Articles tagged reading

Peter Seibel interviews fifteen programmers about their careers. The concept is based on Writers at Work, a collection of Q&A interviews with novelists.

Key points from the book:

1. Read good code to improve
2. There are no silver bullets
3. Testing is useful for protecting complex code
4. Knuth is referenced everywhere, use The Art of Computer Programming to improve understanding
5. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is the best book for learning to program

Jamie Zawinski

Known for leading Lucid Emacs, developing Netscape on Unix and being a prime mover behind the original Mozilla project.

At the end of the day, ship the f… thing! It’s great to rewrite the code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.

• Lucid was a good environment because you could believe a colleagues when they say “We should do it that way”
• At Netscape they had six months to beat the competition, they joked “We’re absolutely 100 percent committed to quality. We’re going to ship the highest-quality product we can on March 31st.” Not using C++ or threads let them ship the product on time.
• Confident no software team has had dinner at home and slept during the night while delivering a big piece of reasonable quality software
• Programming is like writing a story to express a concept to a very dumb person who has limited vocabulary
• Clues to complexities of modules only appear after beginning to write code
• Testing would have slowed them down, get it right first time to beat the competition
• Use English words to describe variables then say in comments something that is not there already like purpose, use or range of inputs
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for teaching programming
• Design Patterns was useless, programming via cut and paste

Brad Fitzpatrick

LiveJournal founder.

• Uses a spec.txt for initial planning
• Consider interfaces first, identify the common methods, RPCs or queries.
• Always protect clever code with tests
• Suggest patches with “What do you guys think of this?”
• At Google to check in you need a review, to be certified in the language (know style guidelines) and approval from one of the owners
• Favourite interview question “given two decimal numbers as strings of arbitrary length, multiply them”
• Could not live without debugging tool Strace. Think like a scientist and patiently change one thing at a time to understand the root cause of things.
• Recommends Higher-Order Perl (blown away by end)
• App Engine is a great intro to programming, Python plus one button to publish to web

Douglas Crockford

Creator of JSLint and brought JSON to public eyes. Now works on YUI.

• A lot of JavaScript’s heritage comes from Scheme (closures)
• Lisp and Smalltalk have brilliant ideas that are finally being factored into modern languages
• Programmers are optimistic and they need to be
• Code reading counters team confusion and helps weak programmers, an hour of code reading is worth two weeks of QA
• Readability of code is now first priority, judge programs by their ability to communicate with the human reader
• Continue statements are a sign of badly thought through code
• Google Gears can be used for JS background processing
• Social systems have to evolve on top of the new network infrastructure, right now the network does a poor job of necessary components including identity and security
• Professional programmers should read Knuth

Brendan Eich

Creator of JavaScript, worked on Firefox.

Because, like the Spanish Inquisition, no one really expects floating point.

• Dave Ungar’s papers on Self influenced design of JavaScript
• Now JS developers make a top-level function to get a namespace, instead of the global object there should have been lexical bindings
• Migrate to better languages but there is no silver bullet like Brooks says
• Test-driven development is valuable, so is static analysis
• Code now riddled with fatal assertions
• Allergic to ivory-tower design and design patterns, Norvig wrote how design patterns are flaws in the language
• Debugs with GDB watch-point facility on addresses or bisects with printfs, now uses Chronomancer, Replay and Helgrind — he attempts to hire Valgrind hackers
• The worst bugs are multithreaded ones
• Skeptical of rewrites and how they correspond with business objectives
• Can learn a lot reading other people’s code
• Liked Brian Kernighan’s books, Knuth, Adele Goldberg book
• Inspired by Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Joshua Bloch

Led design and implementation of the Java Collections Framework.

