expressions–feels more intimate than giving a talk in an auditorium, separated by lights and a stage.

It reminds me of improv. There are games you can play with status and the inversion of status. I still need to practice and relax more before I can easily play those games, and even more before I can play those games for laughs, but it was interesting to learn about the games and start seeing the patterns of conversation.

Unequal status can feel okay, too: introducing someone to a potential mentor, for example. The status difference is justified by the context, not the title (and sometimes is inversely related to job titles or experience).

I’m okay with starting one-up if I know how I can help someone, but I feel uncomfortable if I don’t know or we have to dig for it. I usually introduce myself as equal-ish. In presentations, I sometimes take the slightly-up-at-least-in-this-context position (here are some things I learned that might save you time), and sometimes the slightly-down position (here’s what I know, and I’d love to bring out what you know).

Hmm….

/Thanks to Judy Gombita (@jgombita) for the nudge to reflect on this!/

2010-07-29 Thu 16:57

SCHEDULED: 2010-07-31 Sat 08:00

Introductions. I’m thinking about this because I feel odd when Judy Gombita (@jgombita) enthusiastically introduces me as a tech evangelist rock star, and I need to tease out where that comes from.

I recognize her introduction as a gift, and I appreciate it. Where does this reticence come from?

It’s my birthday, yay! (Happy birthday, Mom!) But I’m away at training, so the annual review + sketches will have to wait for the weekend. In the meantime, here’s something I was thinking about the other day…

SCHEDULED: 2010-08-02 Mon 08:00

I confess: I don’t go to “networking events” to meet people.

I go to eavesdrop on interesting conversations. I go to share and pick up tips and ideas. I go to practice avoiding the name/rank/serial number conversations (and in my small way, perhaps show people there is an alternative). I go to have fun connecting the dots. I go to work on remembering names and little details.

I’m not there to find a new job. I have an awesome one. I’m not there to find new friends. If the seeds of friendships are planted there, terrific. The real work happens outside the event, after all.

I’m there to learn from the conversations that people have with people other than me. It’s one of the reasons why I like having a group of friends over instead of talking to them one-on-one. Other people bring out different aspects of people that I wouldn’t see on my own.

What do I hope for? I hope that I can collapse the distance between people. I hope that I can share people and ideas and resources outside the event. I hope that a chance conversation might turn into a weak tie, and a month or several years down the road, into another connect-the-dots experience, another aha!, or another friendship.

So I seldom go to or organize networking events per se. I like going to events with a bigger purpose. ?DemoCamp, with its promise of interesting startups and ideas. Tea, an excuse for me to prepare treats and create a space for conversation. Conferences. IBM speed mentoring events in Second Life. (Yes, we have them, and they’re lots of fun.) Your typical stand-up-and-meet-people? Sometimes they’re the starting point of interesting conversations and reflections, like the ones I had with Neal Schaffer around sharing and with Judy Gombita about introductions. Sometimes they require lots of digging to get past the surface conversations.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve crossed some kind of tipping point, where the scale effects of the Internet tend to work more for me than the hallway conversations and chance connections of real-life events. (Are search engine results like those serendipitous encounters, except longer-lasting?) I prefer writing and commenting and tweeting over speaking over the din; we reach more people, blossom into more conversations. I could be missing out on subtleties, which is why I go to events from time to time–to see and experience and reflect. But the world stretches before us, and why limit myself to this corner when we could enable aha!s all over?

/Thanks to Dennie Theodore for blogging about large events and nudging me to think about them!/

2010-07-30 Fri 07:40

For the first time in years, we have a television in the house.

I resisted the idea at first, nervous about the gravitational pull of a large television, the mind-numbing effects of passive attention, the shift of hours away from other pursuits.

It would be nice to play games with W- and J-, though. I remember how much J- enjoyed teaming up when we both had Nintendo DSes, and there were some new games that would be fun to explore on a Playstation 3. And the TV would come in handy when watching movies from the library, which we often do while folding laundry.

So we crunched the numbers, figured out what would be worth it based on a projected use of 1-3 hours per week, and headed to ?FutureShop to pick up the television. ?FutureShop was out of Playstation 3s. Walmart had plenty in stock, as well as less expensive HDMI cables and controllers. (You can save a few more dollars by ordering an HDMI cable off the Internet, if you plan ahead.) Having rounded up the gaming parts, we returned to ?FutureShop to get the TV and a wall-mounting bracket (important for keeping it out of reach of cats).

We’ve had the TV for a weekend. So far, we’re still okay. The chores are done. The freezer is full of meals for the next week. I’ve still had time to read and write. We’ve still had great conversations.

