You can focus on what you do best

When you dollarize your time, you can focus on your strengths and outsourcing your weakness will make sense. Working on SchoolPad (my first personal Ruby on Rails project) introduced me to the realities of working alone. I have to learn things like design and copywriting that I knew from the beginning would be hard for a coder like me. But, I had two things that will me help solve my problem – pride and money. I bought all the books I think would be useful and read them every day and night like I was preparing for a do-or-die college exam. In the end, I produced crap and had to beg a friend to salvage my work. After my SchoolPad experience, whenever I work on a freelance project, I make sure I identify the tasks that I can work on and find partners that can help me.

You will not be wasting time

I once complained to a friend that going to the movies is expensive. Then one time, he told me he got a discount (about $3 less) to the movie theater he was working for. He invited me to join him. The problem was it would be a 30-minute (at least) commute. Even if I brought my my wife and 2 kids, it still makes no sense to me. I would rather bring my family to the more expensive theater which is just 5 minutes away, and spend the hour playing in the park with my kids.

How to dollarize your time

The easy way is decide how much you want to earn every hour you work. If you set it at $40/hour, always remind yourself that your hour is worth $40. If you are unsure how many dollars to set, try this formula by Rob Walling (from the book Web Startup Success Guide):

Your $/hour = (current salary x 1.3) / 2000, rounded to the nearest $5 increment.
where 2,000 is approximate number of hours worked in a year

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Do you check your email every 10 minutes?

Do you read everything in your RSS feeds and Twitter streams until your brain hurts?

Is your Facebook account always open?

Do you have hundreds of unread emails?

Is your browser’s bookmarks a mess?

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The staff has developed guidelines for dealing with you and quietly passes them to new employees. “Never suggest that there might be another way of doing something,” they might say. Or “Act self-deprecating so he doesn’t feel threatened.”

#6 Employees start sucking up

You have one or two fanatical acolytes. Yes, such devotion may be a testament to your fabulousness. But often when a boss is perceived as universally loathed, the staff opportunist offers herself up as sole confidante and friend, seeking power and favor at the expense of more honest, critical employees.

#5 Your staff hides from you

You never see people walk by. Employees would rather circumnavigate the entire office to get to the coffee machine or bathroom than take the shortcut past your door and risk being invited in.

#4 Bogus reviews

Your 360-degree evaluations come back short and full of generically positive comments, with one very mild criticism (“Sometimes she works too damn hard for her own good”) thrown in for credibility’s sake.

#3 Apprehension

People don’t volunteer for your pet projects. The idea sucks, and they’re afraid to tell you, or it’s brilliant, but the consequences for letting you down are too terrible to imagine. And, of course, if it’s your pet project, you’ll probably work on it as well. Which means more time spent…gulp…with you.

#2 Former employees disappear forever

You have legions of former employees, but they rarely give your name as a reference for new jobs. Either they don’t trust you to give them their due, or they worry that because they were so miserable working for you, your recollections will also be dismal.

#1 The revolving door

You have legions of former employees, period. If your staff falls away like linty Post-it notes, ask yourself: Is high turnover the problem? Or am I?

[via Inc.]

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1. Ask ‘Why?’ constantly. All creativity stems from questioning why things are the way they are. The more everyday obvious a thing is, the more it needs to be questioned.
2. Always be suspicious when people say, ‘It stands to reason’. Human progress has come from those who had the courage to challenge the generally held view.
3. When working on a problem, never be satisfied with your first solution even if it seems correct. Always look for other answers.
4. Never worry about ideas that don’t work. Most ideas are like that. Just be encouraged to keep trying for a better idea.
5. Always carry a notebook for jotting down any bright ideas that you may have. Ideas come to the surface all the time but, unless they are quickly caught, will often escape and you may well find that you are quite unable to remember them later.
6. It is always easier to ask for forgiveness that to ask for permission. If you believe in your idea, you must go ahead with it at all costs. If you wait for a permission, it might never come. If you find that you are wrong, admit it frankly and then get on you with your next project.
7. Take a random word — the more ridiculous the better — and try to find a way to work it into your creative project. This exercise may seem tough and you might not see right away how it will help but if you persist you’ll be surprised at the number of original notions that suddenly pop into your mind.
8. Always look for new experiences that will stretch your mind. For example, listen to new music, read a magazine that you don’t normally look at, watch a TV documentary on a subject you know nothing about, go somewhere new, talk to new people. If you always stick to your usual routine, you make it hard for new things to influence and inspire you.
9. It is often a good idea to spend some time visualizing what you think a project will look like when it’s finished. This can sometimes show you the path from where you are now to where you will be at the end.
10. It is possible to make a trigger (such as a gesture) that you deliberately associate with creative thought. For example, you could run the tip of your index finger up and down the bridge of your nose whenever you are involved in creative thinking. When you have a bright idea, make sure that you use your trigger. Eventually, the process can be made to work the other way around, and the use of your gesture will prompt you to enter your creative mode and produce bright ideas.
11. Ask a dumb question and you may look stupid for five minutes. Fail to ask it and you will be stupid forever.
12. Always keep stirring the pot. Good ideas will float to the surface unpredictably, but for that to happen there has to be plenty of thought and action going on.
13. First the chaos; then the production of order from chaos. In this way, interesting ideas may be born.

–
From Robert Allen’s Boost Your Creativity

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The short answer: No.

Einstein is a genius. Just like Newton, da Vinci, and Mozart, he belongs to a small group that very few of us will ever be part of. This is not an insult to your capacity but I’m just stating a simple truth – geniuses are born, not made.

