Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Year: 2022

  • The days stack up

    Austin Kleon is reflecting on 15 years of blogging and why he is still excited about it. It’s concise and insightful. His three main points:

    1. To leave a trace
    2. To figure out what I have to say. 
    3. Because I like it.
    15 years of blogging (and 3 reasons I keep going)

    It’s a short read worth its time. It also contains great quote from Marc Weidenbaum on using writing to figure things out:

    Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.

    Bring Out Your Blogs

    I don’t write a lot on this blog. Not nearly as much as I’d like to. But over the years there are now 60ish little artifacts that I found interesting to either collect links to or write up myself. It’s a nice little scrapbook that continues to grow over time.

  • Why We Long For the Most Difficult Days of Parenthood

    Great perspective in The Atlantic about parenting young children by Stephanie H. Murray.

    The sociologist Daniel Gilbert once likened a day spent caring for a 3-year-old to a baseball game that remains scoreless until the bottom of the ninth. Fans remember the thrilling moments of the game-winning home run and not much else. […] Hindsight allows us to put suffering into context and recognize the purpose it served in our lives. Hohlbaum likened it to laying bricks in a road: Only after we find out where the path leads are we able to see the purpose each brick served in getting us there. People with grown children have a deeper appreciation for the initial years of parenthood, because they are observing it from a perspective that only time can grant.

    There’s no sense in trying to cherish every moment of early parenting as it happens, Graham told me. Too much is going on, and much of it isn’t enjoyable. But keep an eye out for the precious moments amid the tumult and chaos, she said. Do what you can to imprint them in your memory—write them down, or share them with friends. Collect them like gems, so that when your arms are finally free and your eyes are a little clearer, you can turn them over in your hand.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/10/early-child-parenting-first-years-hardest/671790/

    I have a little side blog that is not indexed by Google and that only a handful of people know the URL of. I use it to write letters to my children and select out of the myriad of photos that I’ve taken of them, select the ones that are special. While I haven’t written much in it recently, the above is a great wake up call to spend more time capturing those moments for later.

  • Using brevity to write better

    Using brevity to write better

    For the past few years there has been a meme in the system about document-based cultures. I’m a big proponent of writing as a tool to sharpen thinking. At the same time, documents and writing are only a tool and not the goal in itself. All too often I find myself staring at a 15-pager with little structure and hard to identify key insights.

    The hard truth is: It is hard to hold the attention of an audience for 15 pages. But 15 pages is a good start. Take those and turn them into six pages. Six pages that provide enough context, lay out the challenge or opportunity that you are addressing, and what kind of change you want to drive and how. This requires making deliberate decisions on what is important and what isn’t. The goal is not to get as many points across as possible, but to land the few critical points safe and sound. Six pages seem to work well, but it if you can do it in four or three pages, go for it.

    Try to optimize not for brevity, but also for readability. Make sure that you use headings and sub-headings to help the reader with a structure. Use bulleted lists, and if the list has an order, use numbered lists. Write your sentences with simple words and avoid complex sentence structure. Form follows function. Do not optimize your sentence structures to fit a word count, but rather make them easy to read. If sentences sound complex, they are. Use features like “Read Aloud” to have your text read to you. Tools like Hemingway Editor also make your text more readable.

    Use the spell and grammar check to avoid unforced errors. Do not fiddle with line spacing, font size, spacing or page margins. The defaults work well for 99% of all documents. If you have data, go splurge on a chart.

    If there are gems that didn’t make it into the six pages, put them into the appendix. And make the appendix a separate document. Now you have a tight six-pager.

    Now turn the six-pager into a one-pager. Boil your message down to one page – still providing sufficient context, easy to read, well-structured, focusing on what change you want to drive and how. Again, do not fiddle with font-size etc. You don’t need it. By now you know your key messages and it rarely takes more than an hour to get the first draft of the one-pager.


    Now turn the one-pager into three bullets. They express the essence of what you want to advocate for. When you share your document, put those bullets into the email. Then link to the executive summary and your six-pager. While this takes time, it will improve your ideas. Ultimately, you want to get your reader to the point as fast as possible. Do not make your reader pay for all the good thinking and research that you have done.

  • Categories for journaling

    Over the past few years, long-hand journaling helped me reflect and think through many personal and professional topics. Ofir Sharony offers a nice framework to establish a journaling routine.

