Forcing focus

Recently, I found myself struggling to focus. I think the change of pace to coding threw me off.

As a manager, I zipped around constantly; frankly, there were too many conversations and issues all up in the air, so I had to choose, but there was always something. As a developer, I spend a much greater amount of my time staring at the screen. Plenty of things to do, of course, but at my own pace. Which is good, just different.

So, I implemented something that forced me to stay on track: I log the time and a very, very brief description whenever I start doing a new task. Says here today I started at 8:50 reading email, got some breakfast at 9, did some data scripting from 9:05, etc.

After about three days of this, I learned two things very quickly.

First, forcing myself to note the time whenever I switched tasks made me accountable. If I took an hour lunch break, it's there in the log. I know where my day went. When I'm spending too much time chit-chatting or doing non-productive tasks, I become conscious of it quickly, and feel pressured (by myself) to get focused on real work.

Second, I was hopping between tasks too often. I still do, but now I'm better about trying to bundle my interruptions. If I'm in the middle of coding, then I'll wait until I have to go get food before I also reply to some emails. This should be intuitive, but I'm so used to interruptions that I was distracting myself constantly.

I don't find anything wrong with realizing that I might need help to stay disciplined. Sure, I'd rather be ultra-disciplined all the time, but better to realize the need and take action than to continue failing. As they say, if you can't stop eating all the ice cream, don't keep any around the house.

(Side note: logging all my tasks is quite a bit like Dave Winer's suggestion to Narrate Your Work. Though my list remains private, I still accrue to myself some of the same benefits.)

Old friends

For the first time in a while, I am spending the majority of my day coding. Very little management going on for me right now.

I have some other thoughts about it, but one thing that really struck me is totally not code related: listening to music again at work. Since I rarely listen to music outside of work, I enjoy it immensely.

When you're managing, you need to talk to people constantly. Interruptions come frequently, or you go off to interrupt someone else.

Listening to music again has been like re-acquainting myself with old friends. Friends with funny names like Radiohead, but still.

A chance to rate yourself

Today offers a great chance to rate yourself.

Other firms are hiring. Your coders are probably taking calls from headhunters looking to place them.

How many have you lost to competitors? Not counting unique opportunities or clear upgrades -- but basically the same job for maybe a little more money.

Count those as marks against you. Everyone who stays who you want to keep as marks for you. If you're sitting on over 80%, take a bow, you've been doing something right.

The end of iPhone

Prediction: this will be the last holiday season that iPhone dominates.

We are on the brink of an Android break-out. I make no claim about the relative performance of one vs the other, but some points are clear:

* Many manufacturers will be producing Android phones. Only Apple will be making iPhones. Android phones will, in short order, offer a lot more features for less money.

* Every network will offer Android phones. In the US, you must have AT&T if you have an iPhone. That in itself is huge, because when you buy a phone, you usually buy a network too (for a year or two). Hardware lock-in to AT&T is a competitive disadvantage for iPhone. Every iPhone user at my office has to go to the other side of the building or outside to make calls. This is in the middle of New York City; I can only imagine how badly the rest of the country suffers.

* Enough dissatisfaction with iPhone itself exists to allow competition. The primary one is battery life.

* Android apps will explode as the user base increases. That may not seem like a big deal, but I think apps (and not hardware or features) are the real strength iPhone has over all other phones on the market.

Perhaps Apple will end its exclusivity with AT&T. It is not a choice they would easily adopt, or else they wouldn't have suffered with AT&T's network over the past year. I have no idea when their agreement ends, but Apple would likely take a big hit to future earnings if they go that route. Other networks have not been willing to fork out the cash that AT&T pays to carry the iPhone.

Their ideal strategy would be to dominate the market so thoroughly that the other networks eventually come crawling to them, begging to be let in to Apple's party. Unfortunately for Apple, Google is today's monopoly buster -- just ask Microsoft. (Tomorrow, they very well could be the monopoly.)

In short, many always beats one in a competitive market. And open always beats closed.

Expect iPhone to have a lovely holiday season, but sometime next year, its market share will peak.

Here Comes Everybody

Could the giant corporation become a thing of the past? You might reasonably reach that conclusion after reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.

The logic runs like this: thanks to new digital communication and organizing tools, the cost of organizing has dropped close to zero. Self-organized people will inherently rally around the "right" things (serving the interests of the most people). Most attempts at starting movements and clubs will end up dying to do a lack of interest. However, a few will hit a goldmine of unmet need and succeed spectacularly, usually in areas that surprise us (otherwise the need would have been met). Stay-at-home mothers are one of the most popular groups using Meetup. Who knew?

