Yeah.. basically, that..

Hello to the few people persistent enough to be still following me, and also to those that come pay me a visit now and again to see whether I've decided to make up my bloody mind and write another post. Sorry for being so out of sight.

After giving a lot of thought to the idea of writing something, today I landed on a piece of Wikipedia that really struck me, since I naively still keep on searching for that productivity silver bullet that would fix the procrastination issues I've been dragging along for so much time. Here it is in its original form, and I quote:

Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following ten factors as accompanying an experience of flow:^[3][4]
1.- Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.^[5]
2.- Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3.- A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4.- Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
5.- Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6.- Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7.- A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8.- The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9.- A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it).
10.- People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Let's pick each one of those and talk a bit about them, shall we?

Clear Goals

Easy one. Unless we know for sure where we're going, we risk getting to a place we don't want to be at. Some times this rule may be bent a little if we're not really sure something is feasible and there's some research to be done. But the primary objective should never leave our mind, or we risk getting lost. You may observe this everywhere, from simple programming and up to the management layers. It's pervasive among the whole soft-dev chain, but perhaps an Architect would need a clearer state of mind than a Junior Developer. The latter may make mistakes and are easily fixed when discovered. The former may also make some mistakes, but those mistakes may steer the whole project into an iceberg.


Concentrating

Close that goddamn TweetDeck, for heaven's sake! Stop peeking at your inbox tab every 10 minutes just to see if the "1 unread - Gmail Inbox" label has shown up! Deactivate those pesky notifications from your IM program!

Stop those distractions that prevent you from entering a state of mind that'd allow you to delve deeply into what must be done. This is one of the most harmful and destructive characteristics of procrastination. Even breaking out of that state is awfully hard. Some times is like being stoned without you even having touched a joint. The mind jumps from one thought to the other. It's in its nature, and we can't entirely avoid that. But we can train ourselves to be focused, just as we can train ourselves to lift a 100 kg weigth.


One important tool to this is meditation. I don't know of so many people that practice it, and yet it's not an arcane, nor a difficult practice. Even the book "Pragmatic thinking and learning: Refactor your wetware" mentions and recommends it.

Sit down and take a moment. Don’t think about the mistakes you made yesterday or worry about problems that might come up tomorrow. Focus on now. This one instant in time. Right here.
No distractions.
No chatter.
I’ll wait.
It’s not easy, is it? Much of meditation, yoga, and similar practices aim for the same goal: to offer some relief from that gibbering L mode monkey voice in your head, to live in the moment, and to not divide your mental energy unnecessarily. The internal chatter knocks us off our game.
A study published in the Public Library of Science-Biology2 showed that training in meditation could improve a subject’s ability to pay attention throughout the day.
Their testing gauged how well subjects could allocate cognitive resources when presented with multiple stimuli, all competing for their attention at once. Sounds like a normal day at the office....

On a personal note, I practice Buddhism, and even having tried some smart drugs, I've not found yet something that provides a more relaxed and focused state of mind than meditation (smart drugs work, don't take me wrong.. but the mind's state feels unnatural). On the other hand, daily context and my own mind usually drive me away from having a steady regular meditational practice. Paraphrasing a japanese buddhist monk:

To begin is easy but to continue is difficult.

That phrase perhaps sums up every recovering procrastinator's day, doesn't it?

Balance between ability level and challenge

If the task is a tall order, we may feel we're not cut for it. Some strategies may be applied, but if the job still seems daunting, better go learn something and prepare yourself to face it again some time later. There must be an equilibrium, a point where the task seems easy enough to be faced, yet difficult enough to be a challenge and not some boring menial job. An important strategy to achieve this is our famous divide and conquer.

Besides, if you ever get stuck at some point, and can't see a light at the end of the tunnel, go away from the problem. As Isaac Asimov would do it: Each time he felt like he was facing a wall with no exit in sight, he just went to the cinema, and watched a movie that required no thinking whatsoever. That way, he would allow his mind to work "in the background", so when he exits the movie theater, his mind would've been "reset" and is able to see the problem from a different perspective.


Direct and inmmediate feedback

Goes hand in hand with the previous one. Once we have tasks sufficiently small to be approachable, yet big enough to be challenges, we are ready to start working on them. But if we get stuck at some point, or we choose to have nothing to show until everything's finished, we risk losing stamina to keep going in the best case, or just end up building the wrong thing in the worst.

