The Economics of (Not) Worrying

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."

- Henry David Thoreau

Well, Mr.Thoreau, I tend to agree, but which items can we let alone?

As every military officer and every product manager likes to do, I’ve created a 2×2 classifying the behavior a person is exhibiting when not letting things alone that have attributes along the Relevance and Significance domains.

The specific definitions I have for the two domains are:

• Relevance: is the outcome of the event influential to the accomplishment of your goals and does it scale proportionally to the effort invested?
• Significance: is the cost/benefit of ‘letting this alone’ high or low?

Lets work through an example for each of the quadrants beginning with the upper right and continuing clockwise around the chart.

Significant but Irrelevant – if you are spending time and effort in this quadrant, you probably correctly recognize the importance of many of activities taking place around you, but you probably don’t realize that the results of those activities are less impactful to your well-being than you think. Many newer managers err on the side of involving themselves in their subordinates work to an extent that is detrimental to themselves, their subordinates, and ultimately their employer’s bottom line. This is why I’ve labeled time spent in this quadrant as a ‘Control-Freak’.

Insignificant and Irrelevant – when you spend time, and effort in this quadrant, you aren’t helping anybody. In fact, you are probably hurting your won reputation and infuriating those you are seeking to help. The reason is that spending time and effort on something that is irrelevant and insignificant to you means that the topic is socially unimportant, or the owner of the task is someone better equipped to handle it than you. In either case, demonstrating an interest in the results can be beneficial, but exhibiting control and effort here is seen as being pedantic.

Insignificant and Relevant – of all the quadrants, this is the trickiest one to move out of, since the true value of significance is often not known prior to deciding how much time and effort to invest in a particular ‘thing’. However, it is safe to assume that the majority of ‘things’ whose value of significance is uncertain, are in fact insignificant. In all likelihood, this where Mr. Thoreau, encourages us to let ‘things’ alone. If you are in fact concerning yourself with ‘things’ in this quadrant, then you probably have too much time on your hands, and aren’t looking for activities that add more value for yourself.

Significant and Relevant – this is the holy grail of where you want to focus your attention, obviously. Although I can’t offer any rules, heuristics, or algorithms to decide what goes into this quadrant, you will no doubt be more cognizant of ‘things’ that don’t fall into this quadrant if you frame concerns in this template. Many people who recognize the value of this quadrant express the following adage:

“’Perfect’ is the enemy of ‘Done’”.

And with that adage, I’ll fully admit that I haven’t fully refined this idea or 2×2 yet, but for my intents and purposes, I am calling it “Done”.

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Enabling Excel Add-In for SQL Server Data Mining Analysis

Just wanted to post a quick note that if you are fighting with your version of Excel (2007,2010, 32-bit, 64-bit) to enable the add-ins for SQL Server Data mining, that you will need to do some registry hacking in order to get the add-in to load.

Here is Microsoft’s fix for the issue:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1090.aspx

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5 Tips To Annoy and Alienate Your Power Users

Software Providers: It can be challenging in today’s market to effectively limit the productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness of Power-Users who leverage every aspect of your software’s intentional and unintentional functionality to capture the most value for their dollar. Hope isn’t lost, as there are plenty of companies that produce software that is monolithic, cryptic, and generally awful, and they all have one thing in common: the user experience.

Following are five tips that you can implement in order to cause maximum annoyance and limit wide-spread adoption of your software product:

1) Introduce a “Radically New and Improved” interface layout and user-experience that is really just the product of laziness and inexperience.

Take a cue from Skype: Their interface designers must have been engineers throwing darts at a layout pin-board while riding in an off-road SUV after hitting the beer bong. The interface requires several clicks to accomplish the simplest tasks, adding and dropping people from current calls requires guesswork that a RandomWalk has a better chance of getting right sooner than you, and you can never be quite sure if Skype is behaving the way you want it to.

2) Make your software steal window-focus so that it is in the foreground during arbitrary operations.

Nothing will annoy your power users more than when they are typing a password into their web browser when your software’s window barges into the foreground and begins accepting keyboard entry instead of the user’s web browser, all because your software had a new status monologue “dialogue” box refresh. Instant-Messaging software that does this effectively almost guarantees that you tell your unemployed friends with nothing to do the password to your corporate intranet when the IM they sent regarding how wasted they got last night pops up a window just as you begin typing your password.

3) Your software should install a service into the system tray without asking for permission.

