Creating educational exhibitions has always been a fascination of mine (in fact, since I left the cube farm and became free to choose my consulting work, I’ve been engaged in creating three exhibitions, and counting). So it was only natural that throughout my career, wherever I worked I ended up driving the creation of the local exhibit showcasing our technology and our company to visitors and employees alike.

I firmly believe that the internal type of exhibition can play an important role in maintaining and fostering the organizational culture, and in this new insight article I share my reasoning – and some useful tips on how to get it done successfully, based on my accumulated experience.

Enjoy!

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CAPTCHA: A Wonderful Adventure in Exhibition Space

Interruptions are a major component of Information Overload (indeed, they cause more harm than the rightly reviled second component, email overload, as I’d shown here). However, we’ve known for years that not all interruptions are created equal: the damage depends on the context. An unrelated phone call while you’re taking an exam certainly does more harm than one when you’re slouching in front of the TV.

Microsoft Research had developed a wonderful application some years ago called Priorities, which looks at every aspect of a knowledge worker’s attentional context to determine whether to pass an interrupt (pop an incoming message alert, or ring the phone) or to block or divert it. Though never released to the public, Priorities worked quite well by being continuously aware of numerous contextual parameters: what applications the user is using, what their calendar says they’re doing, what deadlines they face, whether they’re talking to someone… every parameter you could want, in fact, save one: it couldn’t know what you were thinking, whether you were in the middle of some focused thought process or not. That would be the holy grail of Information Overload intervention: to read one’s thoughts in real time and react accordingly.

That capability had to wait until last January, when Dr. Ruggero Scorcioni developed Good Times, an application that routes interrupting cellphone calls based on actual brain activity. This came about in a somewhat amusing manner, and was therefore featured in a media flurry (e.g. here), causing many readers to chuckle. Not me, though: I knew I had to hear more, and I reached out to Ruggero on LinkedIn (as I try to do with every Info Overload practitioner I can find – if you are one and we aren’t connected, don’t just sit there!).  We then had a fascinating conversation, and I learned a great deal about this innovative entrepreneur and his brainchild. Read on…

Unusual origin of an unusual application

Dr. Scorcioni presenting Good Times

Ruggero Scorcioni has one of those interesting, flexible careers I like so much. He started as a computer programmer at IBM, then decided that the brain is far more interesting, got a PhD in neuroscience and took a position in the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA. In January he attended an AT&T Developers Summit in Las Vegas, where he entered a 26 hour Hackathon challenge to develop a mobile phone application. He was one of a hundred of the 500 participants to receive a free set of Necomimi brainwave cat ears, which uses an electrode on the head to perk up the furry ears when their owner is mentally active. This was meant as a gag, but Scorcioni decided to hack the hardware of this very simple brainwave monitor, hook it up to an Arduino controller and add the software to create what he called a mentally activated “Do not Disturb” button – a setup that transfers incoming calls to voicemail when your brain waves indicate concentrated thinking.

This unusual application was so cool it was voted first place out of 70 submitted projects, netting the surprised Ruggero $30,000. And then – being a true entrepreneur – he decided to use the money to found a startup, BrainYno, to develop the idea further. At this time he is developing prototypes for a commercial product – sans furry ears, of course, but applying the same concept to implement the aforementioned holy grail!

You can see a video of the winning pitch at  http://youtu.be/ZPFkqJp3Upc.

The promise and the challenge

What makes this venture interesting IMHO is the tension between its promise and the difficulties it may face. In principle, a system that can defer or route interruptions based on the intended recipient’s actual real time brain state could be immensely beneficial to knowledge workers, who are today interrupted every few minutes throughout their harried workday. Where solutions like Quiet Time use a brute force approach – blocking entire time chunks – a solution like Good Times can fine tune the blocking to the times when you’re really in need of quiet… much more efficient.

Two main issues that BrainYno needs to overcome come to mind:

• Is the system’s discrimination reliable – that is, can a brain sensor simple enough to be worn for hours without annoyance actually sense your interruptibility correctly?
• Will people actually agree to use such an unusual system in day to day work?

