Tag: messy thinking

Crafting Purposefulness

Sally Kerrigan on A List Apart:

Because writing—that first leap into taking your idea and making it a Thing People Read—isn’t really about wording. It’s about thinking. And if you can tell the difference between an article that knows what it’s about and one that exists purely to sell ad space, then you’re pretty good at that already.

Start with something messy, get to the point, get an editor, and make it good. Kerrigan’s excellent advice finishes with one of my favorite lines in her piece, “This is what crafting purposefulness looks like.”

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January 14, 2014

Conversation Power Moves

Megan Garber in The Atlantic:

Conversations, as they tend to play out in person, are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and assorted awkwardness. But the messiness is what allows for true exchange. It gives participants the time—and, just as important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights. “You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.”

My current conversation power move is eye contact. Eye contact. All the time whether I’m speaking or listening. For speaking, my natural state is to look away when I’m talking so I can focus on what I’m attempting to say, but I miss essential nuanced feedback. For listening, eye contact can feel uncomfortable because it can feel like staring, but, again, if you look away, you might miss essential conversational data.

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January 1, 2014

Three Superpowers

Phil’s team is adrift. Phil is smart and meeting-friendly, but he’s a crap people manager and that crappiness is slowly poisoning his team. You know how bad it is because the star of Phil’s team finds ways to schedule meetings with you where the story is always the same: “He’s smart, but he is genetically… more

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March 7, 2011
Management
10 Comments

A Disclosure

My management career began with a misunderstanding. “Rands, you’re doing a great job on tools development and I’d really like you to Lead the effort.” It sounded liked your standard professional compliment. Atta boy! Go run with it! Problem was, I didn’t hear the capital L. Lead is what my manager had said. Not lead,… more

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January 25, 2009
Management
32 Comments

The Nerd Handbook

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head. It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that.” We’ll explore the consequences… more

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November 11, 2007
Tech Life
364 Comments

More Messy Thinking

Let’s start with the visual… This new monitor configuration keeps popping up the engineering team and after walking into enough offices thinking, “Useful or flashy?”, I decided to give it a whirl. The basic usage pattern is unchanged. The left screen is for the active workspace whereas the right screen is the palette screen —… more

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April 4, 2007
Tech Life
23 Comments

Meeting Creatures

Worst meeting ever. It’s not that the attendee list is wrong. All the right people are there and they’re bright and they are the decision makers. It’s not that the topic is boring or poorly defined. It’s a big deal. The problem with this meeting is that it’s never going to end. See, about a… more

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November 17, 2006
Management
12 Comments

Management Cheat Sheet

There’s an article somewhere in my head which dissects the intense knee jerk reaction a lot folks have regarding managers. The question is, “Why do so many of us automatically assume that our managers are boobs?” The follow-on question is, “Even if we don’t think our managers are not boobs, why do we constantly ridicule… more

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October 6, 2005
Tech Life
6 Comments

Messy Thinking, Pt. 3

Co-workers keep asking me why I bought the 30″ flat panel and slapped it down next to the 23″. I’m not a coder anymore… in fact, with each passing year, I become less of a coder even with my painfully infrequent excursions into lands of Python and PHP. What I am, as a manager, is… more

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July 27, 2005
Tech Life
11 Comments