Scott Porad

At about 10pm each night I catch a second wind which lasts until about 1am.  This is a blessing and a curse.  If there’s some work I want to get done, or if I want to stay up later to enjoy the evening, then it’s a blessing.  If I want to go to bed at 10:20pm it’s a curse.

With that in mind, some new research indicates that “morning people” have more success, generally, than night owls.

“[Morning people] tend to get better grades in school, which gets them into better colleges, which then leads to better job opportunities. Morning people also anticipate problems and try to minimize them. They’re proactive.” (Not that evening people are life’s losers: They’re smarter and more creative, and have a better sense of humor, other studies have shown.)

Notwithstanding my issues with a 10pm bedtime, I enjoy getting up early, especially in the summer.  In Seattle, the sun rises at about 4:45am (and sets at about 9:45pm).  By 6am, it’s typically full-on daytime and I can really get a lot out of the day.

Can you change whether or not you’re a morning person?  According to the researchers, “somewhat,” but it’s largely genetic.  Anecdotally, I would disagree.  I can sleep in, or I can get up early…let’s say I’m “ambidextrous”…but I can tell you that I’m definitely more productive when I start the day earlier.

Recently, Liz Strauss asked me via e-mail:

How do you delegate responsibility to inspire the best performance from people you work with?

and she asked the same question to a dozen other leaders and managers as well. The result was 7 tips for effectively delegating work.

In no particular order, they are:

1. Know the Outcome You Want
2. Work with and Trust the Right People
3. Set Clear Expectations
4. Let People Know Why You’re Counting on Their Performance
5. Be There After the Assignment
6. Value Great Performance
7. Remember to Delegate Even When You Don’t Want To

Food for thought from David Brooks:

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

…

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

Right now…the Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.

Yesterday I wrote about the Six Steps to Success with Everything and was reminded of one of the lessons I learned while raking the yard with my son.  In that post I wrote:

The lesson here was that when working on a project, you need to feel progress through small successes. Success feels good, so set yourself up to have lots of it, even if they’re small. When you’re having success, you’ll be having fun and want to keep on going. Success is a drug, it’s addictive, so organize your project to get the biggest high possible.

Coincidentally, as I was walking up my driveway last night I noticed that the pine cones are falling in my yard again.  I wonder what lesson they’ll teach us this year?

If I’ve said that once, I’ve said it a million times.  It is one of my mantras: success begets success.

1.  A little bit of success keeps me wanting more.

2.  A little bit of success motivates me to keep on going when times are tough.

3.  Planning for little bits of success is a tool that helps me break overwhelming jobs into manageable and achievable tasks.

4.  Breaking big jobs into little tasks helps me remember that it’s just a temporary setback, as opposed to the whole effort failing, when one thing doesn’t go well.

5.  It’s easier to start a big, overwhelming project when I break it up into little pieces and smaller tasks.  Then, I go back to step #1.

6.  Rinse, lather, repeat.

Last summer, I wrote a popular post about 3 Lessons I Learned About Development While Raking the Yard with My Son.  Welcome back again to Lessons from the Yard, Volume II.

I used to make big plans for the yard.  On a sunny weekend day in the spring I’d be inspired to go to the garden store and buy all sorts of supplies.  An entire spring and summer’s worth of supplies.  Plants and flowers.  Soil and compost.  Tools and equipment.

Oh, how I love to buy tools and equipment!  Tools and equipment are the romance of the garden store.  Tools and equipment fill my heart with songs of possibility and joy.

But I digress…

I would spend lots of money, then go home and unload the car.  By now it was lunchtime, so I’d go inside for something to eat, then head back out to begin turning my big plans into reality.  After a few hours I would get lé tired, so I’d start wrapping up and be done with an afternoon’s work by around 5pm or so.

Everything seems to be okay, so then what’s wrong with this picture?

The answer is that I used only about 1/10th of the garden supplies I bought earlier in the day.  Now, in theory, I would use the remainder of the supplies over the course of the summer, but let’s be honest…we all know that isn’t what happens.  What happens is that the sad little garden supplies are shuffled off into the garage where they dream of being called off the bench one day to play in the big leagues.

Not only was this wasteful, but it made me feel awful too.  Looming over my head all summer was the work that remained to be completed; looming was the failure of not having completed my job.

So, now I do things differently: when I go to the garden store I only buy enough supplies for the work I can complete that day.

Yes, that means more trips to the garden store which some would view is less efficient, and efficiency is revered in our culture.  I think it’s worth the trade-off because the other side of efficiency is effectiveness and my new method is much more effective.

Obviously, it’s less wasteful.  I only buy what I need, and don’t end up putting a bunch of supplies in the garage that never end up getting used.  And, more importantly, it makes me happier.  Instead of feeling the weight of work that remains to be completed, I feel the satisfaction of a job completed.

Obviously, these lessons could be applied to the work world as well, and I’m not the first person to state them.  Pretty much, we’re talking Lean.  Like raking pine cones last year, it’s just nice to feel these experiences while digging in the dirt.

I had coffee this morning with a friend who is looking for work.  (He’s a great guy…10 years at Amazon.com…if you’re looking for someone, let me know!)

As we talked, we came to the subject of “job listings” which are so impersonal.  For a professional, they feel like a pretty bogus way of getting a job.  Or, at least, uncertain and unreliable.

