Archive for January, 2008

I am being interviewed by Mike Vardy for The EffTD™ Interview Series.  Mike is a self professed productivity expert. He has developed a new productivity ideology and a personal productivity system (EffTD™) that can be implemented with little to no effort. Mike has a lighthearted take on the whole Getting Things Done / personal productivity movement. It's always nice to be reminded not to take anything too seriously, and in the end, life should be about having some fun. Look for the interview soon at EffTD!

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In a previous post I described my first attempt at outsourcing. I was diligently trying to ship some software programming work overseas. Please don't tell Lou Dobbs! At the same time, I decided to test a theory: could I find better freelancers through programming forums instead of using popular outsourcing sites such as Elance.

The World Isn't Flat

Here are the results of this first foray into outsourcing:

• Elance: I received a single bid at over double the quoted budget.
• Ajay: By way of background, Ajay was the programmer I found myself through Planet Source Code. After sending the proposed job description and requesting a quote, he disappeared for over a week. After a week he communicated that he was on a vacation in his village and would get back to me when he returned to the city. After another week he did get back to me asking for more details on the job and timing (which was, in my opinion, quite clearly indicated in the original job description I sent).

Hardly inspiring! I was looking forward to comparing Ajay's quote against a myriad of bids on Elance. So this was a bit of a set back. Without at least two competing bids, I had decided beforehand not to outsource this work because, as a rule of thumb, I think you need at least two options before you making any spending decision. What did I learn from this exercise?

1. I think the task, while described quite well and at a great deal of detail (as per best practices), was too complicated. It involved some binary file formats, and while an intermediate to advanced programmer in North America would have easily been able to complete this work, I wonder if most freelance programmers (or the owners of the companies bidding on Elance) are more interested in mundane, brainless work.
2. There is a definite risk depending on a single resource versus a company. As the proposal exercise aptly illustrates, Ajay represents a "single point of failure". Without a firm or backup team behind Ajay, there is no fallback support. This was only the proposal, one can easily imagine the risk when depending on a sole operator to actually get the work done.
3. Another issue with going to someone directly is that you have to be prepared for the fact that they may not actually be interested in doing certain work. This is what I think happened with Ajay. Since I had worked with him on a project before, I think he was afraid to simply decline the work, and so delayed his response and asked for information already provided to further delay having to respond.

Plan B

Despite the lack of success with outsourcing this particular project, this story does have a happy ending: I was able to find a company that provides a ready made component that does what I was looking for, and in fact, provides even more functionality than I currently require. The cost of a royalty free developers license was within my budget. So for this job, the classic buy versus build was perhaps more relevant than outsourcing in the first place! I was therefore able to eliminate the need to perform this task. As I have mentioned before: favour elimination over automation.

Segue To Product Endorsement

How has this experience helped me? In my day job, I meet a lot of people, and over time I end up with a massive pile of business cards. When the pile reaches a critical height, I start to enter them into my contact manager/database. This, to say the least, is a tedious data entry exercise. I know what you're thinking - I could outsource this work! However, based on the experience above, I wondered: is there a way to simply eliminate the data entry? Of course there is a way! I purchased a CardScan Personal v8. Within minutes I was able to scan a large pile of cards. The accuracy of the character recognition is excellent. Besides automatically populating my contact database, the contact management software that comes with the unit is pretty good in its own right - with the added bonus of retaining an image of the scanned business card. So in the end I would say, before outsourcing anything, look to see if any technology already exists that can equally get the job done.

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I have been following the comments on a post at the excellent zenhabits blog entitled: Top 30 Tips for Staying Productive and Sane While Working From Home. The 4-Hour Workweek philosophy advocates liberation from the office - that freedom often being contingent on the ability to be more productive when working remotely. I thought the post might prove fruitful towards that goal, and as promised provides a great many tips. One tip in particular jumped out:

Don’t work an eight hour day. One reader works about 5 hours, in four blocks of an hour, with a 20 minute gap between each. If you do more than that, your attention might start to wander, you’ll be restless and your work won’t have it’s normal level of quality.