    “Start by shutting down all interruptions: disable Slack mentions and email notifications, place your phone out of sight, and enter your flow by wearing your noise-canceling headset. Once you feel focused, go over today’s calendar, skim through your to-do list, and reflect [on one or more of] on the following:

    1. Creations: What did you create today?

    2. Decisions: What were the top decisions you made today?

    3. Insights: What interesting ideas did you or others raise today?

    4. Challenges: What were the main challenges you faced today?

    5. Tomorrow: How do you make the most of tomorrow?”

    Leadership journal: become an inspiring leader | Medium

    It’s a nice structure and allows us to process what happened today to learn and improve for tomorrow. Little by little.

  • OKRs and tools

    OKRs and tools

    In the space of OKRs there is an unwritten rule: Once a team announces the introduction of OKRs they must face within five minutes the question of which software tool they will use.

    This question is mostly glazed over in books like Measure What Matters or Radical Focus. For good reason: The biggest hurdle of introducing OKRs is almost never the OKR management tool, but rather understanding, socializing, and implementing OKRs as a tool itself. Techniques like pressure testing OKRs, outcomes vs. output or focusing on few but meaningful key results are a lot more important than the tool in the early stages, and it often takes a few quarters for a team to get good at OKRs and see results.

    I used to be dismissive when I got the question of the management tool. My standard anecdote was:

    Remember pickup basketball? You never worried about the person with brand new Jordans at the pickup game. But whoever was ready to play in whatever they were wearing?  For sure they were going to be trouble.

    I advised to use a simple shared document, spreadsheet or presentation, because ultimately OKRs are simple: Select a few objectives, find a small number of meaningful metrics to measure progress against those objectives, track progress. This should not be artificially complicated through a specialized digital tool.

    For smaller teams that line of reasoning still holds true even as comfort with OKRs develops. Most OKR management tools are designed for larger teams. While well intentioned, they tend to distract in the beginning – not unlike productivity porn or tweaking a fancy IDE before learning how to code.

    However, as a team grows and OKRs permeate the organization more people are getting involved. They all have their part in setting, tracking and reviewing OKRs. In that process multiple sets of OKRs emerge along the management hierarchy that need to align. Managing this through documents, spreadsheets and presentations starts to become unruly. I’ve been there. You start with a document to set OKRs, track them with a spreadsheet only to review them later with a presentation. And throughout the year you are endlessly cycling through those three artefacts. This is highly manual, error prone and massively annoying.

    Once you reach a team size of a few dozen people, it is time to think about investing in software tools. None of them are perfect, but they do provide structure, control and visibility that help deal with growing complexity. Pragmatically, they help keep data consistent, avoid double entries, and help crush the general entropy that comes with growing teams. Ultimately, it’s an investment in a more inclusive and transparent culture.

    Many thanks to Isaac Hepworth for many discussions about this topic, help with this post, and general encouragement.

    Photo by Cesar Carlevarino Aragon on Unsplash

  • Companies are not families

    Good New York Times interview with the new Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy. Near the end he dropped a nice nugget:

    And I say you’ll never hear me say we’re a family. We’re a sports team, and we’re trying to win the Super Bowl. And so we’re going to put the best players on the field we can. And if you go down the field, and we throw you the ball, and you drop it a bunch, we’re going to cut you.

    We spend the majority of our waking hours at work and with the people at work. But I always die a little inside when I hear teams talk about being a family. While it might be an alluring thought, it is neither realistic nor appealing. Family is about being bound together and in the best of cases about shared values and unconditional love.

    Work ultimately is always at the base level a transactional relationship. You work and get compensated for it. At work, you are replaceable. Everyone is. To your family, you are not. A workplace is replaceable. A family is not.

    In that regard, I’d rather aspire to establishing a community at work. One that promotes values like caring, love, a sense of belonging, respect, empathy, joy, and fairness. These might all be attributes shared with families, but there should be a clear line separating work and family.

    High functioning teams add layers on top of it like shared values, growing together and standing up for one another. But ultimately, it’s a loose band that last for a few years until it doesn’t. And that’s OK.

