Oops.

Since finishing What Americans Really Want… Really by Frank Lutz, I’ve also read:

Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
1-2-3 Magic! By Thomas W. Phelan PhD
Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood
Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas
Every Man's Challenge by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker
The Year of Biblical Living by A.J. Jacobs
Why I Am A Christian by John Stott
Marriage and Caste in America by Kay S. Hymowitz

The copious number of children’s books don’t make the list as that would be the most heinous form of cheating.

I had planned to get started on the last tome of The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, but keep getting interrupted by other, smaller books. I started The Four Seasons of Marriage by Gary Chapman, but found it incredibly boring, and have since moved on to Forgotten God by Francis Chan.

Each of the books I read this summer and early fall were for a specific purpose. The first launched me into a whole new world of software development practice, which has been a fantastic experience. The second has helped with disciplining my 2-year-old, even if it is not a perfect solution. Oryx and Crake was a gift from a fellow employee who wanted to expose me to Canadian apocalyptic literature. It worked, and I’m certain to acquire its sequel shortly. The next two have enriched me and my life. The Year of Biblical Living was very interesting, and only served to motivate me to read his previous book about reading the entire encyclopedia.

By December, I am certain that I can get past last year’s count of twelve, but hitting fifteen is going to be a stretch (I’m on 13 now). One of the men in our church mentioned that he reads about 80 books per year, and my wife figures she gets to around 50. Personally, I’ve discovered that the summer months are not conducive to reading in the least, unless there’s a camping trip (which there was not). Instead, all my free time was spent on one project or another.

Speaking of which, I really should post about the train table I built (and my wife decorated) for our son a couple of months ago.

I don’t know why I can’t break out of the teens, though. I’ll need to work on that next year. Here’s my reading list for the remainder of 2010:

(13) Forgotten God by Francis Chan
(14) Radical by David Platt
(15) The System of the World by Neal Stephenson

What Americans Really Want... Really

Dr. Luntz’ survey data is compounded by his years of polling experience and time spent observing and recording human preference. Some of his data points are startling while others are really not that shocking. Short of posting entire excerpts here (which I can’t… I’ve since returned the book to the library), I will note that my greatest takeaway from the book was that really, deep down, most of us are all about ourselves. We want what we want because it benefits us personally.

Not really a positive, but at least it felt honest.

The System of the World

After my mom saw that I was reading Jesus For President last fall, she thought I might like this one by Donald Miller, the sub-title of which is Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. The authors of Jesus for President footnote Blue Like Jazz a couple of times, so I was already familiar with the book by reference.

I have a hard time deciding which one I like better, to be completely honest. On the one hand, Jesus For President was a hard-hitting look at Christian discipleship in a time when we find ourselves pulled more and more toward secular positions. It made me feel a bit bad about times in which I should have been a better follower of Christ, and guilt can be a powerful motivator!

On the other hand, Blue Like Jazz makes me feel a little more normal about feeling bad. Miller is a fantastic personal story teller, and his insights into his own spiritual growth are engaging, enlightening and motivating. One of the underlying themes is learning to love (God, others, yourself), which Miller introduces as being like learning to appreciate Jazz music – he didn’t like Jazz until he saw someone playing soulfully with their eyes closed, and then he loved Jazz. Being able to accept the forgiveness and grace that comes with salvation and a personal relationship with Christ is parallel to loving yourself (and everyone else).

He also spends a good amount of time recalling events from when he was auditing some classes at Reed College. I have an extended member of the family who went to Reed, and I’m now suddenly very interested in asking him about some of the more sordid events which supposedly take place there. I don’t want details, mind you, but an additional perspective would be fascinating.

There’s one story that sticks with me after turning the 181st page: Miller was part of a small group of Christians at Reed (a certain minority on one of the most secular campuses in the country). During the annual Renn Fayre celebration, the group put up a “confession booth” in the middle of the campus. Rather than accepting confessions, which was likely to cement them as the negative stereotype many viewed them to be, they did the confessing. They confessed their sins, the sins of the church and of Christians at large. They moved people and were changed by the simple experience of saying things like “Christ tells us to feed the poor, and I know I haven’t done the best job of that.” and “Christ said to love your neighbor, and I’ve certainly had a bad attitude when I’m woken up by loud noises from next door.”, etc. This sounds like such a profound experience.

