1 week. 1 project.

Last week I had the pleasure of eating lunch with Dave Woodall. Our conversation covered several topics but eventually landed on the how and why of structuring your daily routine.

He breaks daily life up into 3 parts:

1. Personal - Addressing your physical, spiritual, and intellectual needs.
2. Responsibilities - Fulfilling your obligations to your work, the maintenance of your assets (car, home, etc), and chores.
3. Relational - Investing in your relationships with your significant other, friends, and family.

Now once you have these three aspects situated, he says, look at your work week (Monday to Friday has 120 hours). Say you work 40 hours a week. That leaves 80 hours. Subtract 8 hours a day for sleep and 1 hour of daily commuting, that leaves you with 32 hours (= 120 - 40 - 40 - 8) to address your personal needs, your responsibilities outside of work, and manage all of your relationships. How do you find time for all of that?

Well, work runs from 9am to 5pm. You typically see your family and friends after 5pm. When do you sleep? 9pm to 5am. Where does that leave time for you? 5am to 9am (for better or worse ;) You can try and cram in your personal needs after work but then it detracts from the time you have with all those around you.

This week I am going to take on this schedule, in an effort to structure my life in order to address the three largest aspects of my life: my self, my responsibilities, and all those others that I am blessed to be around.

Welp, here goes!

I asked myself this question because of a segment of Clay Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life?:

A strategy – whether in companies or in life – is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. With every moment of your time, every decision about how your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you… In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented.

I then asked, “What strategy am I trying to live? What are my priorities?” and couldn’t come up with an answer. As a Catholic, I’m called to place God first. Am I doing that? How does that manifest itself? To my parents family is extremely important. It’s very important to them, but for me? Finally, friendships are incredibly important. Am I treating others with care?

So to what degree I need to focus on these three, I don’t know. However, I figured it would be easier to answer, do anyone of these (or other priorities) need to receive more or less of resources?

With time being one resource at my disposal, I decided to track and see where it goes. What are my actual priorities? I made a Google form (I’m actually pretty proud of this :) where I ask two things:

1. What did you just do?
2. How engaged were you?

I’ll use this form to notate anytime I transition from one thing to another. For example, I’ll make an entry when I leave work, after I work out, or go to mass. This form will timestamp each entry so it’ll track how long I did something, what it was, and the quality of that activity. I’ll report back at the end of the week with how I actually spend my time.

Welp, here goes!

I just came across an article called How Geniuses Think. It talks about strategies geniuses use to achieve their breakthroughs. This week I’m going to tackle two of these strategies by writing 5 blog posts explaining things metaphorically.

5 Posts

I want to take on an ambitious 5 blog posts because geniuses produce. They are prolific. One benefit is that I’ll have 5 new blog posts. Another is that I will be forced to think in depth about a breadth of subjects.

Thinking Metaphorically

Communication is difficult. Especially when the subject is complicated as well. How can this be made easier? Package the idea in familiar wrapping paper. That way the idea can be associated with something that the audience already understands making it easier to digest.

If you haven’t read the entire article, please do. It provides some very pragmatic advice for pretending to be genius. Because isn’t that the point? Pretend who you’re who you want to be.

Welp, here goes!!

With the proliferation of text-based communication, I’ve found that I am a worse communicator. For every tweet, status update, text message, or blog post, I lose spontaneity, authenticity, and confidence in my communication with others. So this week I’m going to degrade these “proactive” or controllable mediums, to the old school in person/phone call.

When I’m with people I’m pretty easy to talk with. I’ve got an arsenal of puns and terrible jokes, I’m inquisitive, and I love eliciting and listening to stories. However when I enter the world of text I become my own worst enemy. I lose confidence and overthink things. I lose visual and verbal cues. But the major missing aspect is the immediacy to respond. When talking with someone you have to respond. You can’t stop a conversation, think of a clever response, make some edits, add some ‘lols’ and ‘omgs’, and then hit send. You have to a say something. It’s not the best thing you could have come up with, but it is genuine and it is authentically you.

With this week’s project I’m still going to use text mediums but when I’m struggling with a way to phrase something, I’m going to talk with the other person. If I’m agonizing over a text, it’s either: not worth saying or should be said with my own voice.

Welp, here goes!

This past week Eoin and I created, crafted, and submitted a proposal to Rails Conf, THE conference about Ruby on Rails. Now all we can do is wait and see if our talk gets selected.

Preparing this talk was great because I had to sit down and really think about my job. What causes my despair at work? How do I work myself out of that? This reflection gave me some greater insights into why some days I come home feeling great and others utterly defeated. Also, to some extent, I control these feelings and as a result, can control how I feel when I come home each day. There’s a great satisfaction in self-discovery.

