What's your best email productivity tip?

Increasingly, we spend more of our time in our inboxes these days and as such being productive with email has become vitally important. I've picked up a few ideas recently, most notably Delay 2 minutes, avoid looking like a jerk and Don't send that attachment! but I wanted to see what the general public thought.

Over at LinkedIn Answers, I posed the question, "What's your best email productivity tip?" and got a lot of great responses. I was also lucky enough to get picked as the Question of the Week, where the previous winner was Bill Gates. I'm sure we'll do lunch soon 8).

There were a lot of tips along the lines of folder use within your email client of choice. Sheilah Etheridge responded with an interesting idea using color coding:

"I use a lot of folders so I can always find what I am looking for. I also color code people so I know at first glance if it is work, personal or other. This is very helpful when you get both work and personal emails from the same person. You can see immediately what is a priority.

I also Move everything to its folder once it has been dealt with. There is never anything in my inbox except those items which still need to be addressed. I also try to reply within a day or two max and within a day if it is business related."

Robert Lynch suggests a way to avoid becoming distracted as new messages come in:

"My best tip: Turn off automatic notification of new messages.

Instead of switching to my e-mail program every time my computer goes "ding," I can keep concentrating and getting stuff done."

A tip I first read about in Send - The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home was offered by Anita Bruzzese along with another about early morning habits:

"Two things: Say 'no reply necessary' in order to stop the replies that say 'thanks' or 'that's great.' Next, don't check e-mail the first hour that you're awake. Use that time to exercise, have a nice cup of coffee with a partner or simply breathe deeply and have a nice shower. Getting sucked into e-mail that early will only make you feel deluged all day. You only have one chance to start your day off right, and that means staying away from such a time suck!"

Steve Patrizi came up with a drag and drop technique:

"I'm a big user of the drag-n-drop capabilities in Outlook: I drag a message to the calendar icon, which opens up an appointment with the complete message included in the body of the appointment. This way, if the email is something I need for a meeting, I have all of the information there. I do the same thing with Tasks, which is actually a nice way to keep action-required emails out of your inbox and in your task list."

And, finally, Chris Carpinello shares my love of GTD:

"Without a doubt, the largest email productivity improvement for me was adopting David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD). My inbox used to overflow with hundreds of messages. Every time I opened it, I felt mentally drained rereading the same things over and over again. It was so taxing at times it would take me 20-30 minutes to mentally shift gears and get back into the flow. Now I empty my inbox everytime I process it. Messages get filed for reference or deleted, delegated to others, responded to immediately if it takes just a few minutes, or moved to an action folder. I can work out of my action folder and know exactly what needs to get done."

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The Hard Rock Hotel from a 5-year olds point of view

When we were planning our annual pilgrimage to Orlando last year, we were considering making a stop at the Universal Resort in addition to our usual time spent at Walt Disney World. In the process, I was reminded of something I run into at work all the time, but in a much cuter story. Namely:

Don't assume everyone has the same context on a decision that you do.

Like a lot of people, my wife and I started our search online. Universal's Orlando Resort features the movie-making oriented Universal Studios theme park, the thrill ride slanted Islands of Adventure, and an elaborately themed shopping district called City Walk. Also on the property are three different hotels and we spent a big part of our early reading on the different amenities at the Royal Pacific Resort, the Portofino Bay Hotel, and the Hard Rock Hotel.

Our then 5-year old daughter was in the room as we were discussing the different aspects of the hotels when she announced:

"I don't want to stay at that Hard Rock Hotel."

When we asked her why, she said:

"It doesn't sound very comfortable."

Maybe that marketing manager doesn't understand the technology like you do or perhaps you just used some slang term that your colleague who was raised in a different country from you doesn't understand, but it's all the same as this situation here. Without a shared context, someone might jump to a conclusion you don't expect. Try hard to establish that common point of view and things will flow more smoothly.

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A multimillion dollar documentation mistake

The biggest mistake I see young software engineers make is to assume that the product ends once it's cleared testing. If you've been a part of making a great product, it lives on a long, long time beyond the several months you spent building it. Ultimately, the maintenance costs far outweigh the initial development costs and given how frequently people come into and out of teams, documenting how the thing works becomes crucial when later revisions become necessary.

A great example of how not doing this correctly can come back to be quite expensive has reared itself at my beloved Disneyland. A documentation mistake has cost a particular project several million dollars in overage and months in delays. I have a great respect and admiration for Disney's Imagineering department (see Restrictions Breed Creativity) and usually they do a great job morphing attractions over time (see The Old Disneyland Matterhorn), but they've gotten themselves into problems with recent work on the Disneyland Monorail.

Opened on July 14, 1959 the Disneyland Monorail was the first daily operating monorail system in the Western Hemisphere. The winding path it takes through Tomorrowland and over to Downtown Disney is largely the same today as the original line, but the trains themselves have been retrofitted several times over the years of wear and tear. The last of those refurbishments took place during my high school days in the '80s and first of a new fleet of trains arrived at Disneyland this past December.

But, a pretty serious problem surfaced pretty quickly, as reported by longtime Disney fan reporter Al Lutz recently:

"Things began to go wrong just a few days after the new train arrived and was gingerly set down on the beam back at the roundhouse adjacent to Harbor Blvd. The arrival and installation of the train onto the track went fairly smoothly, with the exception of some scuffed up paint caused by the shrink wrap used for shipping.

. . .

When the train was being moved out of the roundhouse and towards the track switch that leads to the mainline at the back of Tomorrowland, the front of the train began to ease through a gentle S-curve that leads from the roundhouse towards the track switch. It was at that point that a grinding and crumpling noise was heard from under the train itself, and the horrified engineer immediately brought the train to a stop."

Crumpling sounds and moving vehicles aren't a good combination. Plus, there are some far tighter turns than the one that gets the train onto the main line, so the problem was way bigger than just this one section.

