Key Learnings

Thought of the Day - Lottery Thought Experiment

2009-11-08T00:09:00.002Z

[I wrote most of this around the end of June, when there was a $100m AUD jackpot on the lottery. After the draw I forgot to finish it, but in retrospect there are some interesting thoughts in here that are worth posting.]

I'm normally against gambling, on the principle that in the long run the house always wins. I don't deny that some people are lucky and beat the house, just that if it was likely to happen, bookies wouldn't stay in business long. Based on the above, I don't tend to gamble or play the lottery on a regular basis. But every so often, when there is an obscenely large jackpot I'll throw a couple of quid on the lottery. Normally I am left slightly disappointed, it is hard not to wonder 'what if I won?' before the draw. This time however I decided to put my occasional flutter to good use, win or lose.

Recently I have been having a hard time working out what on earth I want to do with my life. I've been thinking about it since I started uni and have yet to come to any good conclusions. There is a classic thought experiment that is supposed to help in this situation: What would you do if money was no object, if you could do whatever you wanted to do, if for example if you won the lottery? It is a little difficult to really get into that frame of mind, money will always matter, there are always too many options. The only time you ever come close to that mindset is buying a lottery ticket, anything is possible, if unlikely.

I'm sure no-one — other than maybe Bill Gates — thinks they would live their life the same if they won the lottery. I mean who fantasises about watching more bad TV, working a job they hate and being dissatisfied with life? Money isn't everything but having a relatively unlimited supply would change your perspective.

Anyway, my thought experiment was this: To indulge my 'What if I won?' thoughts and try to determine from those thoughts, what I really want to do. Rather than focusing on the specifics of having a vast amount of money, I directed my attention to the recurring themes of what I would actually do. I wouldn't say it was a complete success, but there were some interesting trends:

1. Read More - The one recurring thought in almost all of the possibilities was that I wanted to spend more time reading. Literally my first thought was, that if I won the lottery, I would take a pile of books to a cabin in the hills and spend a lot of time reading and thinking. In fact almost all of my fantasies involved reading in some way; from just reading, to building a huge library, to being able to have a 'reading week' every year like Bill Gates. It really seemed to be at the core of what I want to do. The irony being that at the moment I have lots of time to read, instead I sleep and watch bad TV.
With this in mind, I need to strive for a greater level of erudition.

2. Improve Companies - If I did win the lottery, I would still work, if only because it would drive me crazy if I didn't. The one thing I have loved in every job I have ever had, is having an idea so good it feels like an epiphany. Different ideas, thoughts and inspiration, just seem to join up and lead to an answer. They have been rare moments in the jobs I have had so far, but they are what keep me going. Most often these serendipitous ideas are for ways to improve a business, not just in an incremental way, but in a revolutionary way.
With this in mind, I need to focus on jobs with the opportunity to improve businesses.

3. Go To Business School - One of the stranger themes was that I would go to business school. Sure part of it would be because having won a lot of money, you would somehow end up involved in business. But I think the underlying reason is that, if money was no object it would be something interesting to do.
With this in mind I need to consider doing an MBA even if I have no interest in being a manager.

4. Live In The Mountains - Almost all of the location specific thoughts I had involved mountains, generally Alp/Rockies type peaks, but really any relief would do. I don't think I had a single thought of lounging on a beach on a tropical island or the sea. In all honesty, places that are too flat kinda freak me out.

With this in mind, I need to try to live (or at least holiday) in the mountains as much as possible.

5. Learn How To Survive If The Shit Hits The Fan - I think around that time I had been reading too many disaster books (The Stand, Emergency etc), so this was on my mind. However it is probably a good idea to do some preparation for the worst.

With this in mind, I need to ... do something ;-)

6. Travel To See The People I Like To Spend Time With - IM's and e-mail are fine when nothing else is on offer, but seeing people I enjoy spending time with should be the catalyst for travel that I have thusfar been lacking.
With this in mind, I need to make more of an effort to travel to see the people I enjoy spending time with.

There were also some trends that were conspicuous in their absence:
1. Buy a big house, fancy car, jewellery etc.
2. Live a playboy life with a bevy of beautiful women.
3. Give lots of money to charity.

The first two merely confirm that, as I suspected, most of the conventional trappings of money don't appeal to me. I don't feel significantly better-off now, than I did when I was earning half as much in my first job after graduating from university. While chasing money for the sake of it seemed foolish before. It is now more clear, that I am not interested in 'more money' as a goal.

That last one makes me seem like kind of a bad guy. Who could be so selfish, that on having the stroke of luck to win a vast sum of money, wouldn't help out charities. I think this stems from the fact that I don't trust them to use it well. I'm not saying charities deliberately squander money. I just question whether it is used most effectively in absolute terms, or if it is used in a subjective way to make donors feel better. If I was going to give money away, I would want to make sure it was going to have the greatest benefit. Weirdly one of my fantasies involved giving away the winning ticket to an acquaintance (un-named) and disappearing.

It was a nice thought experiment, but in reality it turns out on this occasion the house did win. I only matched 7 numbers across 6 lines. But I think that if I started living life as if I had won the lottery, I would be much happier.

Thought of the Day - Brilliant or Crazy?

2009-04-09T14:05:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I finally solved my backup quandary, I got 6 free months of the premium version of Dropbox to backup 50Gb of data online. I received this for participating in Tim Ferriss's 'Tweet to Beat' campaign along with 33,000 other people. Running the numbers I realised that even if only 50% of the other participants take up this offer, Dropbox will loose out almost $1 million in revenue over the next 6 months. My initial reaction was; 'they're crazy' but it then dawned on me that they might actually be brilliant instead, taking the 'Freemium' model to the extreme.

Anyone who has used web applications should have experienced the 'freemium' model. There is a limited free version of the WebApp that is available, but as you use it more and more, there are then paid levels to allow you greater functionality. The theory being that you can get used to the service, input a heap of data, then you are tied in and likely to pay because of the amount of time you have invested. A more common model is the '30-Day Free Trial' which is similar, but you have 30 days of free use before you have to start paying.

These models are an excellent idea for both the customer and the seller. The customer gets to decide if the product is worth paying for and the seller can reach a wider audience because people like to 'try before you buy'. The downside is that increasingly customers are wise to tactic and may try to resist it. The seller hopes that in the 30-Days or free period, the customer uses the product so much that they are effectively locked in to paying for it by the end. I suspect more and more, that cynical customers are deliberately not using the full potential of the services to avoid this lock-in. I know my first reaction to a free trial or freemium service are to avoid using it too much for precisely this reason.

So how does this relate to Dropbox? Well i have been considering using an online backup system for a while now and have seen various options ranging from free to really expensive, however i was having a hard time deciding between them. There was no easy way to compare features, prices, security and usability, which resulted in decision paralysis; too many options, so i won't pick any of them. Dropbox is offered on a freemium model.There is a free version where you can store up to 2Gb of data and a premium version for $9.99 per month with 50Gb of storage. Unfortunately i suspect this model doesn't work very well in this situation. The full version is really designed for backing up all (or most) of your documents, which is a very different market from the free version, which is so small it is really just for temporary online storage of documents. Due to the fact they are targeted at different markets, I suspect the conversion rate from free to premium is fairly low, this is further exacerbated by the fact that 2Gb isn't much of a lock-in. The alternative would be to offer a 30-Day trial of the premium version, but as i mentioned above, people are wise to that tactic. Few people would bother uploading 50Gb of data to a service if they might not like it or want to move.

On the other hand, how about offering 6 months free? Well that's a different story, 6 months is long enough that it doesn't feel like a lock-in and well even if it is, you're getting $60 of service for free! In reality the lock-in is very high, even higher than the other models above. Once you've setup a system for backups, used it for 6 months and are familiar with the system, there is very little chance you will move when the free period ends. The customer wins; they get some 'free' service and the company wins because they have excellent differentiation in the market and superb retention after the free period ends.

So why doesn't everyone do it? Firstly the company will still have to pay for the storage space, the bandwidth and other overheads that are going to be there. Furthermore they have deferred a large portion of their income for 6 months which is a bit of a cash flow no-no. Also if you offered it to everyone, 6 months is long enough that unscrupulous people would find it worth exploiting. Effectively you are betting the farm that having extremely high retention will benefit the business in the long run.

So is this deal genius or madness? Only time will tell, though after thinking about it i am now a little worried that cashflow might put the company (and all my data) under ...

Thought of the Day - Right Brained Computing

2009-03-08T06:17:00.004Z

First it was widley belived that machines couldn't replace people at making things (pottery, textiles etc), then the industrial revolution happened. While the machines would never be quite as good at making some things (hand-crafted is still seen as a good thing) they do most of the making in the world today.

More recently it was thought that machines couldn't replace people doing knowledge based tasks that required left brain thinking and again they have been proved wrong again. If a computer can win at chess, properly programed it can probably replace a person doing anthing relying on procedure, decisions and memory. This is still progressing and there is still a gap where people are required.

Is the way forward to leap-frog people working on automating the left brained activites and start trying to automate more right brained work?

I suppose this is where researchers in artificial intelligence are going but is there a simpler approach? Does a computer have to be able to think and be self-aware to create? If a million monkey's at a million type writers will eventually come up with the works of shakespeare and a computer can do the same work in a considerably shorter period of time, is it not just a matter of selecting the best version. As the old saying goes; "ideas are like a**holes, everyone has one", surely this means that creativity is simply selecting the good ideas from the bad.

Thought of the Day - Joined Up Writing

2009-02-08T12:59:00.003Z

Do you remember early in school, you mechanically printed out line after line of individual letters to learn the shapes? Then one magical day your teacher let you join them up to form adult writing? Well when i was 14, i decided that my joined up writing was so illegible, that to have a chance of passing exams, i would have to start printing again. Not just printing, but printing in block capitals and that is the way i have written for the latter half of my life.

In fairness it has served me well, i learned to print quickly enough to get down the salient points in an exam in the requisite time. The printing was legible enough that i'm fairly sure that the examiner understood what i was getting at and i passed the large majority of exams. More recently due to the IT revolution, about the only thing of consequence that i have had to handwrite since university exams was an application to MI5 and even then i printed in block caps (which i'm sure annoyed them no end - graphology be damned!).

It shouldn't come as a surprise to me then, that i am now no longer capable of cursive script. Sure i can join up block capital letters pretty well and jot out individual lower case letters but i can't write like i should be able to. I can't avoid starting every letter with an full-size capital; Imagine Every Word In A Sentence Written Like This, only worse. Even more disturbingly i can't write lower case letters in a consistent fashion at all, i can scroll out a couple but as soon as i lose concentration i slip back into block caps.

I suppose there are two questions; in this increasingly digital world, should i care? and given that my cursive script was so bad back in the day, could i even write legibly in cursive with practice?

Thought of the Day - Christmas Business Book Reviews

2009-01-04T12:51:00.000Z

Well i succeeded in my goal of reading 5 books during my 11 day Christmas holiday, 6 in fact, if you count one i read just for fun. So i thought i would do a quick roundup of what i read, some i have already posted 'book notes' on and some will require a second reading before i can do that. So without further ado:

Plugged In by Tamara Erickson [2008]
A book on how to find the right job and succeed in work as part of Generation Y (born 1980 - 2000).
My Thoughts: An interesting book with some very good observations and useful generalisations. Though it did lack some of the more specific strategies i was hoping it would provide. It would be a great book to read if you were leaving college and looking for a job. I found it interesting that in most respects i am Generation Y but i have some Generation X tendencies.
*** 3 out of 5

Personal Development For Smart People by Steve Pavlina [2008]
A guide on personal development using a logical framework.
My Thoughts: I started reading Steve's blog 3 years ago on a recommendation from a friend. I was initially drawn in by the inspirational articles, which unlike most other personal development sites had a slant towards the rational and geeky. Unfortunately as he has developed over the years, he has moved towards a more new-age viewpoint and this book is heavily influenced by that direction. Don't get me wrong there were some interesting ideas in it, however i had read most of them in his blog prior to the book.
** 2 out of 5

The Back Of The Napkin by Dan Roam [2008]
A book on the power of using simple drawings and visual communication.
My Thoughts: An interesting book, particularly if you have never done; art, graphic communication, presentation skills or six sigma training. Unfortunately i have done all of the above, which means most of the book was a refresher course. I have always been a very visual person and this reinforced my view that if something needs explained a picture is a good way to do it. Where i did find it particularly useful was in explaining why visual communication is powerful and providing a framework for visual problem solving.
**** 4 out of 5

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell [2008]
A book looking into difference between the myths of success and actual causes of people who are exceptionally successful.
My Thoughts: As with Malcolm Gladwell's previous books (The Tipping Point and Blink) Outliers is a very compelling and easy read. Unlike its predecessors, it has some interesting social commentary highlighting ways that the current system can be improved for the betterment of society. It is also one of those books that i suspect may have a profound bearing on how i live my life going forwards.
***** 5 out of 5

Pro Blogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett [2008]
A book on how to successfully make a living from blogging.
My Thoughts: An interesting read, though i didn't really learn anything that i didn't already know. It would be much more useful for non-technical individuals that have read, but never written, a blog. A lot of the advice is common sense, the remainder is available online and can be found relatively easily. Where the book does succeed is putting structure to that advice, which can be used a checklist if you plan to start a blog with aspirations of making money from it.
*** 3 out of 5

Something i hadn't noticed until i wrote this down is that all of the books i read were published in 2008. Random given that i didn't set out to do that and have many unread books that were published earlier.

Book Notes - The Back Of The Napkin

2009-01-02T20:17:00.000Z

The Back Of The Napkin by Dan Roam [2008]

Summary:
A book promoting the use of pictures and diagrams as a communication medium. It outlines why visual communication is effective and how to make your visual communications more effective. It contains a framework for selecting the most appropriate diagrams for certain situations as well as a framework for problem solving.

Notes:
Page 4: Reminder, develop an 'elevator pitch' for every project or idea.
Page 15: Six Problem Clumps:
1) Who/What
2) How Much/Many
3) When
4) Where
5) How
6) Why
Page 37: Process Of Visual Thinking:
1) Look - Collecting and screening
2) See - Selecting and clumping
3) Imagine - Seeing what isn't there
4) Show - Making it all clear
Page 57: Rules For Better Looking:
1) Collect everything you can
2) Lay it all out where you can look at it (literally lay it out)
3) Establish fundamental coordinates (use; Who/What, How Much/Many, When, Where, Why, How, as axes)
4) Practice visual triage
Page 72: Common Precognitive Visual Attributes:
1) Proximity - close things are related
2) Colour - hints at groupings
3) Size
4) Orientation - perpendicular angles are best
5) Direction - perceived movement (arrows etc)
6) Shape
7) Shading
Page 84: How = Who + How Much/Many + Where + When
Page 94: You can use the 6w's in order to Show as well as See.
Page 107: SQVID Visualisation breakdown:
1) Simple Vs Elaborate
2) Quality Vs Quantity
3) Vision Vs Execution
4) Individual Attributes Vs Comparison
5) Delta (change) Vs Status Quo
Page 108: You can either progressively go through all of the SQVID steps (idea focusing) or you can work out what balance of each extreme is the most important for the audience (audience focusing).
Page 131: The Three Steps of Showing:
1) Select the right framework
2) Use the framework to create the picture
3) Explain the picture to someone else
Page 134: The links between seeing and showing:
1) Who/What - Picture/Portrait
2) How Much/Many - Chart
3) Where - Map
4) When - Timeline
5) How - Flow Chart
6) Why - Multivari Plot
Page 141: Diagram linking the ways of showing with SQVID.

Quotes:
Page 13: "Any problem can be made clearer with a picture, and any picture can be created with the same set of tools and rules."
Page 133: "For each of the six ways of seeing there is one corresponding way of showing. For each one of these six ways of showing, there is a single visual framework that serves as a starting point."

Thought of the Day - Theory X Vs Theory Y

2008-12-11T08:24:00.003Z

In management there are two theories of employee motivation; Theory X posits that employees don't like work, will avoid it where possible and must be driven to it. Theory Y on the other hand is based on the assumption that work can be satisfying and employees will be self-motivated to work. While it initially appears that these theories are all to do with employees internal motivation, it has also been suggested that whether a boss manages to Theory X or Theory Y determines how the employees behave. I tend to subscribe to the latter idea, if you manage your employees as if they will do everything in their power to avoid work that is how they will behave. If on the other hand you manage your employees by giving them responsibility and trusting them that is how they will behave.

It is interesting to see how people behave when managers aren't around, while not being able to control for things like; workload, task allocation and clarity of goals, how employees behave in a management vacuum should indicate whether the culture of a company is Theory X or Y. If the employees have a; "while they cat's away" attitude and avoid work you can safely guess that there is a Theory X culture. If on the other hand the employees treat it as; "business as usual" and work as they would if the manager was there you can assume it is a Theory Y workplace.

This is another reason that i think ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) is the way forward. Under that culture it doesn't matter where the manager (or infact the employee) physically is, there is work to be done and it either gets done or it doesn't. People won't come into the office just to show up, they aren't just there to look busy while the manager is there and slack off when he/she isn't. In ROWE on the other hand there are specific tasks that get done, the manager can monitor them in or out of the office, the employee can complete them in or out of the office.

