Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Year: 2021

  • Incentives and tools

    Working together across multiple teams is hard. People disagree on direction and priorities which can be frustrating at times. It’s easy to attribute this to ignorance, lack of insights, malevolence or any other factors that are out of one’s control.

    A more healthy way is to understand what people are trying to achieve. Two questions helped me in the past:

    1. Incentives: What drives your bonus?
    2. Tools: How can you influence that outcome?

    The faster you can figure that out, the easier it will be to work within the complexities of multiple teams. It also allows you to realize when people have no incentive at all to support you in your mission (which is usually fine!). They might do it out of goodwill anyway, but an engineer whose bonus is determined by the uptime of a service might look skeptical at your suggestion to move fast and break things.

    Of course, those two questions make for a weird ice breaker. But keeping those questions in mind when you get to know a person can turn an awkward coffee chat into a meaningful conversation. It is a great shortcut to working better together.

  • Adam Grant – How to stop languishing

    Earlier this year, Adam Grant hit the Zeitgeist with the word “languishing” (There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing). The word describes the feeling of being joyless and aimless that most of have been experiencing over the past 18 months. I remember receiving links to the article from all over the world – typically with all caps and exclamation marks (“THAT!!!”, “ME!”, “Must read!”).

    From zero to 100 in one New York Times column

    I’m glad that he followed his discovery up with a TED Talk on how to deal with that feeling. The short version is:

    • Master something: Find something that you like where you can make tangible progress.
    • Be mindful: Dedicate your time and attention to one activity, rather than playing time confetti and spreading it across multiple things.
    • Do stuff that matters to others: Don’t just do it for yourself, but make a difference for somebody else. This can be as little as spending time with somebody.

    Spending time at the intersection of these three will help you address the feeling of languishing. This very much resonated with my own experience. Over the past winter I got back into chess, which addressed the first two buckets. But chess became a lot more meaningful when I started playing with a friend every Tuesday. It suddenly became a lot more meaningful as it helped us maintain and nurture our friendship despite him being on the other side of the US.

    But have a look at the entire TED Talk. It’s 16 minutes well spent:

  • 24 hours

    The blog of a wealth management firms is an unlikely place to find a meditation on the wonders of parenthood. It’s not always obvious and being in the phase of “terrible twos/ threes” provides plenty of growth opportunities on both sides of the parenting equation. I read it a few months ago and it’s still stuck in my head.

    They say the “days go slow but the years fly,” and as I sit here stewing in my worries, I can’t help but reflect on just how fast my life is going. 

    My 20s were a blur. I met my wife and we got married.  As we entered our 30s, we knew we wanted to start a family.  After that period of time, it seems like someone pushed fast forward. 

    If I could map my life from the moment my son was born to its end and compress it into one 24-hour period, it would probably look like this. […]

    24 Hours (rwbaird.com)

    I get easily caught up in the day-to-day exhaustion of parenting and forget to take a step back to see the beauty of kids right in front of me. That being said: I have to go and play with my kids.

  • FancyZones – bliss for ultrawide displays

    The older generation might remember Microsoft PowerToys. Microsoft released it first for Windows 95 and then later for Windows XP as well. Back in the day, they gave us a few extra settings to customize Windows and a few tools like an image resizer. Two years ago Microsoft decided to resurrect PowerToys. Even better, it made it a open source utility collection for Windows 10.

    I find FancyZones indispensable as it fixes one of the biggest flaws of Windows: Window Snap. I might be a bit dramatic, but it has horrible keyboard support and moving windows is pure guesswork. It is that little mental friction which gets exhausting over time. FancyZones allows us to create custom window layouts with overlapping zones. The tool can remap the standard Win+Arrow shortcut, which makes it very intuitive.

    I’ve recently got an ultrawide display. FancyZones transformed this hunk of screen real estate into a highly effective canvas. The setting that made all the difference is

    Override Window Snap shortcut (Win + Arrow) to move windows between zone

    If I’m not mistaken, it’s turned off by default – I highly recommend activating.

    PowerToys is actively maintained and every few weeks new features are popping up. It’s like multiple mini Christmases throughout the year. Thank you, open source community.