Another thought along the lines of scarcity value…

I have boys ages 12, 10 and 8. Let’s say I take them to Borders so that I can sit around, have a cup of coffee, read a magazine, and let my hair down, at least for a moment. In the olden days, I’d tell them that after I was done, I’d buy them a book or CD or something. That something, a few days later, would be littered in some corner of some room, never to be a gee-gaw that was treasured, but rather a figurative dust bunny scrapped to a shadow life and doomed to a quick end as landfill.

Too often, I played the role of executioner, throwing many things into the garbage. I realized that this stuff was rarely missed; my boys simply didn’t care for these idle thingies. I did know that they could care for the money that provided for this stuff. So now when I go to Borders with my boys, I tell them, “you can either have $8 or you can buy something.” More than half the time, they take the $8, and still enjoy wandering the store looking for something of interest. If they buy something, it actually matter to them. The item is enjoyed not neglected. In the end, I save money, I have less to clean up, and most importantly there isn’t some abused, abandoned gee-gaw that otherwise could have been a piece of treasure to some other person.

d.a

Often with my custom work, clients will hold long meetings where nothing is accomplished. The first part of the meeting always covers the e-mail that everyone should have read, but didn’t. Then people talk about vacations that they just came back from, etc. And nothing gets done.

What you really need to have is a stop watch on every person and when someone speaks, they are charged tokens for every person who has to hear it. Then I think people would probably be more productive in the meeting if they had to really think about the time they are taking up.

I proposed a similar solution to our allocation problem at work. At the time, work was allocated via a weekly meeting between project managers and team leads who arguing over fake projections and demanding every job be done by the best team member. I suggested each pm be given a dollar total based on the jobs they were managing and allowed to bid for services each week. Name-brand services (e.g., “I need developer X”) would incur a premium over the regular hourly rate.

My thought was the scarcity would encourage more accurate forecasting (as opposed to reserving time way in advance that you wind up not using), reduce the amount of name-brand development and reduce the arguing and time wasted in allocation meetings. You’ll note the meeting could be replaced entirely by a shared spreadsheet or fairly simple app.

The idea died a horrible death.

Merlin asks some really fine questions.

I personally struggle, or rather am aware of, my on-line time vs. time with my family. I can’t help but have slight feelings of guilt when I’m on my beloved mac when my family is also in need of me.

Perhaps I need to implement some scarcity rules with my personal computing use. The horror!

Their outlook add-in, Attent, allows you to associate importance to messages using allocated “Serios.”

http://www.seriosity.com/

…but when we have meetings I always make sure I have a notepad handy and leave the laptop in the dock.

It’s best to let the one who called the meeting run the show, all of the rest of us should be taking notes and allow the head to delegate questions as he feels necessary. When taking notes, don’t write down every single detail, just make yourself reminders or sketches to stay focused on what the ultimate goal is.

Break your meetings into brief sections and allow for questions and clarification at the end of each section and stay on topic.

This will turn your meetings into, well…”speed-dating”. Get the information you need, stay on topic and get back to work. All real quick-and-dirty like.

I don’t have anything new to say about scarcity (though I will definitely be thinking about it), but I wanted to add that the example of the chips reinforces something that I’ve noticed lately, which is the value of using actual physical tools rather than online ones.

Whether it’s using paper for my GTD system, or carrying around a Hipster PDA, I’m finding that having tangible things to deal with makes me understand and use them more effectively. Somehow by having an actual physical thing to move from my inbox to a file or list or pile is far more meaningful to me than if I tried to do it online.

It’s also been a real boon to my reading comprehension to print out articles rather than trying to read them on the screen. I imagine having a physical pile of chips to touch and count and give to someone would make the question of allocating meeting time much clearer as well. Unfortunately, I could never convince my coworkers to go along.

As one of the more senior developers who has also been fortunate enough to have a hand in most of the big projects at my company, I get interrupted a lot with questions, bugs and general consulting.

On really bad days I hide in an out-of-the-way conference room (or outside in the summer) and turn my IM client off. It’s amazing how unimportant certain things are when someone has to walk an extra 30 yards to find me. My boss is very supportive of this and knows to leave me alone when I disappear.

How about this: a spittoon sits in the middle of the table, and everyone is given a certain number of ball bearings before the meeting begins.

When the speaker has wandered off-topic, is retreading the same thing they just said 30 seconds ago, or just need to be quiet, you throw a ball bearing in the spittoon. CLANG! This tells the speaker they have lost you, and they gotta get back on topic, or sit the heck down and shut up.

