Recently in Work & Productivity Category

Members of my new organization at the UW are currently spread out over five different buildings all across the campus. My boss and I are the only ones on central campus, and even we are in separate buildings. A little over 1.5 miles as the crow flies separates the furthermost endpoints of our "empire."

As a result, putting together a simple meeting of just four or five people may result in several miles of combined walking. Scheduling something also requires keeping everyone's "travel time" in mind, and trying to choose a meeting location equidistant from all attendees just to be fair. In short, it's really a pain in the ass.

One practical consequence of this ass-pain revealed itself the other day while I was trying to clean out my email inbox. Normally, I only keep emails that represent something I still have to act on. Anything that's simply informational gets immediately tagged and filed (or deleted), and I shoot for having fewer than 20 items in my inbox at any time. But after my latest purge, I still had over 60 and couldn't figure it out.

I realized that a new category of email message had evolved as a direct result of the distributed nature of my organization. Around 40 of the messages I was hanging onto represented items I needed more information about, but the issue was too complicated (or sensitive) to do over email and/or involved more than one party, so a phone call wasn't possible either. They were, in short, issues that I would normally solve by either the "casual pop-in" or by calling an impromptu meeting.

But in our environment, the casual pop-in isn't practical and meetings are never impromptu. So, the messages just sit there until I happen I run into the relevant parties in another context, or I break down and engage in the overly-complicated process of arranging a meeting.

In two months, however, everyone in my organization will be moving into a single location. I am curious to see how that move will affect my productivity. Being somewhat of a geek, I added a new tag in my email system to identify messages that fall into this "pain in the ass" category, and I will chart and monitor any changes that might occur in that category after we relocate.

Of course, there's also the question of how much simply not overanalyzing this kind of stuff would increase my productivity, but that's not how science is done, dammit!

The University of Washington recently purchased and took possession of the 22-story former Safeco Tower near the UW campus. My organization, which currently has its staff scattered across campus in five different locations, is planning to move into the newly-dubbed "UW Tower" this summer.

Or, rather, we are moving into the "UW Tower Properties".

We're not actually moving into the tower itself; we're moving into one of the 3-story "outbuildings" that encircle the tower much as medieval villagers' huts encircled their Lord's castle.

The views from the upper floors of the Tower cover the entire region, including the downtown skyline, Lake Union, Lake Washington, and both sets of our mountains.

The view from our section includes a dentist's office and a gas station.

But I'm not complaining. Really. It's going to be nice to finally have everyone in my office located under one roof, and I'm looking forward to interacting with my co-workers more regularly. I've worked in far, far less attractive spaces in my day, and I honestly don't have any issues of status caught up in the location of my office.

I got to take a tour of the UW Tower today. Only a few groups have moved in and there's a ton of work left to be done to the interior to prepare for new tenants. I thought some of the fields of stacked furniture we encountered in our future workspace made for interesting geometric patterns, so I snapped a few photos. Enjoy.

There's a new catchphrase of sorts circulating throughout the hallowed halls of my workplace. In the context of organizational planning and its related activities (development of mission statements, guiding principles, etc.) the popular axiom goes something like:

Properly applied, this homey little rule-of-thumb is perfectly capable of detecting bullshit and pointless utterances. For example, if your mission is "Maximize profits for our stakeholders," and you take the opposite of that -- "Minimize profits for our stakeholders" -- and that's silly (I think we can agree it is) then you need to revise your statement.

For all I know, this is a common and time-honored technique, but it's only come up recently where I work and it's showing all the hallmarks of a new trend -- overuse and misapplication.

In my observations, there are two main errors people make in applying it:

First, they miss the point that sometimes stating something, even if it's obvious, makes a strong impact in that you're not stating something else. To cite a recent real example of this: a mission statement about providing an excellent undergraduate educational experience was determined to be "silly" on the grounds that one would never do the opposite ("provide a bad undergraduate educational experience.") But the very fact that a statement about undergraduate education was included in the mission in the first place is the significant factor. Too often, major research institutions neglect (or are accused of neglecting) undergraduates. The document could have failed to mention them at all, or could have focused on graduate education and research. But it didn't, and that's the important thing.

