Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Year: 2020

  • Scaling yourself

    Scott Hanselman gave a talk in 2012 called “Scaling Yourself ” about personal productivity and not burning out.<footnote>As I learned today, he since has given a variant of that talk dozens of times and it probably has improved. However, I saw the 2012 version.</footnote> I would say it’s more relevant today than it has been then.

    A lot of us have been working from home since early 2020. We’ve had to re-arrange childcare, supervise remote learning, take care of family members and adopt new protocols such as social distancing – all against the backdrop of a global pandemic, an economic downturn and social unrest. We are not just transitioning to work-from-home, but rather dealing with multiple severe crises that force everyone to stay at home while still trying to work.

    While Scott’s talk does not solve global healthcare, he has a few actionable suggestions that might lighten the load. Below are more notes:

    • There is a fundamental difference between efficiency (reducing the effort to get things done) and effectiveness (doing the right things). Efficiency will come with time and experience. Effectiveness can be improved immediately.
    • Each week set aside time to define the work that needs to get done. That makes sure that you are working on the right things.
    • Say no/ drop things off your todo list. We can only do so many things and even fewer things really well. Give yourself permission to say “no” or re-negotiate your commitments.
    • “Being busy is a form of laziness”. Instead of taking care of everything as if everything is of equal importance, invest the time to triage work, i.e. make some upfront decision about if this needs to get done, whether you are the best person to do it and by when it needs to get done. Don’t just jump to the conclusion that add it to the top of your todo list.
    • Save your keystrokes: When writing longer instructive emails, consider putting them in a document or a blog post instead. That way you can share more broadly with others and don’t have to repeat yourself.
    • At the beginning of a day or a week, pick three things that you want to get done. As work and life now blends it is even more important to set boundaries and set yourself a bar for success to make sure you don’t end your day without guilt. If you don’t set that bar, your workday will never feel done and you will continuously carry the psychic weight of unfinished work with you.

    Scott does a much better job at telling stories around these concepts. Give it a shot, it’s only 30 minutes that will pay off later: Scaling Yourself – Scott Hanselman

  • Staying clear of Nazis and Sharks – Reflecting on my News Diet

    Staying clear of Nazis and Sharks – Reflecting on my News Diet

    I’ve always been an avid reader of some kind of news. I spent most of my pocket money on PC magazines. When the internet came along, I discovered slashdot.org and heise.de as good sources to keep abreast with tech news. Over the last 25 years, news has become much more available, abundant and seductive. Over time the barriers for news creators lowered. At the same time, growth hacking and click-baiting made it easier to get away with low quality content.

    Kara Swisher once told the story of John Hendricks. He is the founder of the Discovery Channel and in their early days needed to get onto cable networks. So he put episodes on air that drew people in with their sensational nature. His one-line summary was: “Nazis and sharks, that’s what got ratings up”. That was in the 80ies.

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  • Collaborative Fund: Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

    Lots of wisdom in this post on the Collaborative Fund blog (which seems like an excellent collection of interesting posts).

    The post focuses on two core tenants:

    1. It is impossible to feel wealthy if your expectations grow faster than your income.

    2. Few things fuel denial and ignorance like luck, randomness, and change.

    Each is backed up by fun facts and anecdotes like this one about Stephen Hawking:

    In 2004 the New York Times interviewed Stephen Hawking, the late scientist whose incurable motor-neuron disease left him paralyzed and unable to talk since age 21.

    “Are you always this cheerful?” the Times asked.

    “My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21,” Hawking said. “Everything since then has been a bonus,” he replied.

    A useful financial skill, too.

    https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/obvious-things/

    The whole thing is well worth a read: Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

    As always, the important question is: What does it mean for you and what will you change?

  • The dogs won’t eat it – Choosing OKRs well

    The concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is deceptively easy.

    • Objectives are ambitious, qualitative and time bound goals of a team. Each objective is typically supported by ~3-4 key results.
    • Key Results are measurable achievements that contribute to those goals. They are business outcomes and typically expressed in terms of adoption, engagement, cost, performance or quality.

    An OKR describes both what a team wants to achieve and how it is going to measure its achievement. “We will achieve $Objective as measured by $KeyResult1, $KeyResult2 and $KeyResult3.”

    At the same time, coming up with good OKRs is hard. One has to identify the few key metrics that really matter and to commit on outcomes (e.g. growth) rather than output (e.g. launching a new feature). That requires judgement, uncomfortable leaps of faith and a willingness to experiment.

    Jeffrey Zeldman tells a great anecdote in the context of Marketing that illustrates what happens if you choose your Key Results badly: The dogs won’t eat it.