• Make programs readable, a program is essentially a work of literature (Knuth), and use a dictionary
• Don’t repeat yourself
• It is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code
• Get use cases and write a skeletal API, write the code that uses the API before you write the code that implements it (ensure API method is used), you cannot get an API right until you have tried to code to it
• Use test-first programming and refactor the APIs instead of refactoring the implementation code underneath the APIs
• With an API, when in doubt, leave it out
• Assertions of what must be true are too valuable to lose, always include them (even as comments)
• Get yourself in the meanest and nastiest mood that you can (Knuth)
• Complexity is at least quadratic in the number of language features
• Casting is generally a bad thing, they can fail and make your program ugly
• Writing even small programs correctly is incredibly difficult — see blog entry Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts Are Broken
• You can make a system with obviously no deficiences or no obvious deficiences (Hoare)
• When you lose sight of who your customers are, you’re dead meat
• Everyone should read Design Patterns and Elements of Style, also The Elements of Programming Style and The Mythical Man Month have stayed current
• Design process is in talk How to Design a Good API and Why It Matters
• The more things you learn and the younger you learn them, the better off you are
• Always had one or more colleagues to bounce ideas off, feedback is critically important

Joe Armstrong

Creator of Erlang.

• Gluing things together does not have to be complicated but there is no disconnect between gluing and the black-box innards in system architectures
• When you program tired, you throw it all away the next day
• Beware of slight spelling errors in variable names – use personName and listOfPeople, not personNames
• Write test cases then write the code
• If you want to understand C, write a C compiler, ditto for other languages
• Explicitly required branch matching after reading about Dijkstra’s guarded commands
• All errors will be within three statements of the place you last changed the program
• Pair programming is good with two programmers of similar ability, who both are figuring out what to do
• Spend a day a week learning new stuff, 20% a day compounds to knowing twice as much as colleagues over 4 years, also read Hamming’s paper
• Code is beautiful when you cannot remove anything
• Wants to read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs to his kid

Simon Peyton Jones

Lead architecture of Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

• With research, “Just start something, no matter how humble” (John Washbrook)
• “Functional program is the way of the future” (John Backus, inventor of Fortran)
• Importance of laziness explained in John’s Hughes paper Why Functional Programming Matters
• Read Programming Pearls, Writing Programs for ‘The Book’, Purely Functional Data Structures, SICP, Compiling with Continuations, A Discipline of Programming (obviously no bugs)
• The paper The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith (Brooks) is useful for remembering that we are concerned with building things

Peter Norvig

AI expert, Head of Research at Google.

• In industrial programming, must learn about having schedules and keeping people happy (team members, customers, managers)
• Programmers need bravado but to be really good, you have to test against the failure cases
• A good programmer must make progress then improve on it (in life too)
• Recognize when there is likely a known solution
• Heathrow failure mode impressed Norvig, off-site computer produced print outs of all flights during power failure
• Provide the solution that makes the most sense, normally cannot afford to do the perfect solution (diminishing returns after 80%, Pareto)
• Mars Climate Orbiter needed closer communication with outsourced team (output/input units differed)
• Often ends up rewriting, throwing away a couple of hundred lines of code, to fix bugs
• Does not know PHP and JavaScript
• Knuth is good to know everything but often you want to know if A is better than B or just the asymptotic complexity
• Getting a 1 in one of your interviews ia good indicator for success at Google
• Sally Goldman has a practical take on algorithms

Guy Steele

Programming polyglot that contributed to Common Lisp and Scheme.

• Becoming a student member of ACM was very important
• Reads code by picking an interaction and following the debug trace, source of TeX is well-thought-out and well-debugged, also George Hart’s VRML polyhedra
• Languages are now too big to design/implement at once, and have to develop through evolution
• Huffman encoding problem with programming languages, making something more concise makes something else more verbose
• State purpose and reference source algorithms in comments
• Learned how to sort from the Aho, Hopcroft and Ullman algorithms book, lots of interesting aspects found in Triple-I Lisp

Dan Ingalls

Smalltalk’s father.

• Thinks web should be static content on top of graphics rather than the other way round
• Browsers will change and provide other languages than JavaScript
• Set up projects for immediate gratification, find the first piece of success that is achievable
• Have a clear picture as a team, then you can have confidence in the work teammates are doing
• Smalltalk debugger allowed you to save entire state and send to another machine on a different architecture
• Recommends Val Schorre’s META II paper, the LISP 1.5 book

L Peter Deutsch

Prodigy, worked on Project Genie, author of Seven Fallacies of Distributed Computing, wrote Ghostscript.