As a neuroscientist, Dr. Scorcioni is well positioned to research the first question; the answer to the second will emerge once the system is tested on actual workers. One would also need to identify the right people to use in such tests – people like coders, whose need to get “in the flow” is legendary, may be the first to appreciate this novel protection of their focus. And should Google Glasses succeed in  making us look like cyborgs, maybe one more connection will seem less objectionable?

And perhaps the best thing would be a solution that merges the brain linkage of Good Times with leading edge tools like Microsoft’s Priorities, leveraging the strengths of all the parameters one can elicit from both brains and computers to attain even better specificity and reliability.

I’m eagerly waiting to find out!

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How You Can Deploy “Quiet Time” to Increase Your Group’s Productivity

Today I made another sighting – I went into a gas station I haven’t been to before, and there was the wondrous structure you see in the photo – a robotic battery swap station for Better Place’s cars. A few dozen of these stations are said to exist around Israel, but this was the first time I saw one.

Alas, I was a day too late to rejoice.  Yesterday Better Place filed for bankruptcy, having failed to grow the business to the extent necessary for solvency. If the future has swappable-battery electric cars in it, that future is no longer here; and when it comes again, Better Place will be remembered as an early pioneer who failed to make the grade.

Shai Agassi’s visionary company was relentlessly pushing to realize its dream of pollution-free, user friendly electric cars. It was innovative and courageous. It was a good company in our midst.

It will be missed.

click image to enlarge

I was reading the InnovaScapes Institute blog and noticed in the “About Me” sidebar the statement that Chuck House, its author,

holds HP’s only Medal of Defiance, awarded by David Packard for “extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty”

This sounded fascinating: a top corporate executive recognizing contempt and defiance – heck, insubordination – as a desirable behavior in an engineer?!  Given my interest in promoting Intrapreneurship, my curiosity about this unusual medal was intense.

Fortunately I know Chuck well, having had the honor and delight to collaborate with him when we were both at Intel, so I dropped him a line and asked him to share some insight into this matter, and to allow me to share it with you, my readers. Which he graciously did.

So, here is the story.

The medal

The Medal of Defiance was awarded only once in the history of Hewlett-Packard, by the founder of the company (and then chairman of the board), David Packard. It was presented to Chuck House in April 1982, when he began a new role as HP’s Corporate Engineering Director. Packard had become concerned that the “new HP” in the computer business was becoming very bureaucratic. New CEO John Young thought it key to shift resources from instrumentation to computing, and to co-ordinate all of the R&D efforts across ninety divisions into something much more efficient. But the very appointment of a Corporate Engineering Director was evidence to Packard that a job to co-ordinate strategies, streamline development times, and strengthen productivity rather than emphasize creativity would be viewed as another “Headquarters” imposition.

House was one of those mavericks, though, from a remote division who exemplified local creativity. He had pioneered several major programs, and helped launch a dozen divisions in his first twenty years at the company. If anyone could meet Young’s goals, and persuade the bulk of HP engineers and managers that this was workable, it augured to be House.

Packard recalled the long-forgotten incident with House that is described below, and he concluded that an award to him at inception of this new corporate role could set a tone that emphasized innovation and creativity at every level of the company. Voilà, the Award of Defiance was conceived, created, and bestowed.

The underlying story, in Chuck’s own words

(Extracted from “Old Bribery”, Chapter 2 of Permission Denied: Odyssey of an Intrapreneur, InnovaScapes Institute Press, 2013; available here.)

Given a choice of several new projects, I hadn’t previously seen one that was on the list, an FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) control tower monitor.  I asked my boss, “What’s this one?”  His cryptic answer: “We don’t really know.  It’s a new request, not really an oscilloscope.  Milt Russell in our cathode ray tube (CRT) department has worked in this area; he might know something about it.”

