When it has to be there Tomorrow

You’re filling a sudden order to bang out a Powerpoint presentation for 500 people by morning, and need to walk in looking rested and in control. You need to launch a web site yesterday, because your new client already mailed out their secondary marketing, and their own servers just died. The mobile headquarters of your social action group has twelve hours to get an underground newsletter together and get it into key places before the start of business in the morning.

You’re doing rapid prototyping. Frankly, I love this stuff. Combine virtuosity, brainstorming, and fingers flying so fast on the keyboard that they’re invisible, with a near impossible deadline, bragging rights at the end, and showing off the next day (which consists in just being done and effective), and I’m so there. The sense of accomplishment is immense.

Some key helpers for rapid prototyping:

• Go lean - if twelve slides can be one, make it one. The genius is in the layout and arrangement.
• Gang up - work fast and furious with a symbiotic team - some of the best stuff is clabbered together in smoke filled rooms with papers spread out on the floor, someone at the keyboard, someone at the whiteboard, and someone making the coffee runs, making notes, and giving things another eye.
• Focus on the big picture - get a working model up and running - if the broadstrokes are wrong, you’ll just end up starting over - the details can be nitpicked afterward, and it’s amazing how many opinions that get absolutized when you’ve got lots of time (which word, which phrase, which color arrow to use) don’t seem so contentious when you’ve got a reasonable time frame left to flesh out the details. Again… at the risk of being redundant… if the concept is wrong, you’ll be starting over - know what you want to deliver and why - don’t get sidetracked by tweaks.
• Everyone matters - don’t underestimate any of your team members. Often, the one who’s got his feet up and only refills the coffee pot now and then ends up having the key idea that’s responsible for the most successful chunk of your work. Everyone should be operational, but not necessarily doing what we think - besides, remember the Pareto Principle. 20% of the people will seem to be doing 80% of the work. It doesn’t matter.
• Have organized messes - sometimes it’s cut and paste and two or three mockups before you get it right, and the trash bags in the corner are your best friend. Make a mess, but have piles, and keep your ideas up on the whiteboard. If you don’t have a whiteboard, write on the wall. It’s faster to re-paint later than be at Walmart for 30-minutes with that one cashier they have left at night.
• Take micro-breaks - don’t try to justify 15 minute breaks for two cigarettes, video games, and bags of Cheetos. If you’re doing that, you’re not serious. A break is a 3-minute walk away to pee. You keep your momentum, but there is where you have some of your best summary ideas. If you take 15-minutes, you lose 35, so don’t.

What if you’re doing it alone?: Then you have to stop periodically, and become your audience, and look at that way. Then again, and become your stakeholders, and look at it that way. If you’re doing it alone, you have to be ingenious. And, you may need to set an absolute drop-dead time for sleep, based on the minimum that will sustain you, because very likely that’s what you’ll get. If you’ve got a friend or colleague that can grasp the immediate needs, deal with what (for some people) feels like pressure, and contribute to rather than drain your productivity, make the call. If your friends are just as likely to slow you down or distract you or need tons of looking after on mundane tasks, do it alone. Create the team in your head.

This isn’t meant to be a master-guide to rapid prototyping, just a few comments. If there were more to say, there’d be less to do. The key points: it’s fun, there are some good tips, and you can do it alone if you have to. Happy trails.

Business phone under $40

The Motofone F3. For one thing, it’s an act of dissidence, like entrepreneurship, so I like it a lot in that way: it’s been called the anti-iPhone. It’s the opposite of the culture obsessed with texting and constantly communicating with little of substance to say beyond the kind of thing we all hate when someone hits reply-all: “thx” - “yw” - “c-ya” - “k” . . . [”Unsubscribe!!!”]

1. High durability - no glass and it’s practically armored, but scalpel-thin. You can drop it, throw it, stand on it, run over it repeatedly on gravel, toss it off a roof, then pick it up and make a call. No joke. Youtube videos abound putting it through just such abusive paces. It’s like the old 20-pound Bell phones (which were great for clobbering burglars), but this is the shuriken of phones.
2. High visibility (read it in direct sunlight). It reads like writing on paper. Shine one of those Homeland Security lights in your eyes and at least you can call your lawyer.
3. High battery life (if you get the GSM model - if you’re stuck in a CDMA contract, I’m sorry, but at least there’s a version for you). The battery life is due to the same reason (it’s got a display based on e-paper*, which only uses battery when the screen changes, so it’s always on, but with no video drain)
4. High call clarity - the best there is - sounds like you’re next door (I don’t need my clients and I to pay more attention to reception than to each other)
5. Flexibility - I got the unlocked version, so it’ll work on nearly any sim card provider in my part of the world (either a plan like AT&T or T-Mobile or pay as you go, in case you’re on the lam - or just prefer to live like it - no ties, ready to drop and go at any time)
6. Economic justice: it’s under $40 - it runs what a decent landline phone might cost in a discount store. It costs less than a month of service from most providers, and you own it. After all, why should I carry around the crown jewels, or have my equity, debt, or wealth tied up in telephone? Why should a phone cost as much as a mortgage payment, and need a contract to secure? Live light where you can - not to is a grave thing.

