This morning, it was time to take care of the staircase that looks worn down and on the verge of breaking down.
- Sand down the old paint
- Prime
- Paint
- Done
This morning, it was time to take care of the staircase that looks worn down and on the verge of breaking down.
Yesterday, one member of my badminton group reinjured his knee which was already hurting from a skiing accident. He wanted to play yesterday because he loved the sport and thought he could still play and take it easy. Unfortunately, we pushed him pretty hard on court, and he collapsed in pain when he twisted his knee again. I hope he does recover 100% soon.
When we are young, we often think we are invulnerable. Our bodies will of course recover. We might also over estimate our ability to have micro control over our bodies.
If we take a long view of our life, making a decision to take a 3 to 4 week break to nurse back an injury seems like the obvious right choice. Have a framework to make decision to optimize for the long term, will make decisions easier.
Our VP Of Engineering asked us to think about this at work. We are all busy at work, but are we adding value to our customers with what we are doing now?
What is the next most important item on our backlog that add value to our customer immediately?
It’s a great way to prioritize relentlessly. I struggle with knowing how to prioritize in most of my career. I tend to work on a lot of projects all at once and taking a long time to deliver value.
For my direct report 1:1’s, I’m trying a new structure. I open up a Google Doc that we both have access to for our 1:1’s
This piece about opening up the goals is nice, because we get really deep into how we each think about each individual goals, specifically how to unblock certain ones and I think allow for a nice sync of our brains.
If you send an email to me, it’s very likely (95% chance) I will reply
Two and a half years ago, when I joined my current company I was attending a new hire training and the last slide showed a very long URL to a document that we were suppose to remember for more information.
I asked the presenter whether there is a URL shortener so that we URLs are easy to remember, easy to share verbally and it’s meaningful. The presenter was puzzled and said no.
I researched online and found an open sourced project called YOURLS, asked IT for 2 machines for me to prototyped the solution, launched it and demoed it to my team and emailed an internal list promoting the idea and get feedback.
The feedback was immediate but mostly negative
There were a few folks who supported the idea because they used URL shorteners like http://bit.ly/ and said to give me a chance.
I continued to work on the project, demo’ing the http://GO/ URL shortener along with enhancements during our quarterly hack weeks. I started sending easy to remember URL’s to common thinks like go/food, go/wifi, go/printer, go/tony
Slowly the serviced gain traction and adoption, but very slowly. After about 2 years, I noticed there was some was drastic changes
So what did I learn from this experience?