The FAA wanted to see images of airplanes near an airport ― recall movie scenes where a control tower is tracking radar blips on CRTs (cathode ray tubes, or television tubes) that indicate planes. Our chief competitor, Tektronix, had voted ‘no,’ giving us an opening. Milt Russell, a short soft-spoken scientist, had come from General Electric, the company that built the display equipment extant at airports.  Russell was touting a new technology: an expansion mesh lens that he believed could shorten the picture tube length dramatically (from 54 inches to 18 inches).

For this project, however, there was a new requirement: the FAA wanted the CRT to show more than a radar blip. They wanted identifying flight letters next to each blip, a hard goal with an expansion mesh approach.  The prototype didn’t meet the FAA needs since it defocused the letters that identified the planes.  Russell fiddled with the focusing problem; I sought applications where focus wasn’t so important.  We probably should have gone back to our bosses and said, “Hey, this won’t work for the FAA requirement.  We should call FAA and say ‘we’re sorry’ and then cancel the project.”

The prototype was pretty intriguing.  Essentially it was a very high-speed television set.  The diagonal screen size was impressive for a ‘scope, 14 inches instead of 5 ― an 800 per cent larger display.  The joke was that we were building a much faster TV set so that you could watch the movie Gandhi in four minutes.  Other wags opined that it was a ‘scope for nearsighted long-armed engineers.

By the time that our bosses figured out that we couldn’t solve the FAA problem, I loved the pictures we could display.   Wanting to take the unit to some potential customers, I was strongly told ‘No.’ HP did not allow engineers to go alone to customers (a sales representative had to go); second, we couldn’t afford the extra travel expense; and third, HP didn’t allow prototypes to be shown to customers because that might tip our hand.

I proposed to take the box with me on a personal trip to California for the upcoming Christmas holidays, calling on customers where HP sales people set up the meeting.  This met two of the three objections ― the contacts and the travel cost.  For the third point, I argued that if we were going to cancel the project for lack of market, there was no real danger in ‘tipping our hand to competitors’.  They grudgingly acquiesced.

The box, though, was too big to put in my car.  I had to package the unit ― in an eight cubic foot box, two feet on every side ― take it to the airport, and fly it from place to place.   At each stop, I’d put my family in a motel, take the right front seat out of my vintage Volkswagen Beetle, go to the airport, get the box, bring it to the motel, unpack it, and then go to the customer.

I met with twenty potential customers in two weeks.  It generated phenomenal excitement. Sadly, the findings weren’t persuasive back home.   At the annual division review, Packard asked us about the technology, and later, about the market.  The executives punted, saying they’d found few potential customers.   I wasn’t asked ― I was ‘just’ a designer, sans experience with marketing.  In a stentorian voice, Packard said: “When I come back next year, I don’t want to see this project in the lab.”

Told this verdict the next day, I was quite upset.  Our marketing manager, a talented, energetic voluble man, had said the sales forecast was thirty-one units, a number that enraged me.  I countered, saying that he’d missed by six percent, since he had not called my father, who wanted two units.

I argued for the applications; my R&D boss was courageous, granting an extra $60,000 for eight months to get to production.  When Packard returned a year later and saw it, he nearly had a stroke ― pounding the table, he bellowed : “I thought I said to kill this damn thing.”

I witlessly said, “No, sir.  You said when you came back, you didn’t want to see this in the lab.  It isn’t.  It’s in production.”

The answer didn’t satisfy.

HP1300A monitor in use

Results: Most paradigm shifts start slowly.  Three months after sales release, we had sold forty units, a pleasing if not rousing launch.  The new applications for this display box were compelling.  It became the first commercially available computer graphics CRT.  Beyond Alan Kay’s ‘personal computer’, Doug Engelbart bought one to experiment in the first demonstrated computer network in the famous “Mother of All Demos”.  It won a Hollywood Oscar for technical screen graphics, it was the surgery room display for Dr. Norman DeBakey’s first artificial heart transplant, and it was the basis for the TV space video of Neil Armstrong’s foot landing on the moon July 20, 1969. Seventeen thousand large-screen display units ultimately sold, for thirty-five million dollars.  Development costs were a pittance, less than three hundred thousand dollars.  Profits were in excess of six million dollars.

These high-visibility successes though were in the future – for the moment all we had were a few sales and a peeved CEO.