Baby steps. Build something, read something, learn something. Then go check it out and see whether what you built/learned is right or not. Perhaps you're your own judge, but anyway, just take a couple of minutes to look at the big picture now and again. Check your goals. Check your progress. Be prepared for change. This is the agile way.

Consequences

The rest of the items that show up in the list are more like characteristics of being "In the zone", rather than some points that we may use as strategies.

• - Loss of the sense of self-consciousness
• - Distorted sense of time
• - Sense of personal control over the situation
• - Activity intrinsecally rewarding, effortless
• - Lack of awareness of body needs
• - Action awareness merging

Nevertheless, if you can observe yourself at some point and say "yes, those are true now, I feel that way", you know that you're on the ball, in the moment, present, in the zone, in the groove, or keeping your head in the game.

No, I'm not talking about just interpreting the symbols that build our alphabet. I'm talking about knowing your way around a book.

We read all the time. Those of us that are drawn to texts just as moths to fire, are sometimes lost amidst the myriads of texts that we can access today through the Internet. Millions of blogs and newspapers, a handful of them interesting and useful, and yet enough to fill every day of our lives because of the sheer amount of material that's published all the time. It brings upon us a lot of noise and we are the ones that have to filter it so we are left only with what's the most useful and valuable of all of it.


Why can't we just return to books? Some time ago (not that much anyway, I remember it from when I was a child) there was no internet. No everyday flood of information, no Google Reader. Just magazines that came around once every fifteen days, and that gave us the time to absorb all of the knowledge that they could give us. And then there were books.. those time travelers that could reach us from centuries ago in order to teach us important facts and knowledge that the human race thought was important enough to republish in order to make it available to future generations.

Of course, this was not a perfect filtering process. There are books that reached us from a long time ago that I could think are worthless, because they were promoted by the powers at the time, and are still there to do so. But what could the Internet add to this process that improved it? The wisdom of the crowds. As the Internet is an environment were we all can have our say, we all help to produce knowledge and to filter what's worth from what's not.

Therefore, why would we return to books? We must, because they still are the true recipients of ideas. We could read a statement in a blog (perhaps this one), and think that it's right. But the effort that it takes to do a brief statement is very little, and what it takes to write an entire book is a whole other league. That effort also helps so we can filter those ideas that are useful from those that aren't.

I feel stunned by people who believe that books are not worth the effort, or who believe that they can become the best professionals they can be without ever reading a full book, just absorbing passively the knowledge that our educational system imprints on them. And I feel sorry for them.. for they are the ones that will be left behind..


So, can we also use the wisdom of the crowds so we can get the best books out of the enourmous amount that are published every day? Yes we can. And we should. Not to merely dismiss the filter that editorials also provide, but to enhance it.

Ok, so this post has only one goal: to recommend you the latest book from Frederick Brooks, the author of "The Mythical Man-Month". It's named "The design of design, essays from a computer scientist". Go ahead, download it from Gigapedia and read it (of course, buy it if you can, I live in Argentina). Stop wading through your Google Reader and read something useful instead of just watching noise. I promise it'll be worth it.

I can't say that enough: Context Matters. And that advice extends also to the tools that we are using.

Can we listen to music in a cheap mp3 player? Sure. But how's it that an iPod seems better at it? It's not just some extra feature or the audio quality or some social way of saying "hey, I'm trendy and cool". It's also that it conveys an ease of use because it's nice, and that my friends, is context at work.

An excerpt from the awesome book "Pragmatic thinking and learning: Refactor your wetware"

Several studies have conclusively shown that attractive user interfaces are easier to use than unattractive (or to use the scientific term, ugly) interfaces.

Researchers in Japan did a study of a bank’s ATM interfaces; subjects found the aesthetically pleasing button layouts much easier to use than the ugly ones, even though the functionality and workflow was the same.

Thinking that maybe there was a cultural bias at work, researchers repeated the experiment in Israel. The results were even stronger, even in a completely different culture. But how could this be? Aesthetic considerations are merely an emotional response. That couldn’t possibly affect cognitive processing. Could it?

Yes, it can. In fact, additional studies have shown exactly that: positive emotions are essential to learning and creative thinking. Being “happy” broadens your thought processes and brings more of the brain’s hardware online.

So, next time an extra tool is needed, shop around.. find the best one, not just one that allows you to do the job, but one that also allows creativity and ease of use. Your brain will thank you for it.