However, you share one characteristic with these geniuses that can make you famous, too. It is called creativity.

Creativity is a human characteristic available to everyone. While there is no guarantee you’ll come with an idea as revolutionary as e=mc2, tapping into your creative capacity can help you succeed.

First, you have to accept that you are creative. Even retards exhibit some creativity. However, creativity is not something you enroll in college. It is stupid to think you can just pick a bum on the street, enroll him in Harvard, and he’ll become a genius after 4 years. Creativity needs a room to grow, encouragement, and nourishment.

Capture your ideas. Always have a pen and paper ready. If you think of something, just write it down. You can worry about whether it is good or stupid later. Unless quickly caught,  ideas will escape and you may not remember them again.

Start a project. Buy some Lego and start playing with it. You can buy a model set but don’t restrict yourself with it. How about gardening?

Work on your project regularly. Some people think they need a spark. Well, that spark will not happen if you just sit around. There is no way to predict when that spark will happen but if you regularly work on your project, you will definitely come up with something.

Happiness and creativity are partners. Have you ever met an inventor who doesn’t like what he’s doing? If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, your force yourself into it and everything becomes a burden. If you are not enjoying your project anymore, find a new one.

This is not an exhaustive list and I’m sure there are tons of books written on this subject. Just always keep in mind that creativity is available to everyone but only those who develop their creative power can benefit from it.

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What was it you are doing again?

You are a smart software developer and you need a lot of time alone to finish the new credit card fraud detection algorithm. Unfortunately, only you and Einstein know that.

Programming is one of the most pleasurable moments any software developer will experience aside from sex. Unlike sex where you need at least 1 partner to enjoy it, programming requires an extensive period of time alone — something that is often forgotten even by fellow software developers.

Programmers produce their best code when they are in a ‘zone’ (others call it the ‘flow’). During this stage, developers are fully concentrated in their work as if they are in their own universe. They lose track of time and forget that their last meal was 8 hours ago.

Programmers need at least 2-3 hours of concentrated time to produce sensible work. Less than that, programmers rarely produce something important. There are moments that you go for another 5 hours but sometimes, after doing a lot of creative work, you just spend the rest of the day doing non-brain-intensive tasks like answering support inquiries, reading jokes, and surfing the Internet for the latest scoop on Paris Hilton.

Programming involves managing a lot of tiny details in your brain like variables names, parameter sequence, and where you are in that fraud detection algorithm. It is difficult to juggle these things if every 5 minutes or so you get interrupted by a phone call or laughing colleagues. This is why ‘time alone’ has a big impact on productivity among software developers. Companies like Microsoft and even small shops provide developers with their own private offices. Before you barrage me with MBA studies on productivity in an “open door everybody hears what others are talking about on the phone” study, let me ask you first if you have done any programming work. Writing a 100-page specification does not count. I am talking about dealing with arrays, pointers, recursions, hashes, joins, stack traces, Unicode. If you have not, please don’t interrupt me right now.

When a programmer tells you they want to work late at night until morning the next day, it is not because they hate the sun but simply because it is much easier to get in the zone when the rest of the world is sleeping. Even in the office, there is very little possibility that somebody would call after 7 pm so you would rarely be interrupted by a phone call.

Getting in the zone is difficult to attain and even harder to hold onto. Just getting in the zone takes an average of 15 minutes of uninterrupted time. So if you get interrupted every 10 minutes, you will never reach that productive 3 hour period. And you will just have to spend your 8 hours at work answering emails, listening to ambient noise, and wondering why you have ‘account[0]’ in your code. Even a 1-minute chat in your instant messenger can get you knocked out for another 30 minutes.

The key to reaching the zone is to avoid communication. To get started, you must give up instant messaging, phone calls, emails, meetings, and answering coworker questions. You must also protect yourself from ambient noise.

You can easily turn off stuff that you have control of like instant messaging, emails, and mobile phones. Meetings are often scheduled so if somebody asks for your availability, give the period that doesn’t overlap with your ‘zone’. Much better if you can set a ‘no interruption’ period among your co-workers. That way meetings won’t affect each other’s zone.

Ambient noise like those coming from your officemates’ keyboard can be solved by giving yourself a nice headphone. Rip some music from your Josh Groban collection and you now have your own ‘digital noise reduction system’.

Dealing with a coworker’s questions is more difficult. There is no incentive to ignore your co-workers unless you want to get ostracized. Helping a colleague is also another way to increase your good karma points. However, if you want to get productive you must give yourself uninterrupted time even if it means telling people to respect your “Do not disturb” sign on your cubicle. (You can also do that in your instant messenger) Don’t worry about people perceiving you as rude. People who knows the nature of programming and productive themselves will surely understand what’s going on when you are in the ‘zone’.

We are also guilty of interrupting ourselves. Sometimes when we are stuck in our work, we change tasks like surfing the Internet, reading a book, or updating our blog. Just as it is important for other people not to interrupt you when you’re in the zone, it is equally important that you manage yourself that you stay focus on the programming task at hand. Oftentimes, it is more difficult to tell ourselves to shut up and work than to tell our co-workers to “leave me alone”.

Don’t confuse working alone with not interacting with colleagues. You also need to set a time that you will be available to your team and customers. The key is to determine when you want to get interrupted and when you don’t want to, and to balance the time alloted for each.

So how would you set the no-interruption time? The simplest way to do it is to set up a no-interrupt time and make sure everybody follows – no instant messenger, no email, no “Hey”, no phone calls, no meetings. Just work, work, and work.

“The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it.”
— Mark Twain’s Notebook

If you like this post, please buy me a book. :)

–
Photo courtesy of wittyswittys.

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