Category: Knowledge work

Life hacks at Etech

More insight into Life Hacks from Cory. His notes walk this clever balance
between making me regret that I couldn't be there myself and feeling as
though I still got much of the benefit anyway.

One note that I'm sure others will pick up on. Danny talks about
wanting to find a keyboard macro program for Windows. One excellent
answer of course is ActiveWords. I predict a phone call from Buzz to Danny in the near future.

ETECH Notes: Life Hacks Live!. Cory Doctorow:
Here are my notes from Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann's Life Hacks Live,
at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Danny's
been doing variations on his Life Hacks talk since the last Emerging
Tech conference — it's basically an effort to research the
productivity patterns of very prolific geeks and convert them to wisdom
that anyone can follow. Merlin has been adapting the fantastic
productivity cookbook Getting Things Done into a series of tools for geeks, on an equally fantastic blog called 43 Folders.
They're now working on a book version of their stuff for O'Reilly
called Life Hacks, and today's session was a preview of it — it was
uproariously funny and incredibly inspiring.

Here's a recap of last year, in bumper stickers:

HACKERS HEART PLAIN TEXT

Geeks store what they do in text and spurn big apps, using plain
text editors. Simplicity and speed, ease of search and extraction, cut
and paste. All you need in a filing system.

MY OTHER APP IS IN ~/BIN

If it wasn't plaintext, there's one app that they loved, like
mail, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. The rest was little glue scripts in
~/bin, secret scripts they are embarrassed about and don't share with
others, though it turns out that they're all really similar.

SUPER PROLIFIC GEEKS DO IT IN PUBLIC WITH COMPLETE STRANGERS AND LIKE IT. OH YES.

(don't put this on your car)

Geeks get their credibility and prolificness out of sharing
everything — put it in public and the public organizes it for you. Put
it on a Wiki and others will fix it.

A Swiss Army Knife Approach to Project Management

I’m running a bit behind these days. That makes it a bit ironic that my
most recent column at Enterprise System Journal looks at the topic of
project management.

The column actually appeared last week and looks at project management
from a minimalist perspective. Jim Powell, my editor there, decided to
title it A Swiss Army Knife for Project Management.
My launching point was to ask what everyone needed to know about
project management rather than what the specialists needed to know.

My thinking on this topic has certainly benefitted from the excellent Focused Performance Blog by Frank Patrick and Hal Macomber’s Reforming Project Management.
I’ve also begun to take a close look at basecamp and at ubergroups as
toolsets that are trying to simplify project management for all of us
in place of supporting the complexities that only a small handful of
experts actually need.

Valuing specialist knowledge

While this has been true and will likely continue to be so, it's also
cause for concern. To be a specialist in anything implies we are at
best generalists in most everything else. If we don't learn to value
and appreciate specialist knowledge that we don't have, we will
continue to be at the mercy of those who can best pretend to expertise.

“The only people who value your specialist knowledge are the ones who already have it.”

– William Tozier, On trivia and details and miscellanea: [Seb's Open Research]

Contracting, clarity, and requirements

I’ve certainly been guilty of this kind of approach at multiple points throughout my career. The best techniques I’ve encountered for dealing with these challenges are the “contracting” conversations that Peter Block advocates so strongly in his excellent Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used. Regardless of which side of the table you are on, you had better become more adept at Block’s contracting or you will be building or paying for
entirely too many custom-made drywall saws.

Clarity, Junior Engineers, Requirements, and Frustration.

There’s an amazing essay at The Spurious Pundit on “Picture Hanging.” It’s an allegory that explores how simple requirements in software aren’t that obvious to folks who may not have context. The writing is wonderful, do check it out, it’s worth your time. Subscribed.

