Monthly Archives: January 2006

How Not to Suck at Your Job

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??Ken Walker??: “Getting the Basics Right”:http://relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7104. Hey, that’s me. :)

“Alissa”:http://www.alissaclark.com needed an article for the Career and Finance department of ??Relevant Magazine??, so I thought I’d divulge all the secrets of my success in 1,000 of my favorite words. Speaking of not sucking, do you know _how_ to condense everything you’ve ever wanted to say about the corporate world into a two page blurb? Revise, revise, revise. Then ask for feedback from people you respect (and will be honest about how much it _still_ sucks), and revise some more.

The final article endured 61 mostly-late-night revisions, ballooning up to as many as 1,714 words at version number 34. The picture below is every change I made between that version and the final. Highlighted green words are additions, grey struck-out words are removals. Here’s to “embracing your constraints”:http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_positive_side_effect_of_big_text_less_text.php:

Getting the Basics Right, versions 34 and 59 compared

Do Business Right, Keep Your Soul

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??Fast Company??: “The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html?partner=rss. Snapper chooses to continue doing business with excellence, but not by selling out their brand and everything they stand for to Wal-Mart.

Indeed, the productivity of every factory worker is measured “every hour, every day, every month, every year,” says Snapper president Shane Sumners, who walks the 10.5-acre factory floor with comfort and familiarity. “And everybody’s performance is posted, publicly, every day for everyone to see.” It’s a lot like Wal-Mart–which measures the number of items every checkout clerk scans every hour. Some of Snapper’s dramatic productivity improvements, in fact, seem to come almost directly from the Wal-Mart playbook. These days, the Snapper factory operates in Wal-Mart time. It must, because it operates in Wal-Mart’s ecosystem.

??Rands??: “Subtlety, Subterfuge, and Silence”:http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/01/23/subtlety_subterfuge_and_silence.html

Herein lies the hard part of subterfuge. Depending on where you are standing, my plan could be viewed in any number of ways. The other engineering director would have called it, “Disobeying a direct order” whereas my boss, who got wind of the effort two days in, called it “a skunk works project” and told us to proceed. Phew.

??37signals??: “You still want meetings. Here’s how to make them useful.”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/you_still_want_meetings_heres_how_to_make_them_useful.php

Though meetings are harmful, you sometimes need to get together and work a problem out. Here are some tips to make sure nobody wastes their time.

And, in case you hadn’t seen it yet: “Apple’s Intel ad”:http://www.apple.com/intel/ads/. Love it.

New content from Ken Walker coming soon, promise.

By the Numbers

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My nose has been buried in bank statements lately.

We’ve been closing out 2005 in order to try to get a handle on how our spending might look for 2006 and how soon we’ll be able to achieve some goals. Stuff like paying of all our debts, buying a house, and maybe even (gulp) starting a family. It’s funny to look back over a year or two of financial history. Birthdays, new car, doctor visits, job changes: they’re all there large as life in the numbers. It gets me thinking about all the data — in a previous generation, I would have said “paper” — we generate with our lives.

Emails we sent, notes we scribbled, blogs we published, documents we wrote, financials we recorded, appointments we kept, videos we made, contacts we made, songs we listened to, places we went and the pictures we took there will all one day be indexed and integrated into a singular user interface for you to query, categorize and pivot any way you want. Consider the Google Desktop search and its growing list of indexing plugins. Forget This Day in History, my kids will be able to see This Day in Ken Walker.

Not that any of this is new: people dig through the the archives to learn about other people all the time. It’ll just be a lot faster than it used to, shuffling through mountains of paper, stashed into shoeboxes. Instead, what will likely be left of me when I’m gone is an electronic storage device, about the size of a USB key, with my life’s history on it — indexed and tagged with all kinds of metadata.

But it will probably still be in a shoebox.