I wasn’t trying to accomplish this but it looks like I don’t commit code on Saturdays all that often. I like it.
I am a geek through and through but even I need days to switch gears. Always doing the same thing all the time gets old. Saturdays are usually filled with non-tech things like knitting, visiting with family and friends, bike rides and a ton of camping in the summer. 🙂
Breathe in, breathe out.
One of my favorite shots taken in Park City, Utah during a bike ride.
I had a moment of introspection today as I sat in a pew at a good friend’s dad’s funeral: Death is much like chronic pain. A few years back, on a different blog of mine, I made this statement regarding chronic pain with my cluster headaches:
And lastly, the most important lesson I’ve learned? The pain reminds us that we’re alive. Without the pain we’d go through life not understanding what a gift it is to be able to relax without pain and distractions. That pain keeps me from being a sheep, tooling around life without knowing where I came from and where I want to go.
Death sucks but it reminds us we’re alive. Cherish the time you have with your living family and friends. Everything doesn’t have to be a party – but ever so often have a moment of reflection and smile when you’re having a good day.
<3
I’ve been noodling some ideas lately and I sort of rediscovered an idea I remembered I had from the past.
Most mobile app interactions are 20-30 seconds in length (at most!). It makes a lot of sense to design an experience around these types/lengths of interactions. Some interactions go beyond that length and their design should be completely different.
You know you’re hitting the right area in the users’ brains when you find your app is the first thing they use in the morning and/or the last thing they use before sleep. This is an incredibly powerful place to exist in someone’s life.
Today I was musing about company culture. Most tech job postings these days mention “our culture” and tend to interview for you to be a culture fit. Sometimes I really wonder if they’re confusing culture vs. culture:
culture |ˈkəlCHər|
Source: Oxford Dictionaries
Forcing a culture on new employees tends to lend itself to definition #2. Finding new employees that fit into what is perceived as the #1 definition actually means your culture is artificial. Exposing your human intellectual manifestations to your candidates and letting them determine if they want to contribute to that culture seems to be the right move.
Forcing a culture to form in your company feels more of an experiment than how human nature behaves. Find people you want to work with based upon how they work and not how you want them to work. You might just find their distinctiveness is what your company needs to move up to the next level of success.
Working for a 100% distributed company presents a number of benefits as well as challenges. One of those challenges is the fear of missing out or FoMO. It is a real thing.
The Fear of Missing Out is the emotional stress we can experience when we feel like things that should be important to us are occurring without our observance or involvement. Social media plays an important role in this as we experience other people’s involvement in activities that portray a perceived positive impact on their well-being. Even though we know that the world isn’t as rosy as is portrayed through these sites, we feel a tinge of jealous a number of times.
Boy that looks fun.
I can’t believe I didn’t go to that concert.
I wish I had x to do y with.
Working remote presents its own version of FoMO. The larger our company gets, the more communication channels exist. In Slack we have over 450 channels and a hoard of private blogs to communicate with. You simply cannot subscribe to every blog and channel without overloading your brain. The cost of not subscribing means you feel you’re missing out on something. How do you combat this?
We have a general rule that anything said in Slack is ephemeral. It’s searchable, yes, but unless you were pinged either directly or in a room, we can’t expect people to “catch up” on backchat when returning. More permanent things have to be documented on an internal blog if they are to be treated as such. People who should be made aware of the items that don’t belong to that team should be pinged in the post. The assumption is you should be following your team’s blog pretty closely.
This gives us the benefit to start unsubscribing to things. At some point one of these checks causes the balance to be made and information flows between barriers. You have to trust this happens. Once in a while you get surprised by a piece of information but you just roll with the punches.
The FoMO also happens when you’re in person with your coworkers. We have an annual get-together we call the Grand Meetup. We’re all at the same place at the same time for over a week. There is SO MUCH going on this week that you will miss things. You should miss things. There are so many people to meet, activities to participate in, and projects to work on that we can forget to sleep.