Source: zenhabits.

The astute and mathematically inclined among you will notice that five hours a day works out to a completely unreasonable twenty-five hours a week of time spent on work - hardly the four hours we seek - but hopefully you all get the point: quality of work trumps quantity of time spent. 

However, it didn't take long for one commenter to come up with this criticism of the post:

For those of us lucky enough to work from home, you should work at least as long as you would do at the office, otherwise its called taking advantage.

Source: zenhabits.

With all due respect to the commenter, this kind of feedback is completely misguided, and typical of the 9-5 mentality that pervades the working world. Hopefully all employees, whether working in an office or at home, get paid to produce results that lead to the increased profitability and/or effectiveness of their respective organizations. Productivity should always trump any simpler metric such as hours logged. Good managers set objectives with their employees that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time specific. When management is poor, clear goals or an effective method of easily evaluating performance are often not in place, and managers revert to simpler schemes like hours spent on a task. This is naive at best.

Let's consider two employees that work at a market research firm. Which is better: the employee who produces a great report in four hours and goes to the mall the rest of the day, or an employee who spends over eight hours to produce a report that is substandard? At the end of the day, each employee is getting paid to write a report.  As the owner of the market research firm whose profitability depends on selling reports, I would much rather have the very best report.

Here is another way to think about this: when you call a supplier with a customer service issue, do you actually care about how long their employees work each day? Of course not. What you care about it getting your needs met or your issue resolved in a timely manner.

There were some other tips that dovetailed nicely with the concepts behind the 4-Hour Workweek, such as turning off the telephone when you need to work without distraction (elimination) and designating certain days for certain work (batching). Overall, some useful advice, make sure you check it out!

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The other day I was reading The Four Hour Trial where he laments over having to check email on multiple email accounts. The 4-Hour Workweek counsels us to immediately implement a personal policy of checking email only twice a day (with the ultimate goal of checking even less frequently - author Tim Ferriss boasts of checking email only once a week!). Whether you check email once a month or once an hour, the mechanics of having to log into four, five or six different email accounts is a nuisance. Not everyone will have multiple email accounts, but if you are one of the many that do, what follows is for you!

Note: Most of this derives from a comment I had originally made on The Four Hour Trial's post. Since this system works so well for me, I felt it was worth repeating here.

Here is my system to deal with having multiple email addresses that is almost painless. The real trick was being able to both send and receive email for all of my email addresses from a central inbox.

The Central Inbox

There could be many candidates for a central inbox. If you exclusively access email from the desktop on a single computer, and all of your email addresses can be accessed via POP, your email client, such as Outlook, could serve as your central inbox. I chose Gmail as my central inbox for a few reasons:

• Web and desktop access.
• Superior SPAM protection.
• Superior search capabilities.
• Ability to tag email versus filing email in a folder.
• Lots of storage.

If you choose to use Gmail as your central inbox, you will need a Gmail account. If you are managing the actual domain to which one of your email addresses belongs (for example, you have started your own business or venture), consider setting up Google Apps for your Domain and having Google host that domain's email. By using Google Apps for your Domain, you will not need to get an additional @gmail.com email address.

Sending Email

You can setup Gmail to send email from all of your email accounts. By the way, this is also possible in many desktop clients as well, but I like using Gmail as my central inbox, so I will be describing the process using Gmail. In your Gmail settings, you simply add your other email accounts to Gmail. This will cause Gmail to send a verification email to your other accounts. You should then access your email at the other accounts the way you have in the past to complete the verification process (basically replying to the verification email proves you are the owner of the email account you are trying to add to Gmail). Once verified, you will be able to send email from your other email accounts from within Gmail.

Receiving Email

Receiving email sent to your other email accounts in the Gmail inbox requires you to either forward those emails to Gmail, or download those emails to Gmail. Forwarding email from all your other accounts into Gmail can be done in a couple of different ways:

• Having your system administrator setup forwarding on the actual email server, forwarding email directly to your Gmail account.
• Most web based email will allow you to setup automatic forwarding of email to another email account. In this case forward to your Gmail account.