Now that I’ve thought about it a little more (ok, the span of a few paragraphs), I did like Blue Like Jazz more. A little, anyway.

This was on sale for about two bucks in the discount bin at Barnes and Noble. It looks interesting. And short.

It was both of those things. This could easily be the end of my post, but I actually liked the book…

At 181 pages, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an incredibly quick read. Mohsin Hamid pens this tale in the first-person, speaking to an unidentified individual (who we are led to believe is a journalist) at a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan. This story of a young Pakistani coming to America and finding both academic and professional success only to reject it all and return home within five years is quite compelling. It’s not thrilling, and I make this point singularly because one of the praise notes on the cover is one that makes this book out to be some amazing work of thriller fiction, when in reality it’s not all that suspenseful. In fact, most of “the next page” is fairly obvious, even if it is an interesting story.

Hamid expertly weaves the theme of “fundamentals” throughout the book, and I have to believe that this was the purpose behind the title, using the oft-spoken phrase “Islamic Fundamentalism” as a mental trigger to engage the reader. In fact, there is almost no presence of said fundamentalism in this book, save the last dozen or so pages. Instead, the narrator experiences different aspects of fundamentals throughout this story: the life of an immigrant in America, the academic talents which propelled him into the business world, the business acumen which gave him professional success, love with a woman who was fundamentally unavailable to him, and then the return home to his family in Pakistan.

I really liked this $2 discount book, and I felt a bit insulted for the author that Barnes and Noble was practically willing to give it away.

This month has already started out as a fantastic reading month. Whether by choice or by circumstance, I’ve found 20-80 minutes almost every day to keep up on whatever I’m reading at the time. (This post is late by an entire book – I’ll post about The Reluctant Fundamentalist later.)

I’ve been meaning to read the rest of William Gibson’s books for a while now. Having read several a few Christmases ago, I’ve been nearly as hooked on his writing as on that of Neal Stephenson. Admittedly, Gibson’s books are shorter, easier reads. They’re also not quite as compelling. Win some, lose some, I suppose.

Virtual Light begins the Bridge trilogy, a trio of stories set around what has become of the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco, California. The environment, a more anarchistic version of our present, set “in the future” of 2004, is somewhat like the reality of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. It is different enough, however, to separate the literary works into distinct macrocosms.

The book is excellent, though not quite as dweeby as some of his earlier stuff. I’ve gotten the impression while reading each of Gibson’s books that he started out writing Cyberpunk and has been trending towards Conspiracy Thriller ever since. I don’t dislike the trend overall, even if I found his first books more interesting. I’ll have to pick up the next two in the series soon to keep the momentum going.

Beyond the second and third members of the Bridge trilogy, I’ll need to find myself another five books to read this year. This probably will present little difficulty. Actually getting through all of them will be hard enough!

Tom’s church underwent a transformation into a megachurch over the course of a few years. The transformation seems to have followed the methods produced by the Willow Creek Association, shifting its focus from its traditional, family-focused roots toward more contemporary, performance-driven styles of worship aimed at younger, more casaul seekers. Tom’s criticisms certainly are not the first of Willow Creek and their methods, but his hit a bit closer to home, having lived through the transition as a lay leader in a once happy, family-like congregation. Since Willow Creek’s admission a couple of years ago that they might have done it wrong, the criticisms seem more poignant.

To me, however, Tom’s criticisms of his fictionalized self are the most interesting part of the book. He characterizes his own weaknesses as possible in-roads for negative persuasion by “Wormwood” and his minions. This level of honesty and objectivity, while criticizing what has been your faith home for so many years, cannot have been the most trivial of tasks. There is a strong sense of humility, even within such an obviously critical work.

Overall, this was an excellent book, and even if you haven’t read The Screwtape Letters, it’s quite a good read.

The authors, Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, walk through the socio-political history of God’s Word(s) from Genesis to Revelation, and use it as a framework for discussing discipleship in the present tense. I spent much of the book thinking I’d approached parts of my life woefully backwards, and other parts of the book thinking “this is what I was raised to think – why does it feel so new?”.

Shane and Chris spin an excellent yarn here, and I’d strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in digging deeper into their walk with/for Christ. There is a lot more to say about this book, but my words would not do it justice. I do think, however, that I may read it again in a few months as a refresher.