The Chickens are Finally Here!

I’ve been watching with interest the discussions in real estate news of the suburbs drying up, with vast numbers projected for empty homes and developments going into the future, and little market to fill them. This will be called overbuilding, and there is that, but I think it’s something else.

Similar news for rural communities goes something like this: “This family was spending $800/mo in gasoline to commute to the city for their jobs, while living in a sprawling house in this idyllic rural community, with schools they like, and a down home feeling. Now they’re spending $1600/mo in gas, and are having to abandon their home and move to the city to be closer to their jobs.”

The first question I have is: you were spending what?!? $800/mo on gasoline? And you were OK with that? How can you justify something like that? That’s just decadent, and morally wrong.

The mortgage and gasoline issues tend to get overblown to make news or underblown because of people’s unbelief about change, but what’s not being talked about is the level of decadence we were comfortable with until now. Living an hour or more from our jobs in the country, or 45min in the suburbs, consuming vast amounts of fuel to compensate, living in gymnasium-sized homes in a sedentary, fast-food, big-box store, media-entertainment culture.

And now the chickens are coming home to roost, and everyone’s sad.

In a hundred years, we’ll look more like India.You can’t live this way forever - it’s not sustainable. It’s silly to live long distances from the place you work. It’s silly to demand so much space that you have to drive until dark to get there. It’s silly to create “communities” out in the middle of nowhere that aren’t sustained by industry or a purpose. And they’re NOT communities, not really - they’re recreational leisure villas.

An associate whose ideas I admire says that the future of how people will live is concentrated urban environments. Other countries already evidence the model - we’re twisting and turning and whining about it because we think we’re special. But just the type of industry that’s growing in the US tells you that work will be centered around large facilities or large urban communities, where the critical mass of brains (the workforce) and the easy flow of money (facilities and finance) are. The days of settling in Nowhere, Idaho are as gone as the farming industry, which isn’t exactly multiplying. In a hundred years, says my friend, we’ll look more like India.

So what we’re seeing is the ‘karmic’ outcome of ideology over rationality, and priviledge over ethics, and the tendency of systems to seek balance — like the human body, striving to repair itself, and deal with excess, foolishness, and abuse.

What does this have to do with a blog about work? Well, work isn’t an isolated part of the system; it’s an integral organ. What we’re seeing is that it affects where and how we live, even if we play the rebel for a long time. And interestingly enough, it holds us by the balls of our economy. Mess with it, and it starts to squeeze.

Swerving into Reality

Half of fearing something will fail is the fear. But fear *is* failure. Fear convinces us to chart a course so devoid of adventure, of risk, of originality, that success is replaced with mere survival. I don’t mean success as in living in the right neighborhood, driving the right car, and having the right job. Excuse me while I vomit. I mean when a particular project succeeds according to its goals and ideals. A real project, not a meaningless project of masturbatory self-improvement - improving the self for its own sake.

Swerve into the oncoming reality. Swerve and be alive.The other half of fearing something will fail is the actual failure, creeping up, not because it’s a bogeyman, but precisely because it’s a real thing that waits for those who don’t plan sufficiently to succeed - who are inattentive. All it takes for a ship to fail to make shore is an inattentive crew. So much of failure is predicated on the predictable, understandable, and forseeable, even if it’s a matter of forseeing that the unforseen will happen. You know, in the movies, when someone watches the monster turn, and stalk toward them, while they’re paralyzed with fright? It’s almost as if they find it a relief to be caught and eaten. That’s how failure creeps up on the hopeless, the fearful, those who refuse to take risk.

It’s a risk to hit the thing with a pipe and run, because you don’t know that it’ll succeed. It’s a guaranteed thing to watch yourself fail. Imagine the skipper, staring at the rocks up ahead, unwilling to swerve, because it’s off course and uncharted. The course has changed. The new course is adventure. Swerve into freedom from fear. Swerve into the oncoming reality. Swerve and be alive.

The News of Snooze

The biggest non-issue of the day, using up millions of dollars of airwaves and bandwidth in chatter, is whether or not we’re in a recession. Does x=y? Is this thing that thing and vice versa? It’s an exercise in absurd tautologies, and the single clearest example of masturbatory pseudo-news currently at hand.