Gmail can also act as an email client for other email accounts. Instead of forwarding email to Gmail, you can actually download email into Gmail. There is a setting in Gmail for downloading email from another account into Gmail using POP, much like how you would use Outlook to get email from an email account.

Living The Dream

You can now send and receive email from all of your email accounts using Gmail. Since Gmail supports IMAP, you can use both the Gmail web interface and a desktop email client (like Outlook or Thunderbird) to send and receive email while keeping both in synch.  You can also use POP to download Gmail into a desktop client for offline viewing (selecting the option to keep a copy on the server ensures that you maintain a copy in Gmail).

I understand that some people may be uncomfortable with depending on Google for handling all of their email. Like I said, there are other ways to implement the concept of a central inbox using other tools. I just happen to like Gmail a lot. Gmail provides much more storage than most email providers. As a result I never throw out an email, and I am currently only using 12% of my storage quota! By being able to search through all of this mail using Google search, I can find dated material in a matter of seconds, all the time, no matter where I am. In the end, it might not be absolutely perfect, but this system works really well for me.

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In a keynote speech to top CEO's and government officials at the New New Internet Conference in Washington DC, 4-Hour Workweek author Timothy Ferriss makes the claim that people with the most time and the highest incomes are characterized by the ability to single task: focusing on the truly important, without interruption, to completion. Here is a nice, short, edited video from the session:

The entire keynote address can be viewed on the New New Internet Conference site.

Here is a truism: people do not truly multi-task. Multi-tasking, in my opinion, is usually used to describe switching continuously between multiple single tasks over a period of time. So why not just work on one task at a time to completion, one after another? If we really cannot parallel process, the overall duration of completing all of the tasks is the same whether we do one thing at a time or try to "multi-task". If you believe, as many do, that there is a task-switching cost associated with any switch from one task to another, then multi-tasking actually takes more time than performing single tasks at a time to completion.

One could then say that they must start one task before completing another because of a deadline. I would agree that a deadline is a practical implication, but it suggests prioritizing work by deadline, not the need to multi-task! In fact, task switching costs suggests that by prioritizing work and single tasking, we have the best shot at meeting these deadlines.

By the way, we often think that computers multi-task. Strictly speaking, for single processor machines, that is not technically accurate. CPU's work on a single task at a time, and multi-tasking is emulated by having some sort of task switching scheme built into hardware or operating system software. Just like humans, there can be a substantial performance penalty for a computer to task switch.

Popularity: 16% [?]

One idea that has really resonated with me lately is that we really should work to live, yet often we end up living to work. Unfulfilling work can consume so much of our time, leaving tired evenings and perhaps a few hours on the weekends to pursue our dreams - if we even have any left after our jobs and responsibilities at home have sucked the life-blood from our souls! Alright, that last sentence was a bit strong, but you get the point. It is often not a matter of money as much as it is a matter of time. We suffer from time poverty!

Let's think about money for a moment. What do you do when you are perpetually in debt, or living dangerously above your means? Usually the very first order of business is to find out where you are spending your money. To manage your money you have to be able to account for it.  The same goes for your time. To drag yourself out of the misery of time poverty, you need to understand where you are spending your time.

Step 1: Track

Here is what I suggest: for a week, make a conscious effort to track everything you do, and I mean everything. Since I am usually at or near a computer, I created a calendar in Google to track all the various things I did during my waking hours. Excel, a notebook or a simple pad of paper would work equally well. Activities you track will most likely include meetings, checking email, processing whatever kind of "widget" you work on (for me it is writing software code), telephone calls, lunch, coffee breaks and water cooler socials. It should also include what you do when you are not at work: taking out the garbage, preparing meals, taking the kids to school, reading, watching television, etc. Call this the Things I Do list.

Step 2: Evaluate

Once that exercise is complete, the next step is to determine which, of all the things you do, add the most value to your life or make you the most happy. What is left are the things that add little, or no value - things that really don't provide any real satisfaction.

