A Spork in the Road

Jonathan Follett, in one of two current articles posted on A List Apart, discusses The Rules of Digital Engagement:

When it comes to work style and culture, virtual teams—especially groups of contractors—are inherently less formal and more flexible than traditional office-based organizations. We are, as William Gibson puts it in his novel Pattern Recognition, “post-geographic”—operating beyond physical boundaries. But when workers no longer collaborate within a particular physical space, they must adopt a disciplined devotion to process. In digital space, the physical artifacts of day-to-day business we share are gone—what remains are discussions and deliverables. The way we hold discussions and create deliverables becomes increasingly important.

I love collaborating online, except when I’m dealing with someone who has poor communication skills. These are never people we enjoy dealing with, but the problems are magnified by geographical distance. When you can’t sit down with a person and hash out what she’s trying to tell you—in person—it can double or triple the amount of time it takes to complete a simple task.

I’m always discovering ways to improve electronic communication. For example, I try to limit emails to one topic or main question, and I use a lot more paragraph breaks than I otherwise would. I agree with Follett that, a decade into mainstream electronic communication, we’re still figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

My beloved O’Reilly Linux News newsletter this week included a link to an article that itself linked to a free software tool called Workrave. It’s designed to treat and prevent repetitive stress injuries (RSI) from sitting too long in front of the computer.

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Still no time to write my own posts, so here’s another interview excerpt, this time an interview with Burmese monk Sayadaw U Tejaniya in the Winter 2007 Tricycle:

…when wisdom grows, it leads you by the nose. You can’t stop. That’s why I like the atheists. There’s hope for them. There is no need to believe anything. People become atheists because they think—they cannot believe, but they still want to know.

In the beginning, just start with wanting to know. Everyone has some curiosity, some basic need to know. Just encourage that. A good education is motivating a person to want to know for himself. All the cramming and rote learning is never a good education. You won’t get the best out of people that way. Their potential is stifled. Only people with an inner urge to learn will keep developing.

—Sayadaw U Tejaniya

Another pseudo-post, this time cribbing a fabulous excerpt of an interview with Kelly Link. I hope to someday be bored again…

Boredom is useful for writers. I need a certain amount of boredom to get work done. But I also need to do other things besides sit at a desk and write. If I weren’t involved in various editing projects, I would have to find something else to do. You need other kinds of work, and you also need significant periods of stillness in order to have time to think. Boredom allows time for thinking. Even in writing, boredom serves a useful function — if I’m boring myself when I write, it means I need to stretch myself, try something I haven’t done before. I can only keep at one kind of work for so long and then I need a change. For the past couple of years it’s been kind of nice to have months in which I am writing, then to move from that to editing the books, thinking about design, print runs, fonts, et cetera. — Kelly Link in Locus Magazine

I’m reading a fantastic book about agile software development: The Art of Agile Development by James Shore and Shane Warden. And as I’m reading, I’m thinking about how to scale some of these principles — designed for and derived from teams of approximately 3-20 people — down to a team of 1.

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I got an email from Al Gore the other day about Current.com, which I checked out because, you know, it’s an Al Gore project, and I’m always curious what he’s up to.

I eventually ended up on a very simple but wonderful site called Study Guides and Strategies. This is right up my alley. It’s subtitled “An educational public service helping learners to succeed.”

So next time you’re fighting off procrastination, or preparing to give a speech, or wondering how to manage stress in Kiswahili, or just plain bored, check out this site.

If the title of this post does not make you either chuckle or weep, you may not understand the post. However, if you are reading this blog, you are obviously on a computer, and are probably interested in writing and/or web development, and therefore if you say you have not fallen victim to FreeCell Addiction, then I say you are lying.

Let’s face it. We probably need our own 12 Step Program. FreeCell Anonymous: dry-eyed attendees with twitchy mouse fingers and a tendency to huddle around the refreshments table and methodically sort the napkins by color and shape.

However, I am discovering that FreeCell may not be as pernicious as I thought. Or rather, it is pernicious in a useful way.
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I love words. Love them. In fact, although I try to cultivate a zen acceptance of my own mortality, my most vivid terror about aging is the idea of forgetting words — I feel a choking horror at the thought that I might reach for a word and… not find anything.

Part of this terror stems from my tendency to use words based on an instinctual, rather than a conscious, understanding of their meaning. Let me illustrate: last week I used the word “redux” in a conversation with Maureen in a context that didn’t make sense to her. When she asked me to clarify the word, my vocabulary alarm went off: Maureen knows words, so why didn’t she know this one?

For the longest time I’ve used “redux” to mean “a brief summary.” You know, you’re “reducing” a topic to its essentials. It made sense to me.

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Here’s an interesting example of the bizarre and very science-fictional results of creative ideas meeting technical requirements:

Report inappropriate memories by clicking here. Please give the memory number when reporting (the memory number can be found in blue text at the bottom of each memory).

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Slow down.

Sometimes Procrastination is not the specter du jour; instead, I sit at my desk and slog, slog, slog through my work. My absolute determination to Get Something Done is the only thing between my mushy brain and complete catatonia.

Every time I look at the clock I’m appalled: another hour and this is all I have to show for it?? Let’s get a move on!

It’s not that I’m avoiding work. I’m just doing a crap job.

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