In this way, we get "failure for free" on our way to identifying unmet societal needs -- a truly hyper-efficient market.

In contrast, large corporations often organize around the wrong things (serving their own interests). They fund a big staff of marketing and sales people to generate interest in products and services they've created. Failure for them is most definitely not free. A big bet placed on a software roll out (uh, Vista?) or blockbuster movie can be devastating.

Google seems to be doing the best job of becoming a big company while still maintaining an entrepreneurial attitude. They put out beta products frequently, some of which fail. How long can they keep it up?

They maintain a high organizational cost by necessity. At some point, an organization becomes risk-averse, and tries to protect its gains for itself (employees, managers, shareholders, brand image). Hiring lobbyists is usually a first step in that process. Next comes predatory or monopolistic behavior. Who does that sound like?

The brilliance of Here Comes Everybody is that it talks about lots of little things that you know already, and makes you think about them in new ways, or generate new thoughts about them. Clay Shirky never says the corporation is dying, but it sure made me think that way.

James Cameron, micro-manager?

Have you ever considered the difference between a "micro-manager" and a "genius that controlled every detail to make sure it was done perfectly"? It's more than the result; after all, you don't know the result until later.

This bio on James Cameron lays out the difference perfectly.

Micro-managers have their hand in everything and argue about the smallest details. That's exactly what James Cameron does.

Cameron has mastered every job on set, and has even been known to grab a brush out of a makeup artist’s hand. "I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt," he says. "It saves so much time." ... Cameron inserts himself into every aspect of the filmmaking process.

People who work for micro-managers feel disrespected and despise them for it. Similarly, the crew of "The Abyss" came to refer to it as "The Abuse". Because of his abrasive nature,

Cameron has an uncanny ability to make people want to see him fail.

Yet, despite these flaws, big stars -- people who don't need the work -- will readily work with Cameron. In fact,

A small, loyal band of cast and crew works with him repeatedly

That quite possibly includes the makeup artists.

Cameron brings to the table shared vision and credibility. Without those two things, he would just be a micro-manager.

Cameron aims high.

"This film integrates my life’s achievements," he told me. "It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done." Another time, he said, "If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success."

Whether or not the film turns out to be any good, his lofty goals can inspire. You want to be a part of something like that.

But if you didn't believe he could get it done, then his goals would just be talk. Some credibility comes simply because he's had some success in the past. But, this is new ground, so he needs more that just his past.

What he has is massive amounts of conviction. This quote captures it perfectly:

Before beginning production on "The Abyss" (1989), the most ambitious underwater movie ever attempted, he went to see Leonard Goldberg, then the president of Fox, which was financing the film. "He said, 'I want you to know one thing -- once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you'll be able to stop me is to kill me,'" Goldberg told me. "You looked into those eyes and you knew he meant it."

If you don't buy into the vision and didn't think Cameron could get it done, he would be just another unbearable tyrant. If he also worked in an office instead of on movies, he would just be a micro-manager.

But, he's got all those things, so instead, he's a visionary genius.

Marshmallows predict coding skills

Have you heard about how marshmallows can predict SAT scores?

A study done in the 70s tested the self-control of 4 year-olds. Each was left in a room alone with some marshmallows they were told not to eat until the researcher came back. Some kids couldn't even wait a minute before caving in and eating the marshmallows. Some covered their eyes or looked away or kicked the table. The more self-controlled kids waited over 15 minutes.

Thirteen years later, the researchers looked at these same kids' SAT scores. Those who waited longer had, on average, better scores by a couple hundred points than those who caved in quickly. The marshmallow predicted SAT scores more accurately than IQ tests that the kids had taken. Kids who demonstrated weak self-control with the marshmallows as 4 year-olds also experienced more behavioral problems.

I read about this research study in a few books, and I always interpreted it simply as a lesson about the importance of self-control, which is how the authors present it.

But here's an important factor that I just realized: the successful kids didn't just show self-control. They didn't sit and stare at the marshmallows and then demonstrate amazing willpower. They knew they'd be weak, so they took actions (covering their eyes, doing something else) to help them focus on the correct things (or, more accurately, not focus on the wrong thing).

Many times in software development, we rely on self-control to do the right thing. "After you code, refactor and clean it up." "While you're testing, make sure you come up with all the business cases."

The coding is treated as the main piece of business, and then when that's done, the developer should demonstrate amazing willpower, push through their fatigue and relief at finishing, and focus on quality.