And it was a lot of fun exploring the world of LEGO Harry Potter with J-, who’s getting a lot of practice in solving puzzles, particularly stubborn ones. She and W- have been having fun playing ?LittleBigPlanet, too.

Here are some things I’ve realized about having a television:

TV is not inherently bad. It’s a tool. However, many people have invested a lot of time and energy into figuring out how to use this tool to engage or sell to others, so we should be careful about how we use it and what we absorb.

Knowing that movies and video games can be very engaging, I want to make it easier for me to make time to do other things. This is where choosing the right perspective really matters.

If I frame it as resisting the pull of the television, that’s going to take energy and wear down my self –control. (More about this on Wikipedia.)

On the other hand, if I focus on how much I want to do other things, then it becomes much easier to do them. I’m not fighting the television; it’s just the wrong tool for what I want to do. Let’s say that I want to write, which is fun and interesting and helps me learn. Instead of watching a movie, thinking, “I really should be writing,” and then trying to muster the energy to change activities and do it, I’ll focus on how much and why I want to write, and the television becomes irrelevant because it’s the wrong tool.

It’s easier to focus on the positive than to resist the negative. Easier for me to pull myself towards something than to push myself.

Are you avoiding or trying to break a bad habit, too? What if you tried flipping things around – focusing on the good parts of things you would rather do, instead of on resisting the bad parts of the things you don’t want to do?

Thrilled to announce I'm prepping to shoot a new Q&A video series for Fast Company. Work Smart 2 will be a question and answer consultation with viewers and readers like you. If you've got a burning question to ask me about tech and productivity, this is your chance.

Here's how it works:

1. Email me at worksmart@fastcompany.com or leave a comment here on this post with your question. Topics might include things like email overload, mobile apps, cloud computing, productivity, or anything related to working and living saner, smarter and more efficiently with tech tools.
2. If we choose your submission, you and I will schedule a video Skype consultation where we record your question and my advice. I'll even call in some of my best tech-savvy expert friends for help.
3. We'll edit together the clip and run it on ?FastCompany.com and right here on Smarterware.

Interested in getting a little video Skype Q&A going? Here are the details. Can't wait to talk to you.

From last week’s plans:

Long-weekend focus: declutter space, organize information

Work

• [X] Organize upcoming Idea Labs
• [X] Answer more requests for community toolkit: statistics, bugfixes, etc.
• [  ] Package Lotus Notes plugin – postponed, but worked on community membership management for Lotus Notes plugin
• Helped revise slides and posters
• Helped a client learn more about Idea Labs
• Gave mentoring advice
• Talked to potential new team

Relationships

• [X] Declutter living room – wow! so different now.
• [  ] Follow up with people, learning about them and their interests – still haven’t followed up on tweetup or class
• [X] Catch up with mylifeandart
• Bought a television and a Playstation 3
• Bought latest book in Artemis Fowl series
• Treated W- and J- to Despicable Me, which was lots of fun
• Experimented with the Litter Robot – wonder if the cats will take to it. Pricey, but if it works…
• Decluttered living room and gave away a third of our books
• Harvested our first bitter melon and made pinakbet with it =)

Life

• [-] Draw more! =)
• [-] Create an index for images, book notes, blog posts, etc. – scanned my sketches
• [-] Plan next tea party – maybe end of month?
• [C] Price-match blender if possible – cancelled because of price differences for colour
• Posted lots of reflections
• Replanted large parts of the garden
• Upgraded to Lucid Lynx

Next week’s plans:

Work

• Organize upcoming Idea Labs
• Attend training for Application Innovation Services consultants
• Work on plugin to make it easier for other people to organize Idea Labs
• Contact briefing consultants regarding the expertise pilot

Relationships

• Send a quick note to people I met at VXToronto and in woodworking class
• Mail lots of jam

Life

• Pick up more travel business wear at the Tilley sale
• Outline my “lifeline of books” (see “Write for Your Lives”)

Because I had to piece this together from examples on the Internet, and probably other people do too:

Transfer[] transferArray = new Transfer[]{
    XMLTransfer.getInstance(),
};
tableViewer.addDropSupport(DND.DROP_DEFAULT | DND.DROP_COPY | DND.DROP_MOVE | DND.DROP_LINK,
    transferArray, new ?DropTargetAdapter() {
        public void drop(DropTargetEvent event) {
            ?TableItem item = (TableItem) event.item;
            // You can access the object with item.getData()
            try {
                ?NotesThread.sinitThread();
                Session session = ?NotesFactory.createSessionWithFullAccess();
                if (event.data instanceof URIDescriptor[]){
                    URIDescriptor[] droppedURL = (URIDescriptor[]) event.data;
                    for (int i = 0; i < droppedURL.length; i++) {
                        URI uri = ((URIDescriptor) droppedURL[i]).uri;
                        Document d = (Document) session.resolve(uri.toString());
                        // Do things with the document
                    }
                }
            } catch (Exception e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            } finally {
                ?NotesThread.stermThread();
            }
        }});

Use session.resolve instead of db.getDocumentByURL to retrieve a document from a plugin, as both session.getAgentContext() and session.getCurrentDatabase() will return null.