In the end, i think seeing how employees behave when they aren't around is an interesting insight that most managers are unlikely to see. Unless of course they resort to spying, in which case it would be safe to assume they are Theory X.

Thought of the Day - Career In Reverse

2008-12-10T07:03:00.001Z

I just had an epiphany, my career so far has been in reverse. Not reverse in the normal meaning; going backwards in terms of money or responsibility, but reverse in the progression of job titles.

For most people: Engineering Degree > Mechanical Engineer > Process Improvement Specialist > Leadership Development Program > Project Manager, would be a logical progression of jobs. And yet somehow i have gone in completely the opposite direction. I don't know whether this is a bad thing or a good thing or in fact what it means, it just struck me as an interesting observation.

I suppose my next job either needs to be an internship or back to university ...

Thought of the Day - Complex Decision Making

2008-12-09T11:47:00.003Z

I just read an article in the 'Boss' supplement from The Australian Financial Review which was a reprint from the Harvard Business Review (June 2006). It concerns something that i have given a fair amount of thought to but never really considered from this angle; how to get a group to decide between many options.

In the past i have largely focused on tools like; the Pugh Matrix, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Impact-Effort Matrix and simple voting. While these techniques result in a decision, what i failed to consider is that just because an option is selected doesn't mean that there is broad agreement with the decision. The article focused on the CEO/Leader as a deadlock breaker and the negative aspect that they become a 'dictator by default' and while i suspect that is a frequent occurrence, the problem is equally valid in groups of peers.

The crux of the problem is summed up in this quote; "majority wishes can clash when a group of three or more people attempt to set priorities among three or more items ... different subsets of the group can generate conflicting majorities for all possible alternatives". E.g. Persons 1 and 2 agree on option A but persons 2 and 3 also agree on option C, by selecting option A you satisfy 1 and 2 but C would have been an equally valid choice as you satisfy 2 and 3.

Once you accept that point, it suggests that it is impossible to resolve this conflict. However this assumes that there are only fixed options, the article advises that you carry out the following steps to come to a better solution:
1) Articulate clearly what outcome you are seeking - Classic problem solving, you can't solve a problem until there is a common understanding of what the problem is.
2) Provide a range of options for achieving the outcome - Again classic problem solving, brainstorm as many solutions as possible.
3) Surface preferences early - There is no point wasting time on options that no-one has any interest in, by eliminating them you don't waste time on pointless debate. This step can be done through voting, possibly weighted, or other techniques.
4) State each option's pros and cons - See the good and bad on both sides, in the article it is recommended for someone to present the pros and another person to present the cons, one may have to play devils advocate.
5) Devise new options with the best features of existing ones - Again classic problem solving technique, synthesize new options by combing the best parts of old ones.

While these steps don't solve the decision making dilemma they will help. I think most important of all is to acknowledge that this problem exists, preferably within the group making the decision, so that you know the pitfalls while you are making the choice.

Book Notes - The Adventures of Johnny Bunko

2008-12-06T12:08:00.001Z

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel Pink [2008]

Summary:

1) There is no plan
There are two types of decision; instrumental and fundamental. You make a decision for instrumental reasons if you are prepared to put up with the present because you think it will lead somewhere. You make a decision for fundamental reasons when your not sure where it will lead but it seems interesting. The former rarely work out and the latter may not get you where you thought you wanted to go but normally lead somewhere interesting.

2) Think strengths, not weaknesses
Steer around your weaknesses and focus on your strengths. You will be more motivated, more enthusiastic and more successful if you do what you are good at.
See: Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham

3) Its not about you
Focus your energy outward not inward. Unless you are a starving artist it isn't about what you want, you have a client, a customer or someone else who you need to satisfy so apply your strengths to that.

4) Persistence trumps talent
"The people who achieve the most are often the ones who stick with it when others don't"
You need to show up, practice, practice and practice some more, perfect your art whether that art be painting, music or engineering. Talent only gets you so far, sticking with it and persisting make you successful.

5) Make excellent mistakes
If you aren't making mistakes you aren't trying hard enough. Make mistakes for the right reasons, pushing the boundaries, trying something new, trying to make a difference. If it does all blow up then you need to learn from those mistakes so you don't make the same mistake again. Try to: "Make a mistake from which the benefits of what you've learned exceed the costs of the screwup."

6) Leave an imprint
Try to make a difference, leave things better than they were and be proud of what you do.

Quotes:
"Is this mind-numbingly repetitive? or repetitive mind-numbing?"

Thought of the Day - Online To Do List Roundup

2008-09-25T15:48:00.004+01:00

A while back i blogged about my love of To Do Lists and at the time i was enamoured with Ta-da Lists by 37 Signals. While it is beautifully simple and totally fulfils their vision of; "competing with a Post-It note", i started to yearn for something with more control and flexibility. So over the last couple of months i have been moving between various webapps for capturing To Do's. I don't think i have yet found the ideal webapp (and it might not exist) but i thought i would share my experience with each of the sites so hopefully other people can find the perfect To Do List for them.

Ta-da Lists
Despite my quest to find the perfect mix of features, i still use this on a fairly regular basis, its great for short ad hoc lists and capturing things to be done quickly. I even sometimes transfer To Do's from other sites into this for the satisfaction of ticking them. Superb for short ad hoc lists, not so good for more complicated projects.
Pro's: Beautifully simple, replaces Post It notes, quick and intuitive to use, satisfying animation when tasks are complete.
Con's: Can't arrange your high level lists, no support for rearranging tasks between lists, not hierarchical, does not support; tagging, reminders, due dates, searching.

Remember The Milk
So from Ta-da Lists i briefly moved on to Remember The Milk after reading a great article on how to use RTM with Getting Things Done. It has support for tagging, reminders, multiple categories of lists and even setting locations with google maps. I think in principle it could be great but i find there are some interfaces niggles that annoy me.
Pro's: Very clean looking interface, works offline with google gears, support for; tagging, reminders, due dates, prioritisation and reordering of tasks, physical locations for tasks.
Con's: Can't reorder your high level lists, not hierarchical, interface doesn't quite work for me (rollovers don't stick), clicking anywhere on a task marks it as complete, slightly silly name.

Treedolist
I had a few annoyances with the user interface of RTM and it didn't offer what i really wanted; a hierarchical task list. I worked in project management for a bit so i like the idea of having subtasks that all contribute to a high level task and i hadn't found that in any of the other webapps. While it is possible to do this in Ta-da and RTM it is only to one level i.e. you have a list composed of tasks, but you can't have subtasks within each task. A google search for "hierarchical to do list" lead me Treedolist which is specifically designed to be hierarchical (like a tree).
Pro's: Hierarchical, intelligent search bar, support for; notes, links, due dates, virtual tagging (if combined with search), changing font sizes.
Con's: Visually it is rather ugly, the interface is quite clunky (old fashioned and unintuitive), you can't reorder tasks other than to the top of the list or to become subtasks, there are some inconsistencies with keyboard shortcuts and actions (sometimes they work sometimes they don't).

Backpack
I had looked at Backpack a while back but i dismissed it as some sorta weird replacement for a company intranet, but after reading Getting Real (great book - notes to follow) it seemed like it might do what i wanted too. Overall there are a raft of features that i have no need for (newsroom, writeboard, journal etc) but the Pages (and if i paid for it, the Calendar too) are excellent. The Pages in particular are really flexible, not only can you have multiple lists on each page, you can split them with dividers, add notes sections and even writeboards. Alas you are limited to 5 pages on the free account which is workable but not ideal.
Pro's: Great interface, easy to move tasks between pages/lists, best visual layout method i've seen (lists, dividers, notes, writeboards etc), the same satisfying animation as TaDa Lists when you complete a task.
Con's: Can't reorder pages (only alphabetically), very limited number of pages on free account, no support for; due dates, task level tagging, assigning notes/links to individual tasks.

Todoist
I literally just stumbled on this tool while writing this post during random googling for links and it seems to be just what i'm looking for. If it works out i will do a longer review of it later, but here are some initial observations.
Pro's: Great interface, hierarchical tasks AND projects, ability to reorder tasks and projects, due dates, multiple projects, easy to move tasks within lists and between projects, prioritisation/reordering of projects.
Con's: Slightly strange query system (it might search?), the page is too wide for my 7" EEE, i haven't used it in anger yet.

Some other resources:
Top 10 Web To Do Lists
LifeHacker Poll Of Top 10 Web To Do Lists
LifeHacker To Do List Tips
Information on the 'Getting Things Done' System

I should start a new trend; Blogging As A Problem Solving Tool, by researching and writing about your problem you may find a solution to it. Alas i have been here before, i think all of the above To Do Lists have seemed like the answer to my prayers at one stage or another and after extended use i have found little annoying niggles with them. So hopefully Todoist will work as well as it seems to, but time will tell.

Thought of the Day - Heat

2008-07-27T21:53:00.003+01:00

I have come to the conclusion that must have been an Inuit in a past life. I love the cold too much and hate the heat. Anything over 20C and i start to get uncomfortable and i would much rather be too cold than too hot. It is currently 28.8C in my flat and it is uncomfortable just sitting still and yet i know people who's idea of bliss is temperatures like this and hotter. You would think coming from a cold and wet area (Scotland) that i would be looking for heat, infact i would rather live somewhere even colder.

Alas what with global warming, i suspect there are few places that would be consistently cold enough for my tastes ... short of Antarctica.

Thought of the Day - Traffic Management Idea

2008-07-26T20:27:00.004+01:00

Last week i was sitting waiting in a traffic jam caused by road works and it occurred to me that traffic management is not run in the most efficient way.

If you consider the bottleneck in the process to be the physical bottleneck in the road and the number of vehicles passing as throughput, then it is clear that the bottleneck is grossly underutilised. As the traffic is running in opposite directions, it is clear that the bottleneck can never be fully exploited as you must wait for the last car in one direction before you can move in the opposite direction. However i think there are still significant improvements that could be made.

Firstly as soon as the last car clears the obstruction in one direction the next car should be moving in the opposite direction. Secondly the speed of the cars should be maximized past the obstruction to increase throughput. Finally the time taken for the cars to move off when the light goes green should be minimised.

So what might my traffic management system look like? I would set the lights back from the obstruction by the same length as the obstruction and have the lights change in the reverse direction based on when the last car leaves in the forward direction. This would allow the cars moving in the reverse direction to move off and get up to speed before the obstruction maximising throughput and minimising wasted time. This eliminates the lag in the system for the cars to move off, it also maximises speed through the obstruction meaning the bottleneck is maximally exploited.

There are 3 issues i can see with this system:
The first is if you get a boy racer at the start of the second set of traffic who screams past the lights and then has to jam on the brakes to avoid the oncoming traffic. This would disrupt the traffic behind and impair the throughput.
The second is if you had a very slow vehicle (crane, lorry or little old lady) they would act as a further bottleneck that would reduce the throughput. Unfortunately almost every traffic management system would retain this problem and by giving the vehicle time to accelerate before the obstruction the problem is minimised.
The final problem is that you cannot always see the full length of the obstruction, in this instance if there was a very slow vehicle passing the obstruction the two traffic flows could meet in the middle and come to a stalemate causing chaos. Unfortunately it is not possible to have good visibility on all roadworks so this may limit the locations where this system could be applied. It would also be possible to have an 'emergency stop' sign just prior to the obstruction to prevent this from happening if all of the traffic had not cleared the obstruction.

All of the above issues could be somewhat mitigated through public eduction either via signs or media sources and completely removed if you introduced two convoy vehicles to pace and control the traffic. While the latter option would greatly increase the cost of traffic management it could be used in high profile or high volume situations where throughput was critical.

While i'm sure every motorist would love spending less time in traffic jams and technically they are the end customer. In reality they don't control the cheque books and the cost of the additional equipment might discourage companies from using it. After all the because the motorists aren't paying, best case is that the company gets less complaints. But as with the Heroes Vs Planners debate they are unlikely to get positive feedback, there will still be a delay and the motorist won't know how bad the delay could have been if the system was not used.

Thought of the Day - Injinji Socks

2008-07-25T21:34:00.000+01:00

I love my Injinji socks, sure they may have worked out being the most expensive socks ever, after shipping and import duty (don't ask how much they cost me per pair) but damn they are good.

Not only do they work perfectly with my Five Fingers but they are also really comfortable with my other shoes too. My feet definitely feel cooler in them (great in the summer but might not be ideal in the winter) and my circulation seems better (my feet used to get numb if my laces were too tight) so all in all a good investment.

Now my only worry is how to get more, 5 pairs is fine in my current circumstances but i will need more if i go on holiday or things change. I just have to hope they get a UK supplier soon ... or go on holiday somewhere i can buy them.

30 Day Trial - Minimalism Of Posessions - Day 11 - The End

2008-07-24T18:01:00.003+01:00

Alas it would appear my first 30-Day Trial has failed miserably.

While i did make a post saying timing would never be perfect it has been the opposite of that so far. I think i need to postpone the trial, failure is not a bad thing as long as you learn from it. In this case i have learned not to start a trial while feeling a bit down and with a wedding to go to within the first week.

I will come back to it when i have suitable motivation, this might be internal or external, but it is definitely still something i want to do.

Thought of the Day - Economics Books

2008-07-23T20:58:00.003+01:00

I was at the airport last Friday and i noticed in the business section there were a glut of new economics books which i would suggest are probably a result of the success of Freakonomics. Whether these are new books written because of Freakonomics or whether they are old and have just been made more popular by the success of Freakonomics i'm not sure.

Within these books there seemed to be 3 distinct categories:
1 – Economics can predict the future well – I did have an example however i can't remember the title or author, just that the cover was orange.
2 – Economics can explain the past (in an interesting way) – Freakonomics by Stephen J Dubner or The Economic Naturalist by Robert H Frank
3 – Economics can't predict anything well – Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To be honest i am rather cynical about the first group, they argue that if you have a good enough model and enough computing power you can predict anything. I would argue that there is far to much randomness to come up with anything better than a guess. The only situation where these models are likely to be accurate are when they are self-fulfilling prophecies; i.e. the models predict a recession, the economists preach a recession, so sure enough there is a recession when there might not have been one otherwise.

For the second group, just about anyone can explain things retroactively, but i will admit that economists do have some interesting explanations.

The third group on the other hand have a lot of valid points, no matter how good the model is you can never be certain. We live in a Quantum not Newtonian world, everything in life is probabilities.

Thought of the Day - Mismatch Problems

2008-07-21T17:16:00.003+01:00

Anyone who has felt like they had to jump through pointless hoops at an assessment centre for a job (i would imagine just about everyone these days), can now rest assured that they are infact a complete waste of time. At least according to best selling author Malcolm Gladwell.

In the video of a presentation he made, he argues that most assessments used to determine peoples suitability for jobs are fundamentally flawed. That the entry to careers ranging from ice hockey player to lawyer, are based on tests that have no bearing on actual ability to perform the duties of a job. Moreover he argues that they only thing that indicates if someone will perform well at a job is if they actually do the job.

I suppose the question is how can you tell if someone can do a job without incurring large costs in terms of time or money?

The mismatch problem is only a concern to you and me if people believe that tests and interview questions are doing anything more than weeding out the blatantly unsuitable candidates. And more to the point, accept that the candidates that do well at the tests may be useless at the job.

Idea From: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/gladwell

Thought of the Day - Vibram Five Fingers at 2 Months

2008-07-19T06:04:00.002+01:00

Well it has been 2 months since i started wearing my Vibram Five Fingers and as mentioned in my previous posts both the theory and practice of wearing them has proved sound. So i thought i would do a bit of a roundup of observations so far:

1) They are really really comfortable.
The biggest leap of faith for most people is understanding that padding is not comfort. Almost everyone i talk to about them asks if it is sore walking on tarmac and concrete because they are hard, or rough pointy stones.
I will tackle hard surfaces first because they are what i walk on 90% of the time. Once you modify your walking style (which happens naturally) you land more softly on your feet and therefore they hurt much less than in padded shoes. Even standing on concrete all day (when i am delivering training) doesn't bother me anymore. With trainers or shoes my feet would get sore after a couple of hours, now i barely notice it at all. Pointy stones are a different matter, i grant you i don't have a huge amount of experience at the moment, but from what i have there are two things to keep in mind. Pointy stones are uncomfortable, but it is only discomfort and it does not linger. Also because there is less padding between your feet and the ground you have more of a tactile sense of it and are therefore more careful where you put your feet.
I would recommend Vibram Five Fingers or Vivo Barefoot shoes unreservedly to anyone who experiences discomfort in their feet.

2) Be prepared for questions.
You would think that having five separated toes (just like your feet) wouldn't cause much of a stir. But everyone is so used to traditional shoes that people are genuinely surprised when they realise you are wearing shoes and they have separate toes. The inital shock (and occasional laughter) is quickly followed by a barrage of questions from; what is the deal with those shoes? to why are you wearing them? to do you wear them inside regular shoes? to what happens if you walk on broken glass? Personally having put a lot of thought into it i really don't mind answering questions but if you are shy or bothered by people being strangely interested in your feet, these shoes may not be for you.
The black Classics i have are a blessing and a curse; the blessing is that they are less obvious, in peripheral vision they are just a black shoe, however when people do notice them they look like gorilla feet ;-)

3) Socks
After a period of time you can see a realisation dawning on the persons face and they ask the final question; "hey wait a minute, don't you have to have special socks for those?". The answer is yes you do, mine are from a company called Injinji. I suspect i spent more on 5 pairs of these socks than i have on socks in my previous 26 years. They are expensive to start with, i then had to pay the same price again for shipping 5 pairs from the states and the same price again in import duty. But they are essential, firstly because without socks the Classics look like ladies pumps, second they add a bit of warmth, third they are great with other shoes too and finally (see the next point) they prevent blisters. My biggest concern with the socks is that they already seem to be wearing after around a month of light daily use and at the price i paid that is not a good sign.