The real question is not whether we are in a recession but whether you are in one.It doesn’t even measure up to sitting around debating what’s a beer and what’s a lager, or whether something qualifies as irony. Like so many of the electoral questions up for debate, it’s just tedious filler, designed to convince us that something is going on.

After all, the news outlets don’t get it: they’ve been working on the old “sell some papers today” model that requires a certain amount of daily content, regardless of whether it’s useful or just wasting your time. This is one of the many reasons bloggers are kicking their asses. Bloggers haven’t promised a certain number of paper or screen columns, a certain broadcast time of business or weather or politics as a setting for their advertisers. Bloggers have to have a freaking point, even if a lot of them do have sponsors.

True, you’ll read posts containing manufactured issues - excuses to sound off that are stretching to fill a page. Mostly, though, you can tell it’s crap, because it doesn’t even manage a catchy title, a decent photo, or a poignant quotation. And if it’s lengthy, on top of that, it usually doesn’t get read. We should be prepared to turn off “the news” as quickly as clicking off of a blog. Often, it isn’t news at all - it’s just “the news” - just your pre-portioned, TV-dinner plate of information-product, propped up with stabilizers and filler.

Besides, the real question is not whether WE are in a recession but whether YOU are in one. Only you and your financial advisor can answer that; the rest is bullshNews.

The 10-minute $2 “business” meal

A sound criterion for busy meals is: fast and few steps, few courses, inexpensive (consistently sensible), and few but complete and healthy components. Components are not the same thing as ingredients, mind you, and steps done simultaneously, I count as one. Among them, is this favorite:

Follow the directions for a bag of steam-in-the-microwave frozen mixed vegetables - usually a mixture of zucchini, squash, broccoli, peppers, and long beans, often includes noodles. Typical cost is $1.29-$1.69. - serves two. Meanwhile heat a teaspoon of oil and a moderate amount of precooked frozen chicken or shrimp in a pan. Usual cost is $6.20-$9 for an average of 5 dinners for two. When ready, combine in the pan with seasonings (especially sweet basil - try paprika, coriander, etc) and cook a little longer (until the vegetable broth is absorbed). Two components, two steps, $2/person, and something like a dozen healthy ingredients, and It’s under 10 minutes. Low carb, high protein, and always tastes fantastic. If you have to have a side (I usually don’t), add a few pennies worth of steamed rice (also available in steamable microwave pouches, if you don’t have a rice cooker). Goes nicely with large quantities of cold barley tea.

Vegetarian tip: substitute firm tofu for the chicken. Check out the local Vietnamese or Chinese grocer for the home-made variety. It doesn’t last as long, but it’s better.

It’s not perhaps the cheapest meal, but it’s not expensive, and it ensures that I eat right more often than not. Makes me feel energetic and lean. Of course, this is just one of several I keep up my sleeve. Most times, if you’re working, you need to be smart without letting food dominate your life. I need to knock out meals with hardly any effort, minimal planning, but a significant payoff with consistent health benefits, and conserve funds because, even if I could afford not to, it’s just and wise to do so.

I watch people spend hours in the AM pondering lunch, only to fill it with fast food, or over-priced sit-down fast food disguised as high-end fare (TGI Fridays, the Chinese buffet, Tex Mex) - same as if they’d put NO thought into it. Then either they make a production out of cooking at night, or else eat expensive, unhealthy, prepared garbage, similarly full of brain-killers like MSG and other glutamates - or else it’s back to the yuppy fern bar for the same set of ingredients you find in frozen entrees.

If you’re a gourmet, or just love cooking, or are doing it as a mitvah, perhaps it’s worth it to devote time and money, but it’s almost never worth it to consistently short your health. I can’t rightly do any of these things. Recently got a knock on the noggin from the doc about some bad eating she caught me doing these past couple of years. Now it’s no more cheating. Bad eating is bad for the brain, bad for the mood, and bad business.

Friends are not Food

Never sell your friends, despite what the network marketers say. For one thing, if they’re smart, they know you’re doing it and, either way, it shows a lack of respect. Likewise don’t feed the perpetual salesman, by affecting that bewildered sheep nod that they like so well. Let your body language indicate that you’re not that dumb. I’m about to utter sales heresy here: ABC (always be closing) is not the “key” to relationships. Outside of the day’s business negotiations, it’s a form of narcissism and the sure ticket to a shallow reduction of all relationships to a gratification of self. It ends in the deprivation of the fullness of meaningful connections with others. You never really find out what a life with others could be like without the barrier of one-sided goals.

I’ve known pathological sellers - people who get hooked on salesmanship and sell all the time; not necessarily products; they sell a constant stream of perception the way others tell white lies. It’s their besetting vice. Listening to them is like a constant commercial about their preferences. People that waste your time with such things may think they’re being clever or fancy themselves polite, but actually they’re just creating a debt of trust. Who wants to be ‘handled’ all the time?

