BretWagner.com

I’m see­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing shift in how I work. Where once I con­sid­ered Out­look to be an invalu­able tool for get­ting work done, I now con­sider it a nec­es­sary evil for use only when necessary.

Tak­ing on a new man­age­ment role left me over­whelmed with the amount of com­mu­ni­ca­tion I saw from project team mem­bers. Add to that my cus­tomer respon­si­bil­i­ties, and I was left with lit­tle time for any­thing but email. This focus on get­ting X num­ber of emails out the door a day left me with lit­tle sat­is­fac­tion at the end of the day.  I would go home dread­ing the knowl­edge that there would be another hun­dred for me to act on the next day.

Once I eval­u­ated my daily activ­i­ties, I started to see a clearer pic­ture.  Pareto’s Prin­ci­ple, also know as the 80/20 rule, says that 20% of one’s actions yield 80% of the results. The par­a­digm shift for me was to iden­tify all my tasks in the 20% bucket. 

Here’s my ‘a-ha’: major­ity of my 20% actions are spent away from e-mail.

This con­clu­sion bears repeat­ing — only a small hand­ful of the high value tasks I per­form in an aver­age day have any­thing to do with e-mail.

Some exam­ples of high value tasks that do not involve e-mail:

• weekly plan­ning and pri­or­i­ti­za­tion I do Sun­day evening and Mon­day morning.
• progress report review to get bird’s eye view of the project status
• cus­tomer edu­ca­tion via web pre­sen­ta­tion (work: MS Live­meet­ing, but if it was up to me every­one would be using dimdim)
• cus­tomer rela­tion­ship build­ing — feed­back in the form of notes and phone calls
• eval­u­at­ing com­pany processes and look­ing for oppor­tu­ni­ties to improve

Let’s face it — e-mail is a major time suck. Man­ag­ing your inbox real-time is an even big­ger time suck, becuase it refo­cuses your atten­tion away from the task at hand, which is prop­bably higher impor­tance than that new email mes­sage you were just noti­fied about.

Spend more of your valu­able time away from e-mail and I’ll bet you’ll see a boost in results.

Too much of the world lacks access to clean drink­ing water. Every minute, seven peo­ple die from bad water or no water.  It’s an unfor­tu­nate truth that as recent as 2003, over 1.3 bil­lion peo­ple have no access to clean water.

Engi­neer Michael Pritchard decided to do some­thing about this — invent­ing the portable Life­saver fil­ter, which can con­t­a­m­i­nated water drink­able in sec­onds.  Check out this amaz­ing demo from TED­G­lobal 2009.

This cutting-edge nan­otech­nol­ogy promises to rev­o­lu­tion­ize how we deliver aid to third world coun­tries and those suf­fer­ing from nat­ural dis­as­ters.  Deliv­er­ing the equip­ment for peo­ple to purify water already avail­able in these stricken areas promises to be faster and cheaper than deliv­er­ing bot­tled water.  What’s more, the bot­tle that Pritchard has designed will clean up to 1,000 gal­lons of water with a sin­gle fil­ter.   An adult human drinks 64 oz. of water a day, which trans­lates into 182.5 gal­lons a year.  A sin­gle bot­tle could pro­vide a per­son with over five years of clean water!
 

But I think the most promise is in the 1.3 bil­lion with­out access to clean drink­ing water on a reg­u­lar basis.  Imag­ine the effects on gen­eral health of those who might now have a means to elim­i­nate dis­ease and sick­ness caused by this con­t­a­m­i­nated water.

Funny how mean­ing­ful mes­sages cross your path in two’s.

Not more than a week after dis­cov­er­ing Capt. Charles Moore TED video describ­ing his dis­cov­ery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), I get a call from an engi­neer at Pepsi want­ing to put together a pro­gram to recy­cle bot­tles in America’s schools.

Some back­ground… the GPGP is an end­less float­ing waste of plas­tic trash. Moore is draw­ing atten­tion to the grow­ing, chok­ing prob­lem of plas­tic debris in our seas.  You can watch his TED video here:

I think it is a bril­liant idea to engage stu­dents in social issues, and using recy­cling as a teach­able moment is a great pur­suit.  Why not cre­ate a school-wide pro­gram that engages all sub­jects including:

• Sci­ence — study how plas­tic is made, where the raw mate­ri­als come from, why it takes so long to break down, and what options exist out there to help reduce the plas­tic bottle’s impact on the environment.
• Math — you see it in the video… we are deal­ing with huge num­bers here.  Have stu­dents put the num­ber of plas­tic bot­tles thrown away each year into terms they under­stand — bot­tles per per­son, weight, time, etc. Use dimen­sional analy­sis to con­vert between units.
• Eng­lish — chal­lenge stu­dents to write an argu­ment piece on why plas­tics are great.  Then make them turn around and write another piece on why plas­tics are awful.
• Social Stud­ies — what is the social impact on garbage?  How does one bal­ance the social impact of plas­tics (which every­one should rec­og­nize as a sig­nif­i­cant and valu­able tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment… I don’t want it to seem like I’m harp­ing on plas­tics too much) with the impact on the environment.