The fear is real. It will grip you. Remember to breathe, take a step back and trust that its okay if you don’t experience everything in life. Just don’t forget to look out your own window once in a while. 🙂
Featured image credit – https://www.flickr.com/photos/deathtogutenberg/15065313478/
I love photography. My love for taking photos is an ebb and flow. I’m not sure what exactly affects the arbitrary direction of those currents other than the nature of my brain. I still take a fair number of photos but sadly they’re only with my iPhone 6 Plus as of late.
I have a fair amount of camera gear, centered around my Canon 40D from a few years back. I was seriously proud when I bought that digital SLR. I also have a number of pieces of studio lighting equipment and related paraphernalia. I enjoy the whole concept of being a full time photographer – but for some reason I just peter out and lose interest. I’ve been pondering why lately and this is sort of my mental dump on the subject.
I miss my DSLR because it forces me to take the extra moment to compose the shot and find the right way to convey the emotion and special effect on my being at the time. I’m not sure I miss my film-based SLR as much but this effect is definitely amplified when it’s not easy to see the results immediately on a screen.
Carrying around the iPhone/3G/4/5/5S/6 Plus over the years has made photography more accessible to me. (Well, to the world actually) I find carrying around the gear is not super easy but it is definitely the mark of a photographer. I’ve tried smaller bags and those help but then I discover soon I left a particular lens filter in the larger bag at home and I get all crabby. Having the iPhone in your pocket means you can take a picture whenever the need arises. The other huge improvement a smartphone gives you is you can put it away to enjoy the moment easier.
How many times have you been to a serenely beautiful place and can’t help yourself but take a large number of photos and videos? What we’re trying to do as photographers is capture that moment so well so we don’t forget it and then we can share it. With large memory capacities, high frame rates, auto-bracketing, effect filters, etc we start to reduce the quality and forethought into a photo and replace it with quantity. Being worried about getting the right shot from every angle and a slow motion video of all the movement can ruin the moment. Don’t forget to just sit … and watch … and compose the photos in your mind as well.
The human body seems to have a natural instinct to burn itself out. We find something we like and want to continue receiving those brain signals so we keep on doing the thing. Eventually our brain grows weary and sometimes our body too. My scientific analysis has some gaps but you get the idea. We like to put blinders on until we feel pain that something is no longer fun.
At CocoaConf Chicago, Jaimee Newbury gave an excellent talk on Burnout and how she used her skills as a product designer to battle it. Not only was her talk informative, it was quite moving. She managed to incorporate stories of her family, her childhood and the movie Rocky to help us comprehend why she reached burnout.
Rocky is Jaimee’s favorite movie and from it she remarks on one quote from Sly Stallone – “It doesn’t matter if I lose this fight. All I want to do is go the distance.“ Simply put you’re going to fail in life. The idea is not to let those failures consume you to the point of stagnating your creativity and drive to continue on. We learn from failures – how else would we know when we succeed?
There are four steps in the plan Jaimee is following to help her spin the burnout back into creativity: understand, discover, design, iterate. These are the same steps she would follow when working with product development – why not reuse the tools you already know? First you have to really understand what the problem is you’re trying to solve. Then you have to discover the context of the problem – determine all of the variables, inputs, behaviors, technical issues that cause or interact with the issue. Next, design a solution to help resolve the problem but while keeping in mind the human condition – we can only change so much so fast. Finally, the last step is to iterate because as we go through the journey of change we’ll need to tune things as we discover more about ourselves.
There are a couple big takeaways from Jaimee’s talk that I wanted to share.
I’ve gotten to the point of burnout a few times in my life and I’ve made my own internal rules to deal with situations like this. I don’t think I’ve ever analyzed my process enough to know what it was (or that it really even existed). This talk on burnout has made me understand more about how I approach problems and I’m glad that I do have some analytical assistance from my experience as a software developer. Hacking your own brain and life is quite possible! 🙂
Every year at Automattic we get together at what we call the Grand Meetup. Everyone is expected to give a four minute flash talk on any subject – literally any subject. Last year I described a funny story about a boss stealing my iPhone. This year I combined another funny story with some personal philosophies.
Last summer I posted about how Things With Wheels Are Meant To Move and that paired well with my tweets about my philosophy on systems. This flash talk is an amalgamation of those two posts.
[wpvideo poH8v32Z]
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