Saving Seconds
I’ve been ripping on the mouse for years.
The argument is one of precision. The mouse, while incredibly useful as a casual means of interacting with a computer, is not a productivity tool, because when you use a mouse you sometimes miss and missing isn’t productive.
WAIT WHOA RANDS. PHOTOSHOP MAN. PHOTOSHOP LOVES THE MOUSE.
Calm down, yes, when it comes to art, to replicating the natural brushstroke, there is nothing better than the mouse (except a Wacom tablet), but do this for me. Go find the Photoshop guru on your floor and watch him or her work. Yes, the mouse is in play, but did you have any idea how much manipulation he did via the keyboard? Want to know why? Because anyone who has a deep, meaningful relationship with a computer is constantly looking for a way to save a few seconds.
The Learning Contradiction
Most of the time when you’re sitting at your computer, you’re doing exactly the same things. Your brain protects you from this mundane observation because your brain is really good at repetition. This is both a blessing and a curse. I’ll explain via an example.
Application switching inside of an operating system is the foundation of NADD. The ability to quickly context switch between apps is so common a task that they’ve developed a keyboard command just for us. In Windows, it’s Alt-Tab, and in Mac OS X, it’s Cmd-Tab. Problem was, when I made the move from Windows to Mac OS X, there was no Cmd-Tab equivalent, so my first moment inside of Mac OS X felt like this…
- “Pretty.”
- “WTF with maximizing windows?”
- “Shit, how do I switch apps?” CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK
The pathway I’d learned to do a simple, essential task was blocked. A task I’d taken for granted was now a mental hangnail, which threw off all my timing.
A quick search of the Internet revealed a fine shareware replacement for application switching. After the install of the new system preference, the hangnail vanished. I didn’t think about app switching again. Was my new solution faster? I don’t know. All I know is I’d unblocked the path to do what I needed to do so that I could forget it was there.
The blessing of learning a thing is also a curse. By learning to do a thing, you also forget it’s there, which means as new, improved means of doing things show up, you remain blissfully ignorant. I’m a fan of this ignorance because I’ve got other crap I need to do, and I don’t want to sweat the details, but here’s the rub: the details might be wasting a huge amount of your time.
Saving Seconds
Let’s try a test. From this article, I want you to count the number of discrete steps it takes you to compose a new mail message. Each key or key combination you click is 1 point. A mouse drag is one point. A mouse click is another point.
Ready? Go.
There are two types of people. The ones who waited for me to say Go to compose a new mail and the ones who read “compose a new mail message” and pressed the three keys that are necessary, from anywhere in the OS, to fire up a new compose window.
Anything more than three points to compose a new mail is a massive waste of your time.
“Rands, you are a nerd. I am not. I enjoy the slow gracefulness by which the mouse glides over to my dock and I select the mail application, after which I select the File menu, followed by New Message. Aaaaaaaah.”
All I’m reading is 5 points. All I’m thinking about is the 37 mails you send each day multiplied by 5 points = 185. Let’s multiply that by 30 days in a month, which is 5550 points. Finally, let’s multiply that by the number of other micro-tasks you’re doing where you’re doubling the amount of necessary effort. Ok, I can’t even do the math; I’ve got the productivity shakes here.
Ok, deep breath. Whooooooooooo.
You’re likely not in as a big a hurry as I, that’s fine. You may have an extremely casual, informal relationship with your computer and that’s cool, too. Perhaps this article is not for you, but my question is this: do you want to spend your time heading towards doing stuff, or doing stuff?
This article is for the folks who, when they discover a simpler way to get something done, a shortcut, they get a rush because they know simplicity is elegant and efficiency is a turn-on. The target audience for this article is people who, when presented with some else’s desktop, can’t help but stare and size it up. Their question is, “What is this person doing that will make my world move faster?”
Welcome.
Triage
How many fingers are sitting on the keyboard right now? Go type something. Looks like I’ve got all ten in play, but as I watch myself type, I’m really only using six or so. Yes, my form is crap, but I’m still hitting 90 words a minute on most typing tests.
Would you rather have ten smart fingers or one big, dumb thumb? Ten fingers, of course. Then why in the world are you holding onto that mouse right now?
