Wednesday, October 15, 2008

20 Days: A Non Productive Day

Today I had three long meetings, several other distractions, plus I was one of the speakers at the Seattle Tech Startups meeting tonight. In between, I got a few hours of coding. In short, I did a lot, but it seemed like a totally non-productive day. Two observations:

  1. There are lots of way to measure productivity. I learned things at all of my meetings. And, each one might pay off in the future. So, it wasn't a waste of time, though it didn't help with my current deadline.

  2. I knew going in that this would happen. It's almost impossible to avoid non-productive days in any project. While you can't really schedule for such days (and I've certainly seen it tried), I think you need to take it in stride and move on -- and hope you don't have too many of them. Tomorrow, I'll be spending four hours in UX office hours at StartPad, so I'll just have to be super-productive the rest of the day.
At Seattle Tech Startups, I was one of the speakers on the subject of Public Speaking, but I learned cool things from both of the other speakers.

One of the things that Tom Music presented was the idea of "Speech Patterns" (like design patterns for public speaking) for planning a speech. I really liked the idea and will probably use it in the future -- I think it will work well with the way I plan speeches.

Jamie Riche of Ideal Communications described the Johari Window, a cognitive modeling tool that I had not heard of before, and discussed various aspects of giving and receiving feedback. Now I have an explanation for my desires to share and get feedback! I'm definitely going to have to read more about this.

2 comments:

DaveSchappell said...

Yeah, those 'meeting days' can be a killer -- that's one of the reasons we set up Hops and Chops -- to try to aggregate bunches of lunches/coffees/quick-meetings into a single session. Also gives the benefit of real-time intros. And, of course, the beer doesn't hurt.

Good luck with Day #19!

Dave

Tom said...

Thanks for the kind words!

I really enjoyed your talk about your experiences as a fundraiser for a quarter, and I'm glad we got the chance to chat later on in the evening.

Now to go check the latest Puzzazz!

Post a Comment