From Seth Godin, the high cost of now.

Sometimes, in our quest for the new, we overpay. Most of the time, moving down the curve will decrease your costs dramatically, without hurting your ability to make smart decisions. Alternatively, when you choose to spend the time (or money), leverage it like crazy.

I bet you are overspending on now. Not everywhere, just in the wrong areas. Worth an audit, probably.

Blackberries and the use and misuse of email is probably the #1 place where a good audit would work at an organizational level. There is no good technical way to distinguish between YOU NEED TO READ THIS NOW emails and READ THIS WHEN YOU HAVE A MOMENT TODAY emails and YOU NEED TO SEE THIS BY THE END OF THE WEEK emails, so the solution has to be social.

The alternative? This buzzing device that constantly interrupts you, most of the time for NO GOOD REASON – very damaging for flow.

Looking around me now, I see five ways that people can interrupt me (phone, cell, txt, email, doorbell) and another half dozen or so ways that they can reach me eventually (comments, Facebook, Twitter etc.). I feel like half of my work is keeping these things under control. Having the discipline to TURN THINGS OFF does wonders, when I am able to do it.

Because there is always this nagging feeling, “What if I am missing something important?”

photo credit: Pulpolux !!!

A company of programmers produces code. A company of managers produces meetings.

Greg Knauss via Merlin Mann

Can we talk for a minute about how irritating this smarmy attitude is? It’s the conceit of anarcho-syndicalists writ small. It’s assembly workers complaining about supervisors, masons complaining about architects, and rogue cops complaining about The Chief. It’s Dilbert.

“We could get so much more done if only management would stop getting in the way.”

Look, if you are going to work on anything that has more than a few moving parts, someone is going to need to coordinate and make sure that everything is moving in harmony. If you are going to have clients or customers, someone is going to need to talk to them, process their needs and then filter them into design changes and requirements docs. If you are going to test your software, someone will need to do triage and fit feature-set to budget and schedule.

Every hour that you spend on this is an hour that you are not programming.

Are you going to too many meetings? THEN YOU HAVE CRAPPY MANAGERS. Good managers hold meetings only when they’re needed and spend a great deal of their time shielding employees from the minute to minute neuroses of clients, investors and the public. Good managers reign in the natural over-enthusiasm of programmers to realistic commitments and judiciously nudge development along the right paths, ensuring that time is not lost on wasted or unimportant features.

Good programmers understand that code is not software and see a value to maintaining an overall direction and vision for a project. Then they either hire good managers or sacrifice one of their own and ‘promote’ them out of active development.

photo credit: Paul Mayne