The first thing we need to do is get you to understand the degree of your mouse addiction, so I’m going to ask you to unplug your mouse. It’s important to leave the mouse in the same familiar spot on your desk, but it must be unplugged.
Ok, now go work for 10 minutes. No cheating.
At some point during these 10 minutes, you’re going to forget the mouse isn’t connected to your computer and you’re going to grab it and the pointer is not going to move. You’re going to think, “Huh?”
Good. Jot yourself a note about what you were doing:
- Switching to Mail
- Selecting Format Menu
- Selecting a paragraph of text
Each of these represents a second or two you can save. Each task that you jotted is a task where some maniacal productivity nerd has already stared at and figured out a way to make it faster. This leads to the second part of your exercise.
For each note on your list, I want you to discover a non-mouse-based equivalent. Start with the local help system. Better yet, let someone else do the work for you and search Google for “Must have keyboard shortcuts for YOUR FAVORITE APP”.
You might not find a shortcut for every task, and even if you do there’s no telling whether that particular shortcut is going to stick in your head, but my guess is… one will stick. It will stick because its value to you will become instantly apparent. I made fun of the Windows Start key for months until the key showed up on my keyboard and I realized it was the simple starting point for EVERYTHING I DID ON MY PC. I’m on a Mac now, but I can still close my eyes and imagine firing up Word: START-RUN-“Word”-Return. Four points… meh. I can do better.
The point of this exercise is awareness. Once you’ve found one or two shortcuts that shave a micro-second here and there, you’ll become more aware of other places where you’re repeating yourself. You’ll start looking for time-saving shortcuts elsewhere because there is bliss in saving time.
Practice Productivity Minimalism
Like your desktop, you’re going to construct your own version of productivity nerdery. Still, here are some of my favorite moves and observations.
As much as possible, I keep my system of shortcuts as simple as possible. My ideal is that I should be able to sit down at any vanilla Mac OS X system and fly. The primary reason has to do with my personality. I’m a nerd and I know that without constraints I’d tweak my productivity system endlessly. I’ll explain.
I recently pinged the Twittersphere regarding how many folks actively maintain their Address Books. As expected, the graph of the responses formed a pleasant bell curve with most folks responding with a healthy “I maintain it as I need it”.
Then there’s the guy who sent me the 700-word email describing, in detail, the precise process he uses to maintain his Address Book. This mail included AppleScripts and shell scripts. I read the whole mail. I ran the scripts, too, because I can appreciate the obsessive nerd personality.
I’m that guy.
I’m the guy who will spend the entire goddamned weekend reorganizing my tagging system because I didn’t like the tone or the tense of my previous tagging system.
Paying attention to productivity is a slippery slope. The system efficiency addiction associated with saving time can become so compelling that your process begins to control more of your time than your product.
Only Essential Additional Tools
Given my minimalist approach, I keep my list of required productivity apps short. In additional to the feverish use of Cmd-Tab for application switching, I also use LaunchBar.
This is the cornerstone of my interaction with the operating system. This is a utility that allows access to just about anything in your hardware and on the Internet via a simple Cmd-Space-application/URL/whatever. Your question is, “Does LaunchBar do my_favorite_task?” And the answer is, “Yes, it does. And if it doesn’t do it out of the box, it’s probably a five-minute configuration exercise to make it happen.” In the past ten minutes, I’ve used LaunchBar to: make a TinyURL for Twitter, search for the LaunchBar website, look up John Adams on Wikipedia, and fire up a half-dozen applications. My favorite game to play with LaunchBar is: “I wonder if…?” where I just start typing “I wonder if…it looks up maps”.
Yeah, it does.
Many folks prefer Quicksilver to LaunchBar and want to argue endlessly about the pros and cons of each. Realize this debate has nothing to do with the strengths of the respective tools, but is merely a manifestation of the zealotry of the nerd personality when it comes to defining, defending, and fretting about the inessential details of their favorite tools.
There are a bevy of other tools you can obsess over. TextExpander is popular with heavy email users in my crowd. There’s also a healthy sprinkling of AppleScript on most of my friends’ desktops. Everyone has his or her own system for productivity, which leads me to my last thought.