'morning folks! I'm back in black, so to speak (just served myself some fresh brewed coffee as a sunday afternoon treat).

Due to recent events at the university where I'm studying, where a server was hacked and the proffessional reputation of a couple of students seriously damaged, I've come to realize how much needed is an education about the ethics of our profession. As far as I know, there's no curricula in any university (well, perhaps the M.I.T. or something like that) that offers even a small subject about what are the best ways to behave with regard to your subordinates, pairs, coworkers, or your boss; and in order to correctly manage the responsibilities that we inherit due to our jobs.

Our orientation is basically a technical one. Most of the people that come out of college (at least this one) with a degree in Software Engineering are glorified programmers, only with a superficial knowledge about what being an Engineer really is, and with absolutely no concience of the profound implications of the work that they will be performing. Who's to blame for that? Well, on one hand, the proffessors that call themselves as such, but are anything but because they do not teach anything. On the other hand, society itself and the kind of knowledge and values the students receive prior to their entrance at college.

We're in the age of information, people. The world revolves around computers and IT. If it were to dissappear, major shit would hit the fan. We're at the heart of that. There's not a chance that we can ignore the ethics and morality associated to our job when we are the ones that have the power and the responsibility.


This can't be an issue left to the student's good will, or perhaps to the fear that if someone finds out about what you did, there could be serious consecuences. That's what an environment based on fear and law enforcement would do. We're talking about an environment that should promote a change in the inside, and the awareness that IT is about computers, but also about the way those computers are used by the people. An environment where a student should be able to have mentors and examples to follow when it comes down to the proper and correct ways to use the power at hand. Today, we have almost none, unless we search outside of college.

Some people would think that the students should be screened previously, so that only the "ethically correct" may access that knowledge and wisdom (I swear someone told me just that yesterday.. couldn't believe what I was hearing). Some sort of thinking that "bad apples don't spoil the good ones". I obviously don't believe in that approach. Mostly because everyone should have the chance to prove themselves that they're worthy and able to be more than what they are. As Sartre stated: Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you. It's eventually your decision to change. And also because the institutions we would rely on to make that kind of screening are already spoiled, so there's no point in trying to let only the good ones in, while there's corruption inside already. The institution must be changed the other way around, from its base, all the way up.

The episode that happened in the recent months was not an act of someone who was evil, just naive. Here, right now, all of this should be a catalyst for change, not only for the people involved, but also for the institution itself. Some of those lives that were involved could be ruined because of the mistakes that have been made. We ought to learn from this. Not merely to abide to the law, that's just fear at work. We should learn to be responsible for our actions, and to understand the consecuences that those actions may provoke. And above all, we should learn to take care of the people that's involved. It's not ethically correct to save our butts and let our fellow partners go down, on fear that we could also go down, when we could've done something about that. That goes for the professors/managers as well as for the plain students/workers, but mostly to those that have the power to do something. And this not only applies whenever something goes wrong and heads are lining up to be beheaded.. it also applies when you're designing a piece of software that may influence the lives of millions of people and you decide that testing won't be neccesary, or that the cheaper alternative will do because you really don't care. Or merely to treat your coworkers the right way they deserve to be treated, and they deserve not to be treasoned. Because that people will be there for you in order to give help and support, no matter what. Unless you choose to go with a higher power and leave them behind. In that case, you've chosen your path, but it's not the one I'd like to walk.

Well, I'm back to bring you an awesome video of Mary Poppendieck. From that video I got the inspiration to write the previous article.

A little background information about her would come in handy here:

Mary Poppendieck has been in the information technology industry for 25 years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she provides a business perspective to software development problems.
Lean development is just one of Ms. Poppendieck's areas of expertise. She first encountered the Toyota Production System, which later became known as Lean Production, as Information Systems Manager in a video tape manufacturing plant. She implemented one of the first just-in-time systems in 3M, resulting in dramatic improvements in the plant's performance. Ms. Poppendieck's team leadership skills are legendary at 3M, where new product development is a core competency. One team commercialized a graphics interface controller three times faster than normal. Another team not only developed an image database system in partnership with a start-up company, but also set a new international standard for image formats. Poppendieck, a popular writer and speaker, is the author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit and Managing Director of AgileAlliance.

 And the video. It's a MUST WATCH for any leader in the software development business.