Katrin has a blog! She’s writing about Toronto:
Welcome to the Mukodu Blog: a whimsical exploration of Toronto’s random nooks and crannies, its many unique neighbourhoods, and the lives of its citizens. Mukodu is about culture, places, people, and goings-on around the city. It aims to be a quirky, opinionated and honest sampling of what makes this city great.
Check it out, especially if you’re a Toronto-dweller.
Researcher Elizabeth Van Couvering recently published research results on how search engine employees think and talk about their work.
In the face of rising controversy about search engine results—that they are too restrictive, too comprehensive, lacking in certain areas, over-represented in others—this article presents the results of in-depth interviews with search engine producers, examining their conceptions of search engine quality and the implications of those conceptions.
She interviewed employees of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask Jeeves, AOL, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, and WebCrawler, and her report is remarkable in terms of the insider verbatim quotes. (The search industry is notoriously secretive, so getting people to reveal their inner thoughts about it is challenging.) Her analysis reveals that search industry insiders consistently portray themselves as fighting a war, that they justify much of their work in scientific terms — even when trying to deal with unquantifiable issues like public good — and that they understand in a deep way how their business is driven by profit motives.
Her work is on target. And not just for search; her observations apply to every technical group I’ve been part of or collaborated with, both within and outside of Microsoft. We all used similar language “schemas”. We talked about marketplace war, about science for science’s sake. We often shrouded ideology — “censorship is inherently bad” — in technical terminology — “I suppose the algorithm decided to demote that result because its relevance dropped during our last crawl. We don’t decide; the algorithm decides.”. Or, “Sorry, we can’t implement that feature, the current architecture doesn’t allow it and it would take way too long.” Frankly, it was often easier to fight such technical arguments than to fight the underlying ideological battles, because the latter approach generally ended in stalemate. So technical language became a tool for keeping non-techies from influencing product design, and it shielded teams from struggling with uncomfortable thoughts like, “Does any of my work have a negative impact on society?”. I believe this shielding pattern reoccurs broadly in many science and technology fields.
Elizabeth’s methodology — analyzing the actual words people speak — reminds me of ‘The Four Horsemen’: Why Marriages Fail, a radio story that aired on NPR in 2005. It’s an interview with a researcher who talks to couples about their relationships, then analyzes their word choice and emotional tone to predict whether they will eventually divorce or not. Apparently there are four strong predictors of divorce: criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. And words that convey contempt for a partner are the strongest predictors of all.
The NPR piece is designed for a mass audience. Elizabeth’s piece is written for an academic audience. I recommend both.
This is a post about making smart career choices within a tech company. It’s inspired by email letters I receive — about one every week or two — from colleagues I worked with and hired at Microsoft. They’re reaching crossroads in their careers and looking for advice on how to make their next decision. In a nutshell, “Should I stay or should I go?”
It’s a familiar question. About once a year I pop up from my rabbit-hole and wonder, am I in the right place? Is there something else I should be doing instead? Is this what it’s all about? Then I put on my peril-sensitive sunglasses and go back into my hidey-hole.
Just kidding. To cope with such soul-troubling times I built a handy little checklist of questions. Here it is:
1. Do you find the work intellectually stimulating? You want a job that’s challenging, after all, one in which you’re learning new things at a manageable clip. You need to scratch that intellectual itch. At the same time, your work environment shouldn’t be so diverse or chaotic that you never build true proficiency in an area. So find a job that’s difficult enough to stretch you and keep you engaged, and stick with it at least long enough to master and complete something substantial.
2. Are you valued fairly for your contribution? It’s no fun doing a job that your co-workers perceive to be low-value. As a program manager, for instance, you can all too easily find yourself doing work that is essentially secretarial… writing specs to match already-existing code, for instance. As a tester, you might find yourself testing something that was clearly written without the slightest thought of quality assurance or product support. Not surprisingly, jobs like that are soul-killing, and management values them little when it comes time to hand out performance rewards. These problems were common at Microsoft when I worked there, especially in engineering-dominated groups that preferred “coding for coding’s sake”.
Find a team where you can truly add value and be part of the core, rather than sit on the periphery. For program management, this means looking for teams with a strong desire to understand their customers, and teams that face a high degree of uncertainty and complexity. For test engineers, this means looking for teams where developers and testers work together from start to finish, rather than paying lip service to the quality assurance role. For developers, make sure the software you’re writing is truly essential to the product, and integrates cleanly with what your co-workers — in all job roles — are doing.
The twice-as-good rule applies here: “If you can’t make it at least twice as good as what already exists, choose something different to work on.” The Office team used that rule to help decide what features to put in a new product version, and I think the rule works well for choosing jobs too.