• To be a technical master you need to 20000 specific cases to call at will
• You can understand the physical world in aggregate but not software
• Concerned about XP because it is documentation phobic — is it maintainable and supportable?
• Mistake making Ghostscript pixel-orientated not plane orientated because of zero acquaintance with the printing industry
• Requirements always change in unexpected directions
• Well-designed objects are reusable and pay for themselves down the road
• Theorem proving has failed to improve software because it is too difficult to formalize the properties of the program that you want to establish
• Once offended by anything done badly but realised this mindset was child-like

Ken Thompson

The original UNIX hacker.

• Wish he had taken typing
• Writes down data structures before writing code
• Codes as simply as possible and very often that suffices for all time
• Interviews candidates by asking for details of their most interesting program
• Yacc is wonderful and Lex is horrible
• Cannot live under constant extreme deadlines (80h/100h), they are normally continual and you have less enthusiasm after each one

Fran Allen

First woman to win Turing award, developed Static Single Assignment intermediate representation.

• Learn a new language by taking an existing program and studying it
• Encourage young people not to jump into management, get a reputation for technical work first
• Need involvement of women in technology to make products for all areas of society
• Computers will make people far more creative (Isaac Asimov)

Bernie Cosell

Developed Interface Message Processors on the original ARPANET.

• Rewrote code to fix bugs instead of understanding it
• Write lots of programs to become a good programmer
• Achieve at work by studying at the weekend to learn faster
• Design reviews are a good use of senior talent, double-check parts they think are correct and give insight on parts that are not
• Programs ought to make sense, there are very few inherently hard problems

Donald Knuth

Author of The Art of Computer Programming, wrote TeX and METAFONT.

• We will always have bugs if we stretch our capabilities, people jumping on silver bullet bandwagons will always be disappointed
• If you understand how inventors made discoveries, their process can assist your discoveries
• Reading source code is worth it for what it builds in your brain, Bill Atkinson’s programs are now publicly available thanks to Apple (well-documented, pioneering graphics)

Tired of lying in sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find, ten years has got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
—Pink Floyd, Time

Take control before thirty

Life does not end at thirty but it does have a categorically different feel. A spotty résumé that used to reflect twenty-something freedom suddenly seems suspect and embarrassing. In all areas of development there is a critical period. The twenties are that critical period of adulthood.

A person’s identity is not to be found in behavior... but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. —Anthony Giddens, sociologist

The twenties are the most uncertain and some of the most difficult years of life. An adult life is not built out of eating, praying and loving but out of person, place and thing. Achieving these roots provides stability.

Almost invariably, growth and development has what’s called a critical period. There’s a particular period of maturation in which, with external stimulation of the appropriate kind, the capacity will pretty suddenly develop and mature. Before that and later than that, it’s either harder or impossible.
—Noam Chomsky, linguist

80% of our most significant events take place by age thirty-five. In the thirties we continue or correct for the moves made during our twentysomething years.

Building a career

Uncertainty will always be part of the taking-charge process. —Harold Geneen, businessman

An identity or career cannot be built around what you do not want. Shift from a negative identity based on shoulds to a positive identity based on goals. Goals direct us from the inside whereas shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside.

Not one person has asked for my GPA since I graduated… you can’t think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do something. —Helen, ex-student of Meg Jay

You cannot pull a great career out of a hat in your thirties, you have to start in your twenties. At that point a degree from a university followed by too many unexplained retail and coffee-shop gigs looks backwards.

Craft a story that makes sense to take around to job interviews. Job candidates who tell a good story about who they are and what they want leap other that do not. Amid the CV details, a protagonist needs to appear. Tell your story then change the story to control the next step.

The best is the enemy of the good. —Voltaire, writer/philosopher

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. —Leonard Bernstein, composer

To achieve at work, focus on learning and getting results instead of gaining gratification from feeling superior. Twentysomethings who don’t feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed. Realizing potential requires recognising how individual gifts and limitations fit with the world around us.

The power of weak-ties

The urban tribe is overrated. Twenty-somethings limit themselves if they only socialise with their strong-ties (like-minded peers). Mark Granovetter explains in The Strength of Weak Ties that while our restricted speech enables us to communicate economically with strong-ties, using it hinders our ability to communicate with people further afield. With weak ties we have to make our case more fully.