4) Blisters
The only problem i have had so far with the shoes was some blisters at the front of my foot when walking downhill without socks. It is a bit strange and may be because my Classics are a little on the large side but unfortunately the blisters were really painful and in an awkward position i have a habit of standing on.

5) Workwear

In my current job i can wear the Five Fingers most of the time (occasionally i need to wear steel toed shoes), however in an office that is a bit more formal they might not be suitable. So if i moved jobs i guess i would need to look at something a bit more normal but still close to barefoot like Terra Plana Mercury or Vivo Barefoot Aqua Sport.

6) The Future
So what does the future hold for me and my Five Fingers? Firstly i suspect i will need to buy some Flow's for the winter, the Classic and KSO versions have no insulation at all and i can imagine them being very cold if wet. I'm not 100% sure the neoprene wet-suit effect is ideal in terms of your feet being damp all day but at least they should be warm.

I also want to try them out offroad some more, maybe some gentle walks on paths to start with, moving up to more rugged terrain and possibly even paintballing.

Finally i really want to start jogging in them and they do have the effect of making me want to jog, but i need to lose some more weight so that i don't destroy my joints.

Props to www.fivefingers.co.uk who have supplied both my Classics and KSO's, they have great service and kept me up-to-date with how things were progressing.

No props to www.injinji.com as their general inquiry e-mail address rejected my question as the mail box was full and when i resent it to a more specific address no-one bothered to get back to me or even acknowledge the mail.

Thought of the Day - Timing

2008-07-17T21:42:00.001+01:00

Well the timing for my first 30-day trial sucks, the first 4 days i have been too tired, bored and apathetic to do anything. For the next 4 days i am up in Scotland for my cousins wedding so other than maybe a bit of planning i'm not likely to get anything done.

Most people will agree there is never a perfect time to start something and rarely a good time, so you might as well just get on with it. I suspect when i get back from Scotland i will have to get my butt in gear and start actually doing something.

Thought of the Day - Apathy

2008-07-16T20:21:00.002+01:00

I am so tired, bored and apathetic at the moment that i can barely even be bothered to type. Looking back i think i often used to feel this way and the fact that it seems strange could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. At the moment it seems like a bad thing, i need some way to break out of it, to get back to how i was. Unfortunately i don't know how so i guess i need to figure it out.

30 Day Trial - Minimalism Of Posessions - Day 1

2008-07-14T19:35:00.005+01:00

Well today i have accomplished pretty much hee haw. I have mentally segregated stuff into categories and what i'll do with each category but i really need to actually write them down, make sure i haven't forgotten anything and do something about it.

I'm just too tired and bored and apathetic but i guess i'll have to cope.

Have to be up at 5am tomorrow so maybe will get something done before work.

End Date - Wednesday the 12th August 2008 - 29 Days Left

30 Day Trial - Minimalism Of Posessions - Day 0

2008-07-13T22:31:00.002+01:00

To mark the 100th post to this blog i have decided to launch my first blogged 30-day trial.

As discussed in my Life Simplification post a while back i am looking to simplify the number and volume of possessions i have. This was brought into focus with recent interest from an Australian company in employing me, i wondered what i would take with me if i moved. Sure i could ship everything over, but it would take months on the sea and by the time it arrived i would have learned to live without it anyway. So while it seems unlikely anything will come of this situation, it does make me wonder why i have this much junk even if i am just staying in the uk.

As with the show 30 Days i am going to set some ground rules to focus my mind a little:

Rules:
1) By the end of the 30 days all of my possessions must fit in to the boot of my car (excluding furniture and possessions that are in the process of being sold but have not been collected).
2) A target income from the downsizing will be set to replace larger items with smaller but functional alternatives (eg desktop computer replaced with laptop).
3) I will update the blog with a minimum of weekly updates on progress.

End Date - Wednesday the 12th August 2008 - 30 Days Left

Thought of the Day - Spit Shining Shoes

2008-07-12T20:16:00.000+01:00

According to a body language book i read, two things that almost everyone judges you on at a job interview are; how shiny your shoes are and how big your watch is.

The latter is to do with a big watch being associated with power and class, the shoes i'm not so sure about. Fortunately it isn't something i've ever had to worry about, i don't remember how old i was but my granda taught me to spit-shine shoes and it has stood me in good stead ever since. My granda was in the police for a long time so i guess he picked up some good tips. So today i am going to share with you the best way to spit-shine your shoes (and secure any job you interview for):

1. Put your index finger in clingfilm or a plastic bag and take a fair dollop of shoe polish (i would recommend Kiwi Parade Gloss) and apply it liberally to your shoe, massaging it in. There should be enough polish that you are really just spreading it around.
2. Leave for 5 minutes (normally the amount of time it takes you to do the second shoe) and then remove most of the polish with a dry cloth or soft brush.
3. Take a fresh cloth (i recommend a yellow duster), wrap it tightly around a finger tip, dampen the tip and apply a tiny amount of shoe polish to it.
4. Gently apply the polish in small circles to the shoe, you are aiming for a light haze. Then repeat on the other shoe.
5. Move to a fresh part of the cloth and dampen the tip again (or spit on the shoe) and gently rub small circles to shine the haze but don't remove much of the polish.
6. Apply a little polish to the tip and rub gently onto the shoe again aiming for a light haze. Then repeat on the other shoe.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 moving from shoe to shoe until the surface is smooth. This can take a long time, particularly if this is the first time they have been polished but you want to build up lots of very thin layers of polish to smooth the leather and allow a really deep mirror shine.
8. Once the surface is smooth, take a dry section of cloth and rub the shoes more vigorously (not too hard) to create the shine. If they are shiny enough great! If not go back to step 5 and repeat until they are.

While very repetitive i find it strangely relaxing in a zen-like way, it is also quite satisfying when you get a really deep mirror finish.

Thought of the Day - Good TV

2008-07-11T22:47:00.001+01:00

If i had to cut down my TV watching to just one show it would be Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days. I can't think of a single episode from the 18 i have seen that hasn't challenged my thinking and emotionally affected me.

Frankly it is just damn good TV; it is challenging, its entertaining and normally it is uplifting. The basic premise is that someone spends 30 days doing something they would not normally do ... It is presented as a documentary so effectively it is reality TV for smart people.

A lot of the time it boils down to; "i'm crazy, you have to respect my right to be crazy and my crazy views, but my crazyness means i don't have to respect your views." Most of the time the people realise that their crazyness is not the be all and end all of the situation, even if they don't end up fully assimilating the views they at least respect and understand them.

In only one episode (S03E04) has the person has not budged one iota in their beliefs. That even after spending time with people who try to rationally present their views and have been immersed in the views, that they can't even see the other persons point of view, never mind empathise with their situation.

In some ways it worries me that people are so set in their beliefs, yet if you weren't set in your ways do you really have belief? And possibly more to the point what does that say about having beliefs?

Thought of the Day - Wasted Time

2008-07-10T19:07:00.002+01:00

I really don't use my time as efficiently as i could, this afternoon and evening for example i have done heehaw. I've just felt too tired to do anything worth doing, even writing this blog about it seems like too much effort. I know i shouldn't be tired, i had plenty sleep and felt rested when i woke up and yet around 2pm i just started to feel really tired.

I suppose it might have something to do with not eating between 7am and 5pm.

Thought of the Day - Energy Levels pt2

2008-07-09T07:24:00.004+01:00

Yet again this morning woke up feeling crap, but i think i have worked out why.

In my previous post on Sleep Optimization I suggested that it took me 1 hour to get to sleep and while that may have been true in the past i have noticed it getting shorter and shorter the last couple of weeks to the extent that if it takes me more than 30 minutes i would be very surprised. The consequence of this is that instead of getting up between sleep cycles i am now probably getting up 30 minutes into my next sleep cycle and the interruption is what is making me tired.

So from tonight i think i will set my alarm for 6.5 hours in advance instead of 7 and see if there is any improvement.

Thought of the Day - Energy Levels

2008-07-08T17:55:00.002+01:00

The last couple of days my energy levels have been really low, i'm not sure why. I'm eating the same things i have been for the last 6 months, i haven't been doing anything particularly different compared to the last 6 months so what has changed?

First possibility is that it has been dark when i have woken up due to the rain and the lack of sunlight is affecting me. Though it has been dark and rainy in the past without this effect.

Second possibility is just that i've been feeling a bit down recently. Though am i feeling down because i'm tired and have no energy, or am i tired and have no energy because i am down?

Who knows, hopefully i will feel a bit more energetic in the next couple of days or i will have to look into some further changes.

Thought of the Day - Perception and Reality

2008-07-07T18:57:00.004+01:00

I know people who vehemently believe that perception is reality and some who are convinced reality is an absolute. I on the other hand fall somewhere in between.

I think there are some things where reality is absolute; scientific facts, the nature of matter at a macroscopic level, physical objects.

On the other hand anything that is artificially constructed by people is skewed by the perception of the person and other observers. Money for example is a human construct, it has no value other than that which we assign it. Therefore the amount of money you think you have is based on perception, on comparing it with the amount of money you think other people have. If you feel rich compared to those around you then you are, if you feel poor then you are. In this instance perception isn't the full story though, just by believing you are rich does not make it so in the eyes of others, you can't buy a Lamborghini on belief alone.

So perception determines how you feel but what about how you live your life? I think in this instance perception is even more relevant. If you think you are a lucky person, in your mind you are, no disagreement with other peoples perceptions will change that, the same if you think you are healthy. Now i know there are those who argue that believing you are lucky or healthy manifests that as reality in your life, i'm not sure if i believe that. But i do think that as long as you believe it then that is all that matters.

Anyway enough amateur philosophy for the evening.

Thought of the Day - 05:00 pt2

2008-07-06T22:20:00.001+01:00

Way back in the day when i first started this blog i posted about trying to get up at 5am, it was more of a question really and i think i might have answered it.

The question was, whether i could find a reason to get up at 5am during the week and the weekend. Alas i haven't found a single reason, but i have found another way. I have started recording reasons to get up early the night before in my to do lists. Sometimes the reason is really obvious (when i have to prepare something before work) sometimes it is a bit wooly (well i could get up and read before work) but just having at least a slightly specific item seems to help.

For two weeks i have managed to get up before 5am during the week which i think is a fair achievement. I know i managed more at the start of the year but then i had external motivation, now it is all internal. I am still also having issues at the weekend, i have a hard deadline of starting work during the week but weekends there is no time constraint.

Overall though i am fairly happy, it is a work in progress so hopefully it will get better.

Thought of the Day - What Do Fonts Say About You?

2008-07-05T08:43:00.000+01:00

So what does the font you use say about you? Well according to an academic paper i came across yesterday, in my case (Century Gothic) nothing, the font i use all the time is associated with literally nothing.

You can take that one of two ways;
1) The font is so bland and generic people don't associate it with anything.
2) The font is so unique that people can't label it.

In reality i guess it could be either of the above, or it might depend on the person. But on the plus side for me i know it isn't over-exposed and at least somewhat unique. I use Century Gothic so much that it is almost like my hand writing and it freaks me out when other people use it, its like i wrote it and then forgot.

Idea from: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/81/PersonalityofFonts.asp

Thought of The Day - Heroes and Planners pt2

2008-07-04T05:48:00.002+01:00

I just watched an interesting documentary which reinforced my thoughts on the Heroes Vs Planners debate. It was about a raid in world war two where Commandos destroyed a dry-dock to prevent the use of the most powerful battleship ever built. It was an unquestionable success, the dry docks were destroyed, the Germans were unable to use the ship in the Atlantic and it was eventually sunk in a Norwegian fjord having never sunk any other ship. Ok so it is impossible to say what might have happened if it had been able to operate in the Atlantic; maybe it would have been destroyed some other way or maybe it would have decimated the British navy. The real benefits of that act of planning will never be known and therein lies the rub.

The men who planned and executed that raid were heroes by any way you would care to measure and yet the only memorial is a small plaque on a small rock in a harbour. The problem was because the battleship had never been involved in a battle, because no lives had been lost to it yet, because the threat it posed had never been proven it was an act of planning to render it useless.

This is not to belittle other heroic acts that are remembered because they were in spite of serious fuckups. Just to highlight that even people who are heroes might not be recognised because they planned and prevented the fuckup in the first place.

Thought of the Day - Barefoot Shoes

2008-07-03T05:24:00.001+01:00

Ok the title sounds like an oxymoron, how can you have bare feet and shoes at the same time? You can't, but you can come close and now that i have, i would never go back.

It has now been 1.5 months since i bought my Vibram Five Fingers shoes and i still think they are great. On Tuesday i had to wear regular shoes for a lot of the day and i was surprised by: 1) how much my feet hurt, 2) how narrow the shoes felt, 3) that not only did my feet hurt but so did my lower back. I must admit i was a little bit sceptical at first, but the more i read and thought about it, the more the theory made sense. Now after some experience the practice makes sense too.

My biggest worry now is if in a few years time, what i can't find barefoot shoes?

Thought of the Day - Missed Day

2008-07-02T07:27:00.003+01:00

Curses, yesterday was my first missed day in quite a while. My pre-preparation of posts has been working quite well however i encountered a new problem; no internet connection :-(

I arrived at my hotel last night to find out that the wifi was down and that an engineer had to be sent out ... the following morning. So not only had i paid the ridiculous amount for hotel wifi the day before for a shoddy service, now there was no service at all.

So how do i handle the possible lack of internet connection, should i buffer the pre-prepared posts and have them automatically post if i don't change it? Then the problem becomes remembering which posts are automatic and cancelling them if i post something else. Also how long in advance should i have this automated buffer? I suppose the real question is how long could i be incommunicado from the internet, one day? a week? I suspect this needs more thought ...

Thought of the Day - Tasks I Achieve Flow In

2008-06-30T05:35:00.003+01:00

This morning i read an article on how to achieve flow (link at bottom of post) and i realised that i really don't experience it in work a lot.

Some things in life i find it easy to achieve flow in, most notably; reading (both books and articles), researching a topic online and coding websites. At work it is much more rare, if i get some peace and quiet i can achieve it doing data analysis or creating a presentation. Unfortunately to achieve flow i normally need music on in the background, so it doesn't help that we aren't allowed to use headphones. One other area i think i might achieve flow in is delivering training, i must admit i haven't really thought about it but when i get going it does feel effortless, maybe something to look at in the future.

So if flow is an optimal state of working and i don't experience it in my job very often then am i in the right job?

Idea from: http://zenhabits.net/2008/06/guide-to-achieving-flow-and-happiness-in-your-work/

Thought of the Day - Ready, Fire, Aim

2008-06-29T10:47:00.004+01:00

Sometimes a theory or and idea keeps coming up over and over again and in those situations it is hard to ignore. Recently i kept reading about the benefits of the "Ready, Fire, Aim" approach, it was in books, on websites and in podcasts and it made sense.

Most people use the "Ready, Aim, Fire" approach. Only it normally turns into "Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim ... maybe Fire", too much planning and not enough action. On the other hand "Read, Fire, Aim" relies on action straight away, the results of which can be used to improve your accuracy. It is like firing a gun for the first time, you don't know whether the sights are set correctly or if the barrel is straight, therefore until you fire the aiming might not matter at all.

Something i have been meaning to take action on for a long time (like since 2004) is updating my WebCV into the modern age. It was originally built like a site from 1996; a pain to update, not very modern looking and rubbish for search engine optimisation, frankly it was an embarrassment. At various times since then i have bought and read books about web design, i have felt guilty for not updating it and once or twice i have even started to put something together. But it never quite got done, i spent too long planning and worrying about how difficult it would be and how long it would take to get it perfect. Even the most recent time i made a start in March i had a big elaborate plan, it was gantt charted out over 3 or 4 months but of course after a week i lost interest and nothing ever came of it.

On Friday evening i was listening to a podcast from SXSW where various entrepreneurs who were renowned for being 'fast' were speaking on the topic. These were people who had built the likes of Twitter, Blogger etc which are rather complicated pieces of software and the timescales they were talking about from picking a concept to first release were ridiculously short, months if not weeks. At this stage i began to feel rather embarrassed, my WebCV really isn't that complicated, i have most of the skills to update it, so how come they can launch huge brands in a few months and i can't even build a website?

The answer is simple; they set a short timescale to get something out there, it may not be complete, it may not be perfect, but it is something that they can then build on going forward. Programmers call this "release early, release often". It is better to get something out and get real customer feedback about what needs changed than it is to spend years building what you think customers want only to find it isn't actually what they want or the opportunity has passed.

With this in mind i decided that 12 hours was a reasonable amount of time to build a website. I set key tasks that had to be done and decided if something was taking too long that i would accept something that was ok, rather than taking longer and getting something that was perfect. It was difficult, first off it is the weekend so it was hard to avoid distractions and secondly i had forgotten most of the CSS i used to know. But after 11 hours of work i updated my WebCV and uploaded to the site.