What did I learn?  Bring passion and dedication to your job, and never quit in the face of adversity.  Be willing to challenge ‘the rules’ – nothing good happens unless something happens first.

Some concluding thoughts

Chuck’s fascinating success story of driving intrapreneurship against corporate resistance is well told, so I won’t elaborate on it. I’ll only share some thoughts it brings to mind:

• Note that “Packard had become concerned that the ‘new HP’ in the computer business was becoming very bureaucratic”. Kudos to David Packard (not that he needs my endorsement, with the track record he has): not every executive is worried about bureaucracy. The smart ones do, otherwise they will eventually (but much too slowly) drive their company to the ground. Large companies must perforce have a bureaucracy level absent in a startup, but the better ones take steps to keep it in check by encouraging innovation and a measure of non-conformism.
• Keep in mind that it’s all too easy to hand out a medal for a success that netted the company millions. What’s no less important is that it be safe to take risks while knowing that many of them will fail, as many of them are bound to do.
• Above all, you (as a manager) need to do a masterful juggling act: you have to balance innovation and planning, discipline and defiance, empowering your innovators yet not throwing good money after bad… all in an ever-changing business landscape. Keeping the baby without the bath water can get challenging, but is crucial (in case you wondered why successful managers get a hefty pay… it’s not easy!)(in case you wondered why successful managers get a hefty pay… it’s not easy!)

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New Insight Article: Intrapreneurship – How to Do It and Live to Tell the Tale

The problem with video

I am ambivalent about video instruction.

On one hand, it adds a richness unavailable by other channels. On the other, it takes time to view – and, unless I need to learn how to perform emergency brain surgery, a written paragraph is faster to read by myself than watching a talking head read it to me. With text, you can skim and jump around – it’s a Random Access medium; video is inherently serial and limited by the average person’s verbal speed.

With time an increasingly precious resource in our hectic age of information overload, wasting time is a luxury you can hardly afford. There are many solutions to the overload: some involve major behavior change drives in entire organizations, but some are wonderfully simple yet do a great job whittling away at the problem. One such is the application MySpeed, made by Enounce.

What MySpeed does

MySpeed does one thing, and does it very well: it changes the speed of Flash and HTML5 videos – the kind you find on YouTube and other web sites. With the flick of a slider you can make the video run at any speed you choose from 0.3X to 5X of real time. And it does this without changing the tone of voice – it runs fast or slow, but at the same pitch, without the silly squeaking familiar to those of us who played with analog tape recorders in our youth.

Technically this is a small Windows application that you install on your computer, and you can pop it up at any time from a system tray icon (or make it pop by itself on detecting a video playing).

What it’s good for

Three benefits:

• You can spend less time absorbing a video. Of course you wouldn’t want that if it were a musical performance or a movie, but if it’s a boring yet mandatory corporate training video, you can speed it 1.2X without losing anything – and you get a nice chunk of lifetime back. I find up to 1.3X is still comfortable in this mode; faster speed is doable but requires concentration to the point of being stressful (for me, anyway).
• You can zip through useless parts of a video at 3X and slow down when you get to the parts you need. You know… Fast Forward, like you do to get over the ads in a video recorder.
• A less common situation is when you need to scrutinize some clip, take notes perhaps – that’s when running the video slower than life becomes useful.

My recommendation

As an information overload crusader, I just love this tool: it makes you go through necessary information in less time – what’s not to like? In fact, I found it one day when I grew upset at a slow moving video – I said to myself “there must be a way to go through this video faster”, Googled it, and there it was. Downloaded the tool, tried it out, then paid for it without hesitation. I’ve been enjoying it daily ever since.

So I recommend you try it; and tell your friends, too – they’ll thank you! What’s more, if you manage knowledge workers, I recommend you consider buying it for them all (talk to your IT group first!). After all, any time they save is time they can use to do more useful work.

Think about it!