3. Are you passionate about what you do? If you’re working at a company like Microsoft, or Google, or insert-cool-tech-company-name-here, you’re probably a smarty-pants with a techie bent and strong ability to get the right stuff done. Frankly, you can work pretty much anywhere you want, if you put your mind to it. So, here’s a news flash for you, my fine-feathered friend: life is short. So work on something you actually like. This is especially true in positions that require long, intense hours… sooner or later, and probably sooner, there will come a day when your compensation package cannot possibly make up for burning the candle at both ends. At times like these, and indeed on not-so-hectic days as well, it’s passion that fills the gap and makes the work worth doing. If you can’t get excited about your job for, say, more than half of the time you’re putting into it, move on.
4. Are you working with good people? Do they inspire each other, help each other, treat each other with respect? Or do they just drag each other down? Again, life is short, and there are an infinite number of jobs out there, so it’s incumbent on you to find one staffed with people you like. In my experience, great people are often the differentiator between a good job choice and a bad one.
That’s it. Four simple questions. Learn ‘em. Use ‘em.
Parting advice: if you are at a point where it’s time to move on, do so with grace and integrity. Deliver on the goals you signed up for. Complete the promises you made to co-workers and customers. Hand off your responsibilities so they don’t just drop on the floor. And time it right, too… don’t leave just before a performance review, for instance, because weak managers will often use that opportunity to short-shift you. There will never be a perfect time to move on, but some times are certainly better than others.
Pass it on.
A year and a half after launching their new search engine, Microsoft’s US market share in web search has declined from 13% to 9%, while Google and Yahoo! both gained. Microsoft is treading water while the market overall has grown. Here are the share numbers.
Yesterday brought more bad news for the Windows Live Search team: VP Christopher Payne is leaving Microsoft to start his own company.
It’s hard to imagine how to spin this one positively. Christopher was one of the first to pitch Bill and Steve on building a new search service in-house rather than continuing to outsource to Yahoo!. He played a huge role in recruiting key people to the team, creating a vision, and integrating marketing, business and customer focus into what was undoubtedly a pure engineering team. And as you can imagine, his business performance goals were tied in no small part to gains in market share and profitability. So this is not just the departure of the chief cheerleader and visionary; it’s a sign that success in search is not coming nearly as fast as Microsoft had hoped.
Having been on the team myself I have mixed feelings about this changing of the guard, and I imagine many of the people I used to work with are feeling the same way. When a key leader heads for the door you stop and question what keeps you there. Is it your passion for the technology and business challenges? Your allegiance to the company, the leaders, the team you helped build? The paycheck? How does that stack up against the negatives of the job? (Unless things have changed radically, the main down sides were: unattainable performance expectations pushed down from above, grueling hours, and a maddening culture of prima donna behavior that was tolerated and even rewarded.) Most importantly, how does all that measure up against time you could be spending doing something else? It’s worth doing that math once in a while.
Of course, the search battle is not over. In fact, it’s barely begun. But it will continue to be uphill for Microsoft. From the Seattle PI, March 5: “You have to think that, with the heavy lifting behind it, Microsoft has got to be in a good position to execute, and execute well,” Nielsen NetRatings’ Cassar said. “But they’re competing against two of the strongest companies, between Yahoo and Google, and so Microsoft can’t just execute well. Microsoft needs to execute in an extraordinary fashion in order to just keep pace.”
Good luck to all the warriors.
update March 8: Danny Sullivan gives some history on search at Microsoft.
Happy New Year!
I hope 2007 is starting off on a peaceful note for you. You’re probably reading this from your office, I’m guessing, evading work and responsibilities for just a few moments more before everything roars back into full swing around you. I’m doing the same: writing from my home office, and using a flu as my excuse for being a bit of a recluse and attempting to achieve only easy things today. So begins the year.
I hope also that 2007 is both happy and productive for you. So in that spirit, here is some inspiration from The Economist’s Dec 23rd 2006 issue, which focuses on the theme of happiness:
…some fortunate people … found deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work: “forgetting themselves in a function”, as W.H. Auden put it. … This happy state, which Mr Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”, arises most often in work that stretches a person without defeating him; work that provides “clear goals”, “unambiguous feedback” and a “sense of control”. Mr Csikszentmihalyi is now one of three scholars behind the “Good Work” project, which aims to make “flow” a more common experience in professional life.
Makes sense to me.
I wish you much good flow in the year ahead, both at work and at play.
Email: 1579 inbox items. 998 unread. 400 more incoming by end of day.
Voicemail: 12 messages, 7 of them new. And the phone is ringing.
Calendar: booked solid from 8:30 AM to 6:00 PM in 30 and 15 minute segments.