Step 3: Consider Your Options

Now that you have identified these limiting activities, you should consider three options for each:

• Eliminate: Can you simply stop doing it? Usually you cannot, but sometimes this may be the case. If it must be done, can someone else do it without you being accountable for it anymore? This is what I will call abdication. If you can simply abdicate responsibility for something that must be done, that's great. Maybe there is a report that must be prepared daily for your manager. You know it must be done, but perhaps your manager's administrative assistant, or a junior peer can take ownership of preparing that report. You may find that people actually want to take ownership of a task.
• Outsource: It has to be done, and you have to be responsible for it (example: feeding your kids!). Can someone else do it for you? This is what I will call delegation. Sometimes you can delegate things at little or no cost (example: your eldest child will help prepare lunch for everyone as part of their chores). Sometimes it may cost you something (example: hiring an assistant to put together sales presentation materials). In the end, it is still your responsibility to get it done, but you do so by getting someone else to do it for you.
• Automate: Is there a better way of doing something? Can a system or technology be used that gets the task done with less time and effort required on your part? A simple example might be using filters or rules in your email client to automatically file or forward certain email messages.

Step 4: Work & Live Smarter

Always prefer elimination. For each thing you do ask: can this be eliminated? There are three possible answers:

• Yes
• Partly (or Maybe)
• No

If the answer for a given task is yes, take whatever steps are required to eliminate that task. If the answer is "partly" (or maybe) you probably need to break down the task into smaller components. After breaking it down, go back and ask your self whether each one can be eliminated and repeat the process. If the answer is no, you have to move on to the next question: can I outsource or automate this task? You will have the same three possible answers for each one. If the answer is yes, you may have to consider several options and you will have to analyze each one to determine which is the best way to outsource or automate it. If the answer is "partly" (or maybe) you need to break the task down a little more. If the answer is no, well, you might have to accept that you are stuck with doing that thing for the time being. At least you know you don't have a choice at this time, and we all have to do some things we don't like! My advice: meditate on these tasks and ask yourself, is there any possible way to make doing this a little more fun?

Conclusion

Since starting my quest for the 4-hour workweek, I have followed this procedure in trying to account for, and manage, the things I do. I feel I can improve on my abilities when performing steps 3 and 4, as the idea behind those steps often require a change of mindset. Some things that I initially thought I could not even outsource, I have come to consider as candidates for elimination! As I become more comfortable with the idea of abdicating, delegating and automating the things I do, I find this procedure can be repeated, and the results refined over time.

Popularity: 12% [?]

The 4-Hour Workweek credo describes the concept of elimination - eliminating or otherwise offloading the tasks that take up 80% of our time and yet add no, or only incremental value. It is not a matter of better organizing the time you spend on tasks (i.e. classic time management) but doing only the tasks that really matter. You could say that one is eliminating task clutter - all those activities that literally clutter your time. And Let's face it, when you have to remember when and what to do all the time, task clutter inevitably leads to mental clutter (New Theory: mental clutter is directly proportional to stress). Elimination frees your time and your mind!

There is another dimension to elimination, and that is reducing real, physical clutter. This is all the stuff in our homes and workplaces that we don't really use, at best taking up space, at worse requiring maintenance and attention (leading to more task and mental clutter). A number of years ago, my wife and I moved into a new, larger house. For some reason, as a society, it seems our houses get bigger and bigger, but I digress... The interesting thing about larger spaces: you find a way to fill them up, and that's exactly what we proceeded to do: our new house just gave us an excuse to buy, collect and store more stuff.

Last summer we realized that our house was actually filling up with junk.  What we were accumulating was often not being used at all. In a stroke of brilliance, we decided we needed to have a garage sale and clear it out. We started going through our house, first in our "storage" areas and then our closets. At first when you are going through your stuff you usually come up with some reason to hold onto it. To get by this roadblock we developed a one year rule: if we have not used something in over one year it was a candidate for our garage sale. As we identified stuff that met this criteria, we staged it inside our garage where we would perform a final decision on whether something stayed or went. The funny thing was just getting things into this staging area ended up being 90% of the battle. Nothing we staged came back inside, and in fact inspired us to identify more items we did not need.