  • Staying Clear of Golden Apples

    Staying Clear of Golden Apples

    Rick Klau once gave one of the most influential intro presentations to Objectives and Key Results: How Google sets goals: OKRs / Startup Lab Workshop – YouTube. It’s an evergreen talk and has gotten nearly 1.2 million views over the past nine years. He recently followed up with a post What my OKRs video got wrong. In that post he mentioned that one of his key learnings is “What you and your team say no to is at least as important as what you say yes to”.

    It reminded me of a story that I often tell when introducing OKRs. It is about Atalanta, a heroine in Greek mythology. If you have watched Disney’s Brave you will notice similarities with Merida, the main character.

    Atalanta was a strong, independent woman, and she was the fastest runner in ancient Sparta. To her father’s chagrin, she did not care to get married. Her father did not agree to that plan and set up a contest in which young men would race to win her hand in marriage.

    To keep her freedom, she asked to be allowed to participate in the race herself, i.e. race for her own hand. Her father, not thinking she had a chance of winning, agreed to the deal.

    At the same time, there was a young man called Hippomenes, who fell in love with Atalanta a long time ago. The race was his chance to marry his love. He knew how fast Atalanta was, so he prayed to Aphrodite. Gossip and intrigue are nothing new, and Aphrodite didn’t like Atalanta. So, she gave Hippomenes three golden apples and told him to drop one at a time during the race to distract Atalanta. To her demise, she was so fond of those golden apples that she stopped to pick them up.

    After each of the first two apples, Atalanta was able to recover the lead, but when she stopped for the third, Hippomenes won the race. It took all three apples and all of his speed, but Hippomenes was finally successful, winning the race and Atalanta’s hand.

    Adapted from Christina Wodtke‘s Execution is everything

    If only Atalanta had set clear goals and stock to them. She would have stayed single, footloose and fancy free.

    Atalanta’s story is surprisingly timely. We all are running into golden apples every day. So much to do, so little time. However, unless we focus on a few things, we spread ourselves too thinly and what feels busy is actually distraction. OKRs help discern the trivial many from the vital few.

    The most obvious example is the selection of key results. When introducing OKRs a lot of teams start with more than five key results for each objective, because those are the metrics they are tracking. Over the course of one or two quarters most realize that focusing on three-ish key results per objective helps them focus their energy and get more done by saying no to more things.

    In other words: If at all possible, avoid the temptation of golden apples!

    Image: Herp Atalanta and Hippomenes.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

  • There is something in the air

    There is something in the air

    Ever since the whole web3 conversation gained momentum it feels like a renaissance of blogs is coming. I don’t know whether it is the explanation of web3 within the context of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, or the discussion of decentralization away from the big platforms, or something else. In his State of the Word, Matt mentioned that one of the most web3 things one can do is registering their own domain. He also recently asked people to write more. Others like former Blogger product manager Rick Klau picked up his blog again and Hunter Walk seems to be blogging more frequently these days. And OGs like rands, MG Siegler, Gruber and Kottke continue to blog like it has never gone out of style. It is just a gut feel, but like Vinyl picking up again, it feels like there is an underlying current of people rediscovering their love of blogs.

    Make no mistake, I don’t think that blogs (and its many derivatives like Tumblr) will challenge current or future social media. At the same time, the number of internet users is one or two orders of magnitude bigger than ten or 15 years ago. And a small portion of a large number tends to be a large number. And that is awesome. Maybe we are even in for better tools for reading and commenting on blogs – RSS for blogs seems to be in stasis ever since Google Reader shut down.

    I’m fascinated by looking at personal blogs from way back when. Florian, a friend of mine, started writing a blog back in 2005 when he moved to Ireland. He still posts a few times a year. That doesn’t seem much, but over the course of 17 years it adds up. Isaac started his blog in 2002, but unfortunately stopped writing in 2015. It is still wonderful to browse through his archive as moments in time. I even resurrected and went through my own old blog archive – I even found an old Blogger blog going way back to 2004. Nothing deep and earth shattering, but that’s not the point. Blogs document moments in time. Nothing more, nothing less.

    My point is: Blogging might get another moment, it might not. Both are fine. There is intrinsic value of blogging in terms of sharpening one’s thinking, sharing ideas and documenting moments for my future self. None of that requires an audience, engagement or virality. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? If I blog and no one reads it, does it matter? Who cares! By the time I hit publish, I’ve already gotten a positive return on investment. And as long as I use open source software that runs on my own domain, that’s a pretty future proof investment.