What other ideas are there for teach­ing stu­dents about smart use of our nat­ural resources?  Chime in on our com­ments section.

I’ve got a beef with how feed­back is done in the work­ing world.

Our man­agers give feed­back dur­ing reviews– if you’re lucky, quar­terly. If you’re not, maybe yearly or less frequently.

And that’s about it.

Con­tin­u­ous feed­back begets con­tin­u­ous improve­ment, but I’m not see­ing any good ideas for how to get feed­back into my hands. If cre­at­ing a sys­tem for con­tin­u­ous feed­back was easy, it would be out there by now. This sys­tem should allow for con­sis­tent feed­back that is accu­rate and actionable.

From Y-Combinator:

Now that so much hap­pens on com­put­ers con­nected to net­works, it’s pos­si­ble to mea­sure things we may not have real­ized we could. And there are some big prob­lems that may be sol­u­ble if we can mea­sure more. The most impor­tant of all is the defin­ing flaw of large orga­ni­za­tions: you can’t tell who the most pro­duc­tive peo­ple are. A small com­pany is mea­sured directly by the mar­ket. But once an orga­ni­za­tion gets big enough that peo­ple on in the inte­rior are pro­tected from mar­ket forces, pol­i­tics starts to rule, instead of per­for­mance. An improve­ment of even a few per­cent in the abil­ity to mea­sure what actu­ally hap­pens in large orga­ni­za­tions would have a huge impact on the world econ­omy, and a startup that enabled it would be enti­tled to a cut.

Here’s an idea: why not cre­ate a sys­tem like what Face­book has in place for ‘Like’ing a web­site that makes it as easy as click­ing on a but­ton. Instantly, this infor­ma­tion is posted to my pro­file, and a counter adds total Likes on a site.

In a soft­ware com­pany, one has the lux­ury of see­ing what ele­gant code can do for you, and what prob­lems crappy code can cre­ate. Let’s face it– there is plenty of both.

So why not cre­ate a sys­tem that rewards the for­mer and iden­ti­fies the lat­ter. When I’m con­sult­ing with a cus­tomer and come across an ele­gant solu­tion that helps a cus­tomer, let me give props to the devel­oper and the hard work that went into it. Good doc­u­men­ta­tion? Props to the writer. A process that removes road­blocks and cuts down on headaches? Props to the implementer.

And what about crappy code? Code that is narrow-sighted or that solves one prob­lem only to cre­ate two oth­ers? That should get dinged.

Like­wise, if I mis­man­age my time and miss a dead­line, or develop code that breaks, ding me please. I like that kind of feed­back, because it allows me to adjust.

This kind of thing is more than a social net­work. It is a social pro­fes­sional net­work. Call it a ‘sopro’ net­work for con­tin­u­ous feedback.

An inter­est­ing obser­va­tion of can­di­dates I’ve inter­viewed– it’s been about 50/50 between those can­di­dates who ask ques­tions dur­ing the inter­view and those that don’t.

One of the things I love about a can­di­date ask­ing ques­tions dur­ing an inter­view is that it shows gen­uine inter­est. Even if the can­di­date has already heard the answer, or maybe asked the ques­tion of another inter­viewer, it never hurts to get another perspective.

But there’s one ques­tion that is solid gold, and I have yet to hear it. I’ve made it a habit to ask this ques­tion when I’m in the candidate’s posi­tion. The ques­tion: Does any doubt remain that I would be a good fit for this position?

Boom.

Likely that you caught the inter­viewer off guard with that one. I could see some inter­view­ers not lik­ing this kind of direct ques­tion asked by a can­di­date. But I think the pros of ask­ing it far out­weight the cons, and I’m usu­ally will­ing to take the risk. You should be too.

Think about it for a minute.

The inter­viewer, out of polite­ness, is not likely to say ‘I don’t think that ques­tion is appro­pri­ate.’ Or ignore it. They have to answer, and the only two options are ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

If the inter­viewer answers ‘yes’, well then, you have a chance to probe a bit fur­ther and use your mad inter­view­ing skillz to try to rec­on­cile that doubt.

If the inter­viewer answers ‘no’, you have the job, right?

Not nec­es­sar­ily. But that’s the fun part about this. You have a chance to ask this of all your inter­view­ers… you can get con­sen­sus, and then you can use that con­sen­sus to your advan­tage. Build on pre­vi­ous responses to this query in sub­se­quent inter­views, and wrap this up at the end of the day with an explo­sive close that is the last thing the com­pany will hear from you before they call to offer you that job.