  • Hard to discover tips for macOS

    These days I spend little time on macOS, but I’m still a sucker for tips on how to use it better. Tristan Hume collected quite a few of them:

    Inspired by a few different conversations with friends who’ve switched to macOS where I give them a whole bunch of tips and recommendations I’ve learned about over many years which are super important to how I use my computer, but often quite hard to find out about, I decided to write them all down:

    Hard to discover tips and apps for making macOS pleasant

    The list features one of my favorite macOS features: “You can drag the little file/folder icons at the top of many windows.” Might sound unimpressive, but it is one of those things that I dearly miss in Windows. Have a look:

  • Momentum from Day One – Getting Onboarding Right

    Momentum from Day One – Getting Onboarding Right

    Creating a good onboarding experience as a manager is tricky at the best of times. It’s even harder when you are forced to work from home against the backdrop of a global health crisis. It is harder to recognize the challenges of new hires and it’s harder for them to ramp up and integrate in the absence of ambient hallway chatter.

    At the same time, it is possible and achievable. Looking back at my own onboarding journeys, I’ve learned a lot from the good, the bad and the ugly. Most learnings are transferable into distributed settings.

    Let’s look at the bad ones first. Once, my new boss told me in our first meeting that he’s moving teams – I just relocated to the other side of the globe to work with him. That was also the job where I did not have a computer or a phone for the first week – particularly funny as I worked for a telco and had to read printed PowerPoint decks for the first week. Another time, I was put into “stealth mode” … without ever re-emerging. Or that time when I did not have a project to work on for the first two months – it was called “being on the beach” and it drove me up the walls.

    But there were also the great experiences. When my new boss walked me through everything by himself – not just giving me the opportunity to ask questions, but guiding me through what he considered important. Or when I arrived at a desk with a brand-new machine including access to all relevant systems. Or the onboarding buddy, who took it as a matter of personal pride to make sure that I had a great start.

    First impressions matter. Starting on the right foot and getting momentum is a great confidence booster for every new starter. At the same time, without guidance, new hires have to work twice as hard to learn what they need to be productive. When working from home, it takes a more deliberate effort to give new hires the necessary experiences and exposure for a solid start. Always remember that it is a bigger deal for them than it is for you. They will remember it, one way or another. Your job is to make sure those will be good memories.

    Below are a few ideas that I collected over the years.

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  • Nike ad: You Can’t Stop Us

    We are finally watching The Last Dance. In the nineties, while it was impressive to watch Michael Jordan from Germany and New Zealand, it must have been amazing being immersed in the frenzy up close in the US.

    Nike’s brand machinery was a big part. I was surprised to learn that it only kicked into gear with Michael Jordan. Good to see that they still got it:

  • The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

    What seemed like a goofy post turned out informative. I learned a lot about principles of interface design, in particular about differentiating and organizing interfaces.

    What could cause 400 WWII pilots to raise the landing gear on their B-17 bomber just before touchdown? Catastrophic pilot error, or something more fundamental?

    It was the psychologist Alphonsis Chapanis who first suggested that the high rate of crash landings might be the fault of poor interface design. The adjacent landing gear and flap control knobs were identically shaped. The pilots never stood a chance.

    His temporary solution was to glue differently shaped strips of rubber to each switch, enabling blind operation by touch alone. This gave rise to the idea of shape coding and a system of differentiation still being followed in aircraft cockpits today.

    The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

  • The Curse of Knowledge

    Matthias Ott with a great story that starts with him trying to guess songs that his kid claps (spoiler: it’s a losing proposition).

    When you have an advance in knowledge over someone else, it can be difficult to recognize this gap and act accordingly. This phenomenon – that we falsely assume that others have the background to understand – is called the curse of knowledge.

    The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that can be observed whenever people want to convey information. The readers of your article, the students in your class, the participants of your workshop, the listeners of your podcast, the people at your next meetup, the clients in your conference call, the users of your interface – they all don’t know what you know and are therefore missing context. Always. And while you are confidently talking and explaining like a pro, people actually don’t understand you as well as you would hope.

    The Curse of Knowledge · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

    Even if you know your audience intimately, each conversation should start with setting context. This can take many forms, but it is necessary to establish a foundation from which you make your point. If you don’t start from a shared understanding everything else will be an unnecessarily hard attempt to be understood.

  • Software is eating conferences – Microsoft Build and the digital transformation of conferences

    Software is eating conferences – Microsoft Build and the digital transformation of conferences

    May is traditionally the month where the big tech companies host their developer conferences. Google, Facebook and Microsoft all have their gatherings with Apple quickly following in June. When COVID hit, many in the tech scene wondered what would happen to conferences. The traditional format brought thousands of people together in one space to mingle and exchange ideas in close proximity. That no longer works in a COVID world.

    All the big tech companies responded differently. Facebook and Google decided to wait this year out and canceled F8 and I/O respectively. Microsoft and Apple decided to go ahead and take Build and WWDC online this year.

    Impressions from Microsoft’s Build

    Microsoft was the first to come out of the gate last week. Their Build conference heavily leans towards developers. It’s typically held in Seattle with around 7,000 attendees, big rooms, expo floor and lots of space for the community to meet. Within the last eight weeks, this huge event was re-imagined for the virtual space. And it has been an innovative interpretation of an all-online conference: a 48-hour non-stop event with presenters from all four corners of the world. Yes, here and there minor seams were showing, but Microsoft was pushing the envelope and for a 1.0 this was very stable.

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