Does this sound familiar to you?
Now imagine pumping all of that — the email, the phone calls, the meeting reminders — through a desktop PC, a laptop, a Pocket PC, and a mobile phone. And add ubiquitous high bandwidth wireless connectivity so that you can be online all the time. Every. Single. Second.
Sound familiar now? For your sake, I hope not. But if you work in a knowledge-based job and use so-called “productivity” tools like email, voicemail, task lists and calendars to channel your workflow, this almost certainly rings a bell. I keep bumping into people who work in these sorts of “information overload” environments, and their struggles are much the same.
Below I’ve compiled some recommendations on how to survive in an information overload environment. This is a collection of techniques I learned over time from the workmates I most admired at Microsoft: the 1% slice of engineers, researchers, designers, marketers, admin assistants, and executives who were at the top of their game in quality, productivity, and work-life balance. I used their tactics daily to stay afloat.
To be clear, I’m not offering a magic wand for fixing overload situations in their entirety. In most workplaces the overload problem stems directly from the structure of the jobs, the collaboration methodology, and the number of hours you’re expected to put in. There’s no magic cure for that, short of re-engineering the corporate culture from top to bottom. I’m writing instead about what you can do on an individual level to retain your sanity, maximize productivity, and have more fun.
#1: Eliminate Interruptions
That means the “bling!” noises and popup windows and phone rings and myriad other silly widgets that signify status changes, meeting reminders, and the arrival of new messages. Turn that crap off. It distracts you from the task at hand, annoys people around you, and elevates your stress level by keeping you in a constant state of alert. Set the taskbar to autohide and reconfigure your productivity apps to stop harassing you.
Don’t worry; you can always flip all the bells and whistles back on later if you get lonely. But once your sanity starts ebbing back, you probably won’t want to. 95% of those interruptions are needless distractions. Eliminate them.
#2: Archive Aggressively
This rule is also known as “keep a clean work surface”. Find everything on your physical and virtual desktops and in your email that’s stale –- items you haven’t touched in the last 3 weeks, let’s say -– and file it in a set of reference folders.
Really, go ahead, do it now. You’ll feel much better.
For instance, I use Outlook to manage email and Windows to manage documents. In Outlook I have a small number of folders, one for each active project. I also have an archive that contains my old mail. Similarly in the My Documents folder I have a handful of folders, one for each project I’m actively working on, and then a “Reference” folder that contains reams of old stuff that I rarely need to look at. The archives keep all the old stuff out of sight and out of mind.
Again, don’t worry; you can always dig out all that junk later if you need it. But 95% of the time, you won’t. And with desktop and intranet search tools, you can always find something if you really need to. So archive it. Your archive is for reference material; your work surface is for active projects.
#3: Chunk Everything into Projects
It’s easy to fragment your concentration by treating tasks and messages as a swarm of unrelated bits and pieces. Sadly, most productivity tools push us further and faster down this slippery slope. (Public enemy number one in this regard: e-mail.) These tools are the fast path to overload, because they make it so easy to bombard each other with hundreds if not thousands of documents, emails, phone calls, tasks, and meetings. We end up with too many disparate things to concentrate on, and inevitably start to thrash or enter a state of analysis paralysis.
There’s no surprise here. Humans just aren’t good at focusing on lots of things at once. One way to get around this is to aggregate all tasks and messages into a small number of projects. Then treat every item as part of a project.
It sounds simplistic, and it is. But if you can do this successfully, then projects become a useful primary pivot for your thinking, as follows:
I find about five projects is a reasonable upper limit for me; more than that and I’m back in the same trap of too many things to focus on. This relates closely to a particular philosophy I aspire to live by: do a small number of things really well, rather than many things with mediocrity. (Hey, give me a break; I said it’s an aspiration.)
A common objection to projects is that they just mask the underlying complexity, and ultimately one must still deal with all the nasty individual bits and pieces. Granted, the complexity still exists. But masking that complexity is the whole point: projects help you avoid getting bogged down in the details, and give you a nice clean structure for managing your time, energy, and priority tradeoffs. Which leads us to…
#4: Prioritize
Once you’ve arranged your work into projects you can ask three useful questions: (1) What is the relative order of prioritization? (2) Which projects need more time, or less time? (3) Which ones can you starve or drop entirely, so that you can carve out time to take on new, higher-priority commitments?
This little mantra is incredibly useful, both as an internal mental conversation and with work colleagues. Repeat as necessary.
#5: Filter
What to do with the onslaught of incoming stuff? Filter it, like this:
This is straight out of Getting Things Done, for the most part. It works. In particular, check out the free workflow diagrams, available here.