Jay Rossier’s Living With Chickens gives a great overview on raising these creatures, be they for food (meat), food (eggs) or fun (as pets). I can’t imagine folks keeping them as pets, but as I start to think more and more about living sustainably, I feel a draw towards raising a small flock for a regular supply of eggs. I even looked at some interesting coop designs over at Backyard Chickens. It looks like fun to raise chickens!

On the other hand, it also looks like a TON of work. I have a toddler. Gosh, that’s enough work by itself, and I’m in the office 50+ hours per week! Maybe the chickens will wait a few years.

I’m 3/4 of the way through the book I really should be posting about, Jesus For President, which my dad sent me for my birthday this year. I’ll probably write way too much about it when the time comes, so until then…

It helps that I’ve read it before. The first-person narrator, Sangamon Taylor, is an asshole, and he’s hilarious. Every one of Stephenson’s focal characters is just a little bit of an ass, just a little too smart for their own good, and just precocious enough that the story almost happens to them solely because of who they are. (I suppose that’s the point, right?) This is a formula for fiction that I find incredibly entertaining, hence the repeat read.

I mentioned the first time I read the book on my old blog back in November of 2004:

I started reading Zodiac by Neal Stephenson at the airport, and was about 2/3 of the way through it by the time we landed at Midway. I gotta say, there isn’t a thing that I’ve read by him that I don’t like. I need to pick up The Diamond Age before reading his current trilogy set in the 17th century called The Baroque Cycle.

The book is set in Boston, which means that when the narrator says “We took the green line to Kenmore Square and took a bus to Watertown Square…” I know exactly what he’s talking about, and happen to know he probably took the 70 or 70A bus.

One of the things I like most about Stephenson’s books is that he throws in all of this semi-random, yet utterly useful background information about his characters and the science behind whatever it is they’re dealing with. This means that I learned a lot about Chlorine last night, which I don’t much care about, but was nonetheless entertained.

I highly recommend this book, based only on the first 250 of 308 pages. I’ll re-endorse it later, I’m sure… and on that note, I think I’ll go finish it.

This is actually the third time I’ve blasted through this book, I enjoy it so much. It’s still holding place as my favorite Stephenson novel of all time, just ahead of Cryptonomicon, with Snow Crash in at a close third.

The book was a very easy read, much like Spook Country and the rest of Gibson’s books I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Again, however, I was struck with the single-person-on-drugs thematic element which I have yet to see anyone else take and interest in. Maybe it’s so minor that no one else cares, but every one of his books that I have read to date shares it. It is as if Gibson is a closet fan of substance abuse, or that he’s never experimented and wants to live its effects vicariously through one of his characters. Nevertheless, it was just as entertaining this time around. There is, again, an element of control loss when the addiction is in play.

I’m still psyching myself up to get started on The System of the World later this year. I think I’m going to cram in another book before the end of the month, and try to do another two in September so that I can spend October through December on the third tome of The Baroque Cycle and hit my “one book a month” goal, in number anyway.

Coffee is very important! No, I don’t have a problem!

*sip*

Variety being the spice of life, here’s how each of the five samples faired, in my only-kinda-sort-humble opinion:

Hazelnut

A fair cup of coffee. The flavor is good, and not overwhelming or sweet. I’m neither impressed (Hazelnut is my favorite coffee flavor) nor disappointed.

Original

Fair. Certainly not Dunky’s or Starbucks, but it’s pretty decent. I’d drink this on a daily basis and not nearly be as crabby as I am when I have to drink the swill free stuff we have in our break room.

Vanilla

The best of the bunch. The vanilla flavor is stronger in proportion than the Hazelnut. I don’t know if I could drink it every day (I’d get sick of the flavoring after a while), but it’s certainly enjoyable.

Gourmet Roast

I expected this to be a tad better than the Original, seeing as it’s “Gourmet”. In this case, Gourmet must mean “tastes like your normal office kitchen coffee”. Blech.

100% Colombian

Pretty strong for instant coffee! I liked it more than I was expecting. It’s better than the Original, and easily the best non-flavored of the group.

Decaffeinated

I… don’t drink decaf. Ok, fine, I’ll try it… meh.