I would be grateful if anyone who reads this could go and have a look at my WebCV and provide any feedback they can think of through the contact link. So far my list of things to do includes:

Validate the xHTML and CSS against the W3C standards
Improve consistency across browsers (IE7 and Firefox 3 are ok but i suspect it needs work on IE6, Firefox 2 and IE8)
Sort out the padding and margins to get the spacing between the headings and text right
Make a better header (the current one will do but its not great)
Make the navigation tabs a bit less bland and angular
Think of some ways to make it more visually appealing without being tacky

At least i have something out there, a base to build on. It is a much less daunting task to make lots of small improvements than it is to come up with something brand new and perfect first time. So remember; if you are procrastinating, if a project seems to big to know where to start, set a tight timescale and "Ready, Fire, Aim".

Idea from: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/05/29/the-art-of-speed-conversations-with-monster-makers/#more-362

Thought of the Day - RSS Feeds

2008-06-28T06:36:00.001+01:00

For supposedly being a tech-savy guy i can't believe i haven't made use of RSS Feeds properly until now.

I say properly because i have used them before, i played with Firefox's RSS reader and Google Reader a while back but it never really stuck. I think it was because i was subscribing to feeds that had a stupid number of updates a day (unfiltered news sites etc) so i was just getting overwhelmed with junk. I guess i assumed that all RSS feeds were like that until this morning when i realised that a lot of the sites i have open in Firefox and refresh on a regular basis are sporadically updated. I was just going through checking for updates, not finding any and thought "surely there is a better way" and then i noticed a pattern ... lots and lots of little orange buttons. So i fired up Google Reader, deleted all of the high volume feeds i was subscribed to (but never looked at) and added all of the blogs and other sites with sporadically updated content. So now not only have i saved on memory footprint in Firefox, i only have to refresh one page to get updates, everything is in a nice chronological order and i don't have to worry about missing anything.

In all honesty it hasn't cut down my number of Firefox tabs that much (maybe lost 10 tabs overall) but combined with moving the tabs i keep open 'for reference' to Google Bookmarks and i should get down to one window.

Thought of the Day - Life Simplification - Possessions

2008-06-27T06:50:00.000+01:00

Something i have been thinking about for quite a while is simplifying my life, mostly in terms of possessions but partly in terms of repetitive tasks i have to do.

In terms of possessions i have an unfortunate habit of accumulating things; i might need them at some point and if i do, i want to have my own stuff. A prime example is ice skates, i haven't been ice skating in over a year and the next most recent time was like 5 years ago. But i can't bring myself to chuck out or sell my skates, the thing is i wouldn't want to go ice skating without my own skates because frankly hire skates suck. That is only the tip of the iceberg; i do the same with bikes, paintball stuff, computer stuff and hoard various other things too. The biggest problem i have is that most of my stuff is worth next to nothing if i sold it, but could be useful to me so it feels like it is worth more to me than it is to sell.

Having said the above, if i flogged all the stuff i don't really need i could probably afford to buy anything i did end up needing when i needed it. Then the problem becomes the effort required to flog all the stuff being much more than it is worth to me in terms of time. I would be happy to accept 50% less than the actual value if someone else would just take it all off my hands and sell it themselves. The problem with that is traditional 'house clearers' focus on old furniture, pictures, kitchenware etc rather than the more modern things i have.

Then the option becomes storage, but it is just such a waste that i can't justify it. Its an ongoing cost to hold on to junk that i will probably never use again, i would be better donating everything to charity and setting aside the money i would have spent on storage to buy new stuff.

So i feel like i'm stuck between a rock, a piece of steel and a hard place; selling my stuff is too much effort, giving it away just seems wrong and storing it is such a waste. What to do?

Thought of the Day - Did The British Invent 5S?

2008-06-26T05:02:00.002+01:00

I heard an interesting story, that it wasn't the Japaneses but the British who invented 5S, the Japanese just gave it a name and applied it in factories. Hah! you may say, look at how bad the 5S is in most British manufacturing companies, did we invent it and forget?

Alas no, it was just invented and still used somewhere that most people never see - on boats in the Navy. Only in the Navy it is called being 'ship shape'. I'm sure you have all seen war films, sailors out scrubbing the decks etc. If you think about it what happens on a boat conforms to 5S;
Sort - there is nothing on the boat that doesn't need to be, space and weight are at a premium.
Set In Order - because the boat will move in the seas everything needs to be secured and hence in the right place.
Shine - things are cleaned on a very regular basis, you want to find any problems as soon as possible.
Standardize - The captain or senior officers make it clear what needs to be done and how regularly.
Sustain - The sailors get a bollocking if the previous 4 steps are not done.

In retrospect the best 5S implementation i have ever seen was onboard a nuclear submarine. Not only is space at a serious premium ensuring Sort has to be right, but you want to minimise the noise so the enemy can't detect you so your Set In Order has to be perfect (and noiseless) too.

To be honest i haven't done any fact checking about which Navy first coined the term 'ship shape' or that the Japanese didn't invent 5S thousands of years ago, but it is an interesting thought.

Thought of the Day - Process Improvements I Love To Hate

2008-06-25T05:08:00.003+01:00

There is one process improvement in particular that i love to hate.

Anyone who has stayed in a Travel Inn or similar budget hotel recently has probably noticed the increase in Lux Shower Gel/Shampoo bottles in place of traditional soap and shampoo. If you weren't a process engineer you might wonder why. The simple reason is cost reduction, how many barely used bars of soap and mini-bottles of shampoo do you think are thrown out each year? So something that you don't have to replace after every guest is quite a big saving, huge infact, probably millions of pounds a year, especially for a hotel chain as big as Travel Inn. It is also good for the environment, the waste generated from individually packaged soap and shampoo must be orders of magnitude more than large bottles of Lux. Finally who wants to steal a huge bottle of shower gel that only fits in a mounted holder, so there must be a significant reduction in theft too.

Unfortunately i really really hate shower gel, i always feel greasy after i use it and never quite feel clean. So on a personal level i hate it but on a technical level its is a great process improvement and i only wish i had thought of it first.

Thought of the Day - UK Hotel Wifi

2008-06-24T05:12:00.001+01:00

I'm staying at the Travel Inn (not Lodge) at Manchester Airport and it is damn near perfect; clean room, minimalist, flat screen TV, comfy bed, quiet and bliss of bliss it even has aircon.

But the one thing that kills it all is the woefully slow wifi ... it can't even save this blog post as i go along and my Tada Lists (the simplest web pages known to man) are taking >10 minutes to open. What i want to know is how on earth can this be the case? If it was free (as is the case in most of north america) i could live with it but i'm paying £10 a day for the privilege, if i was charged this rate at home i'd have a dedicated fibre line right to my flat. I'm not even going to be able to use it for the whole 24 hours; arrive 4pm leave 7am and 8 hours sleep inbetween leaves a maximum of 7 hours surfing. Worse still i'm not even doing heavy web browsing (downloading attachments or uploading anything), i'm loading some text based web pages and it is taking forever.

To anyone who runs a hotel in the UK; either stop gouging your customers for the slowest internet connection since 33.6kbps dial-up or provide a decent service for the exorbitant fee you charge.

Thought of the Day - Longest Day pt 2

2008-06-23T05:06:00.000+01:00

Well the longest day has been and gone and i must say i have grown rather fond of light streaming in my windows at 5am. While it is a bit depressing knowing that the day length is only going to get shorter and shorter for the next 6 months a more immediate concern is how easy it will be to build the habit of getting up at 5am going forward.

At the moment it is relatively easy to get up early; it is bright, it is warm and sometimes even sunny outside. On the other hand it is infinitely harder to wake up early when it is dark, cold and raining. Given that i can't even manage to get up now i think it is time for a different technique.

I'm now getting to the stage that i am considering using Steve Pavlina's conditioned response method of getting up. I had shunned it in the past because it seemed too extreme, but as it turns out i have no willpower so i need to turn my alarm clock going off into an ingrained imperative that i must get out of bed.

Thought of the Day - Life As A Laboratory

2008-06-22T15:52:00.001+01:00

Something a lot of people seem to find strange about me is that i experiment with things, not only that but i actually call them experiments. I don't just buy a new pair of shoes, i experiment with near-barefoot walking. I don't become a Vegan, i experiment with my diet. I don't wake up early, i experiment with my sleep.

To me life is a laboratory, all parts of my life can be optimised, improved and if necessary changed wholesale. On the other hand i think a lot of people get into a (un)happy rut and don't see the need to change, to try new things. While i am sure that i am guilty of that in some areas of my life it doesn't stop me looking to change in others. The great thing about experimenting is that if it doesn't work out you aren't committed to the path, you were just trying it out. It also doesn't preclude the possibility of future improvements or changes. For me one of the most reassuring things about science is that scientists can admit when they were not exactly right or even outright wrong. There are no absolutes, it only takes one exception to break the rules and set you looking for new rules.

I'm sure other people experiment with things and maybe it is because my experiments tend to be a little more extreme, but most people i discuss my experiments see me as strange or at best eccentric. What convinces me that i am on the right path is a lot of the most interesting people that i've met and authors who's books i've read have had a similar attitude to experimentation.

Book Notes - Why Work Sucks

2008-06-21T21:18:00.002+01:00

Why Work Sucks by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson [2008]

Summary:
Judge people on results, not the amount of time they spend in the office. A simple and some would say common sense statement, however 99% of the world is managed in completely the opposite way. This book provides a great argument against the prevailing management methods and also what they should be changed to.

Definitions:
Presenteeism - Being physically but not mentally present in your job. (page 17)
Sludge – The negative commentary that occurs in the workplace based on the erroneous beliefs on page 23. (page 30)
Sludge Anticipation – Mental preparation you go through if you are expecting sludge, wasted time and energy. (page 49)
Sludge Justification – The time and energy taken to present your excuse to the sludger, not only wasting your time but the person sludging too. (page 51)
Black Sludge – Sludging people behind their back in groups of 2 or more people. (page 52)
ROWE – Each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want as long as the work gets done. (page 66)

Notes:
Page 13: The core problem with work is the theory that Time + Physical Presence = Results, when infact it is very easy to put in a lot of time and physical presence but not accomplish anything.
Page 15: Random Thought: If you are working in an ROWE and can accomplish your job in say 20 hours per week, what happens if your boss wants you to do more, do you get a pay rise or do you just get more to do?
Page 19: Presenteeism isn’t the employees fault it is the fault of the system, of the judges of performance. Show me how you measure me and i will show you how i behave.
Page 23: List of erroneous assumptions we currently have for work. My favourite is “if people get their work done in less time they should get more work”.
Page 24: Random Thought: I wonder how much the above statement has to do with problems in project management, one of the big things in Critical Chain is that “finish early” is never passed on to the next step, one of the reasons for this is that there is no incentive to do so, you will just get more work or be expected to do future work in less time.
Page 33: Paragraph two goes on to say that almost all companies are the same, even young ‘progressive’ ones because the people working there have the same assumptions.
Page 34: If you have a high level of demands (stuff to do) and a high level of control (you get to prioritise and manage the work) it may be hectic but it is not so stressful. However if you have high demands and low control (someone else decides what you do when) life becomes unbearable.
Page 41: Flexitime is not the answer, it is considered a perk, the company will do anything within their power to put you off doing it and you will likely be ‘sludged’ for not being committed.
Page 54: Random Thought: Is Sludge the 8th lean waste?
Page 61: Black Belt pointing out that it isn’t all about fluff bunnies and spending more time with the kids, it is about focusing on what really matters to the company and eliminating waste.
Page 66: The irony is most people go from a ROWE (college/university) into jobs that are all about how much time you spend at your desk. You go from an environment where you are completely free to select and prioritise your work (within a certain framework) to being told what to do and treated like a child. Is it any wonder that there is a serious adjustment period for graduates?
Page 82: The perception is that ROWE is a win-lose situation (employees win, employers lose) this could not be further from the truth. How can the employer lose if the employees have a focus on business results, are more committed to achieving those results because they want to keep working in an ROWE and are generally happier and more productive?
Page 85: Random Thought: Consultants and freelancers already live in an ROWE world, all ROWE is doing is bringing that ethic to companies. Maybe this is how Charles Handy’s view of the future will happen, rather than everyone becoming freelance and being bought into a company, ROWE will allow similar flexibility and benefits without the hassle of coordinating hundreds of independent workers.
Page 89: The 13 Guideposts:
1. People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customers time or the company’s time.
2. Employees have the freedom to work any way they want.
3. Every day feels like Saturday.
4. People have an unlimited amount of “paid time off” as long as the work gets done.
5. Work isn’t a place you go – it’s something you do.
6. Arriving at the workplace at 2:00pm is not considered coming in late. Leaving the workplace at 2:00pm is not considered leaving early.
7. Nobody talks about how many hours they work.
8. Every meeting is optional.
9. It’s ok to grocery shop on a Wednesday morning, catch a movie on a Tuesday afternoon, or take a nap on a Thursday afternoon.
10. There are no work schedules.
11. Nobody feels guilty, overworked, or stressed out.
12. There aren’t any last minute fire-drills.
13. There is no judgement about how you spend your time.
Page 125: The side effect of “Every meeting is optional” is that people are much more focused on why they are having the meeting, who they want to attend and why and if people don’t turn up it probably saying you got it wrong.
Page 144: Random Thought: An ROWE would eliminate the need for project reviews, it would be up to the project leaders to schedule time for coaching, mentoring and questions.

Quotes:
Page22 : “Perception is reality”
Page 29: “We have this weird permission to be shitty to one another at work.”

Thought of the Day - Results-Only Work Environment

2008-06-21T20:42:00.005+01:00

99% of people are paid for their time and not their results. Which do you think is better for the company and the individual? Unsurprisingly for anyone with half a brain, the results method is better for both.

I really should have posted this when i came across the concept on Tuesday but i wanted to read the book (Why Work Sucks) first to make sure i really understood what i was talking about. The books notes will be up very shortly after this post but i wanted to offer some comentary that wouldn't have been appropriate in the notes.

Having just read the book it feels like the culmination of thoughts that i have been having in my career up until now. It really ties together; behavioural management, self-directed companies (Maverick, Open Minds etc), process improvement (Six Sigma, metrics etc) and even the more recent lifestyle design (4-Hour Work Week).

It also finally puts a name to something i have expereinced first hand, i am a morning person when it comes to work, i like getting up early and making a start on work. I tend to be in the office before everyone else (~7am), i don't take lunch or breaks and i know that after 3pm i'm not really at my best but i have to hang around until at least 5pm because it is expected, because people will call me a slacker if i don't. It doesn't matter if i don't accomplish anything in those 2 hours, as long as i am at my desk people assume i am being productive.
In my first job after grduating from university i took the approach of doing my contacted hours, i'd start early and finish early. The hour before my colleages arrived tended to be my most productive, so i thought logically it was good for the company. However it wasn't long before my boss took me aside and said that he didn't care if i was in early, he wasn't there so he didn't know if i was working or not and leaving before 5pm was showing a lack of comitment. Which sent the clear message to me that he didn't care if i worked or not, just that i was at my desk. It also prompted me to start recording my hours so that if he ever said i wasn't comitted again i could throw my regular >50 hour weeks in his face.
That conversation has stuck with me for the last 4 years and i still record my hours for the same reason. After reading the book it strikes me that it is a huge waste of time. A waste of the companies time because i do it in work time. A waste of my energy because i worry about how it might be perceived if my average hours drop below 45 despite the fact i am only contracted for 38. It also provides zero incentive to improve, if i know i have 2 hours of reduced productivity why not stretch things out to fill them time, the only outcome of working faster is getting more work to do in my least productive time.

I suspect this will be a recurring theme in this blog, so i have given it a tag "ROWE" if you want to group all of the posts together.

Idea from: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/05/21/no-schedules-no-meetings-enter-best-buys-rowe-part-1/

Thought of the Day - Sleep Optimization Pt 2

2008-06-20T05:06:00.002+01:00

Well day 4 of the Sleep Optimization is not quite going to plan. I got up but it was a real struggle, i almost talked myself into going back to sleep for 1.5 hours.

But on the plus side i think i know why i almost talked myself into going back to bed. If i don't have a really clear idea of what i'm going to do or why i'm going to get up it is very easy to postpone, it also doesn't help if what i am planning to do could be done at another time. Yesterday i knew i wanted to get up early to watch 30 Days s03e02 before work, sure enough i got up. This morning i didn't have as clear a reason and therefore it was easier for me to talk myself into going back to bed.

So as a further refinement, before i go to bed each night i need to write down what i plan to do first thing in the morning, preferably something that can be done at no other time.

Thought of the Day - Sleep Optimization

2008-06-19T05:05:00.004+01:00

Well first time i've blogged on sleeping in a couple of months, but i'm trying another experiment so figured it would be worth doing.

Previously i've gone for the 'Steve Pavlina' method of sleep optimization; pick a time to wake up (normally 5am), get up then come rain or shine, go to sleep when you are tired. The problem is that i can't always get to sleep when i'm tired and then in the morning i don't feel rested enough to get up, its a motivation thing.