What happened? With his freaky inside contacts, Al explains:

"There is still a formal investigation yet to be completed, but the smoking gun now appears to be the original 1980's blueprints that were maintained by Disneyland and WDI. Apparently some changes to the chassis were undertaken back in the 1980's prior to entering service, but they never made it onto the blueprints kept on file back in that less technologically savvy time. When one of the old trains was dissected and used in a form of reverse engineering, the difference between the actual chassis and what the blueprints called for helped cause a miscalculation in the dimensions of the new trains chassis. The result is a new train that now has structural damage to the chassis and that still hasn't been able to make it around the track on its own."

I'd argue, though, that the "less technologically savvy time" has little to do with it. The project doesn't end just because your part of it is completed and if you don't properly document what you did, problems can result later. I'm no stranger to making the million dollar mistake myself and this one in particular is an easy one to make, but due diligence when it comes to documentation pays off in the problem you avoid creating later.

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Walking in others shoes, at least in spirit

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror had a great article last Friday entitled UsWare vs ThemWare that focuses on the importance of understanding what users of software go through. More broadly interpreted, though, it makes a great case for taking the time to understand the perspective of someone else for a better end product.

In his post, Jeff quotes Eric Sink's post on 3 kinds of software:

1. MeWare
   The developer creates software. The developer uses it. Nobody else does.
2. ThemWare
   The developer creates software. Other people use it. The developer does not.
3. UsWare
   The developer creates software. Other people use it. The developer uses it too.

Mr. Atwood then comments:

"It behooves software developers to understand users, to walk a mile in their shoes. If we can bridge the gap between users and ourselves-- even if only a little-- we start slowly converting our mediocre ThemWare into vastly superior UsWare. To really care about the software you're writing, you have to become a user, at least in spirit."

I couldn't agree more, but I'd argue this sentiment extends to well beyond software development:

• Why is that time line so important to that marketing guy when it'll mean reduced quality or fewer features?
• How big a deal is it for the product casing to be a certain color when sold in a particular country?
• Where did that finance guy get that we had to spend money equally across the next three quarters instead of having just one big figure to draw from as we need throughout the year?

These kinds of questions come up all the time in lots of different fields and you owe it to your project and your company to walk in the shoes of others to find out their answers. More generally, then:

To really care about the project you're working on, you have to become the other people working on it, at least in spirit.

I could certainly do this more often myself and when I've taken the time to do so in the past it has paid off.

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Worst public speaking moments

Jerry Seinfeld likes to quote a statistic that the #1 fear of people is to speak in public and #2 is death, which means that at a funeral more people would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

Admittedly, it can be a terrifying experience to get up in front of a group of people you don't know and keep them interested. In a recent running diary, I told the story of a presentation that went epically bad and one that went a lot better. Then I got to wondering what others have gone through, so I posted a question over on LinkedIn Answers:
What was your worst public speaking moment and what did you learn from it?

I got some great answers the first is on not getting rattled:

"In a public presentation as I was presenting a controversial proposal, a Board member jumped up visibly VERY angry, grabbed his wife by her elbow and almost drug her out. I knew I was to be fired and I have no idea what I said the remainder of the presentation. It could not have too off topic, because I kept my job. The Board member was upset because his wife had whispered she thought she had left the stove turned on."

I like this one because my wife is from this area of the country and this sort of thing actually happens:

"Allow adequate travel time: My directions to reach a small community group in Louisiana: From Alexandria, go south on Hwy 1 for 30 miles to the flashing yellow light, turn left, when road ends in a "T" turn left, first building on the left. So, I allowed 1 hour. As soon as I turned left off of the highway, I entered swamp. Over 1 hour later from that spot, after literally stopping for 10 minutes while a 8' alligator crawled off the road, I came to the ONLY building since I left the highway - it was surrounded by dug-out canoes and had no electricity for my audiovisuals. But the "worst moment" passed, they had passed the time talking and were surprised I had found the place. It was one of the friendliest and most receptive audiences I've ever had."

Be prepared:

"I think that having to talk to empty slides on the screen tops the list here. The images for my talk have not come up on the screen as I have saved the wrong version of the talk and ended up with 2 blank slides. Now I always double check my versions that I upload at conferences and other meetings."

A physical mishap:

"As I slid the chair back, the carpet began to bunch-up and the chair flipped backward WITH ME IN IT!

The chair rolled over very slowly, in fact my co-presenter said it was like watching a scene from the Matrix it was so slow. The audience gasped as I hit the floor. 40 years of martial arts training resulted in a reflexive back roll and I landed on my feet in a fighting stance (trust me, looks worse when you do). By now the audience was in a full fledged belly laugh, as was my co-presenter and our entire support team. "

And finally, watch out for that sneaky desktop image:

"I was in the audience for training from a network hardware vendor. The vendor turned on his laptop, plugged in and started organizing his notes next to his laptop. As the machine booted, the background of his desktop flashed on the projector: A shot of a fully naked female engaged in what gave a new meaning to 'oral presentation.'

Half the crowd gasped. Half laughed. And one female said, 'OH MY GOD!' By the time the presenter figured out there was a problem, the background had changed to his company's logo. After several minutes of discomfort, the presenter finally asked, 'What just happened.' Our Director of Training (who was female), said to him, 'We'd best talk in the hallway.' She returned, the speaker did not. And I never did get training on that company's equipment."

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Watch This DVD: Pixar Short Films Collection

My favorite thing to do in software is build prototypes. Gone is the laborious rigor required of a full production release, absent is the pressure of having to meet a deadline. Instead, you get to learn, try stuff, and have fun. In that same vein for computer animation, this past holiday season, Pixar released a collection of its past short films on DVD complete with a fascinating featurette on the history of the company called Pixar Short Films Collection.

Starting out as an arm of George Lucas’ ILM, the Pixar technical team was at the forefront of computer graphics processing in the early 1980s. As they began to increase their abilities, though, they found the demos they produced were missing a flair for storytelling that, as techies, nobody on the team possessed.

Enter John Lasseter. Famous now for being the director of the Toy Story films, among others, Lasseter came to Pixar from Disney and helped produce the first short on the disc, Andre and Wally B.:


Pixar-Adventures of Andre and Wally B. - Click here for another funny movie.