He that hath once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged. —Old maxim via Benjamin Franklin, now the Benjamin Franklin Effect

True interconnectedness rests not on texting best friends at midnight but reaching out to people that make a difference in our lives even though they don't have to. Ask your weak-ties for letters of recommendation, suggestions or introductions, or well-planned informational interviews.

Picking the right partner

Other things may change us, but we start and end with family. —Anthony Brandt, writer

85% of Americans marry by the age of forty. It is an inevitability for the majority of us and provides a bridge to another family (with associated support). At thirty everything that was OK at twenty-nine suddenly feels awful and, in an instant, we feel behind. The best time to work on a marriage is before having it so the choice of partner is crucial.

Consider what part you are rehearsing to play in your current relationship. Being available for booty calls is not practising for a loving lifelong relationship.

[Society] is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness. The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse.
—David Brooks, political and cultural commentator

Compatibility comes from compatibility in the Big Five personality traits. These are 50% inherited. People split up because things do not change, because of their inherent differences and the presence of neuroticism in the relationship. In retrospect the differences were there all along. Online dating can provide potential partners that are pre-selected by Big Five similarity.

Living together

Teen marriages are the most unstable of all unions. After twenty-five age does not affect divorce rate, however partners who marry older not be able to grow together as they are set in their ways.

Couples who live together before marriage are less satisfied and more likely to divorce. This is called the cohabitation effect. When researches asked why cohabitate, woman say better access to love, and men say easier access to sex. Cohabitation causes incompatible partners to stay together due to lock-in — “I stayed with Carter because I couldn’t afford a new couch.”

Couples who live together before marriage after becoming engaged, who combine their lives after making a clear and public commitment, are not any more likely to have distressed or dissolved marriages than couples who do not cohabitate before marriage.

Having a family

52% of twentysomethings identified their top priority as being a good parent. Then was marriage at 30%, a high-paying career at 15%, freetime at 9% and being famous at 1%. Most twentysomethings want to have happy families.

Five years of partying or hanging out in coffee shops is traded for five more years with sons and daughters. Twentysomethings who live beyond time usually are not happy.

The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood. —Germaine Greer, feminist theorist

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut whereby we decide how likely something is based on how easy it is to bring an example to mind. You may know of someone who became pregnant at 42 but they had per-cycle odds of 2%. Woman at thirty are half as fertile as their twentysomething selves.

How our minds change

We are born not all at once, but by bits —Mary Antin, writer

Identity capital is our collection of personal assets, formed from investments we make in ourselves that we assemble over time.

The more you use your brain, the more brain you will have to use. —George A. Dorsey, anthropologist

The frontal lobe is where we learn to tolerate shades of gray instead of searching for black-and-white solutions. It fully matures between the ages of twenty and thirty. During these years, personalities change more than at any other time and there is the most opportunity to become the people we aspire to be.

When we try to do something new, we don’t know what we’re doing. That’s the biggest challenge. —Jeffrey Kalmikoff, designer

Pruning is used by the brain to refine its neural network, discarding neglected neurons to increase efficiency in used functions. It occurs once in childhood and repeats again in a second critical period starting in adolescence and ending in the twentysomething years. More vivid memories come from early adulthood than any other developmental stage.

Handling criticism

Blown about by every wind of criticism. —Samuel Johnson, writer

When twentysomethings have their competence criticized they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negeative feelings toward others and obsess about the why.

The way older adults are typically wiser than young adults is knowing what to overlook. With age comes a positivity effect: we become more interested in positive information and our brains react less strongly to negative information.

There is one thing we can do, and the happiest people are those who can do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can be all here. We can… give all our attention to the opportunity before us. —Mark Van Doren

The highest-performing people are those that have installed the best tricks in their lives.

Clear your mind

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. —Shunryu Suzuki

1. Keep everything out of your head
2. Decide actions and outcomes when things first emerge on your radar — handle immediately, discard or create next actions
3. Regularly review and update the complete inventory of open loops in your life and work

Anxiety is caused by a lack of control, organization, preparation, and action. —David Kekich

Every internal agreement distracts the mind from working clearly. There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice unless you like having that thought. Open loops must be trusted to a collection bucket outside the mind and reviewed regularly to prevent the mind taking it back. Managing actions is the core challenge: commitments must have next actions to progress towards fulfilment.

