Month: December 2007

Almost ready to fall off the GND wagon

I brought a bunch of technical books home for the holiday, with the idea of working on a web service to help me get things done. So far, I haven’t opened any of the books, nor have I touched the project.

Instead, I’ve been practicing GND: Getting Nothing Done.

That’s not quite true: I have managed to enter a couple of shelves’ worth of books into LibraryThing, I’ve read a few books (mostly not fiction) and have blogged about them, and I even spent a day adapting some code I’d written for my Temple to their new membership data system. And I’ve been going to the JCC a lot (and eating a lot of tasty food to make up for it). But, in general, I’ve been enjoying my downtime (and, very specifically, I have not checked my work email).

But I’m beginning to feel restless. I’m not quite to the point that Todd wrote about earlier today: “[Y]ou may have reached that consummate stage of holidaydom where you’re not enjoying your down time much — you know, the part where you’re bored out of your mind and need to get a technology news or general Web fix” but I could see myself there in another few days.

So it’s time to dust off the to-do list and start looking at it. Looking can’t hurt, can it?

Oxygen at work

I hate having to do research during dinner, but it was necessary tonight. We brought some wine with us to dinner, having been impressed with it on our previous encounter — but when we opened this bottle, there were purple crystals at the cork, and the wine was flat, lifeless, and raisiny.

A quick trip across the room to the computer, and the verdict was in: oxygenation. (And I bookmarked three more links on del.icio.us, too.)

I’ve reported the problem to the place we bought the wine; it’ll be interesting to see what kind of response I get.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

I wrote about some of the great events at the IBM Technical Leadership Exchange back in April. But there were some other, more mundane, benefits of attending, too. One of them was the “TLE Bookstore”, which had a selection of technical and leadership titles available for the effort of filling out a paper form — a far easier process than our usual internal book-buying system. So, naturally, I picked out a lot of books, including the one I just finished, Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

Goldsmith is an executive coach; he deals with people whose salaries have a zero or two more than mine. But that doesn’t make his ideas and advice inapplicable to me — far from it.

The McGuffin here is his list of 20 “transactional flaws” that one person can commit against others. I’m happy to report that I am not guilty of all twenty flaws, but I do see a few of them in myself, including #2 (adding too much value) and #16 (not listening).

Of course, Goldsmith doesn’t just help you identify flaws — he offers suggestions for ways to combat them, especially apologizing and thanking. And he also strongly suggests that you advertise your intention to change, and find a way of really measuring how you do (or don’t) change your behavior. He also points out that you only need to change those behaviors which cause problems with other people (so I’m safe in not working on my messy files at work!).

I will be returning to this book in the New Year and developing an action plan to obviate at least some of my flaws. Recommended.