Work-Life Balance
All Quiet on the Midwestern Front
Feb 14th
I am having bloggers guilt. The last few weeks have been seen a low posting volume. I have not taken any vows of silence; my schedule has got the best of me. I’m off to the MVP summit, my first, and I’m extremely excited to get a chance to travel to Seattle and meet fellow MVPs, MVP program leads, and MS product teams. Kevin “I need an Architect Now” Grossnicklaus and I will be rooming together. We’ll also see several familiar faces from last years Day of .NET.
Expect it to be quiet around here for a few weeks.
To give you something worth your time, how about some upcoming events to keep your eyes on:
- February 22 5:30 PM – STL .NET Users Group: “The Easy Life: Inversion of Control with StructureMap” My friend and colleague Brad Tutterow is going to present on StructureMap, a great follow-on session to my presentation on SOLID where he will cover Dependency Inversion and what the heck StructureMap does.
- February 26-28 – STL Innovation Camp“Local technology user groups, area businesses, and the entrepreneur support community will join forces to present a one of kind camp designed to spur innovation in the Information Technology community, support economic recovery, and spark an entrepreneurial renaissance in the Saint Louis Area.”
- March 10 – Building Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight and WCF RIA Services – “This event will be a half day of technical drilldown into using Visual Studio, Expression Blend, and Silverlight to build compelling applications. The focus will be on building applications that are useful in a business context, and not on “dancing bears” and “world’s funniest videos””
- April 20 – Gateway to Innovation “An interactive forum highlighting innovation in St. Louis that drives business and community prosperity. The 2010 conference will explore how IT drives growth in the life sciences, manufacturing, finance, global commerce and industries yet to be discovered. Interactive break-out sessions with regional executives and industry leaders will address the convergence of IT with other business imperatives. An evening gala and awards program will recognize the efforts of local leaders and help foster the region’s most significant economic cluster.”
A Lesson in Shedding
Oct 23rd
When you lead from the front you often have to be the jack of all trades. You got there because you were the best you could be at all the other jobs that make up what you do. Your coworkers come to you for guidance. Managers look to you for your opinion. You end up going to meetings one and two levels above your pay grade. Most of the time tackling tasks yourself seems faster than explaining it to someone and setting them on their way (which would require you to monitor their progress as well).
All this adds up to you not getting the real work done. You spend your days filtering questions, going to meetings, and tackling issues you shouldn’t be worried about; all the while your to-do list grows and nothing is being crossed off.
This is when it’s time to let go. Time to shed. Shedding will likely involve delegating something you really wanted to work on but you have to be honest with yourself: It’s just not possible to do it all. It may also involve casting something off as unimportant. Both are tough calls to make but in the end it will be necessary.
Forget about those things that are truly marginal. Do the stuff that only you can do and can do best. Let someone else do something that you don’t have time to be doing. They might be good at it too.
This Year is Just Practice…Next Year is for Real
Sep 8th
Back in January I made a crucial mistake. I asked for work. I asked for a lot of work. I didn’t get it in January but eventually I did. Last week it looked like my random vacation week was about to get canceled; fortunately it did not. I’m now sitting in my pajamas while my wife is rocking out with Guitar Hero III and I’m trying to get back some of the energy I had when I asked for all that work.
I have a lot of energy and I’m willing to devote it to my employer and to go above and beyond what is necessary. I do that when I have that energy available and when I believe what we are doing is the "right" thing. Apparently I’m not alone in this. Discretionary Energy is a hot topic in leadership and organizational development.
Not that it’s anything new. Militaries have used this throughout history. How else could you get someone to go to their potential death for little or no pay and without other methods of coercion?
Last week we had a reconnect session with the RLF and LLF graduates at REJIS. Dick Dooley was there and we got about an hour worth of verbal ‘beating’ from him (more like gentle reminders of the things we need to be doing). We talked a lot about discretionary energy because every organization needs it and needs its employees to devote some level of it to get the real work done.
The title of this post comes from one of Dick’s sayings which really clicked with me. I think it’s very true and has real meaning to all of us.
Keep practicing hard because the real work happens next year and it won’t be any easier.
Attention Management, a Blackberry, and Back in the Office
Aug 16th
The new hot topic of the Internet is this attention management thing. Merlin Mann recently shared his "Who Moved My Brain?" presentation. I enjoyed it so much I passed it around the office but felt a little jerkish because the content is a in your face and the message it sends is clear. The whole idea of attention management means taking control of your time and when and how people can interrupt you. Doing so can make you feel "inaccessible" at times with the idea being you can do your work then and be accessible at other times.
Someone else asked this raised that issue and Merlin posted his reply. The presentation and his reply are great reads.
My wife and I recently picked up Blackberry PDAs through Verizon. This will be a good test to see if I can really leverage this attention management idea as the Blackberry will definitely make me more interruptible.
I’m also going to be back in the office for a bit. This will be interesting as it is definitely easier to control access to yourself when you are offsite. The results we achieved during the time out of the office were very good but that project is winding down to another phase. Without an office to close the door on I will have to try other strategies to allow me to focus on getting work done while giving coworkers access to the answers they need.