We’re All Wasting Seconds
This is the presentation I want to see at the next conference: in a room full of people, anyone is welcome to walk up to the mic and plug their laptop in to the projector. They’ll be asked to complete three simple tasks:
- Send a mail to a friend
- Find something on the Internet
- Save a bookmark or an image.
I would be fixated.
After the presenter was done with the tasks, we’d be able to pepper them with questions: “You did that too fast, what were you doing?” or “What haxie are you using on your dock?” or “I smell AppleScript… what the hell was that AppleScript?”
If each speaker had five minutes, in an hour we’d have 12 different speakers doing the same tasks completely differently, and I promise you’d find a small fix that you’d forget immediately that would forever have added a few seconds to your life.
The Business
You’ve had a small number of career defining moments. These are the select few moments in time when the trajectory of your career changed instantly and drastically. I have two buckets of these: ones I expected and ones that completely blindsided me. While the surprise and subsequent scrambling involved in being blindsided are chock full of delicious adrenaline, I highly recommend the moments you can predict.
One such predictable moment is the first glimpse of the offer letter for your new gig. This is the culmination of hours of resume tweakage, a series of phone screen gymnastics, and two grueling days of in-person interviews. This is the moment where you can answer the question, “How much do they think I’m worth?”
Fact is, you should already know. You’re the business.
Pre-Game
The offer letter negotiation process starts earlier than you think. Think back to your first phone screen. The recruiter was asking you warm-up feeler questions like, “Why do you want to leave your current gig?” and “What’s your ideal job?”, when they slide in a casual, “So, what are you making now?”
You stop. You sense that this seemingly off-the-cuff question is important. Your inner dialog goes something like, “I’m making 64k, buUUut, I’m going to round up to 70k because, well, I’m worth it.”
Yes, you are, but it’s a lie and it’s not a very good lie. You also broke the number one rule in negotiation: be informed. You don’t make 70k; you don’t make 64k, either. You make closer to 90k. HOLY RAISE RANDS.
I’ll explain where this magical raise comes from as well as the other rules in a bit, but first let’s understand how to answer the question “What are you making now?” Your answer: “I’m full-time and I’m making 64k. I’m getting a review in October, and my last raise was 4% plus a 2k bonus. I’d be walking away from 500 unvested options with a strike price currently 12 bucks under market, and all of which are going to be totally vested in 12 months.”
Expect an uncomfortable pause on the other end of the phone. That’s the sound of the recruiter furiously scribbling “Candidate knows their compensation shit” on the top of your resume. What you’re saying with this lengthy informed answer is complex, yet simple. You’re saying, “There are many ways to be compensated. I’m aware of all of them and, when the time is right, I’m ready to negotiate.”
How I’m Doing?
Whether you’re expecting an offer letter imminently or simply wondering how I’m going to make the offer negotiation process entertaining, I have an exercise for you. Let’s figure out what you actually make.
Like frequent resume updates, this career maintenance exercise is designed as a professional checkpoint, which answers the simple question, “How am I doing?”
First, I’ll explain how I calculated your hypothetical yearly compensation above:
- Base salary: 64k
- Benefits: 25% of 64k = 16k
- Bonus: 2k
- Stock: 6k
- Total: 88k
There are two fuzzy areas in this calculation. First, if you haven’t worked for yourself, you probably haven’t considered benefits as part of your compensation before. That 25% is an educated swag that most companies use to account for health and life insurance and 401k. You spend a lot of time ignoring this 25% because it involves things like retirement and health benefits and — duh — you’re immortal. There will, however, be a time, probably sooner than you’d like, that you’ll fully appreciate this portion of your compensation.
The other fuzzy area is stock. This example assumes you got 2000 options when you were hired and these options vest at 25% each year. I’m making an optimistic wild-ass leap and saying that you’re grossing 6k a year using the idea that you are making 12 dollars per option per year. Congrats.
Now, grab a piece of paper and figure out what you make. Don’t sweat perfection. You just need to be close.
