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Reassuringly Expensive

Archive for March, 2008

I’ve just started reading The Art of the Start – the time tested, battle-hardened guide for anyone starting anything – by Guy Kawasaki.

I’m only a few chapters in but it’s a great book. I was particularly struck by the first few paragraphs of the Introduction or “Read Me First”:

There are many ways to describe the ebb and flow, yin and yang, bubble blowing and bubble bursting phases of business cycles. Here’s another one: microscopes and telescopes.

In the microscope phase, there’s a cry for level-headed thinking, a return to fundamentals, and a going “back to basics.” Experts magnify every detail, line item, and expenditure, and then demand full-blown forecasts, protracted market research, and all-encompassing competitive analysis.

In the telescope phase, entrepreneurs bring the future closer. They dream up the “next big thing,” change the world, and make late-adopters eat their dust. Lots of money is wasted, but some crazy ideas do stick, and the world moves forward.

When the telescopes work, everyone is an astronomer, and the world is full of stars. When they don’t, everyone whips out their microscopes, and the world is full of flaws. The reality is that you need both microscopes and telescopes to acheive success.

Almost everywhere I’ve worked has been full of people wielding microscopes with very few telescopes in evidence. For me The Art of the Start is one of many steps I am taking at the moment towards a telescope rich environment.

How about you? Are you a micrscope or telescope person?

Seth Godin has a typically brilliant post on his blog today entitled Why bother having a resume? in which he makes a very good case for not having a resume or curriculum vitae.

Seth makes some very good points in his post, among them:

A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.

I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.

How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch? Or a reputation that precedes you? Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?

The first point is absolutely right; as somebody who has recently been through the process of recruiting a team I recognised Seth’s description right away. Whether you like it or not or intend to or not this is how you end up when presented with a pile of CVs. This isn’t helped by the shocking quality of many of these CVs.

I love the remaining points. It’s a ballsy move but if somebody won’t consider you without a CV maybe you don’t want to be working for them…

What do you think? To CV or not to CV?

A week has passed since I started my RSS diet which brings the experiment “phase” to an end.

“Will you be going back to RSS?” I hear you ask; and the answer is no, I will not.

I really expected to find not using RSS difficult, that I would be spending more time on websites trying to keep up and that I would miss important news. In fact, the opposite has been the case.

I’ve found that I spend less time online consuming content and the time that I do spend is more productive and of more value to me. I haven’t felt that I have missed any news or information and have actually found and read more articles in full.

The only development that may see me return to RSS, although with a more refined set of feeds, is fav.or.it but I am still unable to extract an invitation to their Beta.

So I won’t be returning to RSS and my daily routine already feels less complex.

It’s now the end of day 2 of my RSS diet and I’m pleased to say that I’m not missing Google Reader and my multitude of feeds at all.

Interestingly, not only am I not missing RSS but my time spent online has also dropped. I thought that I would need to spend longer reading my chosen sites but in fact the opposite is the case. I looked at half a dozen or so sites this morning and that was it. I read a few articles on those sites but I didn’t feel as if I was missing out on news and information.

Quality not quantity I think.

I was amused to see synchronicity in full effect when I found this article at zenhabits entitled The Zen of Tech: 12 Powerful Ways to Keep Your Online Life Simple and Peaceful as it echoes the sentiment and actions I’m taking.

In particular:

Focus on the essential. It’s important to take some time to think about what’s essential to your tech work (and play). What do you really need? What gives you the most benefit for your time? What’s not so essential? What takes up a lot of time without making much of an impact?…

Do one thing at a time. I know. This is super hard when it comes to tech. Browser’s on, a dozen tabs open at once, switching between reading and email and work and IM and Twitter, we live in a multitasking world. But it doesn’t have to be this way. While there’s nothing wrong with having multiple tabs open, it can be very helpful to focus on one task at a time. Have 10 tabs open, but do one tab until you’re done, then close it and move on to the next, and so on…

Pare down your feeds. I used to have well over a hundred RSS feeds to read in a day. The need to go through them all, every day, was very stressful to me. So I eventually cut them down, one stage at a time, until I got down to 10 essential feeds…

I found the last point interesting; whilst I never found RSS “stressful” I have taken the same route although moving to reading the sites rather than their feeds. As an online customer experience expert this has the added benefit of exposure to multiple design ideas on a daily basis.

A very interesting article and well worth reading in its entirety.

So day 2 is over and at this point I don’t see myself returning to Google Reader.

I’ve decided to conduct an experiment; I’ve decided to see how I get on not using using an RSS reader or following my multitude of RSS feeds for one week.

bookmarks.jpgI’ve always read and followed a large number of websites for both professional and personal edification and RSS, being created for this very task, seemed to make to make it much easier. However, of late, I’ve come to think that perhaps that isn’t the case.

Adding another feed to your RSS reader takes mere seconds but trying to keep up with the volume of posts across the raft of feeds quickly becomes self-defeating. The object for my using RSS was to enable me to keep up with sites of interest, but it’s become clear that I am missing items of value due to the sheer volume of feeds in my river of news.

So, today I start a week without RSS – an RSS diet and a crash diet at that. Rather than use my RSS reader I’m following a friends model; using a series of bookmark groups or themes on my browser and have populated those groups with key sites I want to read. My intention is to check and read the sites once or twice a day rather than what was feeling like almost constant checking of Google Reader. Although at times that has been as much about countering boredom as keeping up with the news…

I’ll be reporting on my week without RSS here so make sure to check back soon.

In the mean time what is your approach? Bookmarks or RSS?

Caps Lock Done Right

Apple has a deserved reputation for for producing beautifully designed and made hardware. The iMac, the MacBook Air, the iPhone all are simply wonderful to use and to look at. But their appeal is more than just the surface; yes they look lovely on the shelf but it’s when you start to use them you appreciate the thought that has gone into all aspects of their design.

I was struck by this yesterday when I spent 30 minutes and two password resets trying to log into the expenses system at work; a system so bad that once you are logged in you generally wish you weren’t but that’s another story.

It was only when I gave up and went to use another system that I realised I had caps lock switched on. You see on the cheesy Dell keyboard I have at work and in fact all PC keyboards I have used, the caps lock key is on the left but the dim indicator light is over on the top right – about as disconnected as you can get from the button itself. Who thought that was good interface design?

Now, on Apple keyboards the indicator light is on the caps lock button itself, even on the iPhone the button itself changes. Isn’t that just so much more sensible? All it took was for an designer to say “hang on, why is the light over there but the button over here? Let’s change it.” and they did.

It’s not that Apple “Think Different” but they actually just think think about the user experience and how it can be the best it can be. Clearly other manufacturers do not.