How I explain Paul Graham’s Maker schedule and Manager schedule without being insulting
One of Paul Graham’s most useful insights has been his Maker Schedule vs Manager Schedule. Go ahead and read the link if you’re not familiar with the concept. It is True Useful Deep and very hard to explain to people without being insulting By singleing yourself out as a “maker”, and hence on a “Maker […]
An odd thing I noticed after years and years of coding
Growing up all of my teachers told me that my handwriting was horrible and needed improvement. I took two years of Russian in college and somehow learning Cyrillic made my handwriting even worse. My first few jobs after college had varying degrees of handwriting needed, but over time, and especially after I moved to development […]
Productivity Tool – a printed call sheet
For unknown reasons I have embraced printed forms this past year. I started using the Pomodoro Technique (and their To Do Today sheet) for several months now and recently I came up with a form to keep phone calls on track, and I thought I would share it here. This will probably make it into […]
How I engineer my life for maximum productivity
So far 2010 has been the year of gradual improvements in life, health and productivity. I made most of these changes based on what I learned in Brain Rules. Here is a snapshot of my changes so far: General Improvements: No more smoking (though it did take two months to get my concentration back) 8 […]
The 5 lessons of personal development
I’ve read many personal development books and business books in the past year, and they all seem to be variants of the following five ideas Live in the present – thinking about the past and the future leads to thoughts of grievance or anxiety. The best example is Derek Sivers’ essay on the topic Be […]
The Kill Shot and Project Management
What is a preventable cause of scope creep? Anxiety. Anxiety attacks project managers at the end of projects, making some or all of the following happen: Project managers insist on new “essential” features Assistants demand detailed technical explanations for the most mundane of matters. Urgent, surprise meetings will be held People you’ve never heard of […]
New Business Adage: The Lemansky Rule
In the television show about corrupt cops The Shield, Curtis Lemansky, one of the main characters, once said “Why can’t we just do our jobs, and stop?“. That quote came back to me while reading Jason Friend’s book Rework. Rework is A) about doing the bare minimum, B) starting now, and C) completing the work […]
Why you should never complain about anything – with anecdotal proof!
My new commandment: Never complain about anything. Ever. If you feel the need to complain to pressure someone else to make something happen, then be honest and call it manipulation. I realized this while at a client meeting; we were talking about problems with a botched sales program and the staff had a litany of […]
Ways to be smarter – I’ll be testing some of these soon
Via some Twitter link I can no longer find, I stumbled across these two posts. Nootropics: their effects, their risks, and where to get them – I think I’ll be picking up some Thiamine and sticking with that, as the others seem a bit scary. It is a fascinating bit of research though. Nootropics are […]
How to write an effective email
After listening to Jeff Atwood rant about email on the most recent Stack Overflow Podcast I thought I would write a quick guide to creating an effective business email. I am defining “business email” as email designed to garner information needed to perform some larger, work related task. Business emails tend to be a constant […]