Unfortunately, most salesmen are bad at it, so when you’re looking bored and put off, they don’t seem to notice or care. They just keep doing their routine, like clueless young men driven by hormones to keep hitting on the same dry well for a date. If you know the person well enough, or barely at all, it’s often sufficient to respond to what they’re doing rather than what they’re saying. If they’ve half an IQ point, they’ll get that you get it. If you get through and they continue, they just want you to play along to save face for them, but it’s better for civilization (theirs and everyone’s) if you don’t put up with it.

Don’t stand in the Sucker Circle

Try hard not to defend yourself when you’re falsely accused. It happens a little more than now and then, or it wouldn’t have merited a commandment. But put yourself in a position, more often than not, tangibly and emotionally, of having little to lose from it. As a general rule, if people can take something from you, sooner or later they’ll try, even if they don’t need to. What did Francis of Assisi say? “If we had possessions, we’d have to worry about thieves.” Never, though, step into the position of needing to prove your innocence; it’s a sucker’s spot. Once you know how not to step there, you can shrug and let people think what they want. Own nothing in a world of someone else’s making.

The Dangers of Perception

“Perception is reality”, is a prevalent claim in business. It’s akin to “the customer is always right” or “I give it 110%”. Everyone knows it’s a bogus claim. Even the true believers - “No, that’s really true! That’s the truth! You’re just misunderstanding it!” - don’t live that way consistently. After all, I perceive them as makers of bad business mythology. Is that reality? But that’s not what they mean at all, is it?

Perception isn’t reality; perception is perception. It’s important, but it isn’t everything. So what is really meant by such statements? Depends. It’s fairly flexible, but it’s usually some version of:

• I have something indefensible to say, but I expect you to accept it anyway.
• I don’t need reasons, only preferences. (Incidentally, preferences have reasons, too.)
• The truth is what I think it is, as long as I have the power to inflict some penalty or else enough people agree with me.
• The views of others are more important than truth.
• Popularity matters more than reality.
• People can hurt you if you don’t treat their ideas as real, no matter how flaky or irrational. So you should be concerned enough (afraid enough) to go along. Go along.

Where you can master perception, it’s when you’re making it agree with reality. If that’s not an option, choose reality, and let the chips fall where they may.Well, you can’t say much to people who think this way. It’s like someone insisting, ardently and wide-eyed, that the comet is coming, they’ll go live with the aliens, and brother so and so is really a great guy. They’re sure that you just don’t see it, and all the evidence backs them, and if you’ll just get four other people to go out and spread that message for you, you can run your own something, or score the magic power points.

In such cases, perception isn’t reality. It’s in contradistinction to reality. It’s a mockery of reality. A denial of the truth.

I was on the panel of a targeted selection interview once and, after the candidate left, one panel member said she just had a “check in her spirit” about the candidate. She just felt something telling her this is the wrong one. But she acknowledged that the candidate was fully qualified, handled the questions well, and was acceptable in all other ways. That particular panel member was an influential person, and it would have been considered unwise to confront her about the inappropriateness of such an approach to candidate selection.

Was perception reality? You true believers are still saying, “yes”. I know, and this blog post isn’t really for you. We hired the girl, and she became the only member of her training class to remain with the company, meet all the standards, and was the singular success of her group hire. Perception was wrong. Perception was myth. In fact, had perception been taken seriously, it would have created more myth: “so and so is really good at spotting people that won’t be successful with our company.” Perception was dangerous to the organization’s health.

I know that perception is important. Sometimes. Really, it can’t be all-important. Is perception more important than who you are? I mean, really, do you want to let everyone but you modify your identity? That’s certainly a recipe for therapy! And what about you? Don’t you get a say?

Screw perception; stick with what’s real - at least where there’s a contradiction. Where you can master perception, it’s when you’re making it agree with reality. If that’s not an option, choose reality, and let the chips fall where they may. In marketing, this means not claiming a sow’s ear is a silk purse; instead, it’s selling the benefits of a sow’s ear over those expensive, sweatshop-made imports.

There’s nothing as refreshing as reality. “Do you offer a guarantee?” I sometimes get asked. “I guarantee I’ll do certain things. I don’t guarantee you’ll get rich off of it. And neither should anyone else.” My sow’s ear kicks arse over a silk purse, and I let them know it. If they still want the silk purse, I don’t pretend - I give them a lead and move on. A lot of them come back for the sow’s ear later.

How’s that for avoiding the word “widget”?

Most of all, perception cannot be allowed to be the reality of your identity. You’ll never be sorry on your deathbed for being yourself; you’ll be sorry if you tried to be everything everyone else wanted you to be, and even sorrier if you succeeded. Never base your personality on consensus. Quotation of the day: “It’s better to apologize than ask permission.” When it comes to who you are, do neither.