Wish You Were Here
Aug 11th
Thanks to Josh @ Google for the shirt! He brought it to me at the LLF Event last week. I’ll be wearing it all week to work 
On Teleworking, Attention, and the Cost of Distraction
Aug 6th
I never really provided any closure to my three days of Telework posts. Those days were definitely the most productive days I’ve had as a developer in a long time. In my role I am often more than just a developer so shunning all responsibility to write code is not possible. The key to successful teleworking for me is still being reachable and responsive and I think I was able to achieve that during those three days. Over the next few weeks I’ll be continuing to work 3-4 days from home through the end of this current project.
Thus far we over-delivered on what we originally promised and found ourselves in good shape on the project. From the project manager’s perspective he was extremely happy with the results and is a supporter of project based teleworking (he already supports it on another project). One of the senior developers I worked with was also at home on a day or two and we were able to effectively work via e-mail and a few calls on land lines. Our tasks required lots of collaboration and we were very successful in that.
Which leads me to the real crux of why I would want to Telework at all. Yes, I like the people in my office and I do enjoy being there. But it is very difficult to control my environment and my attention. I do not have a door on my cube. I have not found a good hiding spot where I can take a laptop and disappear. Other than putting on headphones or hanging a sign, I cannot control access to my attention which leads to distractions.
At the end of the day my "job" is to ensure that we deliver quality software that works for our customers. During a real time crunch, thorough documentation and other process items may get left in the dust because the end result is a system that works for our customers. Some things can be documented after the release. Late software is not useful for customers.
In order for a developer to effectively deliver quality software it requires a lot of attention. Programming itself requires extensive use of short-term memory. Disrupting that is like clearing the ram on your PC, its lost and it will take time to get it back (hang on while I load Lotus Notes again). Large uninterrupted blocks of time are a valuable resource to developers. When those are attained productivity can easily double or more. 4 uninterrupted hours is easily equivalent to 8 hours at the office with distractions.
While these thoughts were floating around in my head Merlin Mann posted this gem about author Neal Stephenson. Stephenson is admittedly a bad corresponder when it comes to answering fan mail. Merlin’s commentary sums up what is at issue here and that is access to a person’s attention. If Neal Stephenson answered all his fan mail, he would never write another novel.
When you can control access to your attention I believe you can achieve more faster but still allow time to people who need your attention. How you do that will make all the difference in the perception of your responsiveness which is the real key to making this successful.
By teleworking I am controlling access to my attention, letting me focus solely on deliverables. Part of my balancing act will continue to be maintaining a level of responsiveness to satisfy even the most demanding of my attention (like my two-year-old daughter).
Telework Day 1
Jul 31st
I would have posted this update last night but I was too busy on the Xbox. Day 1 went just fine other than I am working really long days. I work my normal hours and then when the kids are in bed I pick up some more until around 10PM. Most of the day was heads down coding but a portion of it went to project management tasks and some e-mail (all project related). I put the idea of using Skype for remote communication to my boss. It would be handy, especially because not everyone is issued a cell phone. My wife and I have our phone service via Charter (love them or hate them) and I have been using the free long distance quite a bit.
Time to start day 2. Another long day. Easier to deal with when I’m just in the basement.
Technorati Tags: Telework,work-Life Balance
Three Days of Telework: Prelude
Jul 29th
Tomorrow begins a three day journey of working from home. My employer’s current feelings on the matter are that in certain circumstances it may be beneficial for employees to work remotely. This can be situational (i.e., delivery, home repairs) or project based. There is not an official policy that allows for N number of days a week (like Monday/Friday, etc).
To date I have been able to Telework one day at a time so three days will be the longest stretch. Of course working from home sounds like all fun and games but it is far from it. Without an official infrastructure for communication other than e-mail it is a lot of work to make sure everyone has cell phone/home phone, etc. Other considerations are power loss or Internet connectivity loss. These things all take some overhead to plan for and flexibility on your coworkers part, especially those who are "stuck" in the office.
Beyond the work overhead there is the home overhead. My wife and the kids have their daily routine and daddy being home definitely impacts them. Since I have worked from home a few times already my daughter kind of understands that when daddy is downstairs he is busy. We’ll have to see what the real impact of three days is on my wife.
Some of you that read this may laugh because you’re doing this five days a week already. Others may be turning green with envy. It still seems like for a majority of companies teleworking is not quite an option. I’m lucky to be in a field where I can do my job from anywhere which is usually the first barrier to teleworking. Beyond that there are the cultural and comfort issues that an organization faces when they have people who don’t clock in at the front door each day. Quite honestly, if you can’t trust a person to do their job, you can’t trust them in the office or out of it.
I’m going to go hit the Xbox for a bit. I can sleep in an extra 45 minutes and report to my basement at 0700. Day one should be the same as the other days I’ve done this. Days two & three may be a different story.