A highlight:

You tell him to hang the photo of your pet dog, and he comes back a week later,asking if you could “just double-check” his design for a drywall saw. “Why are you designing a drywall saw?”
“Well, the wood saw in the office toolbox isn’t good for cutting drywall.”
“What, you think you’re the first person on earth to try and cut drywall? You can buy a saw for that at Home Depot.”
“Okay, cool, I’ll go get one.”
“Wait, why are you cutting drywall in the first place?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure what the best practices for hanging pictures were, so I went online and found a newsgroup for gallery designers. And they said that the right way to do it was to cut through the wall, and build the frame into it. That way, you put the picture in from the back, and you can make the glass much more secure since you don’t have to move it. It’s a much more elegant solution than that whole nail thing.”
“…”

This metaphor may be starting to sound particularly fuzzy, but trust me – there
are very real parallels to draw here. If you haven’t seen them yet in your professional
life, you will. [Spurious Pundit]

[ComputerZen.com – Scott Hanselman’s Weblog]

BlogWalk Chicago Reflections

I spent an excellent day Saturday with both old and new blogging friends at BlogWalk Chicago. Jack Vinson and AKMA have good overview posts and more can be found at BlogWalk TopicExchange and Technorati tag:BlogWalk. With some luck I will find some time to process much of the excellent conversation and output of the day.

One conversation thread that wound in and out of the day was the relation of blogs and social
software to large organizations. Tom Sherman struggled with this discussion and I thought it worth taking a few moments to try and articulate my perspective.One reality for most of us is that we can expect to spend a substantial portion of our time in and around large organizations. I believe they will be part of our work landscape for some time to come. The nature of the work expected of many of us is evolving rapidly. It’s more fluid and less well-defined. Job descriptions, when they are available, don’t provide a lot of guidance.

At the same time the mythology around organizations and work is that there should
be clear guidelines around what is expected of us. I know that I struggle with these uncertainties routinely. Most of the day to day work that leads up to knowledge products and deliverables is fundamentally invisible. The bits that make up email and draft documents and spreadsheet models are hidden and shared only among a handful of people until they are completed. More than anything else, what blogs and social software do is make it drop dead simple to make the conduct of knowledge work visible. To me this is of fundamental importance. Knowledge work depends on our ability to learn and improve as we go. That depends on being able to see what is going on and social software makes that feasible.

Organizations struggle with the notion that they need to learn. Too often, learning is something that someone else in the organization needs to do. Moreover, real learning (as opposed to what passes for learning in too many training environments) is a social activity. These tools will be
central to creating the environment in which necessary learning can take place. Today, that learning activity is almost exclusively the province of those who’ve retained their natural curiosity and inquisitiveness in spite of eduational and organizational systems that work overtime to suppress these natural instincts. The work that needs to be done will force the rest of us to adapt as well. Seems to me that working out this transition presents some interesting work to be done inside organizations.

Column at Enterprise Systems Journal.

This week marks the start of a new sideline for me. Jim Powell, editor of Enterprise Systems Journal, has asked me to write a column for them covering the same kinds of material I talk about here. The first column, Bridging the IT Cultural Divide,
ran earlier this week. In it I start to explore an idea I’ve been
trying to work out about oral vs. literate styles of thinking as they
relate to organizations.

Thanks to the indefatigable Buzz Bruggeman for brokering the introduction. And thanks to Jim Powell for his efforts at edting.

UC Berkeley on Information Overload

Certainly one indicator of information overload is that this item has been sitting in my “blog this” queue since October. Nonetheless, it remains an important set of insights about the data and information that is being created on a daily basis. It is an excellent update, by
the folks at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, of a study they first did in 1999.

In the early days of my career, we thought the problem was to capture and record the information managers needed to make effective business decisions. We’ve more than solved the capture and recording side of the problem; what we’re now working out is how to solve the problem created by that “solution.”

Information Overload.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by information? This site will open your eyes.

Alan Kucheck (a Borland VP)
tipped me off to this research. Perhaps this explains why he doesn’t have is own
Weblog. 😉

If you created 800 MBytes of new information last year, congratulations: You’re as prolific as the average person on the planet.

That’s a big number, but it will likely grow faster than we can imagine. This is the
“information tsunami” that we refer to from time-to-time. Although MyST and MySmartChannels are far from the solution to this rapid per-capita growth of content, they do represent useful tools for chipping away at many of the information problems that are best addressed by lose-coupling applications.

See Also

[Into the MyST]