Cutting edge for the time, the characters exhibited emotion and were made of more sophisticated polygons than the normal spheres and cubes. What emerged in that film was a method of working that continued throughout the graphics revolution that Pixar led that also highlights the synergy that can be achieved by incorporating a perspective (in this case, a trained artist) very different from the one the technical staff producing the software had.

The cone shape of humanoid character in Andre and Wally B., so the featurette tells us, was a result of Lasseter asking for more artistic freedom. “Can you give me a. . . “ became a common way for him to start a conversation with his software developer teammates. Because Lasseter was trying to optimize the power of the storytelling, as opposed to the complexity of the processing, he and the team were able to make functionality leaps that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.

While some of the shorts on the disc were created as extra content for selling two disc sets of theatrical releases of movies like Cars and Monsters, Inc. most of the content is a result of cutting edge prototyping. After leaving the shorts for several years, the studio realized that they provided younger staff members an ideal environment to unlock creativity and gain experience in a relatively risk-free environment.

My favorite short on the disc is Knick Knack, which I saw at a cartoon film festival at the La Jolla Museum of Art in 1989 at the end of my freshman year of college. It is based on a habit that Lasetter’s wife has of collecting knick knacks from every place they go on vacation and features an original song by the then very hot Bobby McFerrin. Also worth noting, I happened to see Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park’s Creature Comforts at the same festival. In hindsight, to see two sets of work that would later become prominent was very, very cool.


Pixar-Knick Knack - A funny movie is a click away

To put the available technology in perspective, I had my trusty 286 IBM PC clone with it’s 20 megabyte hard drive back at my on campus apartment when I saw this for the first time. I wrote term papers on it and played a lot of Larry Bird and Dr. J Go 1 on 1. the breakthrough for this film was the buoyancy of the floating snowflakes, which must have been a major undertaking. A “PG” version of this (one in which the breasts of the female characters no longer abnormally large) appeared as a bonus on the Finding Nemo two disc set a few years ago, so it may be familiar to you if you are a fan of that film.

And, if you now have Bobby McFerrin songs stuck in your head after watching that video, you’re welcome. Don’t worry, be happy.

Building prototypes is among the funnest things to do in my job and it was very satisfying to see the progression of the combination of technology and artistry, with a heavy dose of commentary, from the people who made it all happen. Together and using the lessons they learned from these short films, they changed the way animation is done.

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Is your new job lousy?

CNN/CareerBuilder ran an interesting article over the long weekend entitled "Six signs your new job is lousy" that I liked a lot. My favorite was #2, which reads:

"You were shown to a cubicle your first day of work, given a company manual and haven't spoken to anyone since. Any good employer trains new hires during their first few days on the job. Although you might have years of experience, each company has its own procedures and expectations that you won't magically know without some instruction. From the first day, your new employer should make it clear that you have a network of support ready to help you and answer any questions."

Getting a new employee up to speed can certainly be a challenge, but any good team knows that the sooner the noob gets over the learning curve the capacity of the team will improve. Ideally, when you are ready to hire you have a training plan in place before you conduct the interviews as that's a fair set of things for the prospective employee to inquire about.

If they say, "What will I be doing the first few weeks as I learn the lay of the land?" and your answer is, "Um, er, uh . . . ." then that's a problem. A fixable one, but a problem nonetheless.

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Classic Nerd Guru: Restrictions breed creativity

Note: This article originally ran on February 13, 2007, is slightly edited for reprint in an effort to share previously published ideas with new readers.

Do you ever feel like you could do more if only you had a higher budget?

Have you thought your project would be better if management or preexisting conditions hadn't shackled how you really wanted to do things?

Wish you could take advantage of that cool new technology, only it's not approved for use by your company yet?

We all run into restrictions during the course of a project and they are usually the source of a lot of frustration. Limiting factors can make things more complicated than they otherwise would be, but they also breed creativity. Such was the case in the 1960s when Disney Imagineers began to expand Disneyland.

Most people have been to a version of the Haunted Mansion at a Disney park somewhere in the world. You are led into a dark, creepy room. The Disney cast member closes the door and a recorded spiel begins to tell you that the parlor you just entered is inhabited by 999 happy haunts (there's room for 1,000, any volunteers?). The walls of the room depict previous guests in paintings. The lights get dark, there are scary noises, and then the room appears to stretch.

It's a cool effect that sets the scene nicely before you proceed onto your "doom buggy" for the remainder of your ride, but did you ever wonder why the room stretches? It isn't for the sake of the effect, as you might expect. A key restriction in the original version of the ride at Disneyland in California is why. Disney Imagineers used a physical limitation they could not change to come up with an effect that turned out to be a trademark of the ride and duplicated in other versions despite the absence of the same pre-existing problem.

From an early age, Walt Disney was fascinated with trains. So much so, he had a well-known and very elaborate scale model train in his back yard for many years before Disneyland's opening in 1955. When the plans for a theme park were being created, among the things that Walt insisted upon was that their be a train route that encircled the park.

Disneyland aerial photo taken in around 1955

The effect of this is that the train track, which can be seen in Figure 1 as the inner circuit that encompasses park (the outer one was a service road that no longer exists in its entirety), restricts the amount of real estate available for attractions. As Disneyland began to expand, this space limitation became a problem.

For the Haunted Mansion, the stretching room provides the solution. The room doesn't stretch up as the visual illusion would have you believe. Instead, the entire room is great big elevator that takes guests below the elevation of the train tracks. As you enter or exit that room (in the California version), look down and you should be able to see a noticeable elevator threshold.

The hallway that connects the stretching rooms (there are two of them) to the doom buggy loading area runs directly beneath the railroad tracks. Once you are loaded into your buggy, you are in a structure that is outside the bounds of the railroad tracks for a majority of the ride. This approach is used in several places throughout Disneyland to maximize space inside the tracks without limiting the size of the attractions.

The stretching room effect proved to be so popular with guests, it was replicated in all other versions of the attractions despite the absence of the train tracks limitation. At Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in Florida, for example, the room really does stretch up to achieve the same effect.