Making the Jump to Mazda

Well, I made a decision. It may not be the best decision (I still have mixed feelings), but it’s certainly a decision, and that, at least, pleases me. I traded in my completely debt-free 2003 Dodge Durango (SUV on a truck body), and bought a Mazda3 on credit (with a smidgen of equity).

Previously, I had traded in two vehicles and got the balance of the Durango on credit, because I was spending roughly 350% of a car payment on monthly repairs to one dodgy vehicle and tires for an irreparable one. We got a 6year loan and paid it off in 6 months. Alas, that won’t be happening this time, but it’s got similar logic behind it. I did the best I could - got it at invoice, and got a decent, if disappointing in this market, value on the trade-in.

Fuel economy: I’ll save about 50% on monthly gas costs - roughly half the car payment. For one thing, I got the stick shift, so I can do a bit of hypermiling. With an auto, you stay in gear all the time. With a stick, if you’re smart, you spend a lot of time in neutral, coasting up to lights, coasting on offramps, and you watch the mpg meter soar: 37-55-99… On balance, it’s changing the way I drive. And that leads to the primary reason that I’d do it, even if it was actually cheaper and certainly financially safer to drive my SUV:

Fuel justice: This was actually the biggest tipping factor: a mix of thick shame and the ardent desire to do right. Watching the progress of Africa drying up, species nearing extinction, the tendencies toward starvation, and resource wars breaking out, I realize that every bit of energy I use contributes. I want to minimize my impact.

Smaller footprint: In addition to the carbon footprint, there’s a psychological difference with physically taking up less space. Less parking space, less unneeded room of all kinds. This fits with our current thinking about downsizing from our relatively sprawling home to a condo. More on that some day, perhaps.

Efficiency: An SUV was really a wrong choice for us from the beginning. I looked on it as a replacement for my truck, but you can’t put a full sheet of plywood in the back of an SUV, so from then on it was pretty much like hauling around an extra living room on wheels. It really was a decadent mistake.

Reliability: I was nearing the exit date on the extended warranty and worried about costs. All in all, it seemed very solid, but this was a factor.

Comparison: I had thought I wanted a Corolla. Corolla and Civic have the highest reliability ratings and best gas mileage in their class. I had considered a Smart Car as well. But I couldn’t get my knees under the steering wheel of a Corolla. I’m over 6′2″, and I was finding that, physically, I’m a mid-sized car person. I’m a truck person, but we don’t have solar trucks right now. So I went on my mid-sized car hunt, meticulously narrowing things down, until, just to be thorough, I drove the Mazda3. It’s a compact car with enough room for a man my size. It’s like a 280z in that respect, or a Volkswagen Beetle - surprisingly roomy for the driver. And once you’ve driven a 3, you know why you have to have one. So, I’m fitting in a compact car after all, and it’s got a really satisfying racy appeal, even when coasting through an intersection.

My 3: Black on black, leather, with moonroof, 2.3L engine and 5-speed stick. A snappy combination. That’s me easing into the space marked “compact” and standing up out of it like a tall man from a clown car. I love the car - it’s made 100% in Hiroshima, Japan, and shipped over. Got that tight, well-engineered feel to it. I can drive like a pocket rocket or a hypermiler - my choice. It feels like a glove.

Regrets?: I don’t like not owning it (the bank owns it ’til it’s paid for), but I’d get another one of these. For next time, I’m also thinking about the Subaru Impreza. It’s AWD, which really really helps in the winter. I haven’t driven one yet, but it’s on my list for some day. I loved my old Subaru Brat, so it’s got a fond place in my heart, and I understand it drives like a 3.

This is my first and hopefully last new car. New cars are just too inefficient to own. Currently, the good used small cars are in hot demand so they’re not priced as reasonably as I’d like, and right now I can’t take on any interest in auto repair, but I’m going to get where I can. Buy them for cash, own them outright, put aside enough to fix them when it makes sense (take all the warranty responsibility on myself), and drive them ’til the wheels fall off. Rinse and repeat. I say that, but there’s a certain piece of mind being relatively certain my car will take me across the country right this minute. It’s just that I’m planning to go where I wouldn’t ever want to do that. Anyway, this was the decision process, it’s done, and now I can concentrate on getting it paid for. I can always sell it, if I decide there’s a better way at a better time.

47 Lawnmowers

Office environments can spawn an odd kind of possessiveness. “Why did you throw that away in my trashcan, not yours?” (One was closer than another). “Those are my paperclips. Why don’t you get your own?” (They all come from the same place). You could attribute it to the personalization of space, but I personalize and yet I still look at all the basic instruments as community property. In fact, they come from the same community supply closet, so how do they become protected possessions on the way to your desk? I think, it’s a general phenomenon in a culture obsessed with personal property.