Repeat the filtering routine once in a while, but as a scheduled task, not a continously running activity. Filtering your email every 5 minutes while you’re in a meeting or a conversation just fragments your attention. Which leads us to…
#6: Be Fully Present
Think about the last time you were in a meeting or a conversation with several other people. Was everyone really there? I can’t count the number of meetings I’ve been in where most participants were mentally absent: browsing the intranet or internet, buried in email, or perhaps IM’ing someone across the meeting table or down the hall. Or the number of times a face-to-face conversation was interrupted to take a phone call.
Is that other thing – whatever it happens to be – really so burningly important that it cannot wait? Probably not. So ignore it. You will complete the current task faster and with higher quality by staying focused. Close the laptop, turn off your phone, and give the people around you your full attention.
#7: Match the Medium to the Message
Email, chat, text messages, phone calls, face-to-face meetings, blog posts… which medium to use? Does your communication need to be real-time or is an asynchronous medium more appropriate? Are you trying to deliver a monologue or create a dialogue? In-person or remote? One-to-one or one-to-many? Does the communication even need to happen, or is it more effective to say nothing?
These choices matter because they affect productivity a great deal, both your own and that of people you’re communicating with. My roles at Microsoft were all extremely communication-heavy, so I made these sorts of choices continually throughout the day. I never became a star at it -– I still rely too heavily on email, for instance, as my workmates would testify –- but I did get a lot more adept over time at communicating effectively. This included actively shifting conversations into more appropriate mediums, e.g. identifying the mass email that really ought to be a meeting, or the meeting that really should be resolved with a document. That skill helped me save a lot of time and avoid spamming others.
Choose wisely -– on a per-message basis -– which medium to use, and encourage others to do the same. If you do, you’ll get the message across much more effectively. More signal, less noise.
#8: Take Breaks
Nobody can continually put out top quality work, especially creative work, without taking a break once in a while. So at least once an hour, stop for a few minutes. Get up. Stretch. Go for a walk. Get a drink of water. Do something else and give your brain a chance to recharge.
The same thing holds at the macro scale: take vacations. There is never a good time to take a vacation, so don’t worry about that. Just take it. And make sure the vacation is long enough to (a) fully flush work from your brain, and (b) dissuade your workmates from stockpiling new work for you. I find there is a magic threshold around 10 days after which the rate of incoming mail drops a great deal.
A related technique I used a few times was to post an Out of Office message that read something like this: “Thanks for your mail. I’m on vacation until xx/yy. I’m deleting all email received while I am out of the office. If you need me to act on your email, please resend it to me after I return.” It takes guts to do this, and your workplace might not allow it. But if you can, try it. It makes re-entry a whole lot easier. A close second is to automatically route all mail during that period into an archive folder, which you can reference later if you really need to.
Another tactic in this bucket is to declare an email and/or meeting moratorium one day or half a day a week. (Or a blog holiday, like I’ve been doing the past few weeks.) This works nicely if you can get the whole workgroup to do it at the same time.
#9: Be Draconian With Your Time
You own your time. Be greedy about it. You dig?
Learn to say no to things that are low priority, and to inefficient uses of time, so that you can say yes to the truly important (and usually more fun!) opportunities. When you or your management commits you to something new, explicitly review your project list for something else you can stop doing.
At Microsoft, the true masters at this are Executive Assistants. I will never forget working with Kay Barber-Eck, who handled Paul Maritz’ schedule. On my first day in the team Kay explained to me, with a wicked grin on her face, that the only meetings I could get with Paul would be the 3 minute travel times between one meeting and the next. She meant it, too! Kay would gladly school anyone who violated her time and priority rules, VPs included. She was a blast to work with and worth her weight in gold, because she made everyone else around her far more effective.
#10: It’s the Method, Not the Tools
Don’t confuse productivity methodology with productivity tools. They are entirely different beasts.
A tool used skillfully can help your productivity, and a tool misused can destroy your productivity. This is true of Outlook, Nelson Email Organizer, Gmail, and at least ten other tools that I’ve tried. Good tools are necessary but not sufficient.
Much more important than tools is your methodology -– your mental process -– for managing time and attention. That’s what this essay is about. There are plenty of other productivity methodologies out there, like Getting Things Done, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and related classics like The Mythical Man Month. Find an approach that works for you, and master it. Doing that will trump any tool you can lay hands on. Once you have a methodology under control, you can generally use all sorts of tools to implement it.
Good luck staying afloat!
I just bought a whiteboard. Oh, how I love whiteboards! Those great big open expanses of scribble space are truly inspiring; they free the mind to wander.
My other favorite scribble spaces:
Bliss.
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