When you have unlimited resources, you can afford to be sloppy with your designs. Restrictions introduce a set of rules that you cannot change and are forced to be creative in order to come up with a solution. In many cases, as what happened to Disney Imagineers when designing the Haunted Mansion, this forces you to come up with a better solution despite the limitations being placed upon you.

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Pressure Makes Diamonds

How do you respond to pressure? It can be difficult to perform at your highest level when there is a lot at stake, but when you do, the rewards can be great. When he reads this, I suspect the title of this post will bring a smile to my fathers face because he used to tell me this all the time as a kid whenever I had a big test or a particularly important game:

“Pressure makes diamonds”

He’d say it half kiddingly, and he hardly invented the phrase, but the point is that if you perform well under pressure the rewards are great.

In my line of work that usually means meeting a deadline, troubleshooting some big problem that’s broken, or presenting a new and perhaps controversial idea to the people in charge. I came across an instance of the last one recently that most Americans who have been paying attention to politics in the last four years are no doubt aware of.

I make no secret that I have a man-crush on Barack Obama, as my review of his 1995 biography reveals. I just finished his second book, The Audacity of Hope, which is essentially his manifesto for what he’d do as President of the United States if he were elected. It covers everything from partisanship to race relations to foreign policy and was a national best seller upon its publication in 2006.

Even if you don’t agree with his politics, there is an important lesson to be learned from the epilogue of the book about being asked to perform on a big stage and the benefits it can reap. As he describes, he was an unknown Illinois state legislator who was running for a Senate seat on the national level for the first time back in 2004. During the primary in Illinois that year he met John Kerry and spoke at a fund raiser for Kerry in the state. For reasons Obama was uncertain of, when Kerry won his party's nomination Obama was selected as the keynote speaker at the convention.

In the epilogue, Obama describes the process he went through in writing his speech for this first chance at national exposure, which would center on a phrase his pastor had used in a sermon, “The audacity of hope”. His speech would become known by this phrase and the book is named after it as well. Once he arrived at the convention, he went from being this guy who's name nobody could pronounce to suddenly being on Meet the Press with Tim Russert for the first time and doing interviews with all the broadcast and cable networks leading up to addressing the entire convention audience.

He describes what those final moments were like, beginning on page 359 of the paperback version of the book:

“. . .finally it was just (my wife) Michelle and me sitting backstage and watching the broadcast, that I started to feel just a tad bit nervous. I mentioned to Michelle that my stomach was feeling a little grumbly. She hugged me tight, looked into my eyes, and said, ‘Just don’t screw it up, buddy!’

We both laughed. Just then, one of the production managers came into the hold room and told me it was time to take my position offstage. Standing behind the black curtain, listening to Dick Durbin introduce me, I thought about my mother and father and grandfather and what it might have been like for them to be in the audience. I thought about my grandmother in Hawaii, watching the convention on TV because her back was too deteriorated for her to travel. I thought about all the volunteers and supporters back in Illinois who had worked so hard on my behalf.

Lord, let me tell their stories right, I said to myself. Then I walked onto the stage.”

Imagine the pressure: An unknown guy given a shot at a huge stage. Mess it up and nobody will ever know who he is. I’ll never know what that kind of pressure is like and most of us won’t. But, like my Pop says, pressure makes diamonds:


(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNCLomrqIN8 for my email subscribers)

As you likely know already, this performance catapulted Obama onto the national political landscape and as I type he is vying for the 2008 Democratic Presidential Nomination. None of it happens, though, without the opportunity to give that speech and without him delivering the goods when he got the chance.

Not all chances like this work out for everybody, to be sure. I’ve certainly had plenty of slip-ups myself, like the time I cost the company several million dollars with a premature recommendation on some vendor software that didn't work as advertised. That took awhile to recover from, careerwise, but that’s the chance you take and you learn from those mistakes so you don't repeat them when the next window comes along.

But, if you deliver on most of them, good things happen. Look for these opportunities. Seek them out. You never know where performing well with them might lead you. For one guy, it gave a skinny kid with a funny name a shot at being the most powerful person in the world.

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Testing Seinfeld's "The Deal"

Here's a common problem: You have some really cool idea that takes some completely different approach to a problem and despite getting your whole team excited about the idea, it gets shot down by management. The suits upstairs are pretty risk averse, as a general rule, but that doesn't mean they're right. I know what you're thinking, "What could this possibly have to do with Seinfeld?"

I went digging for my Seinfeld Seasons 1&2 DVD set the other day so I could prepare a Watch This DVD article on the very interesting bonus footage on the genesis of the series when I instead stumbled upon an unexpectedly good example of the use of testing to prove the merits of an unconventional theory that management doesn't endorse.

What can be easy to forget is that Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David weren't always Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, geniuses behind what many consider to be US TV's greatest comedy. When they first started, they were just two guys who wrote what they thought was funny and the suits at NBC didn't always agree with them. The first volume of the DVD set has both Seasons 1&2 on it because both were extraordinarily short as a result of a full season not being ordered by NBC until it's third year. Conventional wisdom in those early days by the management team was that the series wouldn't make it due to how offbeat it was (which, ironically, ended up being the reason it was popular).

Among the things NBC management thought the show needed was for Jerry and Elaine to be a couple instead of just friends. The thinking was that this confused audiences and that they needed to be together in order for people to connect with the characters. Although Larry David in particular disagreed, he came up with a compromise to placate his bosses in what aired as the finale to Season 2, "The Deal".

As I watched the disk set again, I turned on the audio commentary for each episode and the one for "The Deal" presented a case for testing an unconventional idea. The premise for the episode is that Jerry and Elaine want to remain friends, but become friends who occasionally have sex. As explained in the audio commentary, this is based on an actual relationship Larry David had and "the rules" established in the show in an attempt to keep a "relationship" from developing stemmed from the ones he actually used in real life. As a refresher, they were:

1. No calls the next day
2. Sleeping over is optional
3. No good night kiss

So, NBC executives left the second season thinking that the two characters would have a love interest in Season 3, but then something happened: Jerry Seinfeld toured the country during the hiatus with is stand up act. A regular feature of this act was that he'd take questions from the audience in an attempt to interact with them and what he discovered is that people hated Jerry and Elaine being together despite it being a typical TV formula (again, probably because it was a typical TV formula)

With this anecdotal evidence in hand, the next season began with the two characters as friends with no explanation as to what happened. When the show grew in popularity in that 3rd season, NBC left them alone on a host of control issues, including the Jerry/Elaine dynamic.