In a song called “47 Lawnmowers”, a musician critiques the fact that if you drive down an average residential street, you’ll find 47 lawnmowers: stored in 47 little sheds or garages, representing a tremendous investment, and used once a week. There’s no concept of having a community toolshed where expense, storage, and maintenance are shared, and you use what you need when you need it. Each house has to have it’s own box for its own mower for its own lawn, get 47 tuneups, 47 oil changes, fill with 47 gascans, and so on. It’s a commentary on our culture’s attitudes about stuff. True, it’s different in condo living where you share a large public space and split the cost of having one guy mow it. But from the suburban US you have a value system of . . . how did the gulls in Finding Nemo put it? . . . “Mine. Mine? Mine!”

When we start viewing office apparatuses like lawnmowers, we’ll either clutch them as though they represent the dream of personal ownership, or else look at them as tools to be laid aside when idle, shared as needed, and utilized when relevant to the goals of the enterprise, but not sources of meaning in and of themselves. It depends on your values. Mine is work. The work is the thing, and the stuff is just a means of working. Turned on its head, we end up working for paperclips, office supplies, and pretty new tape dispensers - not very enticing incentives in my book.

Stuff. It’s transient, not absolute. It’s made to serve your sense of meaning, not be a source of meaning. Yes, I know art is different; in general, though, stuff is the detritus of life, not life itself. The worst and yet most illustrative equation you can bring to the table is stuff vs. people - or, more accurately, Stuff > People. From there flows all the other ills of property: Stuff > Work, Stuff = Meaning, |Stuff| = ∞. You get the point.

I’m not attacking property rights - though I think they need to be reconceptualized in an era of digital media. It’s not communism I’m suggesting, either. I don’t think someone should come and take away your lawnmower and give you back 1/population of it. I’m simply saying that our attitudes about property can determine and reveal our attitudes about more important things, and frequently get in the way of them.

Addendum 8/8/08: This goes to the issue represented in Google’s office mentality over Microsoft. Google envisions a document as an online object to be shared, mutually contributed to, etc. Or else what is it’s purpose? A diary? One word answer: blogs. Microsoft still thinks of documents as static objects to be sent to one another in e-mail and held on our hard drives. Documents that are not designed to function in the community, or not built on a platform with that in mind, cannot be edited by multiple people without threatening confusion over versions (”Is the one you e-mailed me the one I sent you, or does it have your changes?!?”).

When the primary vehicles of our work are not based on the concept of a collaborative community, is it any wonder we guard our staplers so avidly?We’re working within a business culture that (overall) isn’t yet treating documents as community objects but, in a lot of cases, is still at the stage of using shared network drives and sending a lot of things back and forth in e-mail. We don’t make it a priority to have online project spaces in which to collaborate, though excellent out of the box extranets for that purpose have been available for decades.

The first thing I do, whenever I’ve started a team, is create a shared space for collaboration and communication - for sharing project resources, information, ideas, feedback, and keeping each other’s work on everyone’s radar.

We will evolve, because it just doesn’t make sense not to, and the business forces will push us there. In the meantime, though, when the primary vehicles of our work (documents), and the primary platforms on which we work (computerized offices) are not based on the concept of a collaborative community (for all the rhetoric about “good teams”), is it any wonder we guard our staplers (think Office Space) so avidly?

Calendar Spam

Meetings are the calendar spam of organizational life. People create and distribute them, pulling in others and, like viruses, they distract, disable, or cripple the flow of work. Just as with e-mail, there are good meeting requests and good meetings, so we tend to be hopeful about all the ones we get handed, but so often our calendar inboxes just fill up with things that, because they’re scheduled, demand the highest tangible priority (stoppage of all other work), even if, compared to other work, they deserve lower priority. Managers make this worse, because priority goes up artificially whenever the person wanting the meeting signs your check - even if business needs disagree. Calendar spam makes e-mail spam look cute. The only trick I’ve found is to schedule calendar blocks for the daily, ordinary, but really important work that doesn’t ever get scheduled, and mark yourself unavailable at that time. Sorry… I already have a 3:00, and a 4:00 that lasts two hours. Can this be an e-mail? Of course, if you answer to people who believe meetings are what calendar items make them - “show stopper” important - taking precedence over everything - then you might not get away with it. But I’ve witnessed execs doing it all the time - blocking out 4hrs a day or more of unspecified busy time. Why not everyone else? Calendar spam makes e-mail spam look cute - what takes 10-seconds in e-mail takes an hour on your calendar. Schedule meetings with yourself, and use that time to get your work done.

