The Edge Is Not About Content

This is a nice saying for our bright Internet future:

“Pay more attention to how connections are made than the content of what is said.”

That’s from Brian Oberkirch, whose last name appeared silly at first, but I’m really warming to now. It looks stylish when printed.

I suppose if we wanted to flesh out a big philosophical essay about what he’s said, we could talk about how content is the building blocks of the Internet, and the Internet is a network doing its job, that is, being greater than the sum of its parts.

Can’t somebody write the rest of the philosophical essay for me? I promise you can have royalties.

Model for personal project management

Model for what now? Geez I need to hire a title writer.

Basically, I generally suffer for aimlessness, and by suffer I mean suffer. So, I’m developing a robust framework for tasks and projects.

To my current model, the world is projects. A project might be learning the banjo, maintaining a website, or getting a job.

Projects break down into tasks. Tasks are bite-sized things to do. Your list of tasks is simply your everyday “to-do” list. Projects that don’t need to be worked on right now might not need to broken down into tasks yet (in a Getting Things Done (“GTD”) system, they might even sit in the “Someday/Maybe” basket). But for the projects you are currently working on, decide on the next steps you need to take. These become tasks, to be added to your to-do list.

Because every task fits into a project, and every project has a reason to exist (you didn’t write down a project just for the hell of it, did you?), you can be sure that every task you do has a purpose. As long as you stick to your task list, you don’t have to worry about wasting time.

Now, some tasks don’t exactly fall neatly into projects. There’s a few general things, like sleep, but often we don’t need that in a to-do list. How many times have you gotten to the morning and exclaimed, “Oh bugger, I forgot to sleep!” (Yes, it’s more than once in your life, but not as often as when you got to the morning and exclaimed “Oh bugger, I forgot to write that review!”)

Then there’s planning. When you think about the future, you might be planning, but you might also be daydreaming. Think about it. To a certain extent, it is worthwhile to daydream. It’s good for relaxation and creativity, among other things. But too much daydreaming is just silly. You might want to put “planning” down on your list of tasks. Then if you want to schedule your time, you can set aside some for planning. It takes discipline, but it is possible to hold yourself to working out the path to your goals, rather than wandering off to ponder marrying supermodels and making a speech to your high school assembly four years ago.

Focus on results. How do you get results? Complete the tasks that have meaning. The model described here is far from a comprehensive or robust guide, but I hope it helps you find your own personal system for making meaningful progress in your life.

What’s your model? Comment below.

White-collar dragon spear style: i.e. kick ass.

Here’s some tips I saw in a magazine article and jotted down. Apologies, I don’t remember the name. I read it from a photocopy in a bundle of selected articles.

• Efficiency. Be decisive. How much time do you spend each day thinking about what you’re supposed to be doing?
• Goals. Short- and long-term. Work out what you want to achieve. Saving a deposit for a house? Aiming for a promotion at work? Retiring at 55? Set out some goals. For the sake of cream pie, write it down. When you just think about your goals, they’re nice and airy-fairy. Airy-fairy went out of fashion when Yahweh kicked us out of the garden, buddy. Now work out what you spend your time on. What are the outcomes? How do these outcomes help you progress towards one or more of your stated goals? In general, most people waste about a quarter of their waking hours doing things that really don’t help. And I’m not just talking about watching TV: watching TV helps you stay in touch with your culture, plus it’s a chance to rest and relax, so you can work another time. I’m talking about mindlessly wandering the Internet, dating people you don’t actually like, and massaging your colleagues’ hearts when they moan about management being harsh.
• Schedule and protect your time. Before this week, I had never heard the phrase “schedule and protect”. But it’s fairly simple. Write down a schedule, and if someone tries to interrupt it, try not to let them. For example, if a friend comes over and decides it’s time for a chat, but you’re in the middle of a scheduled 30-minute block of paperwork, consider making the chat very brief, or explaining to your friend that you’re on a roll, and would rather talk to him later. (Because you have a schedule, you can tell him or her exactly when that is… without sounding like a psychologist making an appointment.) There’s a man in my organisation who takes this approach very, very far: he diverts his phone to voicemail without it even ringing, closes his email client, and just works solidly on a predetermined task. Then he has scheduled “admin time” for answering people’s voicemail messages and emails, then he’s back to another scheduled task. Is this too far? Comment below.
• Get support. It’s surprising how rarely people ask for help when they could. Can you offload the kids on a friend so you can work late or get to that conference? Would that passive co-worker of yours actually make a peep, ever, if you politely asked him to do all your low-value work? Exploit people, that’s what they’re there for. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Well, there’s a few pointers I read in the press. What do you think?