The Five Stages of Mastering Workflow

Define work and manage the entire inventory instead of processing the infinite stream of evident tasks:

1. Collect things that command attention
2. Process what they mean and what to do about them
3. Organize the results
4. Create options from the results
5. Choose an option and act

The Four-Criteria Model for choosing actions in the moment

1. Context
2. Time available
3. Energy available
4. Priority

The Natural Planning Model

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. —Will Rogers

A project is sufficiently planned for implementation when each moveable front has a next action. The habit of clarifying the next action on projects, no matter what the situation, is fundamental to staying in relaxed control.

1. Define purpose and principles
   • It never hurts to ask why
   • To achieve a goal, it must be completely clear
   • Clarify focus “What are we really trying to accomplish here?”
   • “Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.” —Dee Hock
2. Visualize the outcome
   • You won’t see how to do it until you see yourself doing it
   • The mind needs to imagine a desired outcome to see how to get there
   • Creating clear outcomes is a powerful skill to be honed and developed
3. Brainstorm
   • Captures original ideas externally
   • Generates many new ideas from the continuous reflection on the thoughts on paper
   • Don’t judge, challenge, evaluate or criticize (quantity not quality)
   • “The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas” —Linus Pauling
4. Organize
   1. Identify significant pieces of the project
   2. Sort by components/sequences/priorities
   3. Detail pieces
5. Identify next actions

Return to the previous natural planning stage to achieve greater clarity. Go forwards to get things moving (define next actions).

Workspace

You own workspace is critical. A basic workspace contains:

• A writing surface
• Room for an in-basket

Most people have four file drawers for general reference and project support (paper materials). Any topic that requires more than fifty file folders should be given its own section or drawer, with its own alpha-sorted system.

Required materials

• Automatic labeler (buy your own Brother) for folders, binder spines and much more with black letters on white tape
• Calendar
• File folders (manila, color-coding is not worth it) and an equal numbe rof Pendaflex-style file-folder hangers
• Paper-holding trays (in/out/in progress/read and review)
• Pen/pencil
• Plain paper for capturing ad-hoc input (consider one thought per A4)
• Post-its (3x3s), paper clips, binder clips, stapler for routing and storing paper-based materials
• Rubber bands
• Scotch tape
• Wastebasket/recycle bins

Integrating existing belongings

Put everything into the in-tray or discard it. All existing lists should be treated as items to be processed. Consider whether your collectible and nostalgia items are still meaningful to you. Emails are most efficiently handled with email software or through the provider because of volume.

Write out each thought, each idea, each project or thing that has your attention on a separate sheet of paper. The Incompletion Triggers on Page 118 can unearth lurking items.

If you don’t have at least fifty next actions and waiting-fors, including all the agendas for people and meetings, I would be skeptical about whether you really had all of them.

Processing the in-tray

Processing does not mean spend time on. Follow these rules:

1. Process the top item first
2. Process one item at a time
3. Never put anything back into the in-tray

Items that cannot be handled in the present can be:

• Added to “Someday/Maybe”
• Marked in the calendar
• Put in the tickler file.

Deciding is instant unlike performing actions which takes time. Physical actions like gathering additional information can aid the instant decision making process. It’s okay to decide not to decide—as long as you have a decide-not-to-decide system.

Track delegated items closely. Record the date when the item was delegated before putting it into pending.

Projects

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning. —Winston Churchill

A project is any outcome you’ve committed to achieving that will take more than one action step to complete. You can’t do a project, you can only do the action steps it requires. Ensure action steps are defined for all projects.

A complete and current project list is the major operational tool for moving from tree-hugging to forest management. You probably have between thirty and a hundred projects. Hold the big projects on the project list and hold the subpieces in the project support material, making sure to include subpieces in the weekly review. Existing projects can be brought into the system with the action step “Organize Project X notes”.

Projects can be activated with a day-specific calendar slot that indicates they should now be inserted into the projects list.

