October 4, 2007
So, I did it again. I have spent much of the last two days trying to edit a technical document into something that I can understand and that exceeds my standards for clear and informative writing. I’ve been line editing, I’ve been working on organization, I’ve been pinging subject matter experts for examples and to clarify points that do not come across well to me, I’ve been excising passive voice. Essentially, I’ve been a tech writer again. And I’m struggling. The document is due, I’m not happy with it, and I don’t think I can line edit my way to nirvana.
I came home tonight frustrated, needing a break from the document, but fretting about the looming deadline. And then, sitting on my yoga mat starting my practice, I realized that I was trying to grope my way through this document towards the perfect document. And, I realized I was wasting energy beating myself up for not knowing which thread to pull or which angle to pursue to get there.
May 23, 2007
Stand-up may be the highlight of my workday. There’s something about it–quick status updates, celebrating achievements, sharing milestones, the rhythm of it, team bonding, flagging confusion or misunderstandings, in-jokes (ending of course with “let’s be careful out there”), the ritual…
We briefly tried chat standup, but it was annoying and boring, so we went back to [...]
January 29, 2007
So, I’ve owned a copy of Michael E. Gerber’s E-Myth Mastery for about a year and a half now. Something about its size (over 400 pages) and the grandiose subtitle “The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company” put me off.
I think the timing was also bad. I purchased it near the end [...]
November 12, 2006
So, a week ago already, I met two friends/former colleagues for coffee/tea. I joke that we’re all refugees, having left the same place when it had very little work. The three of us caught up on our current situations, shared a few successes, and commiserated over challenges. It was great: it helped me gain some perspective on [...]
October 3, 2006
From Stephen: another variant on remote standup from 37 signals. Want to try it?
August 1, 2006
When I read First Break All the Rules, I really identified with their list of 12 questions that differentiate good workplaces and high performers. This list helped articulate some important predictors of success and characteristics of failures I had experienced. Here, I have tried to link this list of 12 questions to what I liked [...]
July 21, 2006
So, a guiding and very freeing philosophy at my former workplace was “make mistakes faster”.
It is part of the iterative and incremental philosophy of development. Instead of doing a huge waterfall process where the team works for months building the perfect design, architecture code, whatever, we should work iteratively and incrementally–deliver paper prototypes, functional prototypes, [...]
July 20, 2006
So, my most excellent friend Chris has loaned me his copy of Stumbling on Happiness. It is giving me interesting things to think about including this:
According to the author, there is something called an “inescapability trigger” that brings our “psychological immune system” of denial, looking to the bright side, and generally improving our experience of [...]
July 5, 2006
My goals for standup are:
actually communicate
get remote folks more familiar with each other (make Chicago and Berlin friends ;))
provide a forum so that I can act less as a clearinghouse/sole gate for communicating with remote folks (though I realize this is much of my job and will continue to be a big part)
We’ve moved to [...]
June 29, 2006
So, a “stand-up” meeting is a communication ritual from Extreme Programming (XP). The developers were sick of long, boring meetings wasting all their time, so someone came up with the idea of ritualizing a quick and productive status meeting. Stand-up has to be short because no one is allowed to sit down.
I believe in stand-up, [...]
not particularly objective musings on odds and ends - Dunrie Greiling, Ann Arbor, MI 48103