Jason M. Hanley :: Custom Software Developer

I read a nice little example of ROWE*-based thinking in a recent blog posting. (link to the full article below)

…
Pre-ROWE

Manager: “We’ve been working on this strategy for awhile, and I really want you to crack the nut this year.”

Employee: “Got it. I’ll do my best.” [”I have no idea what you’re asking for, but if I show up every day, stay late, and come to you next year with something that I think you might like, I should be okay.”]

Post-ROWE

Manager: “We’ve been working on this strategy for awhile, and I really want you to crack the nut this year.”

Employee: “Let’s define ‘the nut’. How will we know if I’ve cracked it? How will it be measured? What’s ‘meets expectations’ and ‘exceeds expectations’ on cracking the nut?” [”If I can get clear on how to exceed expectations on cracking this nut, I can figure out the activities that will get me there and also plan how I’ll volunteer at my child’s school, coach her basketball team, and take a vacation to Miami.”]

…

See the full article here: http://caliandjody.com/blog/2008/10/06/what-is-everyone-doing/
*Results-Oriented Work Environment

Tim Ferris recently posted about a Dutch ROWE office implementation. It was a good read, but I was more interested by the bit at the end about his own home office and techniques for simplifying life.

“I limit misbehavior by limiting options. Notice that I have no shelves. This discourages accumulating papers and encourages both elimination and immediate digital note-taking.” … “Don’t want to eat too much chocolate? Don’t put it in your house.”
…
“Constraints — a precursor to simplicity — aren’t always a bad thing. In fact, they’re often better than increasing options.”

This reminded me of some simple “tweaks” I use in my own life to achieve optimal results. For instance, there are certain types of junk food that I just can’t resist if they’re in my cupboard, but at the grocery store, I have the discipline to simply not buy them. I buy healthy food instead. Then, when I’m at home looking for a snack, I end up eating cottage cheese and fruit, instead of cookies and potato chips.

Simple and effective.

SPAM email. Everyone hates it. Company and individuals alike have built various systems for dealing with it, but from what I hear, most solutions are sub-optimal.

I currently receive about 365 spam emails per day. 290 in my personal account, and 75 in my work account.

But I hardly ever have to think about this!

That’s because I use hosted Gmail for both my personal and work accounts. Every time a spam email makes it through. I simply check it, and hit the “Report Spam” button. Hundreds of thousands of others do this every day. Then, the Google algorithm goes through and figures out which emails are spam based on this aggregate result.
It ends up being extremely accurate. I’ve only had 2 or 3 false positives* over the past 3 years I’ve used Gmail.

Because of this, I can confidently ignore the spam/junk folder. Gmail saves these messages for 30 days — just in case.

Yet another reason to use hosted Google services…

*A false positive is a legitimate email that gets marked as spam.

In the business world, there are phone people, and there are email people. I’ll admit right upfront that I’m an email person. There are situations when phone or face-to-face meetings are necessary or more appropriate, but for most day to day issues, I think email is great.

Consider this scenario: I send an email checking on the status of something. The other person gets the email, and realizes they need to ask me something that basically requires a yes or no answer.

Instead of emailing, they phone me. Naturally, I miss the call and they leave me a long message re-explaining the entire situation, asking me the question, and leaving their contact information and the times they can be reached.

I have to log into my voicemail, retrieve the message, listen to it (possibly more than once) and take down the contact info. Then I call them back — and, you guessed it — they’re not available. By the time I finally get them tracked down and give them their answer, I’ve probably spent a good 10-15 minutes intermixed with other tasks. That’s not that long, you say. Perhaps not on its own, but that’s not the only issue I have to deal with in a day.

Let’s be very conservative and say that I only have 10 such issues per day:

• Email: 1-2 minutes to reply x 10 incidents = 10-20 minutes per day
• Phone: 10-15 minutes to reply x 10 incidents = 1.5-3 hours per day

So with email, I can be about 900% more efficient. Is this a no-brainer, or am I missing something here?

There’s a great little article over at What’s the next action about how to make an effective To-Do list. If you don’t find making lists effective, it might be because you’re doing it wrong!

Some of the key points are:

1. Use verbs: Everything on the list needs to be actionable, which generally means it should start with a verb.
2. Be specific: If an action isn’t specific enough, it’s easy to defer it since you don’t really know what the “next action” is.
3. Group by context: Group your tasks by context. (at the computer, on the phone, running errands, etc.)
4. Focus on “next”: Filter out everything except the very next task for each context.