Overall, I’d have to say I’m pleased how well I enjoyed the instant coffee. I had my doubts, though my experiences with Starbucks’ Via line were also positive. Maybe I’m not cut out to be a coffee snob.

More? Yes, please!

This book is loaded with hilarious anecdotes about Lewis’ experiences with his three young children. He has some interesting theories on fatherly love, mostly that it comes from wanting to toss your children from high balconies and not doing so. I can’t attest to personally scaling any tall objects with my son in tow, but I can relate to the surprise that is the level of stress an infant brings. It’s incredible, and the level of openness in this book is refreshing and easily relate-able.

Yes, I know “relate-able” is not a word, but my inner thesaurus is failing me. Identifiable sounded wrong.

I highly recommend this book for any new or soon-to-be new father. You’ll laugh. You’ll groan. You’ll think “yeah, me too!”. You’ll wonder why he’s storing his cheese outside.

Well, you would too.

1. The Law of the Few
2. The Stickiness Factor
3. The Power of Context

Each of these has a varying degree of no-brainer-ness to it. The first rule has to do with the type of person carrying information. Gladwell uses the example of why Paul Revere’s midnight ride was successful in contrast to the same ride through different Boston suburbs by William Dawes, which had almost no success. The second is about what hooks people, and though it wasn’t the author’s point, my conclusion is that “someone’s lucky guess” is what defines success by this factor. The final rule is basically the Fundamental Attribution Error in practice.

It’s one of the examples from the last rule, however, that made me think the most and therefore kept me from being completely negative in my assessment of the book. Gladwell points to a seminary experiment conducted by two Princeton University researchers. The experiment has a simple premise: Put seminarians in the position of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and see how they’ll act based on their background and whether or not they were in a hurry. The conclusions support the FAE in that, regardless of background (and even if the seminarians were recently studying the parable of the Good Samaritan), the factor which determined how helpful they’d be to someone in distress was how late they felt.

This kills me. I mean, I understand *why* it happens that way. Humans are humans and no matter how hard we try to imitate Christ, we’re going to behave like humans a good majority of the time no matter how hard we try to be better than our nature. It still bothers me a little. I’d like to think that in that situation, I would be an exception and not the hypothesis-proving rule, but the truth is that I know I react poorly to time-pressure also. I would probably get a 2 or 3 on their helpfulness scale, thinking that my academic success was super important and that I could call 911 or tell someone else that the person needed help. I could rationalizing passing the buck. It’s humbling.

Anyway, I also have a sense of humor about it: The only possible conclusion to this post is this VeggieTales clip from Are You My Neighbor, from their take on the Parable of the Good Samaritan because it’s just that silly.

I started reading Quicksilver, the first volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, in 2005. I put it down after about 30 or 40 pages — it was too dense for me to get into quickly. I had read so many others of his books and loved them that it was more than a little disheartening that I would encounter this novel by my favorite author that was undesirable to continue reading. Every so often, I’d pick it back up and chug along, ending up around the 100-page mark. I took it on every camping trip and vacation, always putting in some modicum of effort to move forward, trying to remember the important details from my previous attempts.

In 2008, I made a personal goal to finish the entire Baroque Cycle in the next three years. I had just received the next two volumes for Christmas, neatly totaling 1703 pages between them. In that year, I did not end up getting to either of these two new volumes, even after finishing Quicksilver last February, which I had actually started to greatly enjoy. So this January when I did my annual re-evaluation of goals, I decided to be a bit harsher on myself and decided that I needed to read the rest of TBS this year, which necessitated that I get started, and do it very quickly. in February I decided to plunge in and start reading The Confusion. This was supposed to take two months, and though I took a break in March to read Watchmen and V for Vendetta, it has ended up taking me over four months.

It was continually discouraging to see this ridiculous-length text go on forever and ever. Across three volumes, the entire story takes so long to unfold. There are numerous side-plots and pieces of background which you’re not sure quite how relevant they are. The story of Bob Shaftoe, for instance, and his military field service was interesting, but I really have yet to understand how relevant that was to the main plot. Maybe that’s wrapped up more in The System of the World, but I haven’t gotten there yet.

