Claudio Perrone’s Monologues

Over the years I have used several productivity approaches, from goal-driven/top-down (e.g. Steven Covey’s First-Things-First quadrants) to more reactive/bottom-up (e.g. David Allen’s Getting Things Done).
I have also used more tactical approaches, such as the 48 minutes rule, which I always find surprisingly effective, particularly when I know I can work for some time uninterrupted.

To beat my worst procrastination habits however, I’m now using another set of productivity weapons: David Seah’s The Printable CEO tools.
In the last few months I started measuring where my time goes during my work day. It is always a good idea to know where you are, before taking corrective actions and get where you want to go, don’t you think? Armed with my trusted TimeLeft countdown, every fifteen minutes I tracked my activities (and distractions) in the Emergent Task Timer. After a while I got pretty used to it.

The form that really got my attention, however, is the Concrete Goals Tracker. David suggests a brilliant motivational approach which comes from his experience in the gaming industry: every time you complete something worth doing, you award yourself points.
In the last couple of years I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on motivational patterns emerged in game development and it is amazing to realize how simple things like adding a score to value our activities can trigger some of the most primitive mechanisms of our brain.

This morning, I thought I could use this system at home to help me focus on the tangible things I can do in preparation to my next talk.
Here is my first draft:

Don’t worry if you don’t quite understand some of the items I have written for now. It will all become clearer in the next few weeks. Let’s just say that these are relevant to my talk. The actual deliverables (slides and narrative) are worth 10 points, the goal supporting activities are worth 5 or 2 points, the attitude 1 point.
So what do you think? Would a system like this work for you? In my case, I have absolutely no doubts!

A close friend of mine who works as a developer in a geographically distributed team, recently told me, with extreme frustration, that our profession is doomed and it won’t be long before we will all lose our jobs.
“We just translate user requirements into code”, he said. “Companies see IT as just a cost, we just can’t compete with India and China on a price basis”, he added.

Almost every time I travel to the US I hear stories of IT projects outsourced to India or to some other country abroad. Despite the reported mixed results, the trend is set to continue and it is beginning to extend to Western Europe as well.
Are we going to lose our jobs in the foreseeable future? I seriously doubt. Call me naïve, but I never regarded my job as an expense, although admittedly our financial department may beg to differ

My friend is right about one thing though: we can’t compete on a price basis. To survive, we need to get hungry again and learn how to deliberately think better, since creating new value is the only basis for competition left to us.

Besides, developers who are not cheap but consistently create opportunities that make or save their employers lots of money are, indeed, an investment. Furthermore, if we consider how hard it is to bring projects to success, investing on people who simply can’t fail is actually a fantastic investment.

But who and where are those talented few? Are you exceptional? Am I? Silence in our head. Let’s contemplate this possibility together for a moment… LOL, nice try! Perhaps we can work on refining our skills and try harder though

I’ll be back to Stockholm in early April, delivering a talk at one of the main IT conferences in Sweden. For such a technology-centric event, it is quite fascinating to see an entire track dealing with the often neglected issues of people working together. We should really give the organizers a standing ovation for such a splendid decision.

My talk is titled “Passionate Teams and Cooperative Customers: Agile tales of creative customer communication“. I have the abstract here for your convenience:

“In this session, Claudio presents stories of effective collaboration, thinking tools and valuable insights that can transform “incompetent” customers and “arrogant” teams into unstoppable forces.

We are getting so used to complexity that we no longer notice it. To bring simplicity to our software however, we need to communicate effectively with our customers, distill their knowledge and bake it into our domain models. Yet, we focus so much on improving our technical skills that we often offer elaborate solutions to the wrong problems, unprepared to deal with a world where perception is far more important than logic.”

If you happen to be at the conference, make sure you attend my session! I bet you won’t be disappointed ;-).

The list of stars that will join me at the event is, quite frankly, a tad intimidating (see here).

I always wonder about what drives people to speak in public. Is it the genuine spirit of contribution? Perhaps the publicity and recognition that inevitably goes with it? Is it maybe the excitement of being on stage? It’s probably a combination of all of that and more; my biggest reason, however, is to confront my greatest fears: speaking in public is like Freddie Krueger, a pure nightmare becoming real. In fact, it is the preparation and the waiting for the moment of truth that drives me nuts. All my insecurities emerge all of the sudden, my entire body reacts, and I become absurdly anxious. Then again, once on stage, everything changes completely: I’m on a mission, I’m (over)prepared, I just can’t fail.

So, there you go. It is never easy and probably it will never be. I still haven’t won my fears at all, but the past rewarded me with really good memories (like when, a million years ago, I addressed a group of scientists at CERN for a whole week, for example), and the future will surely hold even better ones.

By the way, have you ever considered speaking in public? There is a good chance that your own community would love you to volunteer on a topic you feel passionate about. If you live in Ireland like I do, this is definitely the case. It takes a lot of commitment, but perhaps this year you could try. Just don’t let your fears eat you. People want you to succeed, don’t you know?