While this isn't exactly the kind of formal research, prototype, testing model you'd use in an engineering situation, the conflict between creative staff and management is a familiar one. By coming up with a compromise and then testing the assertions made creativity won out, ultimately in a big, big way.

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NFL Films is cool

As we rapidly approach another highly anticipated match up in the big game, pitting Brazillian supermodel dating, two-time Super Bowl MVP, GQ cover boy, "I'm really just an average guy" (yeah, right) quarterback Tom Brady versus Peyton's little brother who looks like he still gets beat up by bullies, I can't help but be in awe of NFL Films.

I make it a habit to try to learn about greatness in things I find otherwise interesting on its own (hence the multitude of Disney relate posts I make) and since I'm a son of a high school football coach, I've seen my share of NFL archive footage over the course of my lifetime. Last year, I was extremely impressed with the America's Game series (I particularly liked the one on the 1994 San Francisco 49ers), but just about everything this little arm of the NFL does is impressive.

Like a lot of interesting stories, this one starts simply. Ed Sabol was a coat salesman who, in the late 1950s got into home movies as a hobby, including filming the high school football games his son Steve played in. He thought he got pretty good at it and scraped together $3000 to be the exclusive video recorder of the 1961 NFL Championship game, figuring that he could put together a highlight reel he could then show at movie theaters around the country for a profit. The NFL was so happy with the result and his subsequent efforts, that 2 years later, they bought his then video production company, asked him to run it, and christened it NFL Films. He started producing year in review highlight reels for each team and the company has been going strong ever since.

Steve Sabol now runs the company that has become known for its distinctive style. NFL Films highlights, with their timely use of slow motion and closeups combined with dramatic music and voice overs, have a way of making a 5 yard touchdown run seem like a key component to establishing world peace. They came up with innovations like caputring massive numbers of camera angles so that editors could be more creative, general field microphone dishes to harness the roar of the crowd and the crack of the violent collisions, and wiring both players and coaches for an insight into the dialog behind the action that was absent before.

The results have been great promotional material for the league over the years and have earned NFL Films 92 Emmy's to date.

A few months ago, Wired ran an article about how NFL Films is digitizing its entire library. Not only do they have plans to stream parts of the archive for a fee to fan, keyword tagging of the footage allows editors to assemble new shows from recycled footage more quickly than former manual indexing methods could. This is a huge win for the NFL Network, the cable channel the league operates that rotates shows that includes old footage on a regular basis.

And it all started because a guy had a hobby that he loved, he took a chance, and let his creativity lead his company to innovations. Cool.

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Kindergarten Synergy

Just when I think I'm doing a decent job at blogging and do something relatively creative like hosting a crossword puzzle contest, Jeff Atwood makes another brilliant observation that shows me why he has over 75K subscribers.

Last week, Jeff posted an article entitled, "No Matter What They Tell You, It's a People Problem" he made a great argument for why synergy in a team is so important. Here's the meat of it:

Let's say I was tasked with determining whether your software project will fail. With the responses to these three questions in hand, I can tell you with almost utter certainty whether your project will fail:

1. How many lines of code will your team write?
   
2. What kind of software are you building?
3. Do you like your coworkers?

That last question isn't a joke. I'm not kidding. Do you like the company of your teammates on a personal level? Do you respect your teammates professionally? If you were starting at another company, would you invite your coworkers along? Do you have spirited team discussions or knock-down, drag-out, last man standing filibuster team arguments? Are there any people on your team you'd "vote off the island" if you could?

Even if you aren't a software engineer by trade, this makes a great point about how solid working relationships with your teammates can build a synergy that improves your collective productivity.

The most productive team I ever worked on consisted of 11 people who worked at 8 different physical locations. We all knew the names of each other's spouses, kids, and pets. Everyone shared vacation photos with each other and we delivered more than a dozen and a half on time or early software development projects in 3 years.

How did my brilliant manager at the time (who also invented The Lego Exercise) achieve this level of interaction?

Show and tell.

Because we were almost all remote from each other, a regular part of our 90 minute Friday staff meeting conference call and NetMeeting session was for one member of the team to talk about something they'd recently done in their non-work life. Straight from Kindergarten, some people talked about the sports teams they followed, others about activities they did with their kids, and eventually just about everybody talked about vacations they had gone on.

It was slow at first and not everybody was comfortable sharing, but eventually everybody wanted to get in on the act. He talked me into doing the second one (he did the first one on his annual Christmas light extravaganza) and I did a presentation about how Star Tours works. It was his attempt to simulate the "water cooler time" we missed because we were so spread out across the country.

It sounds hokey, but it paid dividends big time.

I'd love to hear about experiences other people have had. What technique have you been a part of for achieving team synergy?

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Delay 2 minutes, avoid looking like a jerk

We've all been there: 30 seconds after pressing that send button on an email you realize you shouldn't have sent it at all.

Maybe you were replying in anger or realized you could have made a particular point better. Regardless of what it might be, wouldn't it be nice to delay your send by a few minutes so you could catch a mistake like this?

I had a really nice conversation with Will Schwalbe the other day on this exact topic. Long time readers might recall that Will is the co-author of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home (his site, my review) and quite an authority on the subject of email etiquette. We were talking about potential electronic uses of the material in his book like online training possibilities or even Outlook plug-ins that check you for certain behaviors when he remarked to me that simply delaying your outbox would help tremendously.

He said that such a thing wasn't possible, as far as he knew. I took that as a challenge 8).