Your software should be the only important software on your user’s computer and dedicated to running your software alone, right? A computer is an Appliance after-all. You should make it extremely unintuitive to exit out of these services by changing the “Quit” to something more ambiguous like “Exit” and locate the button in the middle of several other options. Again, take a cue from Skype on this one. You can increase the annoyance factor if you introduce a pop-up dialogue box that asks “Are You Sure?” after the power user has finally found the quit button.

4) When a user installs or uninstalls your software, it should never completely clean up temporary files or the original installation files, folders, directories, or registry entries.

Most power users are extremely organized individuals who like to leverage their assets fully in order to be as efficient as possible, and they like to keep those assets running at maximum efficiency. You can exploit this rational desire for efficiency by forcing the user to waste precious time, effort, and energy cleaning up after your software. Do this well and your software will be recognized as one of the sloppiest on the market, nearly on the same level as Bloatware that comes pre-installed on most retail computers.

5) Make your software extremely monolithic with little support for plug-ins, hooks, or APIs. This is especially effective for data processing or storage software, since dispersed accessibility and platform compatibility are extremely key right now. If you force your user to only use your desktop app to access their data on a Mac or Windows (not both), and don’t have any support for Plugins or APIs, then you can make your user suffer through the above four points. If you absolutely can’t avoid implementing APIs, make sure to limit their functionality and provide marginal-quality documentation regarding it. Eloqua.com does a good job of providing a restrictive API and not updating the documentation regularly. Failure to follow this tip will allow power-users to bypass the otherwise awesomely annoying points above, so this is key.

Do you have any other tips for software makers to aggravate and annoy their power users? What is least/most effective from your experience? Are there any software providers that do an exceptional job implementing these tips?

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Geek vs. Nerd vs. Dork vs. Dweeb Infographic

There are many comparisons between Geek and Nerd and other slightly derogatory terms to describe people with social awkward behaviors, and since no single agreed upon definition for any of these terms exists in an information-age context, I wanted to add my own interpretation to the mix in a (not surprisingly) Venn diagram:

The feedback I get most often with this version is that Geek and Nerd should switch places, so that Geek is at the intersection of every category. I’m not opposed to this except that I don’t consider Geek to fit very well between Dweeb and Dork.

However, an aspect to consider is that all these terms encompass some extent of Social Awkwardness. Today you will often see particularly NOT Geeky people claiming to be a “Total [this or that] Geek”. This would be ok if their extreme passion or interest in whatever topic they are claiming to be Geeky about were of the extent that people considered it slightly weird. But more often than not, this is not the case, and these individuals are simply co-opting the term in order to make themselves sound more distinguished on the given topic than they are.

This isn’t particularly important, because I actually benefit with “cool” people co-opting the term, because now I can look like I am co-opting it too instead of just being a Geek or a Nerd. So my problem really isn’t some kind of disenfranchisement or stripping of my etymological identity, it has more to do with the disingenuous nature of people being rewarded for their lack of a feature which they falsely claim to have.

Argument Overblown? Yes.

That is how you know that I am a Nerd Geek (or a maybe a Geek Nerd?). And am therefore the genuine Alpha.

So, do you claim to be a Geek or a Nerd? Why? Are you co-opting or genuine? What would you change about this infographic?

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Gqueues Is My Preferred GTD Tool for Project/Task Management

There isn’t a task/project/GTD management tool that works for everyone, and I’ve tried a number of tools/processes to help aid myself, but the sad truth is that most tools are as good as any other. They aren’t bad, but they are fairly mediocre and always seem to lack that one feature that I absolutely need.

My current process still is not perfect, but my work flow does seem to be better than its ever been, and a big part of that is that I’m managing projects instead of tasks. Think of managing tasks as a bottom-up approach that means you are reactive to whatever is on the list. On the other hand, if you are managing projects (and those projects are aligned to your manager’s/organization’s goals), then you are the CEO of your time and you can figure out which tasks are most important to accomplishing the projects that are aligned with your goals.

So from this perspective, managing your projects is more important than managing the tasks, and the tool that I use to do that is Gqueues.com.

One reason I think Gqueues is a good solution is that I can have as many categories as I need – for example “Work”, “Home”, etc, and in each of those Categories, you can have as many “Queues” as you need. For example, I have a queues called “Active Projects”, “Planned Projects”, and “Conceptual Projects”, plus a project queue with my subordinate’s name. Although the image above isn’t a picture of my queue, I think it demonstrates this characteristic pretty well.

Read the rest of this entry »

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