Dyepot, Teapot

I’ve been neglecting my blog so much that even my mom noticed. Oops. I’m too busy again. Some neat things are coming out of that: a new group for local women who write code (or want to learn), much craftiness, talking with various people about contract projects, getting Yog’s Notebook in front of a wider audience (we were at the Portland Zine Symposium this past weekend). And so on. If you were expecting to hear from me and didn’t, this might be a good time to send a reminder.

A couple of jobs back (actual time: about a year ago) I worked in the data services department at a medical billing company. My coworkers and I were in charge of making sure that data was transmitted to and from the customers on schedule. Most of this was automated, so we had a lot of downtime for reading celebrity gossip magazines, but when something broke down, it was a different story. Sooner or later you’d have a day where the programmers pushed out an update with unexpected side effects, your data files were corrupt, the file transfer script failed to run on time, and every customer was calling to ask “where’s my file and what’s this trash I received instead?”.

While I was there I learned a fair bit about what to do when your brain is screaming ‘I can’t do all of this at once where do I start how do I make these people shut up and go away aaaaah!’. And I’ve been interested to see that a number of busy tech types are experiencing this feeling with respect to their own business communications. Many of them are concluding that the way out is to to cut back on the things calling for their attention. If that works, great, but I don’t think it’s the only option. At the operations job I handled the overload through aggressive triage. Anything that can be done later, should. I also put things that had specific deadlines on my schedule, and those were completely non-negotiable, no scheduling meetings at the same time. My apology-writing skills also got a fair workout some weeks.

I’ve been following the way Stowe Boyd pushes back against the ‘information overload’ panic, and I think he has some very useful tips: You don’t have to reply to everything. You don’t have to read everything. If it’s important, it’ll come up again. I would add: learn to assess what’s important in this moment. Whatever just appeared in your inbox probably isn’t it. Triage, and put anything you can’t work on right now out of your mind.

The biggest disagreement between Stowe and his critics is that they see the state of having more email etc. than they can respond to as a sort of crisis mode, while he believes it to be business as usual. If it’s a crisis, then you want to figure out how to get out of that state as fast as possible (which would be appropriate when the thing filling your inbox and voice mail is ‘the server’s down again and all of our customers are threatening to leave’). But when it’s just your regular work, people you’re talking to about future projects, and other assorted communication (emails from mom, Facebook friend requests, …), a different strategy is required. Unless you want fewer friends, want fewer business contacts, fewer interesting and exciting projects. You could do that. But I’m pretty sure that anyone who winds up in this situation likes the busy busy life. They just feel bad about the unanswered email, and worry that they’re ignoring something important. It’s an unpleasant panicky feeling, but it’s not rational or useful, and if you know that, you’ll be able to work with it.

This is what my triage process looks like right now. Lower priority: Messages from people I don’t know. Questions sent to a group, especially if someone else will probably be able to answer. Links to fun videos, websites, and other distractions. Anything I can resolve the next time I see them in person. Higher priority: Messages from people I know and like talking to. Questions that can’t be answered by other people, especially if they involve potential work. Anything that involves my calendar, like planning future events or meetings.

That’s usually enough to get my inbox and other pieces of incoming information in order. It requires a bit of faith that anything I forget that involves people I know, I can sort out later without too much trouble. I think the best criteria for figuring out whether what you’re doing is working is this: Can people get in touch with you when they need to? Are your business and personal relationships suffering? Those are affected by a lot more than just how many emails you answer in a day, or how fast you return a phone call.

Updated to add: Kaitlin Sherwood has a great post on why email isn’t the problem (”People have been overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that other people give them to do since long before email.”, she writes).

Anne Zelenka has been writing some really interesting things about the nature of work lately, as an extension of her work at Web Worker Daily. She proposes that there are two models for knowledge workers, one older and one emerging now.

Busy: Show your face during all standard working hours.
Burst: If you produce what you need to, we don’t care when you do it or how long it takes.

Busy: Manage the hierarchy inside your company.
Burst: Connect laterally outside your department and company.

Busy: Always available during working hours.
Burst: Declarative availability.

Seeing the response to this has been very interesting. The replies on WWD seemed mostly positive. Several people said, “This is how I want to work, but it goes against how our work environment is set up.” Elsewhere, including her own blog, followers of Peter Drucker’s management philosophies are complaining. “You misunderstand. What you’re talking about isn’t meaningful. That’s just frosting on the ideas we’re promoting.”

I disagree. When Matthew Hodgson says the Drucker credo is, “Worker, manage thyself. Organisation, get out of the way”, I know he’s not getting the burst work concept. Because what I hear from Anne is “Workers, organize yourselves.”