Anyway, I really (really) liked this book. Its biggest fault, or biggest draw, is still the verbosity-factor, and that’s the case with a lot of Stephenson’s works. Had I longer stretches of time to myself, it wouldn’t even be a question. I’d sit down and knock out The System of the World in a week or two instead of the likely two to four months that it’s actually going to take. The books are that interesting, which is good, because my wife keeps looking over and asking if I’m still enjoying yourself, and I am. Now that I am two-thirds of the way through the story and have an understanding of Stephenson has composed these books, the plot is really compelling. I want to keep reading them. I’ll have to jump on the next book.

In terms of a review, the book is fantastic. You really do need to have read Quicksilver prior to reading The Confusion, and I actually had to go back and look up several details I had forgotten. For instance, I couldn’t remember exactly how Jack received his nickname “Half-Cocked”, and really thought it should have been funnier than it was. I also couldn’t remember why Eliza didn’t have a last name and it turns out she just doesn’t have one or it’s left out and no one bothers to ask. In high French Society, unless you were d’something, it didn’t really matter so long as you have a title. As the Duchess of Qwghlm and of Arcachon, she has titles, and so for the entirety of The Confusion, no one pays it any attention. Somehow it’s glossed over in Quicksilver, and I couldn’t find a good reference as to why.

I thought that Stephenson didn’t spend nearly enough time on Waterhouse’s, and consequently Newton’s, story line in this book. He covered a lot of it in Quicksilver — the political divergences of the late 17th century, the formation of the Royal Society, the military actions of that time, Jack and Eliza’s adventures in eastern Europe, Daniel’s journey from Boston back to England — which were all very interesting. I really missed it in The Confusion, which was 80% about Jack and his adventures as galley slave/king/pirate in Eurasia, Eliza in high France and the other side of Cryptology and Natural Philosophy with Bonaventure Rossignol, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and Gottfried Leibnitz. Maybe a bit too much about high France.

Stephenson does such a great job of using real history’s characters and their actions as a plot background. He takes history and inserts Waterhouses and Shaftoes (and of course, Enoch Root) and makes them the unnamed companions to existing historical figures. It’s a really great way to set the stage within the world of the real, but give yourself enough artistic license to write two-thousand pages about what didn’t really happen within what did.

Enoch Root is still an interesting character, and by far one of the best across any of Stephenson’s works. We finally start to get an understanding of who or what he is in this book, though I understand from online posts that we learn even more in The System of the World regarding his consumption of the elixir vitae and his “immortality”. I love that Stephenson has Root say “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.” I wonder if Neal will bring him back in the future timeline he describes in an interview in 1999 from Locus Magazine, now that we’ve read the one set in the past:

I have two sequels to Cryptonomicon planned, but they’re in different time lines. I’m trying not to give the idea that it’s a tightly locked together set of books. They’re supposed to work as stand-alones. There are always a few strange little corners of the story that may not make sense outside of the context of the full series, but 99% of it can stand on its own reasonably well, I hope. It’s kind of a wink to the science fiction readers out there: “See, it really is a science fiction book!”

I have one volume left; The System of the World clocks in at 882 pages not including the four pages of acknowledgments, which I will certainly read. I am hoping that I can get through all of it by the end of the summer. I think, however, that I am going to take a break. My wife picked up a book by Malcom Gladwell titled The Tipping Point. She has two other books to read before it, so I’ll probably sneak it in for June. It looks pretty interesting, and I think I need something that isn’t set in the early 18th century to “cleanse the palate”. I’ll go back to The System of the World in the summer and try to finish up before my son’s first birthday.

And, for anyone who has gotten this far, Sculpting in Solid Mercury (via BoingBoing and Popular Science):

Wow, was I shocked at the disparity! In as much as The Watchmen pledged allegiance to the original, V For Vendetta went its own way. There are entire major plot lines that were re-thought, entire character arcs dropped, historical elements shifted to be “less British”, etc. I found this jarring, but after the first hundred pages, I had the same reaction I have whenever I read an original after seeing an adaptation for film – I end up thinking the book’s way better. With V for Vendetta, it wasn’t as strong a reaction, but what sealed it for me was the ending. Evey’s final scene was far sweeter than just standing there watching fireworks, as she does in the movie. It was a pledge that the struggle for freedom didn’t end with the death of the patient in room five. I liked that.

