This morning I received the most recent “What’s Happening In Seattle This Week?” newsletter from Seattle Spin.  Their editors typically choose a topic for an abridged summary of what’s out there, and this week it was “self help books.”  They boiled all the essentials down to three themes: Get Over It, Knock It Off, and Make A Plan.  Call it sound-bite psychology.

Here’s the blurb for “Knock It Off”:

I have some recent direct experience with this. About six weeks ago I came to the conclusion that there were some habits I wanted to stop, and merely willing myself to stop them was proving fruitless.  So I put together a little template and put green dots when I did the thing I wanted to do, and a red dot (well, orange – Bartell’s didn’t have red) each time I screwed up.

Here’s my progress after almost four weeks:

(These things are things I mostly do at work, hence the blank spots on the weekends.)

You can see that I hit orange every now and then, but it’s amazing that the first day was almost all orange and then IMMEDIATELY started to go green.  By weeks three and four I felt really great about my progress and in fact as of this writing I’ve stopped tracking my daily progress on those sets of habits.

My conclusion: Three things about this type of system work well.  First is the visibility: this was 18 inches from my nose Monday through Friday.  Second was the tactile process: putting the little dots on the paper gave me a sense of accomplishment that I wouldn’t have gotten by clicking a checkbox in a website or on my iPhone.  Third: you can code the things you want to track so that you can have the sheets out in public (in your cubicle, for example) – nobody needs to know exactly what “NVD” means, for example.

I’m not normally a Type A super-organized person – in fact I laugh just writing those words, I’m so far on the opposite end of the spectrum – but this Type A tactic worked really well for me.  Hope it can work for someone out there on the innertubes.

It’s been a productive weekend and as such, I feel pretty good – accomplishing much, stuck on very little – well, ALMOST very little.  I have a bit of a massive writer’s block going on with regard to a couple blog posts I need to write. One is for Seattle 2.0 on the topic of social entrepreneurship, and one is a review of the Balsamiq Mockups product for my personal blog.

Writer’s block is a funny thing – once I get going it seems to go away.  As with many things in life, the anticipation of inertia is much worse than the actual inertia.  I like to write, so it’s not like once my fingers get on the keyboard there’s much in the way.  Tappity-tap-tap-tap.  Words flow from me like rain from a cloud.

But this post?  Personal, anecdotal, and temporal.  This weekend, I:

• Fixed a burnt-out taillight in my Land Rover
• Dropped off an old satellite receiver at goodwill
• Took some items to storage
• Dropped off dry cleaning
• Fixed an exterior vent on the house
• Went to a friend’s birthday party
• Saw “Sherlock Holmes” at the Majestic Bay
• Finished Phase 1 of an important project
• Landed an additional (separate) project
• Took care of some moss buildup on the roof
• Exercised
• Watched some soccer

…so, as far as weekends go, especially recent weekends, this one has been pretty productive.  Tonight I’m meeting a friend at a wine bar for a little catch up and good conversation.

What’s crossed my mind recently?

• Sherlock Holmes was a pretty great movie.  I should do a blog post review.  Robert Downey Jr. is as charismatic as they come.  Yes, I have a man crush.
• Herkimer Coffee in Greenwood doesn’t take credit cards as payment.  Double You Tee Eff.
• The evening baristas as Java Bean in Ballard make *the* best dry cappuccinos in Seattle (that I’ve had so far).  Excellent work, ladies and gentlemen!
• Much of social media discussion on the interwebs is a serious circle-jerk.  If I see another blog post titled “Ten Ways Your Business Can Leverage Social Media” I’m going to yack.
• I’m still feeling the good afterglow of a couple meetups I had last week.  I’m trying to arrange a couple more today for the next week or two.
• I’ll be in training this coming week at work; Experts From Back East are coming in to conduct some specialized sessions on a big 3rd-party product we’re integrating.  Should be intense, enlightening, and busy.
• I’m hoping to find time in the next couple weeks to finish out a new phase of Crowdify.  Talking through some ideas with Ray Page last Thursday really whet my appetite for some of the cool new things I can do to get the thing out the door and build some cool functionality on top of it.

Finishing with a quote: “The best way to get over something is to go through it.”

Hope you’re having a great weekend.

I think this productivity concept from Ross Hill is wonderful:

I started reading The Goal tonight while I was at a Starbucks waiting for someone.

I love books like this because they get me thinking. My thought tonight is: how far along am I on the evolutionary scale?

First, consider the lowly potato bug. What’s the key characteristic of a potato bug? You poke it and it rolls up in a little armadillo-like ball. It’s REACTIVE. It does its thing, day after day, but aside from what you might call its autonomic functions, it’s essentially a reaction-only creature. Have you had days where you felt like a potato bug? Constant interruptions, dealing with crises, fighting fires, your boss has an emergency that you have to deal with right now, you misplace your keys, your son or daughter skin their knee…you end up at the end of the day exhausted and probably not feeling very productive at all.  There is this odd sense one gets now and then about confronting and overcoming a particularly thorny crisis, but it’s like a sugar rush: temporary and probably not very good for you in the long run.

Second, consider the dog. He has some more independent thinking going on than the potato bug: so many things to smell! So many sights! Sounds! Frisbee! Ball! Chew Toy! Another dog’s butt! But the dog, although he can make choices, doesn’t start out his walk thinking he’d like to accomplish anything in particular. He’d led where his nose takes him, constantly distracted by the next shiny new thing. I’d argue a lot of us spend a lot more time than we’d like to admit in this mode, which I’ll call DISTRACTED. Surf much internet? Read much e-mail? You’ve been there. With Web 2.0, blogging, Facebook, (god forbid) Twitter, and their 1,000,000 clones, you can easily lose a whole day getting nothing done in particular.