Rather than reinvent the wheel, the good people at Google helped me find this article over at Suite101.com entitled Delay Sending Email, which suggests:

• Open Outlook, click on START, All Programs, Microsoft Office, Outlook.
• Click on TOOLS, Rules & Alerts.
• Click on New Rule "Start from a blank rule".
• Click in Step 1 box, "Check message after sending".
• Next, click on "On this machine only".
• Next, Click in Step 1 box, "Defer delivery by a number of minutes".
• Click in Step 2 box, "a number of" enter the number of minutes (usually 1).
• Click on OK, click on Finish.

This worked perfect for me and I wanted to pass it onto all of you. I set my delay for 2 minutes so I can have a small window to edit something again before it leaves my outbox and onto the email servers. It hasn't saved me yet, but I suspect it will soon.

Got any email tips of your own? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

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Washington Post : Engineers Learning People Skills, Too

An academic associate of my boss forwarded on a very interesting article that appeared in Sunday's Washington Post entitled Engineers Learning People Skills, Too. The article, nicely written by Michelle Locke, quotes sources from hugely respected institutions like UC Berkley, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and MIT. All endorse the importance of non-technical skills in an engineering career.

As you might imagine, this gave me a huge smile as it validates the topics I write about here. In my 14 year technical career, I have seen time and time again that the folks who get ahead are the ones who master the soft skills. They can translate complex and detailed technical topics into language that non-technical senior executives and marketers can understand. They take the time to understand why they are doing projects, not just how they are going to implement them. They accurately estimate the time it takes to complete a particular project.

While a baseline of technical knowledge is still absolutely required, these other things have a bigger impact on career growth than most people think. Passing on these things I've learned about and continuing to find others is what I'm passionate about here on this space. Agreement from the mainstream media on this idea, even though it wasn't directed at my materials in particular, was extremely rewarding to read about.

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Coding Horror's Elevator Test

Jeff Atwood, the Yoda of all software engineering bloggers, had a great post at the end of September that I'm only now getting around to writing about here (which is sad given the length of this post but that analysis of theme park throughput didn't just write itself, you know). In its title he asks a very simple, albeit vague, question:

Can your team pass the elevator test?

The basic point of the article is that a lot of times us techie types know how to do a lot of things, but never stop to think about why we're doing it. For the duration of an elevator ride, can your engineering team explain to someone why they are working on their current project? Jeff believes like I do that, in order to be the absolute best you have to not just understand the bigger picture but be able to explain it to others.

The reason I write about what I do here are best summed up by a snippet from a follow up comment that Jeff made:

"The best technologists tend to be the best communicators, people in tune with the overall product vision -- they don't just quietly squirrel away on technology in a lab, they'll happily tell you *why* that technology they're working on will let the users kick ass. That's part of the vision statement-- and it's something every developer should be able to do."

Challenge yourself to understand the why and you'll learn a lot more than the technology while opening doors for yourself when you demonstrate there's more to you than someone who squirrels away to the lab.

FOLLOW UP

As fate would have it, my delay in pointing out the great Elevator Test post was rewarded when Jeff chose to write about something similar today in Sharing the Customers Pain, which I see as a prequel to the Elevator Test. Looking at the world through the eyes of your customer is a great way to obtain that deeper understanding of why it is you are doing what you are.

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Mentally blocked? Try a coffee table book.

We've all been there. You need to do some creative task like create a design or write something important and it happens: you get mentally blocked. How do you get out of that stalemate with yourself?

This is going to sound really corny, but I keep coffee table books around on topics I find interesting. What I find works best is to have ones that have lots of pictures in them that you can look through quickly until something catches your eye. Looking at something else that I think achieves greatness helps me unlock my own thoughts on whatever it is I'm trying to do.

I'm a huge Disney and Star Wars geek (as regular readers of this space are aware), so these are some of my favorites:

Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look At Making the Magic Real As the name implies, this one has tons of artist renderings of Disney rides and entire parks from their earliest stages of conception, often comparing them to the real structures that got built. It also goes into the details that you don't notice in the parks, like ambient sound, color design, and costuming. Back stories are explained, even those that are never exposed do the public, but that help Imagineers with the cohesiveness of the various design elements. Conceptual drawings and model photos abound in this book and are probably my favorite parts.

Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Special Effects This one is somewhat dated since almost all effects are done digitally now, but it traces the history of ILM through different movies they worked on during their first 10 years of being in business. Lots of tricks that aren't used any more, but are highly creative in their nature are discussed in detail and with examples of actual use. Optical compositing, creature making, model construction, and matte paintings are among the techniques covered. There's an interesting segment at the end on the future of digitizing movies that is a pretty close prediction of what is happening in movie making today.

I like both of these because they present interesting problems and creative solutions to them. These topics might not be for you, but I'll bet you can find something to your liking that goes into depth about some hobby you are equally obsessed. Let it transport you away from your current task for 10-15 minutes, which should be long enough to get past a block and on with whatever it is you were struggling to finish.

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Examining theme park throughput

Since I'm a software guy by trade, I'm generally fascinated with real world problems unlike the conceptual ones that I deal with regularly within the confines of computer memory. I feel pretty strongly if you spend some time learning about the kinds of problems that other engineering types are confronted with and how they go about solving them, you can apply a different thought process to your own work. As I just got back from my annual Walt Disney World vacation, I spent some time thinking about the queuing theory behind the throughput of theme park rides.

Generally speaking, the people at Disney know what they're doing when it comes to theme parks, if for no other reason than they've been doing it longer than everybody else. As such, their statistics tell them that customer satisfaction, not surprisingly, is directly related to the number of attractions a particular guest experiences during their day at a Disney theme park. They have also found that the amount of money someone is willing to spend at the shops on their way out is a function of their satisfaction.

So, if you get on more rides (generally around 7 to 9), you will spend more money on things besides your theme park admission.

How do you increase the chances that someone reaches that magic number and spends more money at the retail shops on the way out? Increase the throughput of the attractions, that's how. Moving more people through the rides means that more people get to experience them on a given day.

Anybody who has spent some time playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, or something similar, is familiar with this problem and the 3 ride styles mentioned below. Toying with details can make a big difference and give each guest a better chance to be satisfied.