The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster. —Rosabeth Moss Cantor

Ad-hoc project thinking

Ad-hoc project thinking can be captured in:

• Attached notes
• Emails and databases
• Paper-based files
• Pages in notebooks – mid-sized with the project list at the front and “Project Support” towards the back to capture random thinking

The key is to consistently look for any action steps inherent in your project notes, and review the notes themselves as often as you think is necessary. “Exercise more regularly” really translates for many people into “Set up regular exercise program” (project) and “Call Sally for suggestions about personal trainers” (real action step).

The most critical tools for ensuring that nothing gets lost is your collection system—your in-basket, pad, and paper (or equivalents) at work and at home, and in a portable version (an index card) while you’re out and about. You need to hold all your ideas until you later decide what to do with them. Keep ballpoint pens at the stations where you’re likely to want to take notes (around phones).

Easels and whiteboards are very functional thinking tools. Writing can add clarity to meetings. We don’t need to save creative thinking so much as we do the structures we generate from it.

How do I know what I think, until I hear what I say? —E. M. Forster

Things to track

Important lists:

• Projects
• Dated Actions (calendar)
• Next Actions
• Waiting For
• Someday/Maybe

You may need to access any one of your lists at any time. When the boss pops in, it is functional to have the projects list up to date and the agenda list right at hand.

Support materials:

• Project support material
• Reference material

Create one folder for any longer-than-two-minute e-mails that you need to act on (@ACTION, @WAITING FOR). BCC the email to yourself to file it into “Waiting For” (or add the label in Gmail). @ACTION is an extension o your “At Computer” list and should be handled in exactly the same fashion.

Keep the “Waiting For” list close at hand, in the same system as the “Next Actions” reminder list. Travel with a “Read/Review” plastic file folder, and another one labeled “Data Entry” (business cards, quotes, articles).

Dated commitments

The calendar shows the hard landscape of time-based commitments around which non-calendar actions must fit. The best way to be reminded of an action off the calendar is by the particular context required for that action (tool/location/person).

Ticker files are 3D versions of calendars that allow you to hold physical reminders of things you want to see or remember. You need forty-three folders 1—31, 1–12. Daily files are kept in front, then the next month, then the days completed from the month, then the rest of the months in the year. The current day is emptied into the in-basket and then the empty folder is placed after the folder for the next month. They are perpetual.

Action lists

• Agendas (for people and meetings)
• At Computer
• At Home
• At Office
• Calls
• Errands
• Read/Review

Someday/Maybes

Someday/Maybe’s are not throwaway items. They may be some of the most interesting and creative things you’ll ever get involved with. Put conscious awareness on this list consistently.

Create a list. Typical categories:

• Creative expressions to explore
• Clothes and accessories to buy
• Hobbies to take up
• Organizations to join
• Things to get or build for your home
• Toys (gear!) to acquire
• Trips to take
• Skills to learn
• Service projects to contribute to
• Things to see and do

Reassess current projects and consider moving them to this list.

The fact that you can’t remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn’t mean that you’re not holding yourself liable for it. Put “Clean garage” on a “Someday/Maybe” list to prevent hearing agreements internally.

Checklists

Making lists ad-hoc is one of the most powerful yet subtlest and simplest procedures that you can install in your life. Create and eliminate permanent and temporary checklists as required.

A complete inventory of everything you hold important may include:

• Career goals
• Community
• Creative expression
• Family
• Financial resources
• Health and energy
• Relationships
• Service

Reminders of areas of responsibility may contain points like:

• Communication
• Processes
• Staff issues
• Team morale
• Timelines
• Workload

The more novel the situation at work, the more control required.

You’ll feel better collecting anything that you haven’t collected yet. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist. When someone nods “yes, I will” in a conversation but doesn’t write anything down, my “uh-oh” bell rings.