Of course, my thought was that it’s all about who you know…networking.  Essentially, my view is that personal relationships are what will lead to the next opportunity.

After coffee, I came into the office, was reading the paper, and came across David Brooks’ most recent column that addresses the impacts of the recession on people:

Recessions test social capital. If social bonds are strong, nations can be surprisingly resilient. If they are weak, things are terrible. The U.S. endured the Great Depression reasonably well because family bonds and social trust were high. Russia, on the other hand, was decimated by the post-Soviet economic turmoil because social trust was nonexistent.

Brooks illustrates my point in a macro-way, and both of us are simply expressing the point Lisa made when she said people and relationships keep you safe.

Finally, Brooks writes about the impact that social media has on the situation:

Facebook is great, but social networking sites do not by themselves create support networks when jobs disappear and poverty looms.

and notice the exact words he uses: “support networks”.  A “support network” is something different than a “social network”.  The support network is what we’re really talking about here.

Randy, as he often does, sent me some articles recently…this time related to the speculated arrival of an Apple tablet computing device.

We have some big plans for Cheezburger in the coming year, and there’s a lesson to be learned from these articles, in particular one from Daring Fireball:

I have a thousand questions about The Tablet’s design…but there’s one question at the top of the list, the answer to which is the key to answering every other question. That question is this: If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this?

The epigraph I used to start this piece — the bit about Steve Jobs demanding that a tablet be useful for more than just reading on the can — indicates that Apple will release nothing without such an answer. I agree that such an answer is essential.

This jibes a point that I’ve been highlighting lately: we can develop software faster than we can figure out what we want to build.

These days, with the evolution of web technologies, the problem isn’t exactly figuring out how to do something, but what exactly to do.  What is the thing that we’re going to build?  Answering that question clearly is the “essential” element to which Gruber refers.  It’s the clear answer to that which leads to success.

In fact, that’s what Gruber goes onto explain…not why someone would want it, but rather what exactly it is going to be in relation to other products.

When I think about Cheezburger, and the plans we have for the year ahead, that’s our biggest challenge in web development these days—what is it that we’re building and why would someone want it—everything else flows from there.

Following up on yesterday’s post about how to make successful New Years Resolutions, I wanted to add some wisdom from the Agile community.

As background, Agile is a software development methodology.  One part of Agile is that you take a big project and break it up into little pieces.  (Have you heard this before?  The journey of a thousand miles takes a million steps.)  Agile refers to each of these little pieces as “stories”.

INVEST is a heuristic for writing good stories.  In other words, it’s a way to effectively break the big journey up into little pieces.  What is INVEST?

• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Small
• Testable

Let me try to illustrate each of these:

Independent — Make each goal independent of your others goals.  Simply put, creating dependencies makes things harder to achieve.

Negotiable — Don’t make your goals so specific that you’re locked into plans that can’t be made.  Be flexible.  Compare these examples, “I resolve to exercise for 60 minutes per week” versus “I resolve to exercise Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings for 20 minutes”.  Suddenly you’re too busy with work on Wednesday and now you’re beating yourself up for not keeping your resolution.

Valuable — One very good way of creating resolutions that will fail is to create resolutions that you don’t value.  Be honest with yourself: if you don’t care about improving your health, then you’re not going to exercise…neither “get in shape” or “go to the gym this week” will be successful resolutions.

Estimable — If you can’t figure out what it’s going to take to achieve the goal, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to find the time to do it.  When can you schedule “get in shape” on your calendar…between 5-6 on Tuesday?  Unlikely.  “Go to the gym this week” can be estimated…it will take one hour, so it can be put on the calendar.

Small — If you read this space, you know I’m an advocate of smaller efforts resulting in greater success.  “Get in shape” is a big goal, but “go to the gym this week” is small.  Small goals can be achieved, crossed off a list, and feel good…it feels good to succeed…success begets success.

Testable — How will you test or confirm that you’ve achieved this goal?  “Get in shape”….what does that mean?  When have you achieved that?  “Go to the gym once per week” is very testable…you can prove to yourself and others that it has been achieved.  (Be careful—Testable can cross swords with Negotiable leading to pitfalls.)

Obviously, there is no perfect resolution, but INVEST provides good guidelines for creating resolutions that will succeed.

Randy just wandered into my office, as he often does, and made the comment:

I don’t make New Years Resolutions because they’re bound to fail.  Look at it outside—how can you resolve to start exercising when it looks like that!  Perhaps in May or June, but not now.  They should be Mid-Year Resolutions.

He has a point: the weather is seriously ugly today, but I don’t think that’s why New Years Resolutions fail.

New Years Resolutions fail because we try to complete the journey in a single step.  After weeks, months or years of sitting on the couch, we resolve to “exercise daily and lose 20 pounds”.  Yeah, right…I’m sure that’s going to happen.

No, it’s not.  Let’s be honest with ourselves: that New Years Resolution is bound to fail, almost for certain.  You know the resolution that will succeed, try this:

Since I haven’t exercised in [weeks, months, years], I’m going to go to the gym once this week.

Now, that, my friends, is a resolution that will succeed!  It is specific and achievable, and small enough that know that you can fit it into your busy schedule.

If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Resolve to take the first step.  Don’t resolve to complete the journey, resolve to get it started.