Second, I have seen it clumsily applied to complex statements for which there is no simple "opposite." Another example: the statement "We will provide meaningful information for decision-making that is accessible anytime and anywhere" was contorted into something like "We will provide meaningless information for decision-making that is not accessible anytime or everywhere." Granted, the original is not the world's best statement, but its so-called "negation" misses the point. The problem that the statement was intended to address was suboptimization -- information provided in some contexts was meaningless and was inaccessible from some locations. The statement was intended to raise the standard on the quality and availability of information and, as such, was important to state even if its so-called "opposite" is, indeed, silly.

Again, the axiom is useful in many contexts as a tool to detect meaning-free utterances -- the sort that really do tend to crop up in organizational planning, especially after a committee or two have a go at things. But as with any tool, it's important that one doesn't view it as the only one necessary to have in the toolbox. Another oft- (and over-) used axiom -- "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" -- applies here.

My Herman Miller Mirra chair arrived today.

My butt is so happy. I don't want to stand up.

This chair kicks the Aeron's ass.

I'm back from an unintentional hiatus from blogging. I wonder what percentage of blog posts are focused on explaining why the blogger hasn't blogged in a while? I'll bet it's pretty high.

In my case, I don't really have a good reason. I can't say that my new job is to blame as my blog-life is pretty neatly distinct from my work life. In other words, I usually don't blog from work in accordance with University of Washington Administrative Policy 47.2 (hear that, HR?!) so I generally have the same amount of time for blogging regardless of how busy I get.

I have been trying out some social networking sites, however, and tweaking my profiles has been using up what little screen time I'm willing to invest when I'm not in the office.

Some colleagues of mine are getting into Facebook, which I always thought was more for the under-25 crowd so I never gave it any attention. Plus, after having played around with MySpace and its dreadful interface and population of young, hot, horny "women" (bots) wanting to be my "friend," I didn't think much of the social web phenomenon. But, I was invited to join this Facebook experiment, so I created a Facebook profile.

I am reserving judgment on Facebook so far. The site is well-presented and neatly arranged. It has avoided MySpace's ghastly aesthetic problems by preventing the user from customizing the styles of his or her profile to a large degree. Facebook has a concept of "Groups" and "Networks," which MySpace largely lacks (AFAIK). And there is a vast array of "applications" available to help meet new friends through common musical, movie, or other interests (or to just wile away your time trying out new gadgets).

It's somewhat disturbing, however, in that it logs and reports everything that any of your friends does -- from befriending you, to installing a new app, to updating their status ("I'm at the beach!" or "I'm just chillin'!"). Of course, you can modify how much of your own activity you want reported, but I'm still a bit weirded out by its omniscience.

The whole "UW Facebook" endeavor was kick-started by a group interested in seeing how social networking can be used in professional environments. There's a discussion going on now about it in one of the forums, but I find myself here on my own blog writing about it rather than engaging with my colleagues because it's 7:30 on a Sunday night and I don't really want to think about "work stuff." I expect, therefore, that this experiment will be a non-starter for me unless Facebook can play a useful professional role during the work day -- more so that email and phone calls, which seem to do the trick.

After all, the separation of personal business from work goes the other way, too.

After I first started working in higher education nearly fourteen years ago I started hearing stuff about this person called "The Provost." I was completely unfamiliar with the term, and it was not really clear to me what this "Provost" person did at a University But "The Provost" was always discussed with great reverence and awe, so I decided very early on in my career that I wanted to be a Provost.

I mainly just liked the name.

I grew to learn that the Provost is the Chief Academic Officer at a University. Minimally, all the Deans report to the Provost. At some schools, the Provost is also in charge of the budget and a variety of other areas. Provosts are, in fact, a Very Big Deal, and are generally recruited from a pool of well-respected academics with 100-page CV's and the power to bend steel beams with their minds.

