Growing up all of my teachers told me that my handwriting was horrible and needed improvement. I took two years of Russian in college and somehow learning Cyrillic made my handwriting even worse. My first few jobs after college had varying degrees of handwriting needed, but over time, and especially after I moved to development full time, I wrote things out longhand less and less.
Read more on An odd thing I noticed after years and years of coding…
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For unknown reasons I have embraced printed forms this past year. I started using the Pomodoro Technique (and their To Do Today sheet) for several months now and recently I came up with a form to keep phone calls on track, and I thought I would share it here. This will probably make it into the Stronico at some point, but until then, this is what I intend to use.
Read more on Productivity Tool – a printed call sheet…
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So far 2010 has been the year of gradual improvements in life, health and productivity. I made most of these changes based on what I learned in Brain Rules. Here is a snapshot of my changes so far:
Read more on How I engineer my life for maximum productivity…
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What is a preventable cause of scope creep? Anxiety. Anxiety attacks project managers at the end of projects, making some or all of the following happen:
- Project managers insist on new “essential” features
Read more on The Kill Shot and Project Management…
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In the television show about corrupt cops The Shield, Curtis Lemansky, one of the main characters, once said “Why can’t we just do our jobs, and stop?“. That quote came back to me while reading Jason Friend’s book Rework.
Read more on New Business Adage: The Lemansky Rule…
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My new commandment: Never complain about anything. Ever. If you feel the need to complain to pressure someone else to make something happen, then be honest and call it manipulation.
I realized this while at a client meeting; we were talking about problems with a botched sales program and the staff had a litany of complaints about the program (ed. note: it was created by a separate vendor years ago, and the fault lies with the now-departed project manager who designed something inappropriate. It does a masterful job of integrating legacy systems from different vendors, languages, platforms, a mainframe and Europeans are involved somehow, but the user interface is wanting. But I digress…). Then I remembered hearing the same litany of complaints a year ago. Unlike last year, I offered suggestions on how to make small improvements to the program. Everyone proceeded to ignore me and continued complaining. At the end of the meeting everyone felt a lot better once they had talked about their problems. No one made any plans to actually fix the problems. Continue reading “Why you should never complain about anything – with anecdotal proof!” »
Read more on Why you should never complain about anything – with anecdotal proof!…
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Via some Twitter link I can no longer find, I stumbled across these two posts.
- Nootropics: their effects, their risks, and where to get them – I think I’ll be picking up some Thiamine and sticking with that, as the others seem a bit scary. It is a fascinating bit of research though. Nootropics are “Smart Drugs”
Read more on Ways to be smarter – I’ll be testing some of these soon…
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After listening to Jeff Atwood rant about email on the most recent Stack Overflow Podcast I thought I would write a quick guide to creating an effective business email. I am defining “business email” as email designed to garner information needed to perform some larger, work related task. Business emails tend to be a constant stream of communication between two parties over an extended period of time. This quick guide should eliminate 90% of problems related to those emails. We now resume our regular “How To Fix” formatting:
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Estimated read time – 3 minutes
Estimated completion time – 20 minutes
Estimated payback period – 10 working days
I have had my current work account for seven and a half years. I signed up for many email newsletters and alerts over the past seven years. I did a quick check and found I had over 7,000 emails in my inbox in the past year alone. I also need to keep all of my work-related emails forever.
Read more on A quick guide to prioritizing email…
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Try this, I went through an abnormally focused period today and it seemed to be caused by a slightly different posture.
- Sit in chair normally with good posture, nothing special.
- Arch back slightly
Read more on A surprise productivity tip – posture edition…
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