The Swag
Fast forward. You’ve just finished the second round of interviews. Traditionally in high-tech, the recruiter is the last interview of the day and their job is to get inside your head and see what you think about the gig. They might throw in some compensation questions regarding your current gig as well. My advice is simple: the more they know you want the gig, the less they need to offer you.
And they haven’t offered you a thing yet.
There’s a time and place for negotiation, and it’s not at the end of six hours of interviews on a Friday when you don’t even know if you’re getting an offer letter.
So you wait. You send off a set of references, sit in bed replaying interviews in your head, and send thank you e-mails to the interview team. All professional karma-aligning activities, but what you really need to do is build your own offer letter. Let’s swag it:
Salary
The business model everyone loves is a business built on recurring revenue streams. This is why you can get a good cell phone for absolutely nothing. You’re going to pay for that phone many times over with your monthly subscription of $39.95. You’re still happy paying $40 a month because that feels like a deal, but carriers don’t see $40; they see the $1500 you’re going to spend over that three-year contract.
Your base salary is your recurring revenue stream. It’s your financial life blood and we’re going to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get it as high as possible because a 1% increase doesn’t affect just this year, it affects every year after it. For the swag, you need to figure out what you want to be paid in the new gig, and my first question is, “For someone doing exactly the same job as you, how much are they being paid?”
For a question that everyone wants to know the answer to, the Internet is surprisingly useless here. In preparation for this article I spent a solid day researching various salary information sites and couldn’t find a single site that contained a job description that remotely described my current gig.
Go ahead and check out those salary info sites and confuse yourself a bit, but I’ve got two pieces of advice for your swag. First, talk to friends with similar jobs. Remember that salaries for similar jobs vary greatly depending on the industry, geographic location, and specific company. Second, take your current salary and add 10% — that’s your salary swag.
Title
Titles, like salaries, vary from company to company, but what you’re looking for in a new job is a sign that you are growing. Associate software engineer now? Ok, drop that associate title from your business cards. Stuck as a software engineer for three years? I’d be looking for that senior prefix when I jumped ship.
Think of your new title like this: what title needs to be added to your resume for this new job to demonstrate that you’re actively growing in your career?
Sign-on Bonus
It’s difficult to swag a sign-on bonus because this type of incentive is often used to augment weak parts of an offer, and you don’t have an offer letter yet. If a recruiter knows you’re keen on stock and that you’ll be disappointed with a low-ball stock offer, they might dazzle you with a large sign-on bonus. Sign-on bonuses are one-time cash windfalls that may never show up again. For now, all you need to know is that they’re often a band-aid, and the question will be: what are they hiding?
Stock
While representing the largest potential for unexpected financial gain, stock and stock options are also the hardest to swag. Rather than focusing on a hard number here, the question you should first ask is, “How much do I believe in this company?” If your answer is, “I like the company, but I don’t see a lot of growth” then focus your negotiation energy on base salary. If your answer is, “I love this start-up; it’s the next Google” then stock grants are clearly going to play a major role in your negotiation.
In terms of valuing the stock, whether we’re talking about a start-up or an established public company, you’re speculating. For a publicly traded company, take a look at the past 5 years. What’s the average stock price? For the start-up, well, my rule of thumb for stock is no different than a venture capitalist’s success rate. A VC’s expectation is that one out of every ten of their companies is going to hit it big and that will cover the investment for the other nine. My expectation is that one out of every ten jobs will result in a stock windfall. This should depress you.
Any value you place on stock or options is a wild-ass guess, but it’s still an important piece of data. The value you put on stock is a measure of your belief in the company.
The Offer
“… and the team is really excited to have you onboard and we have an offer letter for you.”
And then it lands.
Before we digest what the recruiter is saying, I want to reset your head. Yes, you’ve made it this far. Yes, you want the job. Yes, you love the company. But here’s the reality: You are the business. If you take this gig, I think you should pour your heart into it, but I want you to remember that you’re going to have another five to ten other jobs in your lifetime just like this one. This means that for each moment you spend being pumped about the new gig, you’ll have an equal and opposite moment at the end of the gig where you can’t wait to get the hell out.
