#Work

Brilliant post dead link on how calendars are really for interruptions, not your real work.

most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening.

and a call to schedule work and work towards when you need interruptions (meetings, input etc.). And love his point as meetings as something that subtract from working time, and the calendar as something we treat as additive.

Great idea, but how to bake this into your culture, especially one as interruption driven as most modern offices (including my own)?

One of the more exciting things about the new gig is the full-on focus on campaigning. This video was shot in one day… yep, one day with the bulk of the post-production work done that same day by the amazing guys who we shot it with. Absolutely great experience and learned loads.

Want to help get this ad seen and create a sustainable future for Australia? Please donate to get this aired in the same marginal seats the coal lobby is targeting.

It’s a bit sad I predate the moon landing, but this is kinda cool. In a few scant days, we’ll be celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing which is a symbolic milestone that all humanity can be proud of despite what we’ve done in space since then.

I should point out I often use Kennedy’s example of this as a clear BHAG (Big, Hairy Audacious Goal), when talking about strategy planning because it has a clear, measurable, unambiguous achievement within a time limit.

Love this diagram from Bud Caddell on getting yourself into the Hooray zone for optimum business happiness. Not just for startups, I want this for my department. Love the underdog kung fu ideas this encapsulates.

Loving Umair Haque these days and his excellently penned essays on the zombieconomy and how we got into this trouble in the first place How not to Hummer your business .

What is unnovation? It’s when your business eats its children and destroys the long term value it has been creating (if you’re lucky) by focusing on seductive, easy short-term profits. Great rant illustrated by the Hummer, but insert your value-destroying business move from the 90’s and noughts here.

Great article in copyblogger about how to tighten up your copy to make sure you kill those sales conversion trolls .

Avoid the carney, the sea-monkeys, and the trolls. Write content to be identifiable, engender trust, and provide clarity on calls to action.

Ahhh… finally, the Google Wave developer preview of Google’s HTML 5 re-imagining of online collaboration and communications at Google’s I/O conference.

The interesting idea of it as a Product, Platform (for the embedding of things in the web) and Protocols as well as the re-visioning of email if it had been invented today, kinda sorts well with actual usage. For example, in the demo, the use of email and then a sort of “in-email” IM session (we’re going to need new verbs and adjectives, I can tell) being used is pretty similar to what really happens in real life though you generally have to jump to a new app and those conversations end up being isolated form each other. So, at least that idea in Wave is sound.

Amnesty International’s Annual Report for 2009 , the definitive report on the state of the world’s human rights is now live.

Pretty smooth sailing technically this time round due to using Drupal (the same CMS we use on the main amnesty.org site and some excellent dev help from the fine, fine folks over at CivicActions (except for a worrying little last-minute technical terror of a bug that slipped through).

Really useful article on how to start implementing continuous deployment in your organization. It encapsulates a lot of the stuff I just posted on the Five Whys and Lean Startups.

I can imagine a few other things you need here, like a complete sandbox for for each dev, as well as the continuous integration server to keep testing every commit, and the cultural change is enormous but not onerous.

I think the other important thing is that this is scary. Even me at my most crazy would be a bit concerned about this. People will be worried, especially if this is something you haven’t done from the very start. You also need a culture that doesn’t punish honest mistakes. Otherwise, people will fear to deploy something in short cycles from idea to production in nothing time.

Great article from the currently totally-on-fire Eric Ries.

One of the major things we’ve learned about user stories, even if we’ve never articulated it, is about “popping the why stack.” In essence, you ask “Why ?” a number of times and, if at the end of those five whys, the answer isn’t increasing revenue, protecting revenue, or reducing costs, that feature you’re writing probably isn’t worth the time.

I never realized the idea came from Toyota where it’s practically a gospel part of their keizen process in improving quality and reducing defects.