Instead, we should know that we're weak, and make sure the focus on quality is built deeply into our routines. Practices like automated builds, daily production-quality check-ins, TDD help us address the important aspects of functional and structural quality, while eliminating the need for willpower.

Similarly, if certain activities make you less productive, don't just rely on personal determination to avoid them. Address the problem directly. If checking your email is a big distraction, then decide you will only do it once every half hour and set an alarm. Same goes for your blackberry. Most managers will readily accept any reasonable work pattern as long as you let them know, especially as your intention is to improve productivity.

Backgammon and good code

I'm not yet done with How We Decide, but this example of deliberate practice jumped out at me.

Robartie didn't become a world champion just by playing a lot of backgammon. "It's not the quantity of practice, it's the quality," he says. According to Robertie, the most effective way to get better is to focus on your mistakes.

You might recall that deliberate practice appears in Talent Is Overrated as the key to high performance. Focusing on one's mistakes reminds me, again, of Test Driven Development. I'm not a TDD nut -- I have never personally worked on a devoted TDD team -- I'm just pulling these threads together. TDD focuses on your mistakes before you make them. You'll still make some, and so your TDD gets better and better, along with your results and productivity.

This sentence also struck me:

After a few years of intense practice, Robertie had turned himself into one of the best backgammon players in the world. "I knew I was good when I could just glance at a board and know what I should do," Robertie says. "The game started to become very much a matter of aesthetics. My decisions increasingly depended on the look of things, so that I could contemplate a move and see right away if it made my position look better or worse."

I have long believed that good code is clean code, exemplified by Joshua Bloch's axiom that good code reads like prose.

Concern for aesthetically-pleasing code strikes some coders as just unnecessary housekeeping chore. But I think programmers who consistently produce solid code write clean and organized code as a matter of routine. And those who don't do it routinely, but have to go back after the fact and clean things up, maybe refactor a bit, will improve over time and eventually get to the point of routine. It no longer becomes a chore, but just a standard way of doing it.

The counter-argument is a whistle-clean, beautifully modular code that fails miserably at what the users wanted. That's actually a different problem: bad communication or bad specs. But I bet that code did exactly what the programmer wanted it to do.

The fast-moving world of dentistry

Many programmers do their jobs, do it well, but never train themselves beyond their time at work.

I was thinking about this at the dentist's office recently. My dentist is not young, but she follows the latest practices. She replaced drills with air tools, which offer precision and obviates the need for anesthetic. She installed a laser for some of the gum work. Numerous other improvements have been made over the years.

This is dentistry we're talking about. Not exactly a lot of unexplored frontiers here. Yet, she clearly spends many off-hours staying up to date, obtaining information, and training herself. All that occurs when the office is closed, and no patients are around.

If that's the slow world of dentistry, what are the implications for the fast-moving world of software development?

If you're serious about having a successful career as a programmer, you need to be training yourself. Don't expect to do it on your company's time or your company's dollar. If you really can't afford it, at least park yourself at your local bookstore and read the books for free. Most of them have free wi-fi, so take your laptop and do the exercises.

While you're on a project, marching to a deadline, you should already be fully trained in the skills you need -- just as you wouldn't want your dentist to be pulling that laser out for the first time when you sit down in her chair.

Great traders and great programmers

I talked to an intern trader who recently finished his gig. His mentor told him at the beginning of the summer, "When you finish, I'm going to ask you what makes someone a great trader."

At the end of the summer, the intern gave some generic answer about financial calculations.

The mentor said, "What makes someone a great trader is what he does when things are slow."

How true, and the same could be said for programmers.

For any job that requires creative, highly educated people to work toward high pressure, difficult to move deadlines, the long-term differentiating factor will be how the person invests in him/herself. And slow times provide the only opportunity for that, whether 5 minutes or 5 days long.

Talent is Overrated

Or so says Geoff Colvin.

If someone tells you, "I know the secret to super performance, and it's not talent," you know what the answer is, right? Hard work. Which is basically what this book says. He actually says it's 10 years of hard work to become an world-class performer.

He takes it a little further, explaining the necessity for "deliberate practice" as opposed to just regular practice. The difference is most obvious in activities with clear goals. It's free-throw shooting for hours instead of pick-up games. Repeatedly working through a knotty part of that concerto with deep concentration, not just breezing through easy pieces.

For software developers, I thought TDD would be a good analogy. TDD forces you to regularly think about testing your software, until you're writing good, modular software by second nature, and you can do it with increasingly complex applications.