Reviews

The daily review

In a world of hyperabundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources. —Paul Saffo

1. Look at your calendar and daily tickler first
2. Action lists for current context

The weekly review

Thinking is the very essence of, and the most difficult thing to do in, business and in life. Empire builders spend hour-after-hour on mental work… while others party. If you’re not consciously aware of putting forth the effort to exert self-guided integrated thinking… then you’re giving in to laziness and no longer control your life. —David Kekich

The weekly review encompasses capturing, reevaluation and reprocessing to regain an empty head without the distraction of everyday work. Go through the phases of workflow management until you can honestly say “I absolutely know right now everything I’m not doing but could be doing if I decided to”:

1. Collecting
2. Processing
3. Organizing
4. Reviewing outstanding involvements

Your best thoughts about work won’t happen while you’re at work.

Getting work done

We all have times when we think more effectively, and times when we should not be thinking at all. —Daniel Cohen

Ultimately and always you must trust your intuition. Make action choices based on the following four criteria in order:

1. Context
2. Time available
3. Energy available
4. Priority

There is no reason not to be highly productive, even when you’re not in top form. Always have some easy loops to close, right at hand.

Your life work

There are only two problems in life: (1) you know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it; and/or (2) you don’t: know what you want. —Steven Snyder

1. Make it up
2. Make it happen

There are cornerstone questions that we must answer at some point about everything:

• What does this mean to me?
• What do I want to have be true about it?
• What’s the next step required to make that happen?

To ignore the unexpected (even if it were possible) would be to live without opportunity, spontaneity, and the rich moments of which “life” is made. —Stephen Covey

Embrace opportunities but skip actions that clash with your life purpose or values.

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. —Buddha

Everything will ultimately be driven by the priorities of the level above it, any formulation of your priorities would obviously most efficiently begin at the top. Trying to manage from the top down, when the bottom-level habits and detail are out of control, may be the least effective approach.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. —Mark Twain

Other people

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. —Mark Twain

Bright people have the capability of freaking out faster and more dramatically than anyone else. Complaining is a sign that someone will not move on a changeable situation or consider that the situation is immutable.

Most people only act when under fire (from themselves or others) and are starved of a sense of winning, control, or cooperation with the world.

Talk does not cook rice. —Chinese proverb

Defining specific projects and next actions that address real quality-of-life issues is productivity at its best. Every discussion or interaction should cease with a clear determination of whether or not some action is needed, and if it is needed what it should be and who is responsible. “What’s the next action?” automatically increases the energy, productivity, clarity and focus in a culture.

Bradford Barrington quit his job and chose the rails for an adventure across America. This idea started out as an “insignificant whisper in the back of my mind… but as the months went on the whispers grew louder and louder until they eventually overtook my entire being like a cancer expanding inside my head. It was pleading and begging me to change everything.”

In his first journey, he gave to beggars. Straight afterwards “before I had made it more a few feet a frenzy of outstretched hands and begging voices shot out in my direction. Amidst the noise and confusion one of them came up behind me and started tugging on my backpack.” Now out of his work routine, he began to recognise his sorrow around “Good. Just another day…”, “that tone in her voice saddened me… the level of her [artistic] talent was of a special rarity”.

He met Julia and promptly forgot “about the dinner date I’d agreed to back on the train” and decided with his new infatuation “there was no way I could myself to go now”. He left a present for Julia at the coffee shop and maintained contact.

Organ-player and scientist Raymond had quotes of wisdom:

• The answer to the question of ‘Is there more than just this?’ That answer, Brad, that answer is personal to each and every individual, as you’ve no doubt experienced. It’s a journey each of us has to make alone.
• All life is, is a series of moments stacked on top of each other. The past, the future, both of these don’t really exist. The only thing you’re guaranteed in life is one moment…

His next host Kent was self-employed “here I am, my own boss, working my own hours, getting to take in nature’s beauty every single day. What more could I want? What more could anyone want?”

Bradford defended a train station robbery with his own flick knife and a stern, smooth delivery of the phrase “You ain’t taking shit!” “He wasn’t just asking for my wallet and some money; he was asking for my entire livelihood. Everything I had was in that backpack.” He later met Mark, who described how he had been mugged by three men. Bradford “found it to be an awakening moment on how my situation could have altered my state of mind permanently had I not come out of that situation as I had.”

He stayed with Jenna and “unfortunately for her I’d always been a man of my word. I wasn’t going to sleep with her, no matter how hard she tried.” On the last night he also resisted “I realized I was more than a creature solely acting on its impulses.”

