There have been tons of articles about it over the past few years - Multitasking is not as efficient as we would all like to believe. We have reached a time where it is not only common to be doing 4 or 5 tasks at once, but it’s pretty much expected. Job descriptions list it as a required skill! We are encouraged with “open door” policies to stop by our coworkers’ desks. We have opened ourselves up to phone calls, email, IM, text messages, tweets, pokes, & about a billion other ways to be distracted, and that’s even before we start working on a bunch of things at once. Read the rest of this entry »

For almost the last year, I’ve been working for a company that is based in Seattle, although I still live in Utah. Telecommuting brings some interesting challenges and opportunities, and one of them is the ability (and necessity) to work wherever I am. Whether I’m in my home office, a restaurant, an airport, or the main office in Seattle, I have to have everything I need with me wherever I am. Such is the life of a Digital Nomad.

As I prepare to head to Seattle tomorrow to spend the week in the office and swing by SMX Advanced, I thought it would be fun to show how I pack for a trip such as this. So in the spirit of the recent “What’s in our Bags” series from Lifehacker.com, here is how I am preparing for the week… Read the rest of this entry »

Today I found out that if I don’t change a few things very soon, I am going to be the bottleneck in my team’s upcoming development projects. I will have people waiting around for me to catch up and get my piece of the puzzle finished. Never good. This realization made me review my thoughts on “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

The web development cycle is a lot like a manufacturing plant. A product (web page, widget, whatever) has to be treated and assembled by different machines (like business, development, QA) before it is a completed product. Whenever there is a sequence such as this, one part of the process will inevitably be the part that takes the longest and impedes the flow. This will cause all the parts downstream to wait and waste time sitting idle. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Mike Moran’s most recent book, Do It Wrong Quickly (Quick note - I haven’t yet read the book, just a number of posts and reviews about it. It’s on my list, ok?). You can read the gist of the book on his site, but in 1 sentence taken from the description at Amazon:

“Moran shows how to quickly transition from plan then execute to a non-stop cycle of refinement.”

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