We also got great support from a developer at Living Social, Mike Gehard. He was not only a great sounding board for some of our ideas, but he validated the theme of our talk with some of his own examples. This gave us additional confidence that we were delving into a subject that should be talked about.

So we’ll see what becomes of this talk and this conference. It’s been a great experience thus far and as a result this week was a resounding success.

Here is the abstract of Eoin and I’s submission to Rails conf. The title is: Deprecating Despair.

Abstract

One of the biggest unaddressed problems we’ve encountered as an engineering team is: despair.

Despair is when you are fixing a bug and you happen upon the ghetto of your code base. Ill maintained, written a long time ago, duct taped together to just barely work. You go in and are immediately crippled by the state of affairs. The poor code causes you to seize up, incapacitated. How do you go forward? The business still needs the bug fixed. So you carefully tiptoe in, make your fix, and try to leave without touching anything else, fearing any reason to return.

How can you avoid this? How can your code base instill hope? A hope that is the premise of responsible activity, not an empty optimism that the future will necessarily be better than the past.*

Trada is a mid sized shop, working in our 3 year old application filled with one-offs and best guesses. This is how we are turning this around. This is how we’re Deprecating Despair.

* from Pope John Paul II’s address to the United Nations

This week I’ll be submitting a proposal to talk at this years Rails Conf in Austin. This’ll be my first talk submission to a technical conference but luckily I’ve got an idea of what I want to talk about. By the end of the week I want to have my application submitted.

When looking at past presentations, people magnify their daily challenges and explain their solution. So I tried to think about the challenges we’ve experienced at Trada. One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered is: despair.

Despair is when you are fixing a bug and you happen upon the ghetto of your code base. Ill maintained, written a long time ago, duct taped so that it just barely works. You go in and are just crippled by the state of affairs. You are physically incapacitated because the code is so poor. How do you go forward? The business still needs the bug fixed. So you carefully tiptoe in, make your fix, and try to leave without touching anything else, fearing any reason for returning.

How can you avoid this? How can your code base instead instill hope? That’s the subject I’d like to talk about. This week will be researching the subjects I need to talk about and just how to propose a talk.

Welp, here goes!

This week I will be tackling the project of Morning Pages. A coworker mentioned them to me and after some googling I stumbled across a blogger that had already undertaken the endeavor: Morning Pages: Results From My Two-Week Experiment and 3 Reasons You Should Write “Morning Pages”.

Morning Pages come from Julia Cameron’s “The Artist Way” and are defined as

three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness

I’ve done stream of consciousness writing before (and read the stream-of-consciousness/high school classic: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) but have never practiced it. Since I’ve been getting up earlier I’ll wake up, sit down with the pen for 15 minutes, write whatever comes to mind, and become a member of the pen 15 club.

Welp, here goes!

This week was a belated success. I did everything Saturday and today but it worked out to be very, very intriguing. I did took visual notes of Shawn Achor’s talk The Happy Secret to Work 4 times and once on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s talk on Flow.

I realized I am terrible at drawing people. As good as my stick figures are, they just don’t convey all the emotion and passion I wanted them to. But I did notice, I was more confident drawing them when I was drawing on the whiteboard than in my notebook. I think it was because the thickness of the marker. 37Signals expound on this observation saying:

Fine tips invite you to draw while Sharpies invite you to just to get your concepts out into big bold shapes and lines.

The Happy Secret to Work

I picked this talk because it was one of the most emailed talks of the week on TED. It was a bit tough to draw out because there were a lot of anecdotes (although I think my unicorn representation came out pretty well. :) The core of his presentation was fantastic and I tried to capture it the best I could. Here are my results.

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Flow

This was a talk I went into cold. I felt like I was listening to a lecturer in college again. The only difference was I had space. I had two whole white boards to work with. As a result I didn’t pressure myself skimp on notes or resort to text (as much). It was quite freeing. Here’s what I came up with.

The talk itself was fascinating. There were times where I would get lost in the presentation, have to pull myself out of it, and start taking notes again. It was a really interesting subject and I would highly encourage you to watch it.

This week I’m going to find a TED talk, listen to it, and try to visually illustrate what is being communicated. To see what I mean, check out this video - Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

What astounds me is the illustrator’s ability to provide a visual, coherent narrative. In the video above, he (pronoun based on the amount of arm hair) easily handled transitions, subject changes, and aptly represented each idea. So I will try this three different times, each time (hopefully) getting a better feel for the talk.

Why?

The impact of visualizations have been talked about in communicating ideas. By forcing myself to visually communicate ideas I hope to speak with greater visual cues to help me to become a better speaker.

Welp, here goes!