I’ve spent a long career as a change agent in a large corporation, even if at first I didn’t call the role by that name; it just so happened that I was always trying to execute my “day job” in ways that pushed the envelope and made my employer adopt novel practices and directions. It was an exhilarating career path, though not without its frustrations. I know how exciting, how rewarding – and how difficult Intrapreneurship can be.

In my latest insight article I share some reflections on the practice of intrapreneurship, and give you my take on how you can undertake it, survive the dangers and get the reward. I also include some advice for managers who want to foster such innovative behavior in their groups.

Enjoy!

That’s flexibility for you. Used to be, if you studied biology, you’d be a biologist, and that was that. For most people, that’s the way it still works; but if you look around you’ll see a sizable minority of people who simply don’t care – they do a great job at whatever they feel competent to do. Me too, I suppose – I studied applied physics, went into forensic science and VLSI engineering, but ultimately left all of these behind – and these days I lecture and consult about knowledge worker effectiveness. Similarly, I have friends who switched from management to academia, from teaching to management, from engineering to biological research, from hi-tech to chocolate making… and many more.

So what’s the idea? Is this moving between tracks a good thing?

Flexible careers: the pros and the cons

Actually, there are two sides to this question. If you can switch tracks without losing your stride, you gain many advantages:

• You increase your employment security, such as it is these days – if you lose your job (or decide to quit it) there are more avenues open to you.
• Even within one company, you can take advantage of more diverse career opportunities.
• You gain a much wider scope of knowledge and experience, which can come in handy in unexpected and wonderful ways.
• You can have a much more interesting and fulfilling professional life!

On the other hand, there are risks:

• You may make a switch and discover the new discipline is too hard for you to master.
• You may lack knowledge that only a formal education in the field can provide.
• The lack of formal education may be held against you in future job hunting.
• If you jump too often, you may end up a Jack of all trades and Master of none.

So is the balance good or bad? It depends!

Critical success factors for implementing flexible careers

When I think about it, I realize that there’s no universal answer, but there are two factors at play.

One factor is the character and ability of the individual involved. I’ve seen many competent employees that would view a radical career move as a nightmare; it just doesn’t sit well with their world view, self image, and inherent tendency. Then I know many people who thrive on change like this, and fall on their feet in almost any job.

The second factor is the culture of the organization in which they have to work (of course, if you’re happy to work for yourself that is not an issue!). It takes a special company culture to permit people to take on jobs they weren’t educated for (naturally, after careful scrutiny by their managers!)

At Intel Israel we took a positive view of people making dramatic moves, at all levels. So when the plant’s nurse decided to move into manufacturing as a supervisor, she was allowed to so; and when our electronic testing manager wanted to become a chip designer, management made it so. Most of this kind of moves ended up as success stories – but a few failed; the informed risk was accepted. We were also willing to take such bets when hiring – a good person that impressed the interviewing managers as smart, competent and motivated would be hired even if they lacked formal training. Dov Frohman, the founder of Intel in Israel, famously said he may well prefer to hire a well rounded philosophy graduate rather than an inexperienced computing guy.

Of course, that isn’t all there is to it. Once you have the right kind of person and the right kind of company, it still takes hard work on both sides to get the employee to acquire the needed skills and complete any missing studies, whether  on the job, through internal training programs, or in external institutions. In fact, it is only when the two factors I mentioned – the employee and the organization – work hand in hand, that you can make these interesting career moves succeed.

And once they do succeed, everyone gains. The employees have an interesting career and feel empowered to follow their heart. The company has smarter employees, higher employee satisfaction and retention, and an atmosphere of empowerment that makes it a better workplace for the entire workforce. Been there; believe me, it made me proud to know my company allows me, as a manager, to provide such opportunities, and to empower such daring, among my subordinates – and that I can take advantage of these opportunities myself, should I want to. Which I did…

Image courtesy Centpacrr, shared on Wikipedia under CC license.

Photo credit:

A friend pointed me to a post  that offered a simple and highly unusual solution to email overload: change the signature block on your desktop email client to read “Sent from my iPhone”.

The idea, the writer explained, is that this will make you “feel more comfortable offering short, direct, and concise replies to incoming emails, thus improving your email productivity and freeing up time to do other more important work”.