To do effective "deliberate practice" in business professions, you often need a mentor -- someone who's better than you are -- to tell you, "This is one thing you should work on, and here's how you can do it." That focuses you on building the right skills.

He provided some good research about external and internal motivation. Basically, your intrinsic motivations will outweigh everything else. Managers have to figure out what that is for each person and how to arrange the work accordingly; motivation can't simply be bought.

Books like this can be useful as a reminder about how you want to spend your day, but since I had a good idea what he was going to say, I wouldn't normally have picked it up.

But, I saw some effusive praise on the back cover from people I admire: Daniel Pink, Herb Kelleher, a couple others. (Oh yeah, Donald Trump is there too.) Then I found out they're all cited in the book either as vanguards in the research he quotes, or as examples of outstanding performers --no wonder! In the end, the book is overrated.

Cloud computing and the financial meltdown

Sidekick's massive data loss reminds me of the financial meltdown.

The big banks became too big to fail because all the world's finances flowed through them. It might seem that we have a lot of banks, but actually on a global level, we relied on just a dozen or so. Not enough diversity for the entire planet. Maybe we'll learn something from that mess.... maybe.

Actually, we've seen this problem many times before.

Agriculture has been around for thousands of years, and has given us some examples of systemic breakdown. One famous example was the Irish Potato Famine. The potato became too big to fail in Ireland. Unfortunately, it did, and around 12 - 15% of the population died. Biodiversity has become a global concern.

The financial system started hundreds of years ago, and, as we saw, has reached the point where the industry needs to be actively designed for resistance and maintenance. Mortgage-backed securities and their offspring are like the potato, and the bubble bursting acted like a blight.

Computers are only decades old, and the information age started more recently than that. Some have already wondered whether Google is the first information company that is too big to fail. No one ever said that about IBM, so things have changed.

I don't think Google is a problem yet, but cloud computing can put it there. Given our reliance on smaller and thinner tools -- netbooks and phones -- we increasingly rely on central storage. It only makes sense for efficiency purposes to aggregate that storage in a cloud. Why should you care where or how your data is stored?

Governments increasingly use technology to improve services. Among other things, they're combining databases. All very good things. Things we often criticize governments for not doing, not being competitive enough, not efficient enough.

Wouldn't a cloud make sense for the same reasons for all that government data? Imagine how big the social security database is or just California's Department of Motor Vehicles. Do you really expect these agencies to have stronger, more robust technology than Microsoft?

Cloud computing clearly offers a lot of benefit. This problem will not stop the growth of the cloud. But if cloud computing takes off, it also implies a future where some of these technology companies will have to be regulated. Sounds strange, doesn't it?

Think about all those rows and rows of Google servers, for which they are famous. Companies always want their systems to run exactly the same software because that makes it easier to upgrade and maintain. Now think potatoes in Ireland, or mortgages in the financial industry. Google has had its outages, but they were small enough to ignore. Not so if they held data used for trading markets or air traffic or personal banking.

Regulations might included government-mandated requirements concerning:

• separation of data servers from other applications
• multiple power sources
• replicated data stored in physical locations 100 miles apart
• maximum failover time (in minutes) and minimum uptime percentage (> six sigma?)
  
• monetary reserve to ensure continued operations in case some other project at the company starts draining all the money
• separation of businesses to ensure law suits or problems at one division don't affect the viability of the data business
  

What will not save us is a rallying cry to "back up your data", which just about every article about the Sidekick includes. That will be no more effective than asking people to eat more varieties of bananas.

Free software: Twitter

Of course, Twitter is free, and recently valued at $1bn. So far, Twitter closely follows the Google and Facebook playbook: bring the users and the data, and figure out revenues later. Skeptics believe revenues may never happen.

Felix Salmon reports they may start selling their data, with access costing several million dollars. Also, like other systems (e.g, Nasdaq, high-frequency trading), perhaps the fastest access will be provided at much higher prices.

Twitter could easily sell its data. It's not clear the super-fast data would be that much more valuable. I also question whether selling its raw data would be more valuable than selling analyzed data. Maybe they can do both; Google could use the raw data, but Sears and Southwest Airlines would want summary capsules.

Another option that occurs to me is they could tier their data. The most popular topics at any given moment would be available for only much higher prices. Breaking tweets about Obama's Nobel prize would be delayed or available only after the hysteria died down and turned into stale news.

Twitter clearly has some options. We'll have to wait and find out whether that adds up to a $1bn company.

Increase your productivity!

The ultimate productivity blog. Perfect for a Friday before a 3 day weekend, especially for those of us who have to work on Monday.