Anyway, now I have to watch the movie again, just because the story is so fresh in my mind.

This post is not going to be one of those reviews that lists the things I liked vs. the ones I didn’t. It won’t be a post about what was missing from the movie. Suffice it to say that I liked the movie, but I loved the book. The story was far easier to follow in print, even with all of the pirate comics mixed in. I thought Malin Akerman was mis-cast as Laurie Jupiter, but the rest of the ensemble worked really, really well.

It’s been interesting walking around the office and discussing the move with other folks who saw it this weekend. Some liked it, some wanted their 3 hours back. So far, though, no one outright loved it. It was a successful adaptation, but to most, they were looking for a semi-faithful interpretation. I know why it wasn’t, and I know about the ridiculous drama that has surrounded the decade-plus delay in getting this film to the screen. The film’s ability to be “awesome” viewers who haven’t read the book was far diminished, however. And, since it wasn’t 100% faithful near the end, those who loved the book left wondering why the changes were made. I actually found the differences confusing, having read the last two chapters only five hours before seeing them on screen, but some thought that the modified ending was easier to understand on a wider level.

To each, their own, of course. I hear there’s even more in the director’s cut, so I’ll have to acquire the DVD when it’s released.

I’m not 100% certain I’ve figured out the best way to get past my inability to act just yet, but I’m going to give it another go. This year I’m aiming to read a book a month. To motivate me, I’ll post on the 1^st of each month which book I plan to read, and whenever I finish it, I’ll post about that. Yes, I’m a little late this month. Since it’s, well, a bit later than the first, and I’ve actually already finished a book this month, I’ll claim marginal success and be encouraged to succeed next month!

I read The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch. I’d been thinking about how best to re-implement my church’s web site (which isn’t quite done — the link is to the current, and not new, design) and wondered if blogging would be a useful tool or not. I’ve always been a big proponent when it’s the right fit, but my church isn’t that big or that technologically advanced; it would be a big step for them. I’m still not sure it’s the right time, but I’m going to put the tools in place to let them get started when and if they decide it’s the right next step.

The Blogging Church helped me to put some ideas about blogging and its ministry applicability into better perspective. It was an excellent read, and certainly a very timely one as I’d just started the rebuild project when I received the book.

I seriously considered not even writing about the first Quadrant of the Time Management Matrix. I’ve written previously about keeping tasks from sliding down the slippery slope towards becoming both urgent and important, so I figured that I’d already covered my utter hatred for getting stuck working in Quadrant I. That being said, it’s not just about effective planning. Planning will certainly stave off the slide toward Quadrant I, but you can’t prevent every fire.

The best response to a fire? Call a fire-fighter. (Bear with me? I know the analogy is corny.)

As a manager, we can’t try to put out every fire. For folks like myself, who started out their career being the problem-solver, giving up the need to fix things is VERY difficult. I have a constant desire to tinker and a constant desire to fix what is broken. I hope I never lose that entirely. However, if we choose to be the go-to problem-solver, we’ll end up living in Quadrant I. We’ll never sleep, never plan, and never keep all of the other things we have to do later in line.

This is where delegation comes in. As a manager we have people (well, those of you who have been able to completely staff your teams, anyway). These people have jobs to do, but one of the best ways to effectively groom people to succeed and improve is to give them new, difficult things to do. Enter the fire-fighter.

Penelope Trunk, over at The Brazen Careerist, wrote a great post titled 7 ways to be a better delegator. I happen to agree with all seven ways. She also makes a fantastic point about how this relates to mentoring:

Hands-off management isn’t respectful — it’s negligent. People want mentoring and guidance from their manager. If you give that in a way that helps them grow while also treating them with respect, they’ll love having you around. And when your direct reports love having you around, they do their best work for you out of loyalty. Even younger workers — those notorious job-hoppers — are loyal to respectful, hands-on managers.

After reading the article, I was somewhat relieved that I’d figured most of this out already, (though I admit that I try to put out fires every now and again just to remind and be reminded that I still can). I make a real effort to keep my staff from needing to do any of the busy-work or crap-work that has come down the line. For instance, in functional and design specification writing, it makes more sense to have an engineer concentrate on the concepts and communicating them effectively than on document formatting. I can handle cleaning up a document… it takes me only a few minutes to re-format a document in Word, and hey, it’s kinda fun making everything line up perfectly.