Now i'm trying the 'Tim Ferris' method of sleep optimization; work out how long it takes you to get to sleep (in my case 1 hour), add that to 6 hours (4 sleep cycles of 1.5 hours) and set your alarm. So far (3 days) it is working pretty well, i certainly feel less tired through the day than i did previously (normally with more sleep) and i have more time in the mornings. There are a couple of problems i foresee; what will the effect be if i have to get up before the whole 6 hours of sleep (if i go to bed late and have to get up for work)? and will the effect last because it still requires motivation to get up?

Well we shall see how it goes, if it works i'll be happy with reducing my time in bed to 7 hours a day, if not i think it will be worth investing time in a little psychological response conditioning ...

Thought of the Day - To Do Lists

2008-06-18T20:26:00.000+01:00

First off i will admit i love To Do Lists, normally on Post Its or on paper at home but at work if Outlook didn't remind me to do tasks they would surely be forgotten. I have a memory like a sieve so if i don't write down something i need to do then i am almost guaranteed to forget to do it.

One of the problems i had was coordinating tasks between home and work. At work i have Outlook and at home i have bits of paper, but frequently i think of something i need to do at home when i'm at work and vice versa. Previously i used the To Do List function in Basecamp (project management web-app) to manage a web-to-do-list, but it was overkill, i always forgot the web address to access it and there was too much complexity to get to the To Do List. Fortunately i recently discovered that the people who made Basecamp (37 Signals) have also made a really simple To Do List application.

Its called Tada and it is perfect! Very basic To Do List functionality, but so simple and effective you can't fault it. It is web based so you can access it from anywhere, you can create multiple lists (To Do At Work, To Do At Home etc) and prioritise the tasks within them. Sure there is no support for setting completion dates and reminders or creating sub-lists but if you wanted that you could use Basecamp, overall a superb little web-application that i would highly recommend.

Thought of the Day - Personal Crest

2008-06-17T17:26:00.004+01:00

I came across an interesting site today, it has a flash based system to create your own personal crest:
Scion Personal Crest Creator

While it is a little tacky and random it got me thinking, what would sum me up, my values, my interests etc. I came up with the crest below:

At the top i went for a 'grease monkey' to represent my background in engineering. The circuit motif on either side represents electronics and computers which tie everything in my life together. In the middle i went for my interests; books, rock music, snow/cold and TV. Overall i'm quite happy with it, was interesting to have to only pick the 4 interests that summed me up.

Thought of the Day - Metrics

2008-06-16T20:14:00.006+01:00

I read an interesting article about metrics, specifically it was about metrics for software projects but the main rules are applicable to all projects.

A metric should be:
1) Informative (and ideally Predictive) - It should give relevant useful information.
2) Objective - It should not matter who is determining the metric.
3) Automated - The more work it takes to generate the metric the less likely it is to get used or recorded accurately.

Idea From: http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/IT-Management/Lies-Damned-Lies-and-Project-Metrics-Part-1/

Thought of the Day - Job Acceptance

2008-06-15T14:10:00.003+01:00

Something that I noted down from Go Put Your Strengths To Work by Marcus Buckingham:

Before accepting a job ask yourself 3 things:
Purpose - What is the purpose of the job? Does it fit with your values?
People - Who will you be working with? Do you think you will get on with them?
Activities - What will you actually be doing? Does it fit with your strengths?

He suggests that the the top is the least important, getting more important as you go down. I would agree, if you don't like what you are doing day to day you would have to be working with some very special people or have a very strong purpose before it would be bearable. On the other hand if you love what you are actually doing the other two are easy to put up with if they aren't right.

Thought of the Day - ToC For Traffic

2008-06-14T18:55:00.005+01:00

I just finished reading Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. First off a great book and yet again i wonder why i have left a Chuck Palahniuk book sitting on my shelf for more than a year before i read it.

Secondly i had an interesting thought about one of the concepts in the book. I could be totally wrong but the way i understand it, in the book the government split the population into day people and night people so that the roads would be less gridlocked and accidents would have less of an effect on traffic. But it is an interesting point, even the busiest, most clogged of roads tend to be just about empty between midnight and 6am. So many of the problems that we face with traffic are because we shock-load the roads at certain times of the day. The overall capacity of the roads compared to the total journeys is probably adequate but because everyone is trying to go places at the same time.

In the book the unintended side-effect of the split was that the night people became an underclass that resented the day people but i can't help but think there must be another way to better balance the flow of traffic on the roads. Every time i drive on motorways my mind drifts (more on that in the book too) to Theory of Constraints, i still haven't come up with a way to apply ToC to the roads without a massive overhaul of technology but there must be something that can be done. Strangely leveling the flow across the day hadn't occurred to me before but it would be a great way to remove the need for rigid rules and a drum-beat to pace traffic. Then the question is how to incentivize travel outside of the rush hours to balance the flow without becoming even more nanny-state like.

On the downside if the flow was leveled my 7pm to 3am drives up north would be much less effective.

Thought of the Day - Hydrofoils

2008-06-13T17:15:00.001+01:00

Why do you only see hydrofoils in russia? I'm sure other places must have them, there must be big benefits from the reduction in drag, so why don't you see them all over the place?

Thought of the Day - Cycling

2008-06-12T17:17:00.001+01:00

A few observations since getting back on the bike for the first time in like 4 years:

1) Don't get cocky when you haven't used SPD's before. I always used to laugh at people who couldn't clip out and fell over onto their sides because they were attached to the bike. Sadly this happened to me, i'd been out on the bike a couple of times with no problems, so i thought i would bump up on the kerb at my flat, stop and then unclip. What i hadn't banked on was the difficulty of trying to clip out while stationary, the movement of trying to clip out meant i lost balance and slowly keeled over onto my side. All very embarrassing but a learning experience.

2) I've still got it when it comes to maintenance. I fitted a whole new groupset to my bike while i was home at the end of May with no problems. I guess fixing a bike is like riding a bike.

3) Damn i am unfit, i remember going out on my bike before i went to uni and doing rides with greater than 1000ft climbing and being fine. Now i go out and a short ride with 350ft of climbing just about kills me.

4) The reason i know the above is because there is a free tool called Bikely that allows you to input a route on google maps and it tells you the distance and gives you an elevation profile. Totally awesome for someone as geeky as me.

Thought of the Day - Habits Vs Willpower

2008-06-11T06:55:00.002+01:00

Well there was rather a large gap in my posts (almost a month), which proves one thing; i have no willpower. I can build a habit, but if that habit is disturbed i am screwed, which leads me to think that i need to ensure my habits aren't disturbed.

So to celebrate getting this habit back on track i have prepared a buffer of 5 posts so that even if i don't have a thought every day i can still make a post, the trick will be periodically replenishing this buffer when i have further inspiration.

Thought of The Day - Heroes and Planners

2008-06-10T20:51:00.005+01:00

As has been pointed out by many people, everyone loves a hero and no-one notices a planner. By definition if you avoid a bad event happening no-one notices, the bad event didn't happen and because it didn't happen then maybe it wasn't possible for it to happen.

To borrow from The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; imagine if in 2000 someone had made locked bulletproof doors on airlines mandatory, 9/11 would have never happened. Would that person have been given awards, recognition and admiration? No, instead he probably would have, at best been ignored, at worst been reviled by pilots and airlines for implementing a 'pointless' security feature.

This leaves me in an interesting quandary, i know it is better for the companies i work for to be a planner, however the incentives at work are all set up for hero's. Is the way forward to identify catastrophes before they happen, plan for what you can do when they do happen and then let them happen? I suppose the problem, even with delayed planning, is the full magnitude of the fuck-up is never realised so no-one knows how bad it could have been.

Thinking about it from the other side, how could you incentivise planning? How do you quantify what could have been and how likely it was to occur, even if it doesn't?

Thought of the Day - Hacking

2008-05-19T20:40:00.006+01:00

I love the spirit of hacking (the traditional rather than computer definition of the word), taking something and making it fit your needs. Alas i there are limitations to my hacking ability: computers, electronics, mechanical things; sure, more traditional craft things; not so much.

I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers shoes and while they are very comfortable i can't really use them everywhere without socks. Normal socks won't stretch and separate enough around my toes, so i thought i could hack them (literally) into shape. Alas my sewing skills are not quite up to par, after an hour i had neatly sewed lines in so i could cut toe sized slots in the socks. While i did manage to get 5 pockets, unfortunately only 3 of them were large enough to accommodate my toes ... Doh!

The moral of the story is while £60 seems a lot for socks, the time and effort (and socks) i would have wasted perfecting this hack would be better spent on other things. Fortunately Injinji make some lovely high performance socks that fit my needs perfectly, so time to bite the financial bullet.

Book Notes - The Art Of War For Managers

2008-05-18T15:10:00.001+01:00

The Art Of War For Managers by Gerald A Michaelson [2001]

Summary:
“Know the enemy and know yourself and you will never be defeated.”
Interplay of strategy and tactics; strategy is the plan, tactics are the implementation.
Information and speed are the key to winning.
Attacking head-on is rarely the best approach, find your niche and expand from there.

Notes:
Page 3: A plan that is not written down is no plan at all, a simple written plan is best.
Page 4: Unlike Tzu’s constant factors for the battlefield in business they are much simpler, you must study:
1. The ‘mission’ of the company.
2. The outside factors (industry/economic trends etc).
3. The marketplace.
4. The leaders.
5. The guiding principles.
Page 13: It is important to for start-ups to have sufficient reserves to ride-out downturns and to tide them over between launch and profitability. As they say; “Profit is king, but cash rules” you can survive without profit but you can’t survive without cash.
Page 27: Have two types of edict; instructions and orders. Instructions are issued as guidelines, to be followed if practical. Orders are to be followed immediately and to the letter but can only be given by someone on the ground in the situation. This prevents stupid decisions being made above.
Page 29: Fundamental principles of business:
1. Organize Intelligence
2. Maintain Objectives
3. Establish A Secure Position
4. Keep On The Offensive
5. Plan Surprise
6. Think Manoeuvre
7. Concentrate Resources
8. Practice Economy Of Force
9. Keep It Simple
Page 31: Strategy always comes before tactics, while a good strategy might succeed even with poor tactical execution, a poor strategy even with superlative tactics will almost never succeed. It is therefore important to make sure that you are heading in the right strategic direction before you determine tactics.
Page 32: “Boil the ocean” appears to be a reference to one strategist’s suggestion for how to get rid of German u-boats in the second world war.
Page 38: Customer input is a vital operational measure, it is key to improved performance and winning. Use of balanced scorecard suggested to keep track of financial and non-financial, lagging and leading measures.
Page 44: The use of extraordinary force to ensure victory, this can be applied on a macro level; a company focusing all efforts to ensure that they take a market or on the micro level; a person focusing all of their effort on a particular task.
Page 51: Keep your products secret until the last minute, it removes the ability of your competitors to plan a response. Apple does this particularly well.
Page 63: Reference to Tyco going from $2b to $30b in 6 years, ironically it was under the CEO who ended up in jail. Book probably written before those events.
Page 67: The rule of three: never make more than 3 points in any one communication, if you make more some of the points are likely to be forgotten. Keep it simple and direct.
Page 77: 5 faults of leadership:
1. Recklessness, which leads to destruction,
2. Cowardice, which leads to capture,
3. A hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults,
4. A delicacy of honour, which is sensitive to shame,
5. Over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble.
Page 91: Acknowledging the role of known standards of performance so that the leader can be perceived as impartial and can set discipline to achieve standards.
Page 93: The importance of going to the gemba for managers to inform their intuition and knowledge of the real situation.
Page 95: It is important to have direct communication with the people on the ground, often information is filtered as it goes up the chain which means you might not be getting all pertinent information. Create relationships with a select few people further down the chain so that you can get direct information.
Page 110: Information on personal survival and career paths.
Page 169: Summary of key concepts.

Quotes:
Page 6: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything will look like a nail.”
Page 14: “While we have heard of stupid haste in war, we have not yet seen a clever operation that was prolonged.”
Page 22: “To subdue the enemy without fighting is supreme excellence.”
Page 39: “Where everyone decides everything, no one decides anything.”
Page 65: “Do not do what your enemy wants, if for no other reason than he wants it.”
Page 72: “The key to success is what the customer wants, not what you can do.”
Page 78: “When was the last time anyone said; ‘I wish I had waited 6 months longer to fire that guy’” – Jack Welch
Page 81: “Logic sounds most convincing to the presenter; it is in the emotions of the receiver that positions are changed.”
Page 101: “Know the enemy and know yourself and you will never be defeated.”
Page 112: “Too often, the absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.”
Page 116: “When you can win and retain good relationships, only then can you become strong.”

Thought of the Day - Longest Day

2008-05-13T20:56:00.002+01:00

Is it just me or is it vaguely depressing knowing that in 1 month the days will start getting shorter again? Most people think summer is great but past the 22nd of June i just find it sad to know that for the next 6 months there is going to be less and less daylight until the middle of winter.

Thought of the Day - Reliance On Google

2008-05-12T22:16:00.001+01:00

I am starting to get a bit worried about how much i rely on Google:

Search - Just about every search i do is through Google, i don't remember the last time i did a search on a competitors site and the only regular time i don't search in Google is when i know what i'm looking for will be in Wikipedia and i start there.
Gmail - for the last 5 years all my personal e-mail has been through Gmail, in one way it is great because i have a great search tool to sift through so much information, in another way Google has a lot of personal information and what happens if i ever lose access to it.
Gchat - Chat from within Gmail with my friends with Gmail accounts.
iGoogle - Customized homepage that aggregates mail notifications, various news sites and various links i use frequently.
Blogger - Hosts this blog.
Google Analytics - Used to track traffic through various websites (including this blog).
Google Checkout - Used instead of paypal on some occasions.

More recently i have started using:
Google Bookmarks - Currently i have dozens of tabs open in 3 Firefox windows, most of which i don't look at on anything approaching a regular basis but don't want to close incase i lose or forget them. I also have various bookmark and favourites lists on different computers none of which are linked. I also have various backups of my bookmarks that never quite made it between computer upgrades.
Google Web History - Cataloguing all of my web viewing activity at home, useful if i forget to bookmark something or wonder how much time i waste online.

So what happens if Google ever; become evil, start charging for some of the products, disappear, are hacked, withdraw certain services etc etc? Frankly i'm kinda screwed. In one way it is great to have everything aggregated in one place, but in terms of risk mitigation it does feel like i have all of my eggs in one basket.

Thought of the Day - More Entertainment Musings

2008-05-11T18:46:00.003+01:00

Sadly i have a soft spot for romantic comedies. Sure the plots tend to be predictable and paper thin, often they are neither romantic or comedic and as a general rule i prefer films to have a little more edge, but i am inexplicably drawn to the RomCom.

Why, i don't know, but i can sit and watch the worst dreck Hollywood has to offer and come back for more. I genuinely have no idea why i enjoy RomComs but i do.

Thought of the Day - Electronic Minimalism

2008-05-10T20:32:00.002+01:00

Really random thought, but one of the best things about the electronic age is that you can dramatically reduce your number of physical possessions while still retaining the benefits of having them. Do you really need all of those CD's or can you rip them and keep them all on an iPod or portable Hard Drive. Heck maybe you can even upload them somewhere so that you have zero space requirement and can access them everywhere. The same goes for films, books and many other things. You could probably compress all of the 'media' you have onto a single removable hard drive, hook it up to a network and you can access it worldwide or take it with you.

But while it may be minimalistic physically it is the opposite of minimalism mentally. If anything because of the reduced space requirements it encourages us to keep everything all the time. Personally i keep a lot of things (both physical and electronic) 'just in case' but it is much easier to justify the electronic, it doesn't take up any space and hey it might come in handy in the future. The sad fact is that electronic clutter is probably even worse than physical. Just because you have everything stored doesn't mean that you will be able to find what you are looking for, think of all of the disparate locations; CD-R's, DVD-R's, hard drives, online services etc. None of them are linked and unless you are very sad (and create a database of all of you files) there isn't a way to search them all at once. Worse still is the volatility of most of the above, the dye in CD-R's and DVD-R's fades over time rendering the discs useless, hard drives fail, websites shut down or change their terms of use all the time. Not to mention file types and connections that rapidly become obsolete. Combine all of that together and even if you can find where something should be you still might not have access to it.

Real minimalism should be physical and mental, shedding everything you don't need on a regular basis and getting rid of things once you have consumed them.

Thought of the Day - Idea Execution

2008-05-08T20:26:00.002+01:00

My idea execution sucks. As with just about everything else i try, whenever i put an idea into practice i am kind of ok at it but not great. Hmmm not terribly clear, an example might help.

When i was a bit of an audiophile i took it into my head to build a headphone amp. There aren't many sensibly priced commercially available ones and you can build a pretty decent one really cheaply. So i bought some soldering equipment, some parts and set set about trying to learn to solder and build electronics. Only it turned out that while i could solder and get a working headphone amp it was never going to be elegant.

What i am wondering is whether i just suck at execution and am desitned to live in my mind or whether i just don't give each skill required enough time to develop.

Thought of the Day - Customer Focus

2008-05-06T17:46:00.004+01:00

What my jobs have been missing is customer focus. Sure i have had internal customers but its not the same as engaging with a real end user, someone who chooses to pay for the product, who uses it directly for its intended purpose and who's life you could make better.