Stop and go loaders

Examples: Dumbo or a Carousel

These types of rides tend to have the lowest throughput of them all and that's why you don't usually see to many of them. The limiting factor here is simple: nobody can get on the ride until everybody from the previous cycle has gotten off. Meaning, you can't add riders one at a time, you have to add them in bulk and you can only add them at specific times. This leads to extremely low unload and load times because of the coordination involved.

The loading can be assisted by counting out people in the queue who should be able to get on in the next loading cycle while the previous loading cycle is enjoying the ride, but the bigger limitation of mass load/unload still exists. Alternatively, the other way the throughput of a stop and go loader can be increased is by decreasing the ride time. That translates into more load/unload opportunities per hour, but runs the risk of a guest being dissatisfied with the ride they get.

Interval loaders

Examples: Roller coasters (most of them) and dark rides (most of them)

Most theme park rides are interval loaders. A vehicle comes into a station where the previous riders get off and a new set gets on. While this is going on, other cars are out on other sections of the track enjoying the ride. This is far more efficient than the stop and go loader because the waiting time cost of loading/unloading is spread out to different cars instead of paying that penalty all at once.

The most common optimization is to simply add more cars to the track so as to maximize the number of people on the ride at a time that are not in the loading zone. Another method is to separate the loading station from the unloading station so that the two can happen more easily in parallel. Less obvious is to have a longer track. The more space there is out on the ride experience, the more vehicles (and therefore riders) can be out on the attraction at any given moment. Or, make the vehicles bigger so that they carry more people (think Pirates of the Caribbean or It's a Small World), thereby minimizing the throughput penalty that is paid by the loading/unloading process.

Continuous loaders

Example: Haunted Mansion and Spaceship Earth

What happens if you add enough cars to an interval loader such that there is no space between the vehicles any more? You get a continuous loader. The track of the ride is completely occupied by as many cars as it could possibly carry, maximizing the number of people experiencing the ride at once (albeit riders experience different portions of the ride at the same time).

Disney pioneered this style of ride at Disneyland with its Omnimover system originally used in Adventure Thru InnerSpace (now defunct) and The Haunted Mansion (not only still active, but with a version at almost every Disney resort around the world). The downside of the system is it requires a slower moving ride, since all cars (even the ones being loaded) have to move at the same speed, and typically a more elaborate loading/unloading system so that the cycle of vehicles never has to stop.

At the Haunted Mansion, for example, riders first step onto a moving ramp that is moving at the same speed as the vehicles. Guests have the length of this ramp to get into the assigned vehicle, as opposed to having to quickly jump into a moving one if the ramp were not provided.

Final thoughts

While I'll be the first to admit to being a huge Disney geek, theme park ride throughput presents an interesting problem to solve. You have to provide some pleasant experience, but you need to move as many people as possible through that experience to maximize the number of riders you might have on a single day. In a way, it's not all that different from memory utilization problems that software engineers like myself face (with loading/unloading being analogous to a cache or supplemental swap files out on hard disk) and presents some creative ways to minimize waiting time, increasing the chances that more park guests come away satisfied with their day.

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Don't send that attachment!

One of my faithful "dotted line reports" (a term I despise, he knows this, and likes to tease me with it) recently attended a large technical meeting with 350 other engineers. As is commonly done for large gatherings like this given that people are all remote from each other, it was conducted over a telephone conference line and a desktop sharing tool so that everybody could see the slides being presented. An obligatory moment for such meetings is when somebody asked for a copy of the slides and, not wanting to disappoint, the speaker said they would be sent out to everyone.

That turned out to be a mistake, seeing as the slides were 8Mb in size and the speaker sent it as an attachment.

To 350 people.

And then he realized he made a mistake and sent out an updated 9Mb version.

Do the math: 350 people * 17 Mb of slides = 5.95 Gb of file space taken up on the email servers that could have used up 9Mb on an internal website had a pointer been sent instead of sending the slides as attachments.

Ouch!

While it is a lot more convenient to send information to wide distribution lists as attachments, think twice about it if what you are sending is over 1 Mb or so. I've certainly been guilty of this myself, although not to the tune of almost 6 gigs. If you aren't careful, you might end up accidentally using up %661 more resources than you need, as in the example in this story. Even with disk space as cheap as it is, that's never good.

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7 significant events in my career

I've been tagged. Twice actually.

In a meme series "7 Random Things About Me", both Cheap as Chips and Wendee on her blog at The Digital Fridge Door triple dog dared me to write something. I try really hard here to stay on the topic of engineering careers, so it took me awhile to figure out how to acknowledge the kind trackbacks these sites gave me while keeping consistent to my own material.

Then, I realized I could just change the rules.

So, I altered "random things" to "significant events" and "about me" to "in my career". Is that cheating? Absolutely. Then again, it's my blog and it took me over an hour to draw the logo of the nerd stick figure guy in a meditative state with PowerPoint, so I can do what I want 8).

Here they are:

• My interest in computers started with video games. I'm old enough to have been involved in the Pong craze (I had the Sears home version) and had Pac Man Fever too. As such, I was highly motivated to fuel this addiction, as many young boys are.
  


• Like a lot of people, I was influenced by a great teacher. In 6th grade, Mr. Covington brought in his own personal Radio Shack TRS-80 computer to our classroom. To put that into perspective, ours was the only room in the entire school that had a computer and that included the office, as hard as that is to believe now. It had a black and white display and I think 16K of RAM, but it might have been 4K. More importantly, it also had a Space Invaders knock off.
  
  Mr. C was wise to the video game craze and set up a 7 level self-paced computer learning course you could take when you got done with your regular work. The higher you got, the more playing time you were granted. The series started with the basics. You had to identify and state the function of the monitor, CPU, and keyboard (mice were still to be invented at Xerox PARC later). You then graduated to a "Hello world" program in BASIC and other simple programs before the course culminated with the writing of a program that took user input, stored data in an array, and displayed it back. It was the first programming I ever did and I'm not sure I would have taken it up had he not used the tease of Space Invaders this way.
  