Amongst these five to ten jobs that you’ll have there is one constant: you. You’re the one who has to pay rent, ride the subway, buy a condo, get married, have some kids, and build your dream house. Your welfare is not your employer’s first priority. It takes one layoff to figure that out.
You are the business and the one consistent metric business is measured by is growth. A new gig represents a rare opportunity where you can drastically change the trajectory of that growth.
The Counter-Offer
As a hiring manager who has been involved in many offer negotiations, the safest way to get me to ignore any counter-offer is to make it without data.
Recruiter: “The candidate wants a higher base.”
Me: “Really? Why?”
Recruiter: “He just does.”
Me: “Grrrrrrr.”
Negotiation is a discussion of facts. Any counter-offer needs to be constructed with the impression that it’s based on data. “I want a 10% raise because, based on my research, that represents the average salary for this gig elsewhere in the industry.”
Sure, it’s still a swag, but your swag demonstrates effort/research/desire and in an interrupt-driven industry full of bright people racing around doing nothing in particular, I’m a fan of research. It demonstrates that you care about your career and that’s someone I want to work with.
The real problem is…
This Offer Blows
There’s some portion of the offer that is disappointing to you, and everyone involved, including your future employer, would prefer that you didn’t walk in the door disappointed. Let’s fix that.
As I don’t know what your problem is with your particular offer, I can’t advise what you need to say, but here are some common frustrations and a plan of attack.
Lower Base Salary: If you’re staying in your industry and you’re staying at an established company, I can’t see how a pay decrease is ever a positive sign. Yes, if you’re moving to a start-up, you’re going to trade salary for stock. You need to figure out if you’re cool with that.
You wanted a 10% increase and they came back with 5%? Why? Sure, your 10% was a pie in the sky swag, but how is the recruiter justifying this base salary? They’re probably saying something about comparable salaries across the company and how you’d be making more than 90% of the people in your grade. That’s a warm fuzzy, but I call bullshit: you’re in the wrong grade.
But It’s Ok, Here’s a Bonus: If the recruiter is pitching this bonus as a fix for your low base, I call bullshit again. A sign-on bonus, like a bonus plan, is a finicky thing that has a habit of vanishing when the sky falls. You can’t count on them. There’s nothing like an instant pile of money to distract you from the fact that, over the long term, you’re bringing less money home.
Even Better, Here’s a Pile of Stock: How do you value this stock? Sure, for the public company, you have a stock price, but you’re not going to see a penny of that stock for a year. And what about that start-up? Well, did you know they have a stock price, too? They have to in order to give it some sort of value. This is how a start-up values itself when it goes to a VC. They say, “We’ve issued x amount of shares and we believe they’re worth y per share. How much would you like?”
You can ask about this internal stock price. You can ask about how big their pool of outstanding fully diluted shares is and that will give you some data about how much of the pie you’re getting. But here’s the rub: I assume start-up options have zero financial value, but this doesn’t mean they have zero absolute value. Again, your measure of the stock is merely the measure of your faith.
And This is Our Final Offer: If some part of the offer blows and there’s absolutely no way to fix it, you have two options: walk away or find another way to ease the blow. If you can’t walk away, have you thought about:
- Asking for additional vacation hours right out of the gate?
- Getting a start date a month later than they’re asking? There’s nothing like 30 days of work-free bliss to adjust your perspective.
- What their work-at-home policy is? Perhaps Fridays working at home will remove that “I’m not getting a raise” taste in your mouth.
- Perhaps my favorite “This offer blows” move is to negotiate a six-month performance review. You know you rock, but they don’t… yet.
Meh
My single worst gig was one where I got everything I wanted out of the offer letter, but in my exuberance for being highly valued, I totally forgot that my first read on the gig was “meh”. 90 days later, I couldn’t care less that I got a 15% raise and a sign-on bonus. I couldn’t stand the mundanity of the daily work and I happily resigned a few months later, taking both a pay cut and returning my sign-on bonus for the opportunity to work at Netscape.
All of this discussion of compensation ignores a simple question you need to be able to answer: “How much might I love this gig?”
For any new job, you should be able to quickly explain to anyone why the new job is bigger than the last and why you might love it. Whether they believe you or not is irrelevant. You’ve got to believe it because you’re the business.