Sure i may have bitched and moaned about customers and the public in the past and there are certain aspects of customer service that would drive me insane. But talking to the customer to understand their needs and coming up with solutions that exceed the customers expectations really appeals to me. Alas while my job in LifeScan somewhat involved that, i was never allowed to talk to real customers, heck i wasn't even supposed to talk to marketing. In my current job i couldn't be more isolated from the real customers if i tried, there is zero customer focus and it frustrates the hell out of me.

Maybe my next job needs to be in sales and marketing or in a company so small and directly linked to the customer that i can't help but get involved.

Thought of the Day - The Nature of Entertainment

2008-05-05T19:09:00.004+01:00

What is the nature of entertainment; what makes something entertaining, what value does entertainment provide and where is the line between something entertaining and something valuable?

This is a fairly key question for me, i won't deny it, i watch a lot of TV. I mean more than a lot, like a few hours every day, often more. But why? If you asked me now i would say because it is entertaining, i might not be able to define what 'entertaining' is but any other answers (i learn from it, it is relaxing etc) would be a bit feeble. Not to seem big-headed but i am a fairly bright guy, i would hope that it's not just a case of "turn on and tune out" but at this juncture i don't know how else to explain it. It seems like giving up TV should be a 30-day trial at some point, probably the summer so if i continue to watch tv afterwards i haven't built up a backlog of days.

I think even more strange is my desire to watch ice hockey, i have always said i don't understand people who watch football but then why do i watch ice hockey? I don't play and haven't for around 10 years, i don't have any real investment even in the team i 'support' and yet i enjoy watching it. I just don't know why.

Lastly what about fiction books? For some reason people equate TV with mindless entertainment and books of any sort with knowledge. Books are somehow seen as superior to TV, even though i would imagine a large majority of books are no more intellectually stimulating than TV.

Are some forms of entertainment better than others and what would life be like without entertainment? I suspect most people think there should be a balance between work, learning, entertainment and relaxation, but is entertainment really necessary?

Somewhat interestingly this idea arose from reading some information about Buddhism and one of the 8 precepts of living a good life is; "7. To refrain from dancing, using jewelry, going to shows, etc.". So it isn't explicitly entertainment but it is kind of implied. At the moment i'm not doing too badly with the precepts. The only one i suspect i would fail is not lying, but that is a bit of a grey area as the literal translation is "speaking truth always" and technically do that, i just tend to omit rather than say anything untrue.

NB This is an extension or possibly a branch from a previous post where i discussed TV and Social Surplus. However in that post i didn't really tackle why i watch so much tv, only that it was probably too much and wondered what i would do with the time instead.

Book Notes - The Goal

2008-05-04T22:27:00.003+01:00

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt [1984]

Summary:
Prime measurements should be: Throughput (sales), Inventory (valued as raw material) and Operating Expense (everything that doesn’t fall into the other two).

Steps for a Process of Ongoing Improvement (POGI) in production:
1. Identify the bottleneck(s) – Find Herbie.
2. Exploit the bottlenecks – Work out how to make Herbie Produce the maximum amount possible.
3. Subordinate Everything Else to the Constraint – Keep the kids together with Drum Buffer Rope, have Herbie keep pace on a drum and tether him to the front person with a rope of a fixed length.
4. Elevate the Bottleneck(s) – Lighten the load in Herbies backpack
5. If the constraint is broken go back to step 1 and repeat.

Rules of managing a bottleneck:
1. Balance flow through your plant (not capacity).
2. The value of parts waiting at a bottleneck is equivalent to the sale price of the products that are waiting for the parts.
3. Never lose time on a bottleneck.
4. Never have a bottleneck work on a part that isn’t required immediately.
5. Never have a bottleneck work on a potentially bad part.
6. Redistribute work from the bottleneck to non-bottlenecks even if it seems like they cost more.

Notes:
Page 40: “The goal is to make money.” While elaborated up on It’s Not Luck this is still the primary goal of every company and the other two goals are complimentary (like the golden triangle).
Page 46: Primary measurements of making money; Total Profit, Percentage Profit and Cashflow.
Page 51: The above measurements have no meaning to people on the shop floor, so other measurements are needed to convert the management metrics to shop floor ones. The meaning is probably lost, the conversion results in local optima rules.
Page 60: The three operational measures Goldratt advocates are:
1. Throughput – The rate at which the business generates money through sales.
2. Inventory – All the money the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell.
3. Operational Expense – All of the money the system spends to turn Inventory into Throughput.
Page 61: Inventory is deliberately only the price of raw goods and does not include cost of ‘value added’ activities to eliminate the confusion of whether a dollar spent is an investment or an expense.
Page 87: The reason no plant can ever be perfectly balanced is a combination of dependant events and statistical fluctuations. I.e. As the events are dependant the statistical fluctuations do not average out, delays are passed on but shortened times are not, therefore lead times stretch out.
Page 135: Any incentive system based on absolute output over a day or a week is fundamentally flawed, it encourages ‘hero syndrome’ at the end of the shift to meet the quota. Instead the incentive system should be based on how consistent they are in achieving the quotas on an hourly basis. Reduce statistical fluctuations as much as possible.
Page 217: Need to implement Drum Buffer Rope system to prevent an increase in inventory on the shop floor. Use a ‘drum beat’ to signal when to release raw materials into the process. Use a ‘buffer’ of a fixed size to ensure that the bottleneck always has material to work on, the buffer should be twice the statistical fluctuations in predicting when material will arrive at the bottleneck. Finally use a ‘rope’ so that there is a maximum amount of inventory between raw materials and the bottleneck.
Page 230: Benefits of cutting batch sizes in half:
1. Half the WIP
2. Half the cash tied up
3. Lead time is reduced as wait and queue time are halved
Page 238: Halfling batch sizes should increase efficiencies as the next steps will no longer be waiting for parts from preceding steps.
Page 269: For the Socratic method to be successful you must know what questions to ask the people you are trying to teach. To anticipate their questions and issues so that you can pose the right answers to point them in the right direction. The basis for these questions might come from a CRT.
Page 272: While every manager knows that inventory is a liability – cash tied up in the system, things you might not sell – on a balance sheet it is classed as an asset. Therefore by reducing your inventory it can show up as a loss in your P&L. Fortunately this only shows up as a one-time reduction in your assets.
Page 289: Example of Mendeleev and the periodic table, identified an underlying pattern in atoms that not only fit the existing data but was used to determine where there was missing or incomplete data. Rather than imposing an arbitrary order on the table he revealed and intrinsic order in nature.
Page 299: Key parts of POGI are; Improvement, you need the right measurements to know that you are improving and Process, it needs to be a step by step repeatable process.
Page 300: Chain analogy; in the cost world you are trying to trim the weight of the whole chain, in the throughput world you are trying to strengthen the whole chain.
Page 301: Steps for TOC production improvement:
6. Identify the bottleneck(s) – Find Herbie.
7. Exploit the bottlenecks – Work out how to make Herbie Produce the maximum amount possible.
8. Subordinate Everything Else to the Constraint – Keep the kids together with Drum Buffer Rope, have Herbie keep pace on a drum and tether him to the front person with a rope of a fixed length.
9. Elevate the Bottleneck(s) – Lighten the load in Herbies backpack
10. If the constraint is broken go back to step 1 and repeat.
Page 312: If you have spare capacity you can sell that capacity at any value above cost of materials because all of the other costs are taken into account already, the one proviso for this is that your market must be segmented so you do not have to lower the prices for everyone.
Page 317: Pick a hypothesis and then try to rigorously link it with other things using deductive logic.
Page 336: The questions that all managers should be able to answer are:
1. What to change? – Current Reality Tree + Conflict Resolution Diagram
2. What to change to? – Future Reality Tree
3. How to change? – Transition Tree + PreRequisites Tree

Quotes:
Page 41: “An action that moves us towards making money is productive.”
Page 88: “Most of the factors critical to running [a] plant successfully cannot be determined precisely ahead of time.”
Page 138: “Some resources have to have more capacity than others. The ones at the end of the line should have more than the ones at the beginning – sometimes a lot more.”
Page 158: “An hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour lost for the entire system.”
Page 210: “Making an employee work and profiting from that work are two different things”
Page 268: “Don’t give the answers, just ask the questions.”

Thought of the Day - Distractions

2008-05-04T21:05:00.000+01:00

How annoying is it when you open a new window, go to google and then forget what you were going to search for.

Ok maybe you don't get that if your memory is not akin to a goldfishes, but i need to find a way not to forget in the first place (not get distracted) or remember quicker (currently i rely on retracing my steps). Thinking about it, it may be a problem of my own making. I have a fairly complicated iGoogle page and tend to get distracted by e-mails or news so maybe simplifying it might help me stay on topic.

Thought of the Day - How To Piss Off Your Customers

2008-05-03T11:05:00.001+01:00

What are the three easiest ways for supermarkets to piss off their customers?

1. Provide plastic bags that tear at the least provocation.
There are two CTQ's for a plastic bag; 1) It is intact and 2) It has handles. Nothing is more annoying when you pack a bag, pick it up, it tears and all your bruisable items fall on the hard tarmac. Sometimes it is because some foolish cashier has used a knife to open a new pack of bags and put a slice in them all. Sometimes the bags are just poorly formed and weak. Either way it is seriously annoying.

If the things the customer just paid for end up ruined because you supplied crappy bags they won't be returning.

2. Put products where customers don't expect them to be.
Where would you expect to find socks? Perhaps menswear, perhaps next to the underwear, heck at least in the clothing section. If you guessed no to all of the above, correct! In fact socks are located in the toiletries section, somewhere between condoms and moisturiser. Who on gods green earth thought that was a sensible choice, what do socks have to do with toiletries?

If the customer can't find what they are looking for you aren't going to sell it.

3. Have barely any stock on the shelves for most of the day.
The reason that Taiichi Ohno (the father of Lean manufacturing), was so impressed with western supermarkets was that while there was limited stock on the shelves, they were replenished as the product was sold in a pull system. I suspect he would be less impressed with the Frome Sainsburys. Whenever i go in there are chronic shortages of a lot of the products, especially in the fruit and veg section. I mean how hard would it be to have an electronic signal to the warehouse to replenish every time half of the shelf inventory was sold? That would mean constant replenishment, constant supply and lots of small shelf-stacking exercises rather than the mammoth ones they have at the moment. The whole point of the shelving is that customers can get what they want, if they can't then what on earth is the point of putting product out at all.

If there is nothing for the customer to buy you definitely won't sell it.

Running a supermarket should be a relatively simple exercise but yet they manage to screw it up. I do find it somewhat ironic that supermarkets inspired some of the principles in one of the great process methodologies but somehow in the intervening period they have lost all of the best parts.

Thought of the Day - Actions Vs Ideas

2008-05-02T19:22:00.000+01:00

I was only yesterday cursing that Steve Pavlina had forsaken me, his blog hadn't been updated in over a week and then he made a great post (see link at bottom). Unfortunately this post was about something that profoundly troubles me, the balance between ideas and actions. His argument is that an idea that is not implemented is worth almost nothing. While i completely agree with him, it troubles me because i have great ideas and i am ok at starting to implement them (though sometimes even that doesn't happen) but where i really fall down is sticking with the implementation. I get bored and move on to the next idea.

Coming back to my Strengths Finder Results, none of my strengths relate to action, they are all about coming up with ideas, thinking, analysing and planning. My concern is that i excel at the easy part - having the ideas - granted they are good ideas, but my strengths do not allow me to (nor do i particularly care if i) actually implement those ideas.

I have two questions; 1) Is there a way to be successful just with ideas and not necessarily the implementation? and maybe somewhat related 2) How could i avoid implementation or at least become more effective at implementation?

Idea from: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/05/the-value-of-ideas/

Thought of the Day - Technical Support

2008-05-01T18:28:00.003+01:00

How do normal people cope when technology doesn't work?

Further to my previous post on technology not working i have to wonder what less technically savy people than myself do when their technology doesn't work? In my family's case they call me, i suspect most people (or at least i hope most people) have someone they know that helps them with tech stuff. While it can be very frustrating to have to deal with (i understand how hard it must be to work in a call centre), if there weren't people like that in society technological advances would grind to a halt. Imagine if everyone had to call tech support, how much would that add to the cost of consumer electronics, more to the point i wonder how much it adds now.

I suppose alternatively if that was the case it might force manufacturers to make products easier to use, you could almost say that experts are a crutch allowing companies to sell half-baked devices knowing that someone else will sort them out.

Thought of the Day - Energy Levels

2008-04-29T18:06:00.004+01:00

Despite my current diet (mostly fruit and vegetables) and lack of a large heavy lunch (i snack on fruit throughout the day) i still experience that afternoon dip in energy. More than that i find that quite frequently on Friday afternoon and at weekends my energy levels dip to the extent that i take a nap.

I don't know whether it is boredom or physical but i really need to find some way to feel more energized, something that wakes me up and motivates me. Unfortunately i can't think of anything at the moment so will just have to be on the lookout for things in the future.

Thought of the Day - TV and Social Surplus

2008-04-28T17:58:00.005+01:00

I read an article today which argued that television represents 'social surplus', an abundance of time that people don't know what to do with. It suggests that it is like a security blanket that we need to hold on to because of the pace of change in society. Lastly it argues that this security blanket is needed only for a generation, then uses are found for the surplus and society as a whole reaps the benefits. I have a few questions: Of most global importance; is TV too addictive for people to give up and put the time to better use? This would result in a brain-dead society as is portrayed so vividly in Mike Judges excellent Idiocracy. Of most relevance to me, as i watch more TV than anyone else i know; what could i be doing instead of watching TV?

According to www.myepisodes.com in the last 3 years i have wasted; 2 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, 9 hours and 45 minutes watching TV shows. I should note that is only counting the TV i care enough about to track, the real number is probably a good bit higher. As a comparison, that is probably round about the amount of overtime i have worked in various jobs in the same time period, but still it is not an inconsequential amount of time. We're talking about 1 month per year (~9%), including sleeping (~42%) and working (~23%). That means that 75% of my time is spent doing things that aren't really that exciting. I wish i could say i filled the remaining 25% with bungee jumping and dog sledding across Alaska but in reality most of it is probably filled looking at random stuff on the internet.

I initially went into this post wondering what i should replace my television watching with, but in reality i could keep it more or less constant and still have an abundance of time to be doing other things. The question from a paragraph above still remains though; what could i be doing instead? Something that adds value to me (learning, travelling, working out), adds value to the community (voluntary work) or adds value to the world (creating something new).

I don't have a shortage of things that i could be doing (improving my web design skills, learning a foreign language, selling my excess possessions on e-bay etc etc), i just can't think of something that i have enough motivation to do properly. I suppose the first step in any change is an awareness that you want to make the change, now i just need to work out what to change too.

Idea From: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

Thought of the Day - Benefits of Persistence

2008-04-26T19:09:00.005+01:00

Just watched The Pursuit of Happyness and it got me thinking about the value of persistence. In the film the guy decides he wants to do something and in spite of many and varied setbacks he reaches his goal.

My calendar at work says; "Give Up: At some point, hanging in there just makes you look like an even bigger loser." and while in films the plucky hero who keeps trying always wins, in real life i wonder what the percentage is?

There is a certain level of persistence that is required to achieve your goals but how do you know when you have crossed the line from persistence to stupidity, or is stupidly pursing BHAG's (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) the only way to really succeed?

It also made me realise i have never really been strapped for cash. Sure i've lived on pasta and baked beans for a few months at uni but there was never any danger of me starving or ending up on the street. As with many 'extreme' circumstances portrayed in film and on TV you have to wonder how you would cope. But it wouldn't be a true representation, the consequences wouldn't be there and if they were, would you really want to risk not being able to cope?

Thought of the Day - Time Constraints

2008-04-25T23:59:00.001+01:00

Today i happened across an advert for possibly my ideal job - Business Design Consultant with IDEO, the daddy of all creative consultancies. There was only one slight problem, the closing date was the 25th of April ... today.

It was 20:30 and my first reaction was; "stuff it, not enough time, why bother". Then it occurred to me that my CV would probably only need minor tweaks and really 3.5 hours should really be plenty to draft a cover letter and project report. So i whipped up a plan with some tight deadlines and set to it. Turns out i didn't even need until midnight, i finished 30minutes early!

About half way through the work i realised that if i had found the advert earlier i would have procrastinated or forgotten or not really worked on it until now. So really having a very challenging time scale was probably beneficial to me. Unfortunately we can't rely on serendipity to bring tasks to us at exactly the right time but it has convinced me that Goldratt is right in Critical Chain. What i really need to do is work out how to manufacture that tight deadline, that stress, so there is a cut-off to each task and i don't continue tweaking for longer than is required.

Ok so the chances of me getting the job are virtually zero, but i would have always wondered 'what if?' if i hadn't applied. The worst that can happen is i don't hear back from them, anything above that is gravy. If they call me i can ask what i could do to develop more, if they interview me i get a free trip to London to the meca of creative consultancies and while it is a million to one shot, i might even get a job out of it.

Thought of the Day - Limitations and Local Optima In Life

2008-04-24T17:45:00.004+01:00

The strength of the human race is that we have adapted to survive, but now that survival is not really an issue for a lot of people, should we be questioning whether the adaptations are really the optimum?