Managers have to become ok with being good at silly things so that they can give the fun, interesting and difficult tasks to their employees. This is a two-outcome strategy. If they succeed, two things happen – first, they look good; second, you look good for having good employees. If they fail, it’s a learning experience for them and also for you as you get to find out by example what they’re capable of so that you know where they need to grow.

This is about to lead into a post about mentoring. Maybe another time… I don’t want my new employees who might google me to get all of my management secrets right away.

Back to the central point – handling Quadrant I tasks. If you don’t have someone to whom you can delegate, don’t spend too much time trying to get out of doing the work. It has to get done, and the sooner it’s done, the sooner you can get back to Quadrants II and III, which is where you should spend the bulk of your time. Obviously, if you have an appropriate person to whom you can delegate, you should do it with prejudice! It’s your job as a manager to keep the nonsense things out of the way of your employees. So, by giving them emergencies to handle, they grow, you look (are) good, and everyone’s happy. Eventually, you look like the person who can handle anything that gets thrown their way.

The funny thing about that is that at said point you actually are that person. To me, that’s a great goal. It requires some strategy to how you handle what gets thrown at you, but if you combine that with proper planning, proper prioritization and proper maintenance, you should be pretty effective at it.

I love to plan. Making lists, brainstorming, hypothesizing. I love it all. If I could design my perfect day, I wouldn’t do a single urgent thing. Rather, I’d spend the time getting done anything that I thought could become urgent in the near future. Everyone would think I was so completely on-top of my game that they’d probably hate me.

Well, just a little, anyway.

From the Time Management Matrix, the common set of Quadrant II activities include:

• Preparations
• Presentations
• Value Clarification
• Planning
• Relationship Building
• True Recreation
• Empowerment

An aside: I made an argument relationship building being a Quadrant IV activity, but other than that, this is a good list with my favorite “preparations” squarely at the top.

Ideally we should spend the majority of our time here in Quadrant II, handling activities that are important but have low urgency. This is wise; it serves to keep your deliverables and responsibilities from actually becoming urgent. Once something is urgent, you’re stuck. If you want to keep your job/family/life/etc., you have to do it NOW.

Taking care of that looming task when it’s still in Quadrant II (or ideally, IV) empowers you. It puts you squarely in charge of the tasks about which you are already aware. I don’t know if this is what is meant, in the list above, by “Empowerment”, or if that’s about empowering your delegates. I’ll go ahead and presume I’m right and it’s about empowering your own ability to do things in a particular order. If I’m wrong… meh.

I spoke about a previous life previously, in which I spent a vast majority of my time in Quadrant I. One of the most helpful things I ever did in that life was to shut my door for an entire day and re-plan absolutely every facet of the next week. I took the time to stop and plan how my week would follow, giving myself about 30-40% of my time to deal with all of those urgent and important activities that were bound to attack me as the week went on. It meant all of the difference to me in the world. David Allen talks about this a bunch in Getting Things Done, though he doesn’t explicitly link it to the TMM. The closest analogue is when he discusses task collection and the process of emptying one’s head. This is an interesting enough process that I’ll write about it another time. It has, recently, led to the creation of a few sets of goals and milestones, such as:

• A list of 101 things to accomplish in the next three years.
• A list of achievable work-related goals for myself for the year.
• A list of (hopefully) achievable goals for my team for the year.

The point of all of this is simple – make the time to take the time to plan at least enough to get you through the next short period of time. A proper plan (or at least a proper set of goals) gives you the flexibility to adjust your workload as you encounter the more urgent tasks along the way. This is what I meant when I started to talk about breaking down your list of projects into smaller, quickly completed, tasks. That, at the core, is what GTD is all about, for me anyway. I’ve read posts by several other users of the GTD methodology who center on an important concept – Getting Things Done is about finding the best possible framework for you to get said things done efficiently with overall lower stress. Each person is different, so any blanket approach will fail some of the time.

..as much as I want to think otherwise, blogging will always be a Quadrant IV activity. I suppose that, until someone wants to pay me to do so (who would ever want to do that??), it’s smart that it remains something I do with bits of free time.