This is certainly devious, is probably effective, and the logic seems unassailable… but it raises a question: why would you need it? Surely you can send “short, direct, and concise replies to incoming emails” without this sneaky ploy? What is going on here?

What are they afraid of?

What is going on – the underlying assumption of that post – is that many users are afraid to send too brief replies. And we should ask ourselves, why is this the case?

It’s not like anyone gets hurt by shorter emails. On the contrary: the sender saves time, but the recipient also saves time – and time is equally precious to both of them! Why should you step with such care before doing your recipient a favor?

Obviously, there is an expectation at play here, that messages should not be too brief. I can only surmise this derives from a long gone time when etiquette demanded ornate verbosity in handwritten letters, complete with honorific embellishments and inked flourishes. In that context, writing too curtly would indeed offend. But times have changed so much – isn’t it time to change the expectation?

How you can get away with being brief

If you’re still afraid, here are some ideas for how to write with brevity and get away with it safely.

• Align expectations with each recipient. You can do this in your sig. Take the famous http://five.sentenc.es/ policy… once your sig states in a cheerful way why you write briefly, no one can take offense.
• Align expectations across your group. If you manage people, negotiate a “group contract” with them that messages should be short. If you’re not a manager, try to get your boss to do it. I’ve seen it done – we actually had a senior manager at Intel who managed a huge traffic reduction by decreeing that no report submitted to him may exceed half a page… The point being, once it’s agreed by everyone that short is OK, it becomes – well – OK!
• Write clear messages. The shorter the message, the more important the clarity, since there is no repetition to remove ambiguity; and if the message is crystal-clear, the expectation for more words is reduced. Writing good short messages is an art – as I once mentioned, Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. Still, once you talk SMS-like short, it’s not all that time-comsuming to do it right. And it saves the subsequent ping-pong of clarification messages.
• Be a senior manager. After all, where a junior employee offends, a VP role models… As a senior manager you can afford to be brief, and many of them are, if only because they have such a huge email load to react to.
• Be a Gen Y. Word is, millennials couldn’t write at length if they wanted to – it’s all that TXTese… but take great care how you do it in email – many older users in your organization may not know the conventions and abbreviations.
• Just do it! With or without the above tricks, writing well-crafted but short messages will make you a better employee and a happier person. If someone ever complains, talk it out with them…

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Brevity is the soul of Wit… so where is the soul of Email?

Is the brevity of SMS language compromising our emails?

The acclaimed American novelist Jonathan Franzen has an unusual way of ensuring he can concentrate and be creative. To quote the NY Times:

Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. He did so in a Spartan studio … behind soundproof walls and a window of double-paned glass. The blinds were drawn. The lights were off. And Franzen … wore earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold.

Kudos to the Franzen for being a touch typist, but here I want to focus on his statement: “It’s very, very hard to concentrate. You have to hold your mind free of all the clichés”. Now, his means of getting this freedom may verge on the eccentric, but the underlying question remains: do we need this sort of isolation for intellectual work?

The upside and the downside of true isolation

Yes, we do. The need to eliminate interruptions and distractions has been studied and discussed by many researchers. Distractions have been shown to cause severe degradation in creativity, quality, accuracy, and productivity of knowledge workers. It follows that removing distractions, as done in the well known Quiet Time experiments, can improve all these parameters, and indeed it does.  I’ve summarized some of the highlights in a recent insight article.

These experiments, however, never go so far as to use earplugs and blindfolds; they attempt to control incoming interrupts like email, phone calls and coworker inquiries. Once you do that, the removal of auditory distractions is left up to the individual, and seldom goes beyond music in a headset.

On the flip side, isolation is anathema to a key element of the modern workplace paradigm: teamwork and collaboration. How can you collaborate with your coworkers when each of you is hidden behind earmuffs and email blockers?

Isolation is not an issue for a novelist, or for a monk, but a full withdrawal from interaction would never work for knowledge workers in an enterprise – I’m sure you’ll agree. Which brings us to that fuzzy but necessary task of trying to find the golden mean between real isolation and in-your-face interruptions.