  It's a good thing for me he did.
  


• I wanted an Atari 2600 for Christmas that year to replace Pong, but instead got a TRS-80 Color Computer, which you hooked up to your TV. It also had a ROM cartridge bay you could plug games Radio Shack published into. I also got a subscription to a TRS-80 gaming magazine, as absurd as that sounds. It was full of reviews, ads, high scores, and had listings of text mode games written in BASIC. I learned a lot typing those things in. Since I wanted to alter some of those games slightly, it gave me the chance to learn the foundations of reverse engineering code that I still use today.
  
  I lost interest, though, once I got an Intellivision two years later. Wouldn't you?
  


• Fast forward to the end of high school and the only piece of advice I ever got from my guidance counselor was: "You're good at math, you should try electrical engineering." Having no other ideas of my own, I tried it out. I understood EE, it just seemed like a lot of work to figure out the voltage between a resistor and a capacitor. The exact moment I decided to switch majors was when the professor was doing some hairy double integral with an imaginary number in it. I couldn't see doing that for 3 more years, so I left class early and never looked back.
  
  As fate would have it, I was taking an assembly language class at the same time and actually enjoyed the double all-nighter I had to pull to finish my last assignment. The best advice my Dad ever gave me was, "If you're going to do something 8 hours a day, every day, for the rest of your life, you damn well better enjoy it." And with that, I started my 3rd year as a Computer Science and Engineering major.


• My first computer job, while I was still in school, lasted exactly 12 hours. It was to write a Dbase program for a guy sending out brochures to all registered voters in San Diego County and it was supposed to extract the right fields from a database before printing off labels. I knew no Dbase and have no idea why the guy hired me except that I was cheap labor. He fired me after I skipped work to go to my paternal grandmother's funeral.
  
  Really, he did. I wish that were made up.


• Then I worked as a database administrator at a chipfab plant in Rancho Bernardo. Ironically, I had to pass the HP site there every day to get to work. My biggest accomplishment there was rewriting the program that printed out the labels that got attached to the chips at various assembly points. Why printing labels played such a strong role in my early career, I have no idea. When I got yelled at for going into a clean area without taking proper precautions to fix a broken label printer despite being instructed to do so, I knew it was time to look elsewhere.
  


• I spent my last 9 months in school working part time for a startup that was building business planning software on Macs. It was my first exposure to event-based programming and it was pretty energizing to imagine changing how the world planned projects from our little office. Staying on was the only other offer I received upon graduation besides HP and I still have the offer letter because it was written with so much emotion by the owner, who was very nice to me. In the end, though, I decided to go with the more established company.
  
  

My friend Tac likes to point out that I'm a freak, because I'm a Gen Xer who has worked for a single company my entire career. I like to point out to him that, yeah it's been one company but I've had 7 different jobs in those 14 years. There's been lots of variety in those opportunities and I don't see that ending any time soon.

So there you have it. And, it all started with Pong.

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Avoid trouble with the generic personal commitment

Sometimes, you get asked to do things for work at hours you don't want to do them. Especially if you are working with an international work force, time zones occasionally necessitate that you be available when you'd usually have family time. Maybe it is as simple as a checkpoint meeting or perhaps it is as a pressure situation like tagging along with your boss' boss to a high powered affair.

Regardless, there come times when you really can't make such a meeting because you have something personal going on. How do you bow out of a work commitment for personal reasons?

I was forced to think about this recently when a coworker of mine had this exact problem. There was a meeting scheduled on a Wednesday at 4-5 pm, Pacific but this person lived in New England and was supposed to be at a dance recital for his daughter during that time (7-8 pm Eastern). The email exchange that insured went something like this:

East coast prospective meeting attendee:

I'm sorry, but I can't make that time despite the deadline we're all up against due to a recital for my daughter I need to be at. I'd be open to rescheduling the following day, though.

---Ben

Pretty good, huh? A graceful bow out for a legitimate reason and an offer for an alternative. I thought it was great (I was CC'd on the message), until I saw the reply from the meeting scheduler:

Dear Ben,

I realize it is asking a lot for you to miss personal time, but I myself am missing my son's inaugural landing of the Space Shuttle to make this meeting and Mr. Kurtz is traveling in Shanghai, but will make it also despite the even more inconvenient hour for him. Given our deadlines, I don't thing a reschedule is possible and your attendance is required.

---Jerry

Ouch! That first message doesn't look so good now, does it?

My Dad has a saying that struck me when I read the response from the meeting scheduler. It goes, "first liar has no chance". That's not to say that either party in this exchange is not telling the truth. That's not my point. The idea is, that no matter what you say first, somebody else can come up with something better in response if they think about it hard enough.

That was Ben's problem here. He had what many would consider to be a legitimate reason for missing the meeting, but what he hadn't counted on is that others had even more legitimate reasons, but were going to make the meeting anyway. You might argue that Ben should go ahead and take the negative work repercussions to make the personal commitment, but after thinking about this awhile, I think there is a way out of these situations without having to burn bridges at work.

Be generic.

Consider if Ben had originally replied with:

I'm sorry, but I can't make that time despite the deadline we're all up against due to a personal commitment I need to be at. I'd be open to rescheduling the following day, though.

---Ben

Notice that the only difference between the two messages was to replace 4 words ("recital for my daughter") that offer a specific excuse with two words ("personal commitment") that offer a generic one. Ben could be donating a kidney to the Pope for all Jerry knows. By removing the specificity, Ben avoids having his reason compared with someone else's sacrifice.

Better yet, consider if Jerry presses the point and asks what the commitment is. The situation begins to creep into privacy rights issues and all Ben has to reply back with is "It's personal, I'd rather not get into the details."

Now, keep in mind that you have to be careful with this tactic. Miss too many meetings, regardless of how unreasonable the timing might be, and you will be causing yourself trouble at work. If it happens more than you are willing to be involved with, though, maybe that's not a job you want to keep anyway. Either way, use this technique sparingly despite its potential effectiveness.

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