Who owns your free online account?

Answer: not you.

a federal judge has ordered Google to deactivate the email account of a user who was mistakenly sent confidential financial information by a bank.

Try to follow the logic: a bank accidentally sent out confidential data, so the random person that happened to receive it is punished. Since that person doesn't pay anything for the account, he has few rights in the matter.

The problem of account ownership will only grow.

Facebook user recently revolted over changes in content ownership. But the problem still exists: some people get kicked off and have their accounts closed on them, while others try to get off but can't get their accounts closed. Because Facebook owns the accounts, not the users.

Maybe you could live without Facebook, but what about things you invest serious time in? Like writing a blog everyday. Or applications you use for school or work, like Google Apps.

Scarier still: apps that have all your personal data, like mint.com. Maybe you feel comfortable with this company, you like how they do business. But what happens if they get bought?

Scariest of all: apps that have all your business data, like Amazon's S3 storage. Amazon couldn't go out of business, right? But it was only a few years ago that we thought they would never turn a profit. And only a year ago it was inconceivable that Lehman would be gone. In this case, as a paying customer, you have a few rights, but Amazon still owns the switch.

Thin, free software remains the inevitable future destination, but you might think twice about being the vanguard.

It's not the cockroach you see that should worry you

You probably heard about the man with no arms who couldn't cash a check. A Bank of America branch manager turned him away because their rules require fingerprints. No exceptions.

That manager surely got an earful, possibly a demotion.

The web overflows with customer horror stories dealing with BofA "customer service". I ran across another one the other day without trying, simply because one of the blogs that I regularly read had a personal experience.

Whether or not BofA's service falls short (or even it's standard among banks), the real point here is that bank executives will likely erupt in furor and disbelief at their employee's behavior.

What should concern them more are the thousands of examples that fall just below the line of ridiculousness -- equally aggravating, no less insensitive to their customers, but without the farcical aspects -- and then the millions of occurrences that annoy and dismiss their customers just slightly less, all of which go unnoticed and unreported by local news. Such a massive visible failure signifies massive numbers of failures below the surface.

I'm willing to bet that BofA trains its retail banking staff to behave very rigidly, probably in an attempt to reduce mistakes and minimize costs. Eventually, a rules-based culture breeds a system of automatons that only know the rules.

Crucial characteristics

Crucial Conversations provides some useful guidelines for communication in difficult situations. You can enjoyably read the book in about an hour or two, so that makes it easy to recommend.

This comment struck me:

The more you care about an issue, the less likely you are to be on your best behavior... When it comes to our strongest views, passion can be our enemy. Of course, feeling strongly about something isn't bad in and of itself. It's okay to have strong opinions. The problem comes when we try to express them.

People want to hire only passionate people these days. And for projects with a very clear destination and fairly well understood obstacles, passionate people will drive it to completion exactly as you'd want. Nothing will stop their forward push.

But what if the goals are vague, or constantly shifting? What if you expect numerous detours and re-starts along the way? What if the challenges can't be driven through, but have to be innovated around?

Projects like that might very well be better served by good listeners, or by people who can step back and let things simmer a bit, away from the fire. Of course, passionate people can be excellent listeners, and can be wise enough to be able to let things develop in due time. But, in terms of priority -- what leading characteristics you particularly seek for the project -- passion might rank pretty low.

As the author points out, passion often acts as a source of ineffectiveness, when everyone else is not "on board". And you would most expect to see this variety of opinion on projects with vague goals and unforeseen detours.

The thing is, don't most projects fall in this category?

Connect

Ever notice how some people become very active on LinkedIn when they start looking for a job? They join lots of groups, make lots of connections.

Or they start emailing old co-workers and managers. "Haven't talked to you in a long time -- how's it going? Any openings over there?"

Unfortunately, this is the wrong time to try to breathe some life into their network. They should have been doing that all along.

The ex-colleagues you know well enough to email in your time of need? Why not drop them a note now and then? "Hey, I saw this article about local micro-brews. I recall you had a big interest in that." Or "Here's an event next week with free activities for kids, thought you might want to take yours."

Cultivating contacts well takes time, whether they're people you worked with or new ones you've met in professional groups.

Does this sound manipulative? As if you're treating everyone as a tool for your own gain?

Here's a crazy thought: you could actually be interested in these people's lives! You got along well enough with your co-workers to feel comfortable later contacting them. Sending an email costs you nothing, and you could actually be doing them a favor. That's trying to connect with people, not just link in to them.