According to The Time Management Matrix, activities that are neither urgent nor important fall into Quadrant IV, a position that I refer to as “The Procrastinator’s Corner”. These are the trivial, unimportant things that you do when you don’t want to do anything in Quadrants I through III.

This is solitaire. This is reading the news. This is, unless you get paid for it, blogging.

You know you do it. I do it. Everyone does it. We waste time… if we didn’t we’d go nuts! Filling the day with high-priority issues without any relief will lead to certain burnout. The human brain can only take so much stress before it pops, so we play minesweeper. (I don’t anymore – I’ve given up video games in 2008.)

This is ok. The TMM’s quadrants can also be lined up like a slide, from IV down to I. An uncompleted activity in Quadrant IV will eventually trickle down to either Quadrant III (if it becomes time-sensitive) or Quadrant II (if it becomes important).

Minesweeper is probably the exception and not the rule, of course. I personally handle Quadrant IV by living by a suggestion I read somewhere (probably Lifehacker):

When you procrastinate, don’t do nothing, do something else that you’ve been putting off.

This is somewhat similar to the concept of “Structured Procrastination“, though admittedly I only found out about John Perry‘s essay when trying to find the site that originally gave me said advice. It’s also a good read on the concept.

One disagreement that I have with the traditional matrix is that I put Relationship Building activities (Networking, Inter-Departmental mingling) in Quadrant IV instead of Quadrant II. This is a personal choice that really comes down to a simple rationale: I already have strong relationships with most of the rest of my company (I know the names of just about every single in-office employee since a majority of them have been hired since I started).

For folks that don’t have strong inter-departmental working relationships, getting to know your co-workers should definitely be in Quadrant II! For me, getting to know newer employees might fall into Quadrant II, especially since hiring season is going to be ramping up in another month or so!

Since I’m big on lists, on a particularly slow day in early December, I “procrastinated by thinking about procrastination” – I made a list of several arguably low-effort tasks that can be accomplished when I have free spots of time or need to hop out of Quadrant I and II for a few contiguous minutes. A few examples from this list:

• Tidying up the office
• Processing a list of general task collection triggers (more on this another day)
• Networking (Rocking the LinkedIn, Facebook, Email, etc.)
• Casual, Job-Related Reading

For the most part, anyone who needs to make a list of such things probably does not have to try to make time for them since inevitably they will want to leave Quadrants I and II often enough that these things will get done anyway.

Personally however, I find that having a list of things I could do if I need a break is very helpful. It keeps me from actually playing minesweeper.

My company gives managers quarterly training on management technique, skills and habits. Covey would call this “Sharpening the Saw”, which is Habit 7. I find these sessions to be incredibly helpful and am very thankful that we spend so much time working to improve ourselves. In one particular session in mid-2006 we spent half of the day discussing time management and Covey’s groovy Time Management Matrix. The matrix breaks down all of the responsibilities and tasks which we must do into four areas, defined by two critieria, Importance and Urgency:

1. Important and Urgent
2. Important, Not Urgent
3. Not Important, Urgent
4. Not Important, Not Urgent

Each time I was trained on this topic the trainer would ask us how much time we spend in each quadrant now before telling us how much time they thought we should spend. Invariably, every single participant was spending way too much time in Quadrant I. Each time I completed this exercise I was in a Technical Support role so my Quadrant I number was around 50%, which is sickeningly unhealthy. I won’t post what the actual values should be… you should pursue Covey training if you’re interested!

The instructive premise is simple: If you don’t take the time to do the things that are not yet urgent or not yet important, they will become both at some point. In tech support, everything is urgent in the eyes of your customer, so you constantly feel like you are operating in crisis mode. For adrenaline junkies, this works very well, and explains why I have loved such roles during my career. For everyone else, they burn out.

I really like the time management matrix – it reminds me that every single task falls into one category and should be given a certain amount of time based on that. It’s an easy rule that removes (some) stress from planning one’s day/week/month/life.

I am going to write a few posts in the coming weeks about each quadrant and what I’ve found helps me to both keep things in their respective places as well as keep me as sane as possible while managing these tasks.

The image above was mirrored from www.careerdevelopmentplan.net. I didn’t ask to use it, rather I found it in a Google Image Search, so if they are annoyed and would like me to refrain from using it, my email address is readily available.