For those of us that glommed onto the burst concept automatically, I think the issue is this. We procrastinate. We work hard, and then we take breaks. Our day looks like a mishmash, but we’re productive. And traditional management and organization structures, even in ‘knowledge work’, are not very accommodating of these patterns. When I’ve done project management, I actually prefer situations where people aren’t all in the same office (and especially the same room) together, because it helps me remember that I don’t need to care what people are doing at any given moment as long as the work is getting done. The very nature of being able to see everyone in person all day is that it’s really hard to support anything but a ‘busy’ work pattern.

I’m in kind of an odd situation right now, employment-wise. I’m not working full-time for anyone, but I’m running a (very small) business, doing contract work, and generally enjoying the chance to write and network and claim my own time. At the moment, that just barely pays the bills. I’d like to be earning more, but it’s really hard to trade away this kind of freedom. I get work done. On time, and to spec. What else matters?

I made it through a week of self/un-employment without freaking out. (Regular paychecks? What’s that?) The first two days were taken up just kind of getting comfortable, getting the right software on the MacBook, handling a couple zine orders, etc.

Tuesday I went to a Social Media Club meeting at Someday Lounge (a little dark in there, but a nice space):

Dan Harbison, Internet Marketing Manager for the Trailblazers, talked about the ways they’re using blogging and podcasts and social networking to connect with fans. They have a site called I Am a Trailblazers Fan, billed as the “official online community” of the Portland Trailblazers.

The part I found most interesting is that Dan said that even when fans are negative or critical of the team, they’d rather have them giving that commentary within the sphere of the team’s blogs and networking site. Even angry fans are still important to the organization. Apparently they only take down posts if the language is abusive or not PG, and even then the person will get an explanation and be asked to play nice, instead of being automatically kicked off the site.

Afterward, I talked with someone involved with the Platform International Animation Festival, which is happening this summer in downtown Portland (June 25-30). They’re going to have a really incredible lineup of work there (the schedule isn’t on the website yet, but the person I talked to mentioned John K. and Scott McCloud as participants), and they really want to connect with fan communities like anime clubs, as well as bloggers/podcasters/etc. If you’d like more info, let me know.

Wednesday I had two things on my calendar: a booksigning by the lovely authors of Mason Dixon Knitting, and the Dorkbot meetup.

Totally different venues and crowds. Both fun.

Yesterday, pretty quiet. Worked on some code for a blog aggregation project. Had lunch with Dawn at Cup & Saucer.

My plan for today was more code, but I woke up feeling kinda tired, so instead I’m putting together flyers for BarCamp.

Logo by Patrick Sullivan of Lov.li.

If you’re even slightly interested in tech, the internet, geek stuff, etc. you should consider coming to BarCamp. I think it’ll be a really interesting event. It’s May 11-12 at CubeSpace (that’s another neat thing I keep meaning to talk about. It’s a workspace for the self-employed, with meeting rooms and desks. The place reminds me of the grad student research cubbies in university libraries.)

Tonight Lucas and I will be at a Timbers pre-season event at the Bitter End. The $6 cover goes toward a Timbers documentary a friend of ours has been working on, and they’ve lined up three bands, a bagpiper, a raffle, plus a sneak preview of the documentary. We’ll have copies of Yog’s Notebook for sale, too.

Busy busy.

Work is exhausting. In addition to Rails programming, I took on some of the page layout work, and the project management tasks for the site I’m working on, because essentially we’re understaffed. I really enjoy all of these kinds of work, but because I like what I’m doing, it’s easy to spend so much time on it that I feel worn out. I am trying very hard to keep work from creeping into my weekend and evening down time.

Lucas and I are taking a long Thanksgiving holiday in Arizona and Las Vegas starting on Saturday, and the timing could not be better.

It’s already over a week past the other fall holiday, but here’s what we went as for Halloween:

Lucas is Wayne Rooney. I’m Rincewind the wizzard (but not one person asked why it said that on my hat).

It’s been a good (but too short) weekend. I got two pairs of Doc Martens super cheap at a warehouse sale. I’m listening to a recently purchased copy of Bowie’s “Heroes” album. Sputnik is napping. The whole apartment smells like gouda because I just made a batch of cheese biscuits. In a week I’ll be in Vegas (or at least Laughlin, having flown into the Vegas airport, after which we’ll hang out in Arizona for most of the week, see the Grand Canyon, and come back to Sin City for two nights of cheap drinks, roulette, and taking pictures of drunk tourists and neon signs). And I’m going to a Blazers game tonight.