Suffice to say, I realized that I probably won't ever be a Provost.

However, I just scored a position that's probably the closest to a Provosture that I'll ever get: a job as Associate Vice Provost with the University of Washington's Office of Information Management. It has the word "Provost" right there in the title!

I just got back from spending a few days in New York City attending a leadership training program. Look! That's me by the Brooklyn Bridge!!

Yesterday, I arrived at the Dean's office a few minutes early for a meeting so I ducked into an empty cubicle to inhale some lunch. I found the pictured stack of books on the cubicle's desk.

(click for a larger version)

For those photographically-challenged amongst you, the titles of the books I found were:

Chairing the Academic Department
The Academic Chairperson's Handbook
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

What the hell kind of College are they running, anyway!?

Coincidently, one of the topics at the meeting I was going to concerned training new academic department chairs. I mentioned the pile of research I had spied in the cubicle, which drew a big laugh. I then suggested that perhaps basing our mission on, say, Brave New World instead would be more effective. The room was in stitches. I owned that audience.

Later, I recalled that the drug from Brave new World was called "soma," which was also the last name of our former Acting Dean. If only that had occurred to me at the meeting I could have scored a legendary comedic triple play. Oh well.

Writely is an online word processor currently in beta. It supports all the common formatting you'd expect from such a program, plus direct posting to blogs, so I'm trying it out. If you can read this, then I've succeeded in configuring it.

In general, I find I have little use for a word processor. In about 90% of all cases in which I need to write something, email or some other plain text outlet suits me just fine. Word processors were designed for producing print output, and there's very little that I need to print these days.

I also have have issues with most web-based WYSIWYG editors, such as the one I'm currently using in Writely. For some reason, they generally insist on inserting errant spaces and doing funky things with line and paragraph breaks. I've tried incorporating some into the Movable Type interface, but the resulting code always seems to break my validation. We'll see how you perform, Writely.

Upon inserting the hyperlink for the first word of this post, I became annoyed. I selected the word by double-clicking it, and the program un-helpfully selected the space after the word as well (grrrr). Then, upon applying the hyperlink, three spaces popped in afterwards that I then had to delete.

Upon checking the code, I am pleased that in-line formatting is applied via the span tag (though the style attributes are in ALL CAPS, for some reason), but I'm annoyed again now I see that two line breaks are used in place of a single paragraph break. Granted, it's hard for software to determine when you're going to hit Enter once or twice and then do the right thing, but it's not impossible and ignoring the basic "p" tag has the potential to mess up my existing styles. Oh, and I just noticed that it inserted a superfluous line break at the start of the text.

There are some collaboration options that might be nice. I can invite other Writely users to see and/or edit this document. And that's really the whole point, I guess. Writely is not just a word processor, but a document management and sharing system. I wonder how good it is at tracking changes? Oh, I see a "Revisions" tab that lists the changes made to this document as I've been working on it. That's sort of cool. I'll have to find some more people I know who use it and try out the sharing functions.

Many see tools like Writely as a potential Microsoft Word-killer. It's been demonsrated that the vast majority of people use only a small fraction of Word's capabilities, yet the software has become the de facto standard for word processing. Everyone seems to need it, but mostly for writing basic documents with minimal formatting. Given what I use word processing for, I have to say that, minus a few glitchy annoyances, Writely could meet my needs pretty well.

After posting this to the blog, I made a few corrections. The document title did not map to the blog post title, and the XHTML-compliant "<br />" tags I saw in the preview were replaced with non-compliant "<br$gt;>" tags with spaces in between them (I removed all of them and replaced with paragraph tags). The weird ALL CAPS formatting I spied on the inline span styles, however, were converted to lower case by Writely.

I got a call today from someone at a completely different state university, which just happens to also have the name of our state in it. They were referred to me by a software vendor who told them I was the contact for the university's site license for a particular product.