Balancing opposites

I’m not an advisor to eccentric novelists, but my work with knowledge workers taught me that a certain measure of isolation from distractions is highly desirable, as long as you leave enough available time for interaction with others. There are two ways you can get the isolation without going off the deep end:

1. You can secure complete isolation part of the time. That is, accept that much of your work time is interruptible, but set aside times when you will not be interrupted at all. There are many ways you can achieve this, for instance:

• You can avoid the office and work from home part of the time – a day here and a day there. This is best done in the context of a formal Telecommuting program, but some people do it ad hoc – I’ve even seen people who call in sick merely so they can focus on creating some report nearing its deadline.
• You can leave the office for a week or so at a time. Some companies actually send their managers to retreats in remote locations; some senior managers, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, do so on their own.
• You can implement a Quiet Time arrangement where your team recognizes certain times – usually in half-day chunks – as interruption free.
• You can travel – no place like a hotel room in a remote city or country to get some focus time, and for those whose routine includes many business trips this actually has an impact (at least for me it had – my best ideas came to me during such trips).
• You can start work earlier than everyone else, or stay much later, to work in peace (but it is getting harder to do so).

2. You can secure partial isolation most of the time. This means you go to the office normally but reduce the impact of interruptions on your work there. For example:

• You can use a headset to hear music while you work. This not only reduces the inevitable noise pollution of an open space office area, it can also be relaxing if you choose the right music. Another variation on this is using white noise type sounds, like surf noise, in the headset. And either way, seeing you like that may deter some of the people popping into your cubicle.
• You can use a “Do not disturb” barrier on your office door. This won’t keep out the noise, but will deter the less persistent interrupters.
• You can block incoming messages and alerts – some, like “you’ve got mail” pop-ups, are best blocked all the time; others you may want to block only during times you set aside for thinking work.  There are software tools that help you do this easily; I’ll give a list in a coming post.
• You can seek refuge in a conference room away from your office (a wasteful solution in real estate terms, but many use it), or in the cafeteria (an effective solution much in use).
• You can sneak some work time in coffee shops, at customer offices, or in a different building of your own company. You can even do so on a train, if you use one in your daily commute.
• You could get an office with a door. Of course your  employer would need to support this mode (mine never did… sigh).

What you should do

As you see, you have quite a selection of methods… take your pick! Just remember to incorporate in your schedule both protected thinking time, and time you’re open for group interaction. How much of each? That’s your call, although for most typical enterprise jobs I’d say 15–20% isolation would be  about optimal.

Let us know in the comments what works best for you!

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Is there a downside to Quiet Time?

Somehow my career has repeatedly led me into doing unexpected and wonderful things.

One such piece of serendipity has been the role I landed at the Jerusalem Science Museum as the curator of an exhibition in honor of Alan Turing. This project took a year and half, and gave me the occasion to work with some amazing people at the museum, interact with many more from around the world, and learn so much about that tragic genius, Alan Turing, of which I wrote here before.

Now we’re finally done, and the exhibition is open to the public. It wasn’t my first exhibition about the History of Computing, which has been my hobby and passion for years; but unlike the five previous ones it started with a major unanswered question, which was no less than this: what is this exhibition to be all about? We started with no clarity as to what is the narrative we’re trying to impart, and how will we impart it to an audience spanning eight year old kids to adults.

We did crack this enigma, and ended up with a wonderful exhibition called CAPTCHA, with good reason. I’ve written a detailed article called The Curator’s Take on the Wonderful CAPTCHA Exhibition, which shares the fascinating dilemmas, solutions and creative processes that went into this challenge, as well as images and descriptions of many of the exhibits. Take a look!

Three Two-dimensional Turing Machines

The exhibition itself will remain open for three years, so if you’re in Jerusalem you’re welcome to visit the Bloomfield Science Museum and enjoy it.

Oh, and of course, I misled you a bit: it isn’t all just serendipity. You have to guide your career to intercept such opportunities. But that’s a whole different story, which I help organizations tell on other occasions.

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