The reason i bring this up is that i read an article on the benefits of 'barefoot' walking (see link at bottom), which blamed the 'features' of current shoes for various foot, ankle, leg and back issues. You can understand that in the past having a covering on your foot would be beneficial; less cuts, less chance of infection and a bit of protection. It then became even more critical as we moved to colder climates and didn't want our feet to freeze and fall off. Shoes allowed us to cope with conditions.

Of course it then became important that the sole of the shoe was durable and strong to prevent puncturing, which meant that stiffer, thicker materials had to be used. To make these stiff, thick soles more comfortable we added arch support, padding in the heel and rockered the sole to try to make the gait more natural but all we were doing was accommodating a limitation. Related to my notes on Beyond the Goal [coming soon] it seems that these local optima rules (padding, shaping etc) to accommodate the limitation were made so long ago that people no longer notice the rules or the limitation. With new advanced materials, a puncture-proof durable sole can be much thinner and more flexible, so why aren't they? One simple reason; people are used to what we have at the moment. Most people associate soft foam soles and thick padding with comfort, heightened heels are ubiquitous and hey if they are good enough for Olympic athletes they must be good enough for us, right?

Wrong. There is growing research which indicates that rather than making our feet more comfortable and protecting our joints from damage, that most current shoes actually cause these problems. So what is the solution? As with all good ideas it is very simple; use the millions of years of evolution in the human foot and interfere with it as little as possible. Provide protection without hindering the natural movement of the foot.

Recently i have had similar thoughts about a vegan/raw diet. That humans added cooked foods, dairy and meat so that we could overcome the limitation of seasonal fruits and vegetables. The only way to survive was to get calories any way we could and we adapted. But that adaptation is relatively recent and given that in the modern age we can get fresh fruit and vegetables year round is that adaptation the best decision or is it based on a local optima rule that helped us to survive in the past.

I am no Luddite, i love technology but i think we need to question the rules and assumptions of society to ensure that our choices are the optimum based on the current situation.

Idea from: http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/

Thought of the Day - Layoffs

2008-04-23T21:02:00.002+01:00

Two tips if you are involved in layoffs:
1. Do as much pre-work before the day of the layoffs so the inevitable loss of productivity doesn't impact performance.
2. Communicate the date when the layoffs will occur or when the decision will be made and then DON'T change it. It minimises disruption and uncertainty.

Tips brought to you today from Tristan.

Thought of the Day - Learning

2008-04-22T17:34:00.003+01:00

I read an interesting article today on Wired, it was about a method to optimize your recall of information. If you are interested in learning facts for training/university or learning a foreign language i strongly suggest you check out the link at the bottom of the page.

The theory is that over time your chance of recalling something gets less and less but the optimum way to learn is to recall the information as long as possible away from when you last thought about it. In other words you first read a fact, then you wait until there is a 90% chance of remembering it before you test yourself again. Then after that test you wait a longer time until you get to a 90% chance of recall before you try to remember it again. You repeat the process until the time between remembering is so long that it is effectively embedded in your mind. The advantage of this method is that you don't just memorize the information for a few weeks or a month like you would with traditional cramming, it stays with you almost forever.

So if you are somewhat astute you will have spotted the obvious problem; how do you know how long to wait before retesting yourself? The duration depends on the person, the type of data you are trying to memorize and how many times you have recalled the information. As you can imagine this would be difficult to work out for one piece of information never mind the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information that you are likely to want to recall. Fortunately Piotr Wozniak has created some software that has an algorithm to automate all of this for you. You can input your own information or you can buy 'Libraries' of pre-compiled factoids.

Your next questions are bound to be; If this method is so great why have i not heard about it? Why is every language, law and medical student not issued with a copy of the software? Why is it not taught in every school? Unfortunately i can't answer those questions but i am sufficiently intrigued to put down the $45 to get the software.

Lastly the thing that i find the most interesting is that the method seems to have benefits beyond simple rote memorization. It is suggested that due to the random nature of the questions it can help you creatively too. Your brain has to be used to jumping between topics and the questions in a random order might help you to see linkages where you did not see any before.

Idea from: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak

Thought of the Day - Immobilization

2008-04-21T18:59:00.002+01:00

What would you do if you were immobilized in a hospital bed for 6 months? Go slowly insane? Get lots of audio books? Do some deep thinking?

I don't know why but was wondering what i would do if i was hospitalized, at first i thought "great i could catch up on reading" but then i wondered what i would do if i either physically or mentally couldn't read, what would i do? Depressing yes, but also instructive, you would have to come up with a really creative solution to stop yourself going totally insane...

Thought of the Day - Power

2008-04-20T16:49:00.003+01:00

In a relationship who has the most power? It has been suggested that the person with the most options or the least to loose has the power. I am more inclined to agree with the former.

Whether it be a personal relationship, your relationship with a shop, your relationship with your employer, the side with the most options has the power. But how do you define the most options, more accurately it should be the most good options. If you have more good options than the other side you should always end up better off, even if they don't relaise you have the upper hand.

Book Notes - The 4-Hour Work Week

2008-04-19T17:49:00.002+01:00

The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris [2007]

Summary:
Alas not many notes from this book, it is just so different from anything I’ve ever read before I’m not quite sure what to write down. I suspect that some reflection and re-reading will be required before I have full notes.

I kind of feel like I’m being exploited by the book, that the lifestyle it espouses requires you to exploit other people (in this case me), the author highlights an adware pioneer as someone to aspire to after all. But at the same time there is definitely some gold in there and it is thought provoking and eminently quotable.

I think the concepts in this book could help you run any business. While a more morally acceptable product would not be as profitable or easy as the products the author suggests, the methods are applicable.

With all of the above said I think Timothy Ferris is very astute, he is giving away his secrets because he knows people will pay good money for the dream it sells but very few have the courage and determination to see it through. For other examples see Toyota or Eli Goldratt.

Notes:
Page 4: People don’t want to be millionaires, they want the millionaire lifestyle.
Page 77: Three times a day (at set times ask yourself; “Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?”
Page 101: The author suggests batching things (E-mail, phone calls, bills payments), it sounds rather un-lean to me, maybe an alternative self-help book would be how to lean your life. It is a bit strange because a lot of the other things in the book sound very like Theory of Constraints and Lean ...
Page 120: By outsourcing things to other people you will be surprised how many tasks don’t need done if you have to pay for them directly.
Page 192: Offer limited options, while you can charge heftier premiums for customisation it can create more problems than it is worth. Firstly options attract pedantic picky people who are more likely to complain if it is not exactly what they want. Secondly too many options can make customers more indecisive and hence less likely to buy, they worry about the benefits of one product over another etc.
Page 193: Try to avoid high maintenance low profit customers, they will waste the majority of your time and provide the lowest income.

Quotes:
Page 13: “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field” – Niels Bohr
Page 46: “What we fear doing most is normally what we most need to do.”
Page 74: “Parkinson’s law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.”
Page 168: “To get an accurate indicator of commercial validity, don’t ask people if they would buy, ask them to buy.”
Page 220: All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it is impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Develop strength to do bold things not the strength to suffer.” – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Book Notes - The Empty Raincoat

2008-04-19T15:55:00.002+01:00

The Empty Raincoat by Charles Handy [1988]

Summary:
Alas typing this up 2 months after I took the notes so can’t really remember an overarching narrative or point to the book. Note to self: If I read it again think about a synopsis.

Notes:
Page 23: Handy sees intelligence as an assets, at least as important as owning a home.
Page 25: We should pursue increasing our intelligence quotient as avidly as we pursue owning a home. In fact the more intelligent the society the less home ownership there is.
Page 33: You should be able to build up a “time bank” annual leave over years.
Page 36: Time is Money. Small businesses trade their time for busy people’s money.
Page 50: Concept of a sigmoid or s-curve, (see TRIZ theories of evolution). This may explain the companies I have worked for, they have all been at the top of the s-curve when I started with them and only those that have found the next curve have prospered.
Page 50: When things are going well it is time to change.
Page 53: You can see s-curves everywhere from personal relationships to empires.
Page 59: The past is a poor predictor of the future.
Page 68: You should strive for a balanced donut in your life: The centre represents your core responsibilities and the outside is discretionary things that you can do. If the centre is too large you get bored, if the outside is too large you never reach a target. There should be a balance of freedom and responsibility.
Page 69: A Type 1 Error in business is getting something wrong and a Type 2 error is missing an opportunity. Think of a way to relate to Goldratt’s DollarDay metric in Beyond the Goal.
Page 76: Ricardo Semler used a donut structure for Semco.
Page 79: The core of the donut is what people rebel against. E.g. Non-smoking offices.
Page 104: “The £5 Note Auction” to illustrate the importance of communication in generating win-win solutions. Pick two people at random from opposite sides of the room and make them bid on 3x £5 notes, they will both end up bidding to around £5 and possibly more on the last of the 3. Exhaust all possible permutations of this to prove that people are stupid. Then pick two people sitting next to each other (preferably who have been talking) and repeat. They should have an agreement that is mutually beneficial to both of them and they will fleece you.
Page 115: Subsidiarity – Reverse delegation, leaving all decisions that can be made locally local. Handy suggests that people have a moral right not to be interfered with.
Page 146: Highlights the J&J Credo as a good model; primary responsibility to customers, then employees, then environment and finally to shareholders. Makes mention of the Tylenol crisis.
Page 172: Head of Nissan UK comparing the different management styles of western and Japanese companies. Western companies have rigid interfaces and departments like facets of a crystal, Japanese companies are more like mud, fluid flowing able to respond.
Page 205: Different types of intelligence: Factual, Analytic, Linguistic, Spatial, Musical, Practical, Physical, Intuitive, Interpersonal.
Page 261: Chapter on “A Sense of Direction”.
Page 262: People want entertainment, too little and they get bored but they also don’t want too much as it becomes harrowing. There is a suggestion that the first world war was caused because the middle classes in Europe were bored but they got more excitement than they really wanted. We have the same problem now, there are no ‘great causes’ that universally inspire a country, most people are content to live their lives amass wealth and possessions and not rock the boat. This is not enough.

Quotes:
Page 19: “There are kings and prophets, I was always told, the kings have the power and the prophets have the principles.” – Tony Benn
Page 26: “If work were so great the rich would have hogged it all long ago” – Mark Twain
Page 27: “Slack always costs money. It is just a matter of who pays for it”
Page 38: “When intelligence is the primary asset, the organisation becomes more like a collection of project groups.”
Page 43: “No-one can do much about the brilliant, they will be miserable anyway.” – Michael Young
Page 59: “The world belongs to the discontented.” – Robert Woodruff [Coca Cola]

Thought of the Day - Sleeping

2008-04-18T22:39:00.003+01:00

I previously wrote about wondering what the optimum amount of sleep is and preliminary results after 4 weeks of monitoring how rested i feel seems to suggest that:
If i get less than 10 hours then less is more and 6-7 hours seems optimum.
If i can get 10 hours that results in feeling the most rested.
That waking up earlier results in feeling more rested.
And finally staying up past midnight (regardless of when i get up) is the worst.

Of course my sample size is a bit low and once i get a proper sample size i will statistically analyse it, but so far the results seem quite interesting.

Thought of the Day - Passport

2008-04-17T19:26:00.003+01:00

Well i need to renew my passport and realised that my current one (10 years old in June) is depressingly empty.

4 stamps for Canada, 2 green bits of cardboard from America and one rather spiffy whole page sticker for Russia. Ok the last one is rather cool and i have been places in Europe, but clearly i haven't done anything interesting enough or i would have more stamps.

Well hopefully with the next passport; I won't spend more than half of the time in abject poverty as a student (though admittedly that didn't stop some people traveling), I will make some money to enable me to holiday in interesting places and maybe be able to travel interesting places for work.

I'm sure some old business tycoon said one of his rules was; "to always replace a passport before it expired because there was no room left in it", clearly he did all of his traveling before EU countries stopped stamping you passport!

Thought of the Day - Student Syndrome

2008-04-16T18:36:00.004+01:00

“Parkinson’s law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.”

Sounds a lot like the 'student syndrome' discussed in Critical Chain. My question is how do you artificially shrink the time you allocate to tasks; do you postpone them until just before the shrunk deadline or do you do them now with a set end time ... Both have motivational issues and it sounds like the Start Early Vs Start Late debate in project management.

Therefore the question becomes; how do you determine the Critical Chain in your life so that it doesn't matter when you start the non-critical tasks?

Thought of the Day - Fear

2008-04-15T19:09:00.004+01:00

"What you fear doing most is normally what you most need to do."

Strange maxim but probably true, from making a difficult phone call to deciding what career to take all of these things are highly important but very scary.

So what do i fear most?

Book Notes - Necessary But Not Sufficient

2008-04-14T21:50:00.001+01:00

Necessary But Not Sufficient by Eliyahu Goldratt [2000]

Summary:
The inherent conflict in software development is adding features to keep the customers happy Vs keeping the software easy to maintain and use to keep the customers happy. This conflict can be avoided if you focus on adding value to the customer, if they are making bottom line benefits they will not be interested in adding features that do not add value.
To add value you must work out what limitation your software can overcome. Moreover you must work out what rules are in place in the company to accommodate those limitations and then replace those rules with new more suitable rules. Only once the rules that accommodated the limitation are removed will you see benefits.

Notes:
Page 60: Have the client meet the project team before the bid goes in, while it does mean you need to have excess staff it can work very well to motivate the sale. If the client can get a feel for the project team and their competence they are more likely to select that vendor.
Page 61: Companies spent a lot of time making their new tools (ERP systems etc) look like the old tools, the problem is if they looked exactly like the old system then what is the point in upgrading.
Page 114: Refer to these 5 pages for discussion on finite capacity scheduling, along with its pros and cons.
Page 124: The key to finding the where the benefit lies in a new technology is to understand what limitation it overcomes, but moreover work out what rules helped us accommodate the limitation and what we should replace them with.
Page 130: Concept of time buffers as well as material buffers. Also concept of dependant setup times (going from black to white parts in injection moulding). Even more complicated if dependant setup on two machines overlaps and causes the bottleneck to shift between them.
Page 163: To make sure clients don’t focus on stupid little details you need to offer them sufficient value that they don’t care about the little details only the bottom line benefits.
Page 175: TOC can be devastating to a system if you only introduce it to one section at a time. If you introduce it in production and sales can’t keep up you have too much capacity for no reason. If you increase sales but production can’t keep up then you annoy your customer. The same is true of all other dependant functions.
Page 176: Forecasting at a warehouse level and particularly basing Min/Max Replenishment on forecasts is an easy way to build inventory, the solution is not to have a better forecast but to be flexible enough to make product to order.
Page 183: Oral presentation of the conflict between production, distribution and sales, example of presenting a transition tree.
Page 190: Forecast accuracy for various sample sizes like central limit theorem?
Page 192: Have a pull system with each plant holding ~3 weeks (dependant on replenishment time) of inventory of everything and shipping what each warehouse sells on a daily basis. As the shipments are for all sales, not just one product, the transportation should be still be a sensible cost.
Page 198: Measure your pull in throughput dollar days both for inventory and for missed shipments.

Quotes:
Page 4: “To be paranoid you must constantly assess the impact of your actions on the global picture. Which means that first you must relentlessly search for a deep understanding of the global picture.”
Page 62: “The customer is not always right but they are always the customer.”
Page 124: “We expect that a new technology will bring benefits when and only when, the new technology surpasses an existing limitation.”
Page 224: “As long as the end customer in the supply chain didn’t buy, nobody in the supply chain has sold.”
Page 226: “Trust is nice as long as there are measurements that serve as a watchdog.”

Thought of the Day - Simple Solutions

2008-04-14T17:23:00.003+01:00

I have a problem ... all of my best solutions are too simple.

When i start working on a problem the solutions are not obvious at all and in many cases the company's plan is to do completely the opposite of what i end up suggesting, but sure enough by the end of the project the dissent has started. The suggestions that the solution was obvious, that the company would have come up with it without me, what have i been doing the last few months etc etc. It is really frustrating that the best solutions always seem obvious in hindsight and it does make it particularly difficult to get the credit you deserve. As Einstein once said; "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.", add to that spending money on things a company doesn't really need and you have the essence of my philosophy.

Which leaves me with a dilemma; should i make my solutions appear more complicated than they really are or can i somehow make the people involved realise how completely counter-intuitive my solution was to start with? The latter is definitely preferable but without knowing the solution how do you know what to record to prove the solution was not obvious at the time? More to the point how do you record the information so that it is undeniable and impossible to rationalise away when you present it?

Maybe i just screw myself by presenting potential solutions too early in the project. In one way you want the leadership to know that you have a plan, a goal an idea of what to do but in another you want them to see you struggle and then have that light bulb moment after the work has been done.

Thought of the Day - Speed Vs Velocity

2008-04-13T12:43:00.004+01:00

The physics definition of 'speed' is what most people understand as speed, it is a scalar measure it only takes account of the magnitude of the motion. In physics 'velocity' is something different, it is a vector measure taking account of both the magnitude and direction of the motion.

At the moment in my career i think i have speed but not velocity, i am moving very quickly (in terms of responsibility, training and money) but in an unknown direction. To be both happy and succesful i really need to find a direction, the question is how do i find that direction?

I was kind of hoping that the above question might give me some ideas but i think i need to give it some more thought. Hey at least i have identified the problem.

