Blogs

“A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you > can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can > become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. > The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop > looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. > Gulp.” (Jeff Bezos) This is a quote from a Jeff Bezos letter to the board, talking about internal metrics and improvements. Sometimes when you add a process to a problem, the process can become the focus and not the outcome. ...

Sometime over the last year I stopped paying attention to Twitter. Between the political cacophony of 2016 and a growing list of people I was following, the noise ratio was just too poor to hold my interest. Twitter had become like LinkedIn to me, a service I used to have a professional presence, but not one that inspired or taught me anything. I had given up. A friend recently challenged me to find the interesting in Twitter again. He suggested declaring bankruptcy and starting over. While I liked his suggestion, I decided to apply another minimalist principle to my feed. Instead, I’ve been scrutinizing the people I follow looking for the “spark of joy” in what they post, things that make me grin, things that inspire me, or things that challenge me in some way. Anything that’s disingenuous, caustic (for no reason), or just consistently unintelligent can go. ...

I had a realization last week: How can it be more me? If I’m not in it, can I get into it? I’m an idea guy. It’s why I love designing software, both in terms of system design and user experience. I love designing and developing products too. It’s something that can get me fired up, keep me from sleeping, and keep me motivated through even the darkest, rainiest days. ...

There’s a lot to like about our beloved task management tools. But if we’re honest, there’s a lot they get wrong too. Here are a few ways TODO tools grind my gears: Every task and list looks exactly the same. Lists are organized with limited hierarchy and pre-requisites. Lists are organized with no real spacial control. (Kanban boards are a great example of how spatial organization can vastly improve how we think about certain types of lists.) Tasks lists are either a huge a black hole or they’re a cacophony of noisy craziness. Task tools can be too atomic. A task is an indivisible line item, in single list. Grouping and splitting tasks is often manual and way too much work. Importance is missing from most list tools; everything has the same weight; there are only minor visual differences between lists and items. TODO lists require careful weeding, and they accumulate cruft really easily. It’s can be difficult to work a list; one task is usually a dozen and not all completed tasks are interesting. Task lists don’t care where you’re at personally, they just sit and stare at you. I swear my lists judge me some days. They don’t play nicely with your schedule. Not everything on your lists needs to hit your calendar, but the stuff that does really does. Completing a task is more than checking it off. Tasks have more exit states than done, anywhere from “Wow, that was a bad idea” to “This doesn’t matter anymore because of such-and-such”. Huge lists are super demotivating. Huge sets of completed tasks don’t have the positive effect you wish they would. Some tasks are time sensitive, which is more than just when it’s due. Some tasks are recurring, but not in the it’s-due-every-wednesday sort of way. Meaningful tasks like “You should really filter through the bug list this month” need to happen regularly, but not monthly on Tuesday mornings. Some tasks are just plain different than others. I’m looking at you, “Find inspiration today”. I finish certain types of tasks better at certain times of day, or when I’m in certain moods. And finally, task lists are very rarely inspiring. I’ve never looked at my TODOs and had an epiphany.

I don’t like the term technical debt. We mostly use it without thinking, and it’s often the wrong way to frame the value of our software designs. Most of the time we’re being dishonest when we call our decisions debt, and unless we’re planning out the general long term costs of our approach, it’s not debt at all. With financial debt, money is mostly money, regardless of the source. The terms of a loan are known up front when we borrow money, and those terms may or may not be satisfactory. Any decision to borrow is based on a known commodity, and on the need and the terms, both compared with the gains. Taking on debt, at least in business, is an informed and unsurprising proposition. Debt is often a rational choice for a business too, if the risk is low and the return is favourable. It’s rare for a company’s investors to allow a business to take on financial debt that isn’t clearly understood. ...