At the end of the day, I spent perhaps a full day of effort between setting up and holding the actual garage sale. I made about $200. It was a great way to meet people in the area and also nice to know that some of our stuff might find use with someone else. Beyond this, there were so many benefits to this exercise:

• There was a lot of stuff that did not even make it into our garage sale and went directly in the trash. The whole thing doubled as a spring cleaning exercise!
• Seeing the sheer volume of stuff that we were willing to part with, all in one spot, made us realize that a lot of things we had bought over the years were really quite unnecessary. We now have a garage sale rule when we are shopping: if there is a chance that at item we are considering might end up in a garage sale, we put it down.
• Freeing up space was actually mentally liberating. We have found that less clutter in our space eliminates a lot of mental distraction.

In the end, the garage sale itself was probably not worth my effort, but the exercise of preparing for it was priceless.  In the future I would either simply donate any items of value to charity, or put it on the curb with a big "Free" sign (a friend tells me he had a big piece of plywood with "Free" spray painted on it that he would regularly use for just such a purpose - ironically the sign itself was also taken by someone!).

This is just a story about a single battle, but the war against clutter still rages with me and others. Resources and tactics:

• Lifehacker (tagged as Clutter)
• Unclutterer
• zenhabits (tagged as Simplicity)

Popularity: 7% [?]

In a previous post, I had outlined a strategy where I had identified a candidate to whom I might outsource some programming work.  This strategy is based on the use of popular programmer forums. As I had mentioned, the benefit of this approach is being able to understand a programmer's skills up front as well as their particular subject matter expertise.

Since I had identified a virtual coder (VC) candidate first, I had to go back and create a description of the programming work I wanted to outsource. A best practice is to make such descriptions as specific as possible. Here is what I came up with:

What I need done: Create a simple .NET 2.0 component, preferably written in C#, that can convert html tables to an excel file. This component must have the ability to create Excel 2000 workbooks, and to be able to specify which worksheet will contain the converted table. The component should not require third party components to run (except, of course, the MS Foundation Class Libraries). I expect to get a running version of the component that demonstrates how it can meet these requirements and all source code, including all rights to the source code.

What I already have versus what the provider will build: I can provide a sample VB6 project that converts html tables to Excel files. I am willing to provide the full source code for this component. I retain all rights to this original component and may ask you to sign a NDA.

Other context/requirements that providers will need to know: The component's interface/API should be simple and intuitive. It should be designed on solid OO principles, the code should be well documented and as a general rule on style, methods/procedures should not exceed 50 lines (i.e. large methods should be refactored).

Specific expertise that I am seeking: You should have intermediate to advanced level .NET programming experience.  Experience with programming Excel and html would be an added plus.

Timeframe for delivery: I need this component within 2 - 3 weeks.

Note: This is not exactly the actual programming task I want to outsource, but by way of illustration, this description is of the same format and level of detail as the actual programming task I outlined.

I then sent this project description to Ajay, the candidate I had identified on Planet Source Code. I also posted it on Elance based on The Four Hour Trial man's advice. Note that there is a video from none other than Tim Ferriss himself right on the Elance home page extolling the virtues of the service (now I am wondering if the guy has shares in the company!):

If you have never posted on Elance before, it was pretty easy to set up an account and post the project for bids. It does require a $10 deposit which is supposedly refunded to you within ten days. We are told that this refundable deposit process helps them qualify "serious" posters. When posting the project I selected to use the payment escrow service:

Elance Escrow protects both the buyer and the provider. Buyer's funds are held securely until the services are provided satisfactorily. The provider can begin working on a project knowing that the buyer has provided project funding into the escrow account.

Source: Elance.

I have read that using this service may help you get more bids on the work. I am requesting a fixed price proposal from both Ajay and Elance. I emailed Ajay and posted on Elance yesterday.  So far no bids and no response from Ajay. It has only been a day, so I will wait until Monday. In the mean time I may try posting on Rent A Coder and perhaps GetaFreelancer as well.

Popularity: 7% [?]