Paperwork: Triage or Bulldozer

Sometimes, you just have to clear your desk. Pile it all up in one stack and go through it - even if the result is more stacks. Throw away, scan, or file anything that doesn’t need to be in your way. If for no other reason that the psychological benefit, periodically, you need a pristine workspace.

Go one better, though. Anything that can be paperless, make paperless. Invest in two items: a sheet-fed scanner and a shredder. Use them in that order, and clear clutter like a bulldozer on a lint pile.

Pounding out the List

The Rules of Safe Driving

There were four friends, one of whom died in a car accident. The other three (let’s call them Jim, John, and Bob) decided to take a road trip in his memory, but vowed to be safe drivers from then on out. Jim sat behind the wheel of the car for a while, but wouldn’t drive. He reasoned that there was some danger at any speed, so there couldn’t really be such a thing as safe driving. He later sold his car and never drove again. John agreed that all driving is dangerous, which is why he said there was no point taking any precautions – you might as well drive as fast as you want, seatbelts off, because there’s nothing you can do to avoid danger anyway. Later in life, John was also killed in a car accident. Bob was the one who drove for the road trip. He listened to the others politely, shrugged, and then simply drove as safely as he could. Over time, he learned more general rules of safety and actually averted several accidents, and eventually assisted with CPR on a crash victim, saving his life, and thereby honoring the memory of his lost friends.

One can reason that, because there are exceptions to nearly any rule, there are no rules: there are only incentives and deterrents. Typically, we live with a generation that rejects overall principles of life. The twin results are paralysis, bewilderment, rampant anxiety, and nihilistic indifference.

A person with no law can be a coworker, but never a colleague.I find that exceptions underscore the rules, as the old adage suggests. The logic of this is inaccessible to those driving this generation. It can no longer be grasped. “The exception demonstrates the rule.” I once knew a man who couldn’t believe in anything, because he couldn’t find anything perfect. He’s the non-driver – the man whose life is typified by an absence of realities larger than the immediate, and by a flight to pseudo-realities in which rules are consistent and ‘believable’.

I’ve never been able to befriend the other kind of non-believer – the nihilist. There’s simply nothing there that can be shared since, for him, nothing is really there at all. I’ve watched, though, the tragedy left in his wake.

I identify with the person who has some rules, whether rules of work, aesthetic principles, ethical propositions, or what have you. As a rule, a person with no law can be a coworker, but never a colleague.

When people reject the notion that there is any law to life - any order - any general principles by which to live, think, interact, contribute, create, work, etc… by their logic, we should never give anything to the poor, because we won’t give everything to the poor (You can actually observe this principle of skeptical nihilism at work - it’s quite telling). Same thing with environmental impact: the notion that because we won’t reduce our carbon footprint to zero, indeed cannot, then we shouldn’t be overly concerned with reducing it at all. This is a kind of skeptical nihilism that hobbles this generation’s ability to function in any but the most narcissistic fashion. It has reduced them to people of faith - whose faith is that nothing is truly real, pure, sacred, right or wrong, or worth radical changes to your life.

In fact, I look at most “pocket philosophies” coming out of the current culture as merely justifications for avoiding radical change to one’s life, whether it be consumption, luxury, culture, religion, work, or what have you. Most modern men and women will always arrive at a philosophy that protects the status quo, tho they will convince themselves that it’s what they really believe, rather than that they’ve simply chosen to believe it. Beliefs, like preferences, and indeed all effects, have causes. Another minority will arrive at some extreme effect on the other end of the spectrum - paralysis.

What people have a hard time accepting is what I’d call the Principle of Death: that the world as we know it is not an absolute - not necessarily “natural” and not therefore “normal” in that sense, and that we are unlikely to arrive at perfection within it, but that we must still strive toward perfection from our imperfection. A futile cause, arguably, because indeed the world is subjected to futility, but a cause that makes us fully human. Indeed, this is our work here - it is the genus of all that we properly call work.

[for reference, see Driving as a Mental Skill in this article]

Philosophy in between Meetings

In the course of work one will eventually run into the enthusiastic semi-intellectual. It might be the vocal ideologue, telling you how everything is supposed to fit together, or it could be the lazy skeptic, who takes the position that anything outside the realm of his experience, knowledge, or specialization, is silly.

There’s always someone who tells you how the world works (or doesn’t), because he has accumulated so much wisdom and experience that it seems to him quite small. Of course, a real sage wouldn’t define the world.

Lately, I’m using a couple of out-of-the-box responses. One is, ‘you can’t answer faith’. That’s what it is, really. Faith that if the world were bigger, you would have grasped it by now. Faith that your logic is impeccable, and nothing could have escaped your pervue. Faith that those who don’t nod with you either didn’t understand you, or are just being ridiculous. Or have just been gullible enough to be taken in, somehow - sold something on a late night infomercial.