Not only did the vendor have the institution wrong, I'm not even the contact for my university's site license anyway -- in fact, we don't have a university site license. I am the contact for my college's license, which is a critical distinction. Today's experience tells me that they really don't care as much about me as they keep saying they do.

Most companies have some form of "CRM," or Customer Relationship Management, software. The CRM business itself is enormous and highly profitable. But I have to wonder how effective the products really are.

A rant to close out the week.

I received an email message today. The message itself contained 194 bytes of text data which explained what was in the accompanying attachment. The attachment was a Microsoft Word document that contained 285 bytes of text. No fancy formatting, no images ... just text. The entire message could have, therefore, easily been conveyed in under 500 bytes.

The Word document, however, was 20,480 bytes!! The entire message, therefore, was 51 TIMES the size it needed to be in order to convey the exact same message in plain text.

The message was sent to four people, plus a copy was presumably saved in the sender's Out box. That makes for a grand total of 102,400 bytes of data sitting on our mail server for something that could have been transmitted using less than 2,500 bytes.

This is not to mention the fact that viruses can ride in on email attachments, that it takes extra time to open email attachments, that some people not want/be able to use Word, etc.

Now, this is a small potatoes example, but this kind of thing goes on ALL THE FRIGGIN' TIME around here. Every meeting agenda with 6 single line agenda items is sent in a Word document with a letterhead graphic. Meeting minutes, which are just plain text, are put into Word. I recently received the membership list of a committee that was in Microsoft friggin' Excel! Ten names in Column A, cells 1-10. No phone numbers, no email addresses, nothing that even approached requiring a tabular format let alone any complex calculations and formulas (which is what a spreadsheet is FOR, people!)

Given the fact that no one ever deletes any of their email, it's no wonder our file backup process is now taking over 8 hours.

People (and this includes everyone): stop with the attachments already. Plain text is Just Fine for conveying 95% of the information you are sending via email.

I've always been an advocate of the "power nap." Through trial-and-error, I've determined that 20 minutes is enough to get me refreshed without making me feel worse than before.

It seems the results of my selfless and rigorous experimentation have been borne out by actual scientific research. Men's Journal reports that Dr. Sara Mednick ("a scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies who is at the forefront of napping research" [emphasis mine]) confirms the optimal timing of the power nap is 20 minutes.

Mednick's most recent research also shows that power naps can lift productivity and mood, lower stress, and improve memory and learning. In fact, Mednick has found through MRIs of nappers that brain activity stays high throughout the day with a nap; without one, it declines as the day wears on.

Yawwwwwwwwn...

The title of this post comes from Merlin Mann's wonderful site, 5ives, specifically his post on "Five things I’d like to see engraved on little rubber bracelets"

My annual performance review is on Tuesday. I blocked off the entire morning today to write up my goals, accomplishments, activities, and all the other stuff required for my big meeting with the Dean.

It's now 10:30. I have brewed two pots of coffee, cleaned my office, filed all my loose papers, printed new labels for all my file folders, organized my email, tested out a couple new Firefox extensions, and spent the last 15 minutes chatting with my staff about where to find good bicycle shorts.

Add to that, now, writing this blog post.

I wonder if the Dean would be impressed with the fact that I have posted over 250 entries over the last 12 months and have increased readership on my site to over 100 visits per day?

I just finished reviewing a bunch of résumés for an open position where I work. Since I'm not leading the search, I wasn't confronted with the task of narrowing down the 50+ applications to the 10 I had to look at, but 10 is still a significant number of documents to read and evaluate.

I have served on a number of search committees at three different higher education institutions over the last 12 years. Here is some of my advice to job applicants.

Last month, I mentioned that I had been nominated for an award at work. I later learned the award came with a big, fat check for a cool grand.

I didn't win it.

But, you know, it's an honor to be nominated, blah, blah, blah....

:-)