Thought of the Day - Random Thoughts

2008-04-12T19:42:00.004+01:00

Thought 1 - Only The Good Die Young
A lot of the best TV shows don't seem to last more than a season; Is it because they are so niche that most people don't get them? Is it because they are ahead of their time? Is it because the networks are just plain stupid?
For a long time i was pissed off when great shows got canned and thought that i would rather they had not been made at all so they couldn't be taken away prematurely. Now i'm just glad they were made at all, shows like; jPod, Dead Like Me, Firefly, Jericho, Odyssey 5 etc have really changed my outlook on things, made me think in different ways and i would be different without them. Sure i would have liked them to continue on for longer but when is enough is enough, at what point would they have jumped the shark? For me a TV show should have an endgame, maybe not a prescribed number of seasons but the writer should have and idea of where things are going and how they will progress. It is good to know that Lost isn't going to continue asking questions forever (though i'm not sure we will ever get all the answers) and i think limiting it to 7 seasons might be a blessing, you know where you stand.
If you look at other media; films, books, albums, theatre, they all have an ending obvious to the reader/listener, maybe TV should be that way too. I suppose the big difference is that a book is less likely to get cancelled mid-read due to bad ratings.

Thought 2 - Coding As Art
Douglas Coupland mentioned that he thought coding (computer programming) was art. I totally agree but it raises an interesting question, is the code itself the art or is it the program at the end that is art?
If it is the former it is the ultimate elitist art, firstly 99% of people will never see the code and even if they did 99.999997% of people wouldn't even know what they were looking at.
If it is the latter then a lot of the creativity is lost, the end user is never going to know that the programmer came up with a really eloquent way to achieve their goals. They will never know what could have been, although at least they should appreciate the end product.
Thinking about it coding really is art; hundreds of thousands of people dabble in it, you can go to school to learn the basics, people do it for fun, very few people ever stand out though. Where i think it differs from traditional 'art' is that it can be so immensely complex, to the point where even experts in the field might not understand it, but can still be successful and people appreciate the outcome. That and the fact you can make a decent living as a fairly poor programmer but would be out on the street if you were a similarly poor painter ;-)
I'm sure there are programmers out there who are some of the most creative people on the planet, coming up with solutions so simple and elegant that other coders are in awe. But for every Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Larry Page and Sergey Brin there are tens of thousands labouring in obscurity. At least they can comfort themselves with cash and the knowledge that they are helping people.

Quote: "Always remember you are writing for someone to read."
Douglas Coupland - CBC Podcast

Thought of the Day - TOC For Traffic Management

2008-04-08T21:45:00.003+01:00

I must have TOC on the brain after reading the two books because while driving on the motorway today i wondered how you could apply TOC to traffic management.

How could you apply Drum Buffer Rope to cars? Could you convince people who like to speed and people who like to drive slowly that really they should all go at the same speed (drum) so that everyone arrives quicker. How could you keep the cars the same distance apart (buffer) and stop the whole queue of cars being disrupted if one car stops or slows down (rope)... More to the point what is the constraint; is it the slowest driver? or is it the speed limit?

Probably a pipe dream until all the cars are connected in a mesh network and can synchronize with each other though.

Thought of the Day - TOC For R&D

2008-04-07T21:05:00.004+01:00

While reading It's Not Luck (see notes below) it occurred to me that Goldratt has tackled a lot of topics; Production, Marketing, Project Management and ERP systems. He has probably tackled even more in his ancillary books, but to my knowledge he has never applied TOC (Theory of Constraints) to R&D (Research and Development) or NPD (New Product Development).

You could argue that the marketing covered in It's Not Luck is all about NPD. You are devising new offerings for the market, but it's scope is restricted by the assumptions that: a) There is no money to make physical changes to the product and b) Provided you modify the existing offer to suit the customer that you can fulfil their requirements. What about situations where the existing product, regardless of how the offer is packaged does not sufficiently satisfy the customer?

I suspect there is an answer somewhere in his books and i can see how you could relax the constraints on the methods to construct 'unrefusable offers' to create 'unrefusable products' but i wonder if that is sufficient to cover the full spectrum of R&D. While i'm sure it would help you with re-engineering of existing products to better meet customer requirements and could even enable you to create new products from the ground up to optimally meet these needs, i fear it lacks the potential to imagine new products to meet needs customers do not even know they have.

In other words is there a way to apply TOC to the creative process and is it possibly linked with TRIZ? It might just be a coincidence but both are obsessed with conflicts, breaking assumptions and in love with simple solutions ...

Book Notes - It's Not Luck

2008-04-07T20:12:00.003+01:00

It’s Not Luck by Eliyahu Goldratt [1994]

Summary:
To develop unrefusable offers in marketing:
1. Understand the Undesirable effects of your customers and link them together in a logical Current Reality Tree.
2. From the Current Reality Tree understand the Core Problem, the Core Problem is normally expressed as a conflict in a Conflict Resolution Diagram.
3. Once you have identified the conflict look for injections to break the conflict and then use these injections to construct a Future Reality Tree.
4. To bring your future reality tree down to earth insert Negative Branch reservations which you can trim so that the solution is workable.
5. Next construct a Transition Tree to plan how you will move from the current to future states.
6. If required use a Prerequisites Tree to understand what specific steps are required to reach a specific goal.
7. Implement the above.

General Notes:
Most companies understand their UDE’s but not their Core Problems, if you can understand the Core Problem in you or your clients businesses you can offer real value.

Definitions:
CRT = Current Reality Tree = Logical diagram of undesirable effects used to surface root causes.
UDE = Undesirable Effect = Symptoms of the root cause problems.
RC = Root Cause = The cause of a number of related UDE’s.
CP = Core Problem = There are normally only 1 or 2 core problems for all of the undesirable effects and root causes and by solving the problems all UDE’s are eliminated.
CRD = Conflict Resolution Diagram = Also known as the “evaporating cloud” logical diagram of the conflict between necessary conditions.
FRT = Future Reality Tree = The opposite of the UDE’s in the current reality tree, the future state of where you want to go.
NBR = Negative Branch Reservation = Branches added to the Future reality tree that outline any potential problems with the FRT. Similar to Murphy’s Analysis.
TT = Transition Tree = A how to guide to go from the present to the desired future.
PRT = Prerequisites Tree = What steps are required to achieve a certain objective.

Notes:
Page 8: Similar negotiating technique to Getting To Yes.
Page 9: Negotiating steps:
1. As soon as you identify that you are in a negotiating situation that does not have an acceptable compromise, immediately stop the dialogue.
2. Set the right frame of mind, accept that it is not the other person to be blamed but the situation.
3. Write the cloud; a) What do I want, b) what do they want, c) what need is the cause for what I want, d) what need is the reason for what they want, e) what is the common goal of both parties.
4. Examine the assumptions that lead you to believe there is a conflict and attempt to break the assumptions.
Page 41: Forecast accuracy increases with the square root of the number of locations being delivered to, e.g. the forecast for 4 shops is twice as accurate as 1 and 25 shops is 5 times as accurate as 1 shop. It therefore makes much more sense to keep as much stock centrally as possible so that you can supply what is needed to the locations it is required without cross shipments.
Page 43: Buffer the customer like you would a physical constraint in a plant; expected production (sales) by replenishment time (shipping time).
Page 94: Except in simple situations you should construct a Current Reality Tree BEFORE you construct your cloud to make sure that you are tackling the root cause of the conflict and not merely a symptom.
Page 112: How to construct a CRT:
1. Identify ~15 UDE’s.
2. Find a cause and effect relationship between at least 2 of your UDE’s.
3. If the gap between these steps is large try finding an intermediate step.
4. Add ‘injections’ to bridge any insufficiencies in the logic.
5. Once you are happy with the connection between the first two UDE’s add another UDE that logically fits in.
6. Keep expanding the tree with new injections and UDE’s until all UDE’s are included in the tree.
7. Identify your root cause by tracing back the arrows in the logical diagram to the one or two UDE’s/Injections common to all branches.
8. Express this Root Cause in the form of a Conflict Resolution Diagram and examine the assumptions behind the arrows.
Page 142: Market segmentation is the key to coming up with unrefusable offers.
Page 162: If you can break the conflict arrow in an Evaporating Cloud that usually results in the most powerful solutions to your problems.
Page 173: Once you have the Future Reality Tree canvas for ‘reservations’ and add them as negative logical branches on the tree. Some will not be big issues and ignored and those that are a big risk should be trimmed.
Page 175: To cause market segmentation develop one CRT for the overall market and then add additional UDE’s for each client or sector, develop a core offer, then have modules that can be added to solve the additional UDE’s.
Page 179: How to construct an FRT:
1. Start at the top of the page with your goals.
2. At the bottom put an injection that helped you break the core problem in the Current Reality Tree.
3. Attempt to reach the objectives from the original injection by adding further injections and statements.
4. Start again but add Negative Branch Reservations to trim the fantasy elements of the tree.
5. If you have problems thinking of NBR’s look back at the CRT for ideas.
6. Using the NBR’s generate new more practical injections and re-write the FRT using these new injections.
Page 183: Negative Branch Reservations are what change a future reality tree from fantasy to something that should be practical.
Page 186: Most companies know their UDE’s but not their core problems, use CRT’s to identify the companies core problems and solve them, these are the most powerful solutions.
Page 197: Problem solving technique of weighing positives and negatives and trimming the negatives, starts at bottom of page.
Page 207: Involve the client in the sale, present a negative branch and have them help you trim it.
Page 207: Try something different, instead of pressuring the client into the sale offer to give them time to go away and consider the offer. If they ask you to proceed present a list of the usual obstacles to closing the sale, by this stage they are bought in and should help you trim these obstacles too.
Page 211: You can select who your customer is, it can be your direct customer or the end customer or any customer in between.
Page 220: Often people don’t trim a negative branch because they think that the injection required causes more trouble than it is worth. However this is normally not the case, often although the injection causes more negative branches they can be trimmed more easily than the initial branch.
Page 235: How to construct a Prerequisites Tree:
1. Start with an objective.
2. Raise obstacles about why the objective cannot be accomplished.
3. Work out Intermediate Objectives to overcome all of the objectives.
4. Organise Intermediate objectives into a logical tree, working out which parts must be done in series and which can be done in parallel. (Like a project management network diagram)
Page 273: Three necessary conditions for companies:
1. Make money now as well as in the future.
2. Provide a secure and satisfying environment for employees now as well as in the future.
3. Provide satisfaction to the market now as well as in the future.
Page 282: Strategy principles:
1. Segment your workforce across segmented markets.
2. Even if you are dominant in a market, do not take the whole market.
3. Only enter segments where there is a low risk that they will drop at the same time.
If you do the above you can ride the s-curves, as one or many market drops you can move your people to new more lucrative markets that you have not yet fully exploited, that way you will not have to layoff employees.

Quotes:
Page 169: “In order to drastically change the perception in the eyes of the market, [you] don’t have to upgrade the physical product. [You] can change the periphery, the section of the offer that is not the product itself. And this my friends can be done with almost no investment and very quickly.”
Page 185: “A product that relieves the prospects problems brings benefits – the more and bigger the problems the greater the benefits.”
Page 186: “If we want a marketing solution for our company, we shouldn’t analyze our company, we should analyse our company’s markets.”
Page 272: “You can fool a few customers for a long time. You can mislead many customers for a long time. But you cannot mislead many, for long.”
Page 275: “We shouldn’t ever build a strategy based on a market forecast.”

Thought of the Day - Trends

2008-04-05T22:46:00.003+01:00

Just had a quick read back through my blog posts so far and significant proportion concentrate on purpose; what i want to do for a living, what my ideal job is, how i can use my strengths to uniquely tackle problems etc. It seems like something i really need to work out and i think i now have plenty of tools to attack this problem, i think i just need to set aside some time to look at it until i find an answer.

It just occurred to me that some of the things i am doing at the moment (looking for jobs, updating my WebCV) might be rendered moot or at least changed significantly depending on the outcome.

Might be a good opportunity to try out 'journaling' for the first time too.

Thought of the Day - The Grass Is Always Greener

2008-04-04T06:54:00.003+01:00

"The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence"
So true of so many situations, but in my current situation it applies to jobs, or more particularly my perception of jobs. Reading a job spec i always imagine the good things, make the spec fit what i am looking for, then at the interview i steer the interviewers to tell me what i want to hear, then i start the job and it is never quite right. I think i have gotten better at checking my optimism and having a more realistic view of jobs but it is still difficult. The biggest problem is that you never know what a job will be like until you do it and by the time you find out if it is good or not you are kinda committed.

Idea From: Caroline "The grass is always greener on the other side of the golf-field"

Thought of the Day - IT Departments are the new Typing Pools

2008-04-03T20:49:00.000+01:00

Something i have been saying since i joined the world of work almost 4 years ago is that in the near future IT Departments are going to become as much of an anachronism as the Typing Pool. I don't think we are there yet but three things are converging that are accelerating the process: 1) The IT skill level is increasing exponentially as the 'millennial' generation join the workforce, these people will be able to support older users and should be much more used to solving their own problems. 2) Increased automation of IT processes make the system administration simpler. 3) Increased outsourcing of high level IT infrastructure, if you don't need people to support servers and bespoke programs it isn't really worth keeping them around to support stupid user issues.

They are surprisingly similar to the things that caused the demise of the typing pool. 1) Most employees were using computers and became used to typing (people). 2) Printing technology meant you could type something once but producesubtly different versions with minimal effort (technology). 3) It was possible to retain secretaries for specific people for whom typing was not the best use of their time (outsourcing high level tasks).

Idea From: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/02/14FE-user-managed-pc_1.html

Thought of the Day - Slow Down Time

2008-04-02T06:50:00.005+01:00

What is the best way to slow your perception of the passage of time?

Some articles suggest that the best way is to do a lot of different things and avoid routine because that stops days merging into each other. Unfortunately i have found that if i have too much variety and am too busy time goes just as fast because i don't have time to reflect and assimilate all the experiences. I wonder what the optimum balance of activity and reflection is for maximum time perception ...

Edit Found the link that this idea came from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6926500.stm

Thought of the Day - Mentors

2008-03-31T05:52:00.003+01:00

It is important to have a mentor in work, i think i have always been happiest in jobs when i had a mentor. A good boss is one thing, but someone senior who is intelligent, is on a career path you want and takes an interest in your career development really makes the difference in terms of job satisfaction.

Don't get me wrong, someone with the above qualities is hard to find. They can't be your direct line manager (makes it hard to discuss your problems) and they can't be a peer (they don't have the experience or big picture) which does kinda limit the options. Unfortunately my mentor in my current job has left the company and i am struggling to think who cold replace him. If he cannot be replaced then maybe it is time to move on and find a mentor in another company.

It also raises an interesting quandary, at what point can you become a mentor, how much more senior and/or intelligent do you have to be to mentor someone else? And even if you are mentoring other people do you still need mentoring for that?

Thought of the Day - Autocracy is the new Empowerment?

2008-03-30T11:33:00.003+01:00

In the last century there has been a shift from Autocracy to Empowerment in management styles and it could be argued that some companies are reaching the extreme end of employee empowerment (Semco [Maverick], St Lukes [Open Minds] and WL Gore) so where do we go from here?

Is the future the logical conclusion of empowerment and what Charles Handy predicts, where people will primarily be self-employed and come together to work on projects? Everyone becomes their own boss.

Or as with technology, will Apple lead the way full circle back to Autocracy again? One leader of the company controls all through fear and intimidation. If a company as creative as Apple can work and thrive under autocratic management then surely others can too.

Idea from:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_apple?currentPage=1

Thought of the Day - Stupid Daylight Savings

2008-03-29T19:56:00.001Z

Damned daylight savings time means i have one less hour to work today, one less hour of daylight to wake me up tomorrow and one more hour of useless daylight at the end of the day.

Of course you won't hear me complaining in 6 months time when i get an extra hour in bed and an extra hour of daylight in the morning ;-)

Thought of the Day - Ideal Job

2008-03-28T22:38:00.003Z

I don't think i know what my perfect job is and if i do (or at least have an inkling) then i have no idea how to get there. At the moment i am just bouncing around from job to job doing things that seem interesting. Which could be worse; i make decent money, i learn new stuff, but despite the fact that ~90% of my life is work i don't really feel fulfilled. Is it because i need more of a balance (find a hobby other than getting new jobs) or is it because i haven't found the right job yet?

If my ideal job doesn't exist can i create it? I really need to refer back to an earlier post about working out what problems i am uniquely able to tackle based on my strengths and try to think of a job that fits with that.

Thought of the Day - Teaching

2008-03-27T21:20:00.002Z

Teaching is quite possibly the most rewarding and most frustrating thing I have ever done. I know it is a cliché but it really is great when you see that light go on in someones head when they understand something for the first time. Conversely it is painfully frustrating when no matter how you explain something a person just doesn't get it. You try phrasing it in every way you know how, draw pictures, give examples and yet it just doesn't sink in. Even worse is when you finally think it has sunk in, you ask the person a question and it becomes obvious they are just as lost as they always were.

Maybe the latter problem is a failing as a teacher, though can you always explain concepts to everyone? Could even the best teacher explain quantum physics to a toddler?

I can't imagine ever teaching full time but it is certainly a nice change of pace in my current job.