Last month, I said:

What will July be like? I want to polish my community toolkit and share it with more people. I want to explore sales and see what I can learn even in my current role. I want to invest more time into developing relationships. I want to build a few projects. I want to learn how to play at least one song on my ukulele. It’ll be busy and fun and amazing.

And it was busy and fun and amazing.

Lots of Idea Lab awesomeness: It’s always such a thrill to bring together so many engaged and insightful people to help our clients innovate. And we’re getting better at the process, too. We pulled the latest Idea Lab together in three weeks or so, and I prepared the summary of the results on the same day. We’ve got a number of Idea Labs on the go, and I even helped a client learn more about how they might do those Idea Labs internally.

I’ve been doing lots of other fun stuff at work, too. The expertise location pilot I’m working on is going well, and dozens of SMEs have filled out their profiles. I’ve been revising presentations, designing simple posters, preparing handouts, organizing information, and updating tracking spreadsheets. Thank goodness for to-do lists, organizational tools, I learned how to extend Lotus Notes with Java plugins. Added a bunch of features to the Community Toolkit plugin Luis Benitez had started, including the metrics tool that people had wanted for private communities. Also added a bucketload of metrics to the web-based tool. Fixed some bugs along the way, too. I’ve started seeing communities weave the output into their newsletters, and it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

I’m checking out another fascinating career possibility – a new digital expertise position that’s just been created. It looks like a great fit, and we’ll see if things work out. It’s amazing how so many of my different passions come together. That position, for example, might take advantage of my master’s work in expertise location, my development using Drupal, my interest in marketing and communications, my passion for helping people connect and collaborate… Another position I’m interested in would make the most of my passion for helping people and organizations collaborate better, my interest in sales, my love of making quick prototypes. Passions can be like LEGO blocks, quickly reconfigured and combined.

Reflecting and mentoring: I’ve been thinking a lot about life, success, and happiness these days, prompted by what other people post or ask. Here are some of those reflections:

• Finding opportunities in a big company
• A philosophy of sharing and a truth about teaching
• Technology evangelists: What we do, how to find and hire one, how to become one
• Reflections from a tweetup
• Love and reaction
• Thoughts on writing and starting again

Relationships: I enjoyed having people over for tea, and I made a few new friends along the way, too. I’ve also been helping a friend settle into Toronto and learn how to cook. I’ve (slowly) been sending out bottles of jam, and really should set up some kind of packing center so that I can get more of these out the door. <laugh>

Also, moved wedding to October 2 because of delays related to my parents’ visas. I think everything’s sorted out now! =)

Ukulele: Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah – can play it, but haven’t memorized it yet. It sounds very chipper on a ukulele. Woodworking: Not as much as last month, but we did work on our chairs some more. Sewing: Stops and starts, but am definitely keen on sewing more.

What will August look like? I’m turning 27, so it’ll be a great excuse to do that yearly review (and what a year!). Work: Organize lots of Idea Labs, support workshops, attend training, improve our community toolkit, come up with a way for other people to organize Idea Labs easily, explore opportunities, and prepare presentations. Relationships: Sort everything out for wedding, reorganize space, meet up with W-’s family, have a tea party, meet up with friends, mentor and be mentored. Life: Get back into sewing pouches and other organizers. Draw and write more vividly. Have fun. =)

Other blog posts from this month:

Cool mornings
Electronic ears: Using Performous to learn how to sing
Living an awesome life: Not a Greek tragedy
Getting the hang of leading small things
Giving myself permission to delegate again
Troubleshooting my Lotus Notes 8.5.2, Expeditor 6.2, and Eclipse 3.4 setup
Using org2blog to publish Org-mode subtrees
This is a test post from org2blog
Garden riches
Keeping track of multiple projects
Playing the long game: writing, raw material, and backups
Delegation and thinking about what I want to do
CookOrDie: Passing it on with lemon-rosemary chicken
Sooner or later? Expertise and the new
Yogurt, change, and growing oldness
Get-together ideas for Toronto
Career growth in a large company
Blueberry jam, apricot syrup, and kiwi jam
Thinking about dinner parties
Tools, big companies, and collaboration

Weekly reviews:

• Week ending July 26, 2010
• Week ending July 18, 2010
• Week ending July 11, 2010
• Week ending July 4, 2010

Last month’s review: Monthly review: June 2010