Developmental assignments: five tips for making progressing in your career while staying put

Wow, what a long title. Today I’m going to talk about a magazine article.

In this article in CIO Magazine, McCauley talks about how you can improve your career while still in the same job. I’m sure a lot of you have had that feeling when you’re stuck in your current position, at least for the short term. Alas, no amount of hard work is going to get you promoted twice a week, so how do you keep yourself on edge while sitting in that same job?

One way is developmental assignments. Basically, you take on responsibilities that challenge you, and expose you to not only new experiences, but new skills and risks. Like any venture, there will be differing levels of risk involved in each individual opportunity. Here are some examples:

• Go to your boss and ask to look after the team’s cheque account for a month. You’ll be exposed to dealing with processes you may never have seen before. Perhaps you’ll have more sympathy for the poor bugger who has to reconcile the account at the end of the month. Most importantly, you’ll learn about financial control and develop your skills, and your boss will hopefully notice that you are eager and trustworthy.
• Low risk: learn a new personal skills, such as a reflective listening technique, and practice it on your co-workers. Even if you stuff it up completely, there’s almost no downside! But it is still a case of you going a little outside your regular comfort zone, and gaining new skills
• High risk: volunteer to champion a new IT (information technology) program. Now that’s high risk. You’ll learn about project management, training, budgeting and, most likely, dealing with the sht hitting the fan. There’s a significant risk of failure, which would reflect badly on you professionally. However, the potential upside is far greater than the lower-risk example above.

There’s a couple of general templates for developmental assignments, which will work in most industries. Firstly, do something you haven’t done before, and learn what it takes to do it well. Usually there is a job in your area that nobody wants to do. Some industries have cleaning the deep fryer in the kitchen, other industries have the really menial bits of data entry, or the nasty clients that the company should be sued for putting you near! While the task in question doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad job, sometimes bad jobs provide particular opportunities.

For example, if nobody likes filing, then perhaps you can take on the filing job for a week, learn how to do it efficiently, and identify improvements. Perhaps you’ll write a set of instructions that allows a newcomer to perform the job efficiently and gain satisfaction from their speed. Or even better, perhaps you’ll improve the filing system or work out how to do away with the need for filing.

But as I said, it doesn’t have to be a bad job. Perhaps you could take a temporary assignment to the team across the floor (it helps if you’re in a large organisation with an open-plan office). When you learn to do their job well, you gain what your resume will refer to as “cross-functional experience”. Depending on the dynamics inside your organisation, you might discover new synergies between the teams.

The two main benefits I see in developmental assignments are: achievements, such as improving processes, which your peers and superiors will remember and hopefully reward you for; and new skills, which you can add to your arsenal for when it comes time to apply for that next promotion.

Article reference: C McCauley, ‘Developmental assignments: five tips for making progressing in your career while staying put’, CIO Magazine, <http://www.cio.com/career/boost/column.html?ID=29114>

Commonwealth vs Virgin credit card

This is an easy one. CBA has customer service that only just beats Centrelink, i.e. woeful. The Commonwealth Bank also has a terribly mediocre product line-up! It’s as if they looked at all the other banking and finance products out there, copied them, but then removed the one good feature that made them attractive to customers.

I’ve been with CBA since forever, simply because they pretty much inherited my accounts off the old state bank.Through pure inertia, I only investigated alternatives within the past month or so.