In Atlanta, Brad became the minority, used as an example of a slave trader “Yes… like him” and shown abhorrent respect “Yes sir… No, thank you, sir. You have a great day sir.” At the train station, he realised “everyone outside in the courtyard with us was white, and everyone inside the lobby, black”, Nico commented “I guess that is what they call… the song of the south.”

Men go and come, but earth abides. —Ecclesiastes 1:4 (Earth Abides by George Stewart)

Brad saw that his character had completely changed. Before he arrived home he met Frank, who was doing his own dream expedition after a life of work: “I’m getting old now, and I don’t want to die with regret.”

The final train ride had to stop because of a fault. He account his story to a circle of fellow passengers and found the “crowd of people literally applauding me.” When he arrived home on independence day, he spent his night “with all these people who had been living their normal lives while I was out doing anything but. Standing amongst these countless faces, I’d truly never felt so alone.“

About Steve

Genetics and events conspired to present Steve with not just a career, but a life. He woke up every day with a cup of tea and large bowl of Shreddies and ate it standing in the kitchen before the first rowing outing of the day. This is followed by breakfast — a vast bowl of porridge workout and half a loaf of jam — and the start of a day of training and eating (reaching 6000 calories per day).

In competition, Steve used a mask of nonchalance to appear invincible to rivals. The Romanians believed the British would be world champions, and thus they were. By his fourth gold medal in Sydney, he let up in one famous TV quote “Anyone sees me go anywhere near a boat, you’ve got my permission to shoot me.” The initial emotion of winning was relief — job done — not elation, that came later.

When diabetes hit, the challenge became completing a single stroke, not 20 km. Ian Gallen took him through the practical side of treating diabetes and improved his outlook “Yes, you have diabetes, but I see no reason why it should stop you achieving your dream in three years‘ time in Sydney.” His coach, Jurgen had maintained a degree of distance to remain independent (so that all the rowers could trust him) but commented that though he had total respect that Steve finished every session.

If you were to ask him if he would do it again, he would, even if the results weren’t guaranteed. “It was a privilege. It was a quest. It was a challenge. And I’ve always been inspired by a challenge.”

Inspiring athletes

John Naber recomposed by breaking down his swimming goal into an improvement of one twelve-hundredth of a second every hour. The hard part was that this blink of an eye improvement is an incredibly difficult commitment to maintain for four solid years.

Oscar Pistorius told children at the Paralympic World Cup in Manchester “I’m not disabled, I just don’t have any legs.“

Jonny Wilkinson is remembered for the one kick in the 2003 Rugby World Cup final that earned England the title of champions. However, it was an act committed on automatic pilot after years of concentrated training.

Emil Zapotek believed “It is at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.” He turned up at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and shockingly won the 5 km and 10 km races. Then he entered his first marathon and won it by a clear half mile. “I was unable to walk for a whole week after that, so much did the race take out of me, but it was the most pleasant exhaustion I have ever known.” He gave record breaker (but Olympic failure) Ron Clarke one of his Helsinki medals as a gesture of recognition.

Eric the Eel was a no-hoper Olympic swimmer from Kuwait who arrived to a standing ovation, finishing the 100 m qualifier first after much struggle and with the other competitors disqualified.

Baron de Coubertin came up with the idea of the Olympics to overcome political and religious differences between the nations, while inspiring youth to great deeds and higher learning — “I shall burnish a flabby and cramped youth, its body and its character, by sport.” His famous pronouncement is heard at every Olympic Games: “The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

Sir Roger Bannister was the first man to run a mile under 4 minutes. In the act he “had a moment of mixed joy and anguish, when my mind took over. It raced well ahead of my body and drew my body compellingly forward. I felt that the moment of a lifetime had come. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim. The world seemed to stand still or did not exist. The only reality was the next 200 yards of track under my feet. The tape meant finality — extinction perhaps.”

Jesse Owens symbolised the power of truth over propaganda — a black man turning Hitler’s monstrous racism into a visible lie.

Carl Lewis beat age, gravity, history, logic and the world at a rocking Olympic Stadium in Atlanta to win the Olympic gold medal in the long jump.