On Focus

Through most of my career as an entrepreneur, my mornings have always been devoted to checking email. This has always seemed like a good way to dive into the day. But recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that this behavior is actually quite poor for productivity. Not because there’s anything wrong with checking email - it certainly needs to be done at some point (or many points) each day. No, the reason why I prefer to do things differently now is that I think a morning email-check starts you off at the wrong level of detail.

Email tends to be very zoomed in. Little notes, FYIs, and requests related to stuff you’ve already done, or may do in the future. But one of the biggest impediments to productivity is getting too caught up in the details, and thus missing out on the big picture.

There are always an infinite number of details, and you can run yourself ragged trying to keep up with them all. It’s easy to do so, because all of these details tend to be so demanding. They sit on a todo list looking terribly not-done, or worse yet, they come in attached to subtly demanding emails from your coworkers, clients, or partners.

The start of the day is a perfect time to look at the big picture. You’re rested, and your head is clear, since it’s been 12 hours or so since you last thought about work. The whole day is ahead of you, full of promise and potential. Now’s the time to ask: what is the absolute most valuable way I could spend the next eight hours?

I’ve been amazed at the insights this produces. I’m more productive - not from doing more work, but from working on things that matter more. Humans tend to get caught up in the details so easily. Once caught up, we rarely stop to question the comparative value of this here vs. anything else you could be doing with your time and energy. But the opportunity cost of that energy may be huge. Morning is a great time to stop and think about this; it’s the one time of day that you’re not already wrapped up in something.

Not surprisingly, I’m not the first to have this insight. Getting Things Done recommends setting aside two hours each week to look at the “50,000 foot view”, or the really big picture. This is one of those “But I don’t have time for that!” → “You don’t have time not to” things. My complaint with the specific method suggested by GTD - doing this review late on a Friday - is that you don’t want to think about the big picture much then. The events of the week are still fresh in your brain, demanding your attention. I find it much more effective to think about this at a time when I’m more distant from the details.

By: Noah

There is a typo in line 2:

`>> /dev/apt/sources.list` should be `>> /etc/apt/sources.list`

Making Happiness, Not Money

So many people seem to judge success based on how much money one makes. This is a terrible misconception though, as success is not defined by monetary gain, but by happiness. This inspires an entirely different way of thinking about our lives; in particular our jobs. What if we didn’t strive to make money, but instead to make happiness?

When I first iterated over this article, I went back and forth on whether or not to include bullet points refining the concept. I found it difficult to articulate, because I was quick to inject my own inspirations for contentment. Everyone has a different definition of “happiness,” but there are a various ways you can look at your job in which are most encouraging. I believe I’ll continue to post on this concept, but here are a few things I find important and that could lend themselves to others as well.

1) Layout a base set of criteria that makes you happy. Like profiling an application for performance gain, you can’t know you’ve reached your goal unless you’ve set one. But how does one determine what happiness means? It’s actually fairly easy. Slow down, take a deep breath, and think about what makes you smile (smiling on the inside counts as well). What makes your entire body reverberate with that indescribable feeling?

2) Make just enough money to be able to provide these things for yourself.

3) If you make more money than you need to be happy, use it to inspire happiness in others.

4) Ensure that your means of making money contributes to your overall happiness. Sacrificing your well-being for delayed reward is a broken model. Some would argue this point, saying that there are necessary evils; Someone has to do the dirty work. But one can be content in their work, glamorous or not, based on their perception of the work itself and its benefit to the greater good.

5) Love unconditionally.

6) Add pictures of cats to whatever projects you work on. This guarantees, without the glimmer of a doubt, the happiness of not only yourself but your users as well.

Ok ok, the last one was a joke, but seriously … who doesn’t like cat pictures.

IE Cookie Domain Bug

I run across bizarre IE bugs from time to time, but this one was obscure enough that it bears repeating.

We created a beta site for Chow at beta.chow.com to test out new features and wanted our login cookies to work across both domains, so we changed the existing code to:

cookies[:pk] = { :value => 'foo', :domain => '.chow.com' }

Pretty simple, but we ran into a couple of problems.

The first is that cookies.delete(:pk) won’t work, because you can’t pass options to it which is problem when you’ve set the domain manually.

You can get around this by setting the same cookie with :expire => Time.at(0). Chris wrote a patch to fix this a year ago, but I digress.

A much worse problem is when you’ve set different cookies with a ‘www.chow.com’ domain and a ’.chow.com’ domain.

Firefox and Safari handle each cookie correctly, but IE will use the domain from the cookie it read in last.

This meant any user trying to access the beta site couldn’t get in because IE was using the www.chow.com cookie. This hasn’t been fixed in IE 7 either.

If your curious how something like this would happen in the first place, we set a timezone cookie via javascript (using my Zoned Rails plugin) and set the rest of the cookies within our application code.

I had updated the app code to use the ’.chow.com’ domain, but neglected the javascript thus causing the issue.