Then there’s the human. You. Yes, you. You have the capability to set goals, to decide what’s important, to focus, to delay gratification, to make sacrifices if necessary. You can evaluate pros and cons, weigh consequences, mentally rehearse planned actions, predict likely outcomes. You can build upon every previous sensory input, every piece of knowledge you’ve gained, every intuition you have, to build a model of how to make the next day hour minute as productive and fulfilling as can be imagined. You can be PROACTIVE. You have all the possibilities in the world open to you because of that three-pound, 100-billion-neuron miracle of nature that sits between your ears.

Do you take advantage of that? Or are you spending most of your days as a potato bug or a dog?

I’ve held the opinion for many years now that what you might call the “old-school” or “checklist” annual performance reviews are ridiculously ineffective. One might even use the term “asinine”, and I do. There are two main reasons for this: you might call these the “Comparison Problem” and the “Absolute Value Problem”.

The Comparison Problem

I remember the old MSFT performance reviews from the mid-90s: rankings on a one-to-five scale, with one being a cold corpse and five being a superman. Ones and fives were so rare as to be almost unused, and you didn’t hire a lot of people who were natural twos, so 95% of the people got threes or fours.

You’ve heard of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where

all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average.

Have you heard of the Lake Wobegon Effect? This is

the human tendency to overestimate one’s achievements and capabilities in relation to others

i.e. we all think we’re better performers than average. So let’s take the Microsoft example quoted above. Let’s say that the “average” score for the company, given that there are only two practical values on the one-to-five scale, should be 3.5. Here’s a hypothetical approximation of the results:

• 25% of the employees (the A performers) get a 4.0, higher than average
• 50% of the employees (the B performers) get a 3.5, the average score
• 25% of the employees (the C performers) get a 3.0, less than average

But due to the Lake Wobegon effect, every employee walks away from the performance review dissatisfied.

Even with subconscious grade inflation by the managers (which anecdotally happens A LOT) you’ll still have a lot of dissatisfied employees. It is REALLY REALLY HARD to pleasantly surprise a person come review time.

The bottom line is that the Bell Curve works against you when it comes to performance reviews and employee morale. The reality is that the subpar performers are working at Dairy Queen, not for your organization, and when you invite your employees to see how well they did against “the average”, it will only hurt you.

Think you can keep reviews a secret? Think again. Employees share information, or worse, overestimate the grades given to peers. Feelings get hurt, grudges get nursed, productivity suffers.

So what’s a smart manager to do? Frequent, informal, and specific feedback about job performance. Stagger salary reviews so that there’s no one “big-bang” moment for annual performance reviews.

The Absolute Value Problem

Imagine toll-booth operators. People drive up all day, hand the guy a dollar, and drive on. Drive up, pay, drive up, pay…routine and predictable.

What’s the difference in bottom line difference between the best performers and the worst performers in this job? Not very much. The two biggest risks are probably (a) the guy abuses customers so much they choose alternate routes, or (b) theft. The first guy is extremely rare and can be fired, and there’s a whole cottage industry behind “till reconciliation” that discovers the second guy’s shenanigans before too much damage is done. The upside is also pretty limited. What are you going to do if a toll-booth guy is super friendly? Recommend that lane to your friends? I doubt it.

Now think about software developers. What’s the bottom line difference between the best performers and worst performers? I remember hearing, way back when, anecdotal evidence that it may be as high as 100-1. My own experience suggests that, among actively employed programmers, the difference may be as much as 20-1. On the low end, maybe 10 to 1. Whatever the number is, it’s way different than the difference among toll-booth operators.

Is the difference between the best-paid and worst-paid software person in your organization different by a factor of 100? 20? 5? Probably more like a factor of two, maybe three. How about the annual raises coming out of a performance review? Again, probably two or three. No organization I’ve ever heard of would justify a salary increase or bonus of 50% for normal circumstances. So in your annual review, you are actually UNDERPAYING your high performers and OVERPAYING your low performers, relative to each other. And the system is structurally set up such that you, the line manager, have very little effect over what you might call the “Big-Oh” bounds of this calculation.

Software people are talent, not “resources”. They can’t be levelled. They can’t be optimized via sophisticated bean-counter spreadsheets. They can’t be exchanged like cogs in a wheel. They can’t be managed like toll-booth operators. Your organization will suffer if you don’t remember that.

I hadn’t heard the term “coworking” before, but I was doing some idle research into this new joint in Belltown that I had seen — My Day Office — and realized that there is a small but clear group of freelancers and independents who are looking for a shared working experience outside of the home, but without the hassle and cost of the coffee shop.

Coworking Community Blog

For my part, I’m happy as a clam at Zoka when I’m not in the office – which, some weeks, is up to 50% of the time. If I happen to go and all the tables are full, it’s not the end of the world, and in fact I’ve gotten used to getting up earlier in order to make sure I get a table I like. Remember Ben Frankin’s adage here. Plus, the coffee is the best I’ve had in Seattle — those baristas really know their stuff and take a lot of pride in their product. I’m pretty sure one or more of them have placed high in things like the Northwest Regional Barista Competition.