So now I’m getting a Virgin Money credit card! It’ll have no annual fee, an interest-free period, and a decent interest rate too. Fantastic deal. Not to mention the fantastic customer service. Sure, the on-hold music is more tacky than “funky” (which was their claim), but the people are friendly and they really help.

Contrast this with CBA’s telephone operator: “Did you know you are eligible for a $200 increase in your credit limit?”

Useless.

Time: invest rather than spend

When you spend something, you gain some immediate benefit. But then it’s gone.

When you invest something, you forego that immediate benefit. You must slowly recover that benefit over time. However, the long-term benefit may be greater than the immediate benefit that you could have achieved.

When it comes to your time, you have two choices: spend or invest. You can spend your time watching TV, eating, or aimlessly reading the entire Interweb. Or you can invest it.

Examples of places to invest your time include learning (targeting learning, with a goal in mind, not pointless learning of trivia! Unless, of course, trivia is useful to you.), developing relationships, or planning.

Even work can be either used for spending or investing. For example, slaving away for an hourly wage in a menial job is basically just spending your time, in return for monetary compensation. That’s great. But when you work in a job where you develop ways to improve your productivity, learn skills that make you more employable, and build networks, you are investing your time. While you still receive the salary as an immediate benefit, you can also expect to reap long-term dividends.

New PowerPoint is new!

100 reasons why you no longer wish to end your life. One of them is not the new Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 format. The file extension is “.pptx”, as if adding “X” to everything makes you sexy. SeX. DirectX. Wormhole X-Treme. Xbox, et cetera.

Whoops, make that et ceteraX.

Anyway, some tool emailed me a presentation in the new-fangled format, and I had absolutely no idea what it was. Fortunately, Wikipedia saved the day, and I found a free viewer.

Now if we set aside anger for a minute, PowerPoint 2007 has some nice bits. The font, for example, is better than the one they used before. Furthermore, WordArt has changed from being tacky and horrible, to being a colourful version of the Apple website.

Get back to me later on, and see if I’ve worked out by then whether that’s a good thing or not…

Procrastination

I think my version of procrastination is interesting: I occasionally do my work, as procrastination to avoid recreational activities.

For example, the other day I was reading some article about the Internet, and it started feeling very dry. But I said to myself, I should finish what I start, and that includes articles. But then my concentration lapsed, and my eyes wandered to the bottom of my computer screen. I had mail! Once I alt-tabbed from the article to the new email, my determination to finish the article was broken. I still felt that I should finish it, but I was subconsciously seeking anything at all to avoid the article. My saviour appeared in the form of the report I was writing for my uni course, which I had been distracted from earlier.

Before I knew it, I was tapping away happily on this report, just to avoid reading an article.

My conclusion, therefore, is that if you really need to get some task done, concentrate on something else uninteresting. You can then use the first task as an escape from that other uninteresting thing.

If you liked this piece, pull my finger.

Jesus’ Dolmio Grin

Fair enough, if I’d just risen from the dead and conquered sin etc, I’d be pretty stoked.

 

But does he have reason to be happier this this bloke?

 

Eternal glory, or glorious pasta sauce? The choice is yours.

A breakfast fit for a king

I have a proactive attitude to health: if it hurts/aches/doesn’t work – fix it. Usually, that means attacking my internal organs with whatever pharmaceutical remedy claims to fix it. Some people say pharmaceutical companies are full of bull, but if that’s the case, I have a fantastic sense of placebo.

So when I woke up this morning feeling drained from too little sleep, and knew I was getting ill (celebration of winter, I suppose), I decided that rather than pull a sickie or plan to spend more time in my warm bed, I’d tackle the problem head-on. I worked out that my bodily constituents were demanding protein, carbohydrates, salt and swagger. Swagger is an important nutrient, it helps the body function smoothly by forcing each organ to act as if it is the best, even if it is a pathetic failure. So I made an oversized serving of bacon and eggs, tomato, mushrooms, and some diced random vegetables.

Nutrition, flavour, and the divine right to supreme executive power: a breakfast fit for a king!