There’s always someone who tells you how the world works because, to him, it seems quite small.That leads to my other standard response, when my failure to express agreement is deemed ridiculous: ‘Hmm. Yeah, I must not be very bright. I guess I’m just not too swift. What you’re describing is apparently just subtle enough to be beyond my understanding.’ Then I just chuckle and go back to work. There’s not much the office chair ideologue can do with that, since you’re unafraid of his perceptions. In fact, it generally takes him a while to realize you’ve simply dismissed them as absurd, and meanwhile, you can go back to work. And if someone says, “well, at least you admit it”, just keep agreeing: “just so”, and go back to work.

The principle is very simple: you only duel with someone whose reasoning you respect. The rest you just let waive an epee in the air at nothing, while you do something productive. Engage by not engaging. I will occasionally knock a point out of my face, with the overzealous or the simply annoying, and that usually discourages them in the long term, though sometimes they whine about it. Generally, though, if you can manage a decent mood, it’s better to pretend they’re not in your face at all.

Philosophy is for those who know what it really is. Treated as a hobby, like any hobby, something to dabble in at the coffee pot, it really has no place at work. Just like politics and religion. That’s the real reason it should be anathema - lack of time, depth, and context, and not any nonsensical posturing about diversity, which is just another philosophy in which corporations dabble when it suits them.

If you work in a corporation, besides, it’s really a trap. It’s not true that ALL ideas are equally acceptable. It’s a system that rewards whiners, and for your trouble you’re just as likely to get someone whining over your answer to some question as to get a look of bewilderment. In general, it’s best not to bother, however tempting it is to respond. Barring perfections, one does what he can.

Being a Finder

To hate a part of yourself is to hate yourself, and I know no blacker feeling. …We were business people …We made our living… from the things that made our old lives Hell. - Finder, Emma Bull

Rule: Find the unavoidable, unacceptable of you; then try to get paid for it.

Perfect Exercise for Intense People

This is it. HIIT! High Intensity Interval Training. It’s going to be my new best friend. I’ve been hitting the gym, but what I’ve been doing is just not for the impatient. If you’re a decisive, bottom line, goal-driven, task intensive, and even impulsive kind of person, HIIT is it! Seriously - this is the ideal exercise pattern for the person who would rather be doing something with a point.

[What is HIIT?] [How to HIIT] [Found it with LifeHack]

What if it’s not that easy?

With regard to the future, people seem willing to accept one of two basic extremes: the status quo - that things will be as they have been - or the end of the world. What seems harder to accept, indeed a less popular, socially heretical idea, is that we will endure suffering, hardship, and chaos, but the world will not end, not immediately, not while it can get worse.

The terror of inconvenience, of deprivation, of having to undergo radical life changes is simply unacceptable in many quarters. Optimism, at least a basic underlying level of it, is the required dogma of the day. We’re supposed to be happy, and we’d darned well better be.

Frankly, then, fear will likely be the rule of the day, and all the societal soma necessary to squelch it, if things continue as they seem to be going.

What seems harder to accept is that we will endure suffering, hardship, and chaos, but the world will not end.OMG! Life won’t mean anything! I’ve actually heard people suggest that. How tenuous our grasp of meaning if it depends on cheap food, cheaper fuel, and the prospect of living always beyond our financial, environmental, and geopolitical means. How shallow such life already is, let alone then. But perhaps a leaner future with a smaller footprint is a blessing in disguise.

In any case, it may be that the middle class era is ending - the values of safety, security, deliverance from risk may seem unrealistic one day - the vestige of nostalgia - a bit like the romantic conventions of old movies.

How might we live in a world in which risk is the norm, security is not something you can be granted, even by totalitarian utopias, and safety is neither in numbers nor homogeneity?

Whenever someone says things will always be as they have been, I prefer to look at the radical changes taking place. If you don’t believe it, just remember that a couple of years ago, we were buying SUVs like crazy. More than half of us were sure there was no such thing as global warming. We knew that gas prices would go down with a reluctant war over oil. The marker has already moved, and we’re never going back, my friends. When they say ‘maybe the world is coming to an end’, I prefer to ask “What if it doesn’t?” How will you live your life then? Isn’t it interesting to think about?

Or maybe I just like observing that shudder of horror barely concealed by stuffing in a little more food or fleeing to a refreshing diversion. But I wouldn’t be that bad.

Fuel - Food - Food - Jobs

I Know How

Never market your own services by saying “I’ve been trained to…”. It makes you sound like a terrier. It might be a simple mistake, but it could also mean that you still are thinking of your work as a job. What will a client be more interested in - someone who makes his success relying entirely on himself - and his continued success depends on that being a consistently wise choice, or someone who sounds like he expects some invisible superior to step in if he makes a mistake? Training is a good thing, but just say “I know how”.