Imagine 10 people all sitting around the table throwing ball bearings into a spittoon! That would get the message across…

I’d love some of these systems, but my boss works in a strict FIFO fashion - the Absolute #1 Priority is whatever the last thing he thought about was.

see those "!!!!" in subject? Let's just use quantity of exclamation marks to signify how important a message is (that's what www.seriosity.com signifies by their Serios currency points). Your memory or future optional plugin to your e-mail program can compare number of exclamation marks to average from this sender.
Good enough to start using now with email, IM and pretty much anything textual.

Can anyone give me a clue how can it be used in semantic HTML? I'm ready to set up a microformat creation process for this.

Until fairly recently I’d managed this by essentially scheduling in those non-work activities that I wanted to make sure happened. For example, Monday and Wednesday mornings had a bike ride structured into them - my first meeting of the day was always scheduled late enough after to ensure enough time to get the ride in and a shower after.

Since my schedule often seems to rule my life, placing that human time on it ensured that it actually happened. I had a shift in my schedule a couple of months ago, lost that time, and haven’t yet managed to re-institute it.

Many of us have made conscious decisions to move away from 9-5-ish sort of work schedules and manage things independently. There’s a lot of good to be said for that, but those structured schedules also structured in that human time. I think Merlin’s right here that we have to find a way to put it into the day ourselves.

I think the main problem with this working “in the real world” is that the system relies on artificial scarcity for it to work. If the meeting manager decides that this meeting is “really important”, s/he will plough right through any self-imposed barriers.

Instead of long giant meetings where the agenda is several high level bullet points, why not apply the GTD concept to the meeting itself. Have a very short meeting to discuss one topic that can be covered in about 10 minutes, then go back to your workspace and follow-up based on the outcome of that meetlet.

Of course, then you run into the problem of context switching. Humans aren’t good at context switching. If you’re in “the zone”, you suffer huge mental penalties for stepping out of that, and doing something else.

I have stopped answering the phone. People who need to talk to me can get to me via e-mail. (My life isn’t so complicated that my e-mail is over-crowded). But I find the phone to be very interruptive. Plus, my answers and thoughts are better organized via e-mail than on the phone.

sWe’ve found that the farther away we are from each other the better. Several years ago we sent everybody home and saw productivity gains. Since then, we’ve all moved to different countries. Different time zones creates smaller windows of appropriate “phone time”. It’s cut down on interruptions and made us happier and more productive. I haven’t seen most of our team in over two years. It’s great!

I’ve found that it’s actually counter-productive in many instances to CC other members on a team with a request to someone for a ‘next action.’ Ever spent time sweeping up after everyone has had a (different) go at a follow-up? Somehow, some folk don’t get what CC means.

While I believe meetings should be limited to only those that are necessary, if you practice Agile development practices, it encourages interactions and collaboration with team members over email/im. There is the daily standup meeting which is critical to remove impediments asap and improves team communication as a whole. That being said, we only commit to work that meets our capacity or how many hours per day/week we can give to a particular project. A PM’s job is to protect their team and ensure they are not taking unnecessary meetings. I do not want to limit my interaction with my team but you do need to balance what is absolutely necessary for that specific person so they can focus on actually coding, designing, testing, etc.

One thing that is often scarce is quaility work and this makes people bored. I used to work for a chap who did not really enjoy his job. He used to convene meetings at a local Starbucks. There’d then be ten minutes of joking around, a catch up from the week before, followed by an informal and tediously overlong meeting. The man was avoiding work and was dragging those who reported to him in on his game. He got sacked. But for a few months me and my colleagues often ended up working late to catch up with our proper work.

I am relatively senior now so I have just let everyone know I am not a meeting person and that my time is scarce for farting about. My emails are short as are phone conversations.

What also is scarce is a bit of slack to allow people to work properly, sensibly and with the appropriate time for a given task.

Essentially my work system based on a certain amount of confidence on my part (probably misplaced). My work is ok, so I let people I work with know I work at my pace and that they cannot have me will nilly. I am happy to say I can’t help someone with something.

I am straight with my time estimates for doing work; or perhaps… maybe not…I overestimate. I use a system from the film “Alien”: Brett estimates that it will take 17 hours to repair Nostromo’s engines and Parker immediately passes this on to Ripley as 25 hours.

At lunch time my phone is off, I go to a local cafe and sit in peace for an hour I read a newspaper or listen to podcasts.I avoid lunch with colleagues where possible, even ones I socialise with. Before 9am the morning I do not answer the phone. I get up have a leisurely breakfast with a cup of tea and some nice music on. I want a clear and relaxed frame of mind. When I get to work I feel ready to work and I do work.

Reading this back I sound like a lazy, awkward sod. I am not (well lazy anyway). My goal is trying to maintain a relatively high average productivity. Going hell for leather and being totally immersed in the work environment for too long is unhealthy and counterproductive. In order to do this I have had to adopt a slightly cantankerous work persona which means I am known as someone not to be put upon; that’s a failing of mine though.