Iāve known my bossā bossā boss to express this in different words:
āNobody gets out of bed and comes into work in the morning just to screw you over.ā
Itās good to know that thereās a name for this concept I can reference, and also an alternative wording I can use to make it appropriate for all audiences:
āNever attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance.ā
Wikipedia also teaches me that Sir Bernard Ingham coined an even more succinct version:
I have a reading list of blogs and other websites in Feedly that I read throughout the day, every day.It includes everything from traditional news through to cartoons.
Often I find something that I want to share on this blog. I
quite often share links here to other articles, but I always try do it in the
context of providing my own commentary and thoughts on the content. What Iām
getting at is that sharing links on here is not a quick, one-click process,
because I donāt want this blog to be merely a long list of links to other
peopleās content. Iām much too egotistical for that.
Anyway, the result of all this is that over time I build up
a handful of flagged articles that Iāve been intending to share but never got
around to doing so.
This is the first of what may become a semi-regular feature,
where I spew those forth with (in the interests of time) only a sentence or two of comment instead of the full-blown article I was originally planning. Enjoy!
Three Communication
Strategies for Building Strong Relationships from Far Away Working in a ROWE is great, but is not without its
challenges. Communication is by no means impossible, but can certainly suffer
when the face-to-face aspect it lost: particularly with a team thatās become
subconsciously reliant on bumping into people in the hallways. This article
lays out some strategies for addressing that. Ā
Why
Resource Management is Better from a Dedicated PM Another post from the excellent Brad
Egeland, this one talks about why a dedicated project manager is better
than using somebody with another role (like a lead designer) to occasionally
manage projects as the need arises. Ā
Fluency
with Excel and Word are Key to Getting a Higher-Paying Job I wanted to link to this article because it surprised me. Higher-paying
compared to what? Isnāt fluency with office applications a prerequisite for getting any
job? Maybe āfluencyā is the key word here, and a basic understanding is a prerequisite
and those with more advanced skills will find more opportunities to progress up
the corporate ladder, but the article doesnāt really say that. This is the
knowledge economy here, people! We donāt make things anymore, unless of course
you count spreadsheets. Get on board! Ā
How to Put an End
to Workload Paralysis I absolutely suffer with this. As the author notes about herself, āthere seems
to be a tipping point for me when I go from being really busy to so-busy-Iām-paralyzed-and-canāt-do-anything.ā
The four steps to fighting this paralysis are not rocket science, but of course
nor should they be, and itās well worth a read if, like me, youāre an
occasional sufferer. At least you now know youāre not the only one.
Last week I linked to and wrote about an article
that gave some tips on running effective meetings.
In addition to posting it here I also posted it, in advance,
to my workplaceās internal social media platform to share it with my team and
get their thoughts on meeting best practices.
My boss Matt
commented that one of his tips was to highlight any meeting pre-work that may
exist: information that participants need to bring with them to the meeting, or
documents they should review in advance, for example. Matt suggested that it
may sometimes even be worthwhile to go so far as to include these expectations
in big bold text within the invite so they jump out.
This was an interesting topic to me, because I am certainly
an occasional offender in this regard.
Basically, if you send me an email that includes a call to
action then I will notice it and deal with it appropriately. I may not take
the requested action immediately, of course, but Iāll flag the email for
follow-up when I know Iāll have time to get it done, or maybe even schedule
some time in my calendar if the situation warrants it.
A calendar invite is different, though. No matter how hard
you try and how good your writing skills are, the instruction in the body of
the invite is not the primary call to action when I receive it: instead, thatās
something thatās defined for me by Outlook (or your client of choice) which is
demanding that I choose to accept, tentatively accept or decline the invite
itself. Once Iāve done one of those things the invite is forever gone from my
inbox, and the meeting (along with whatever instruction you provided) is now on
my calendar.
Iāll get to your email on whatever schedule my workload
allows for, but my calendar by its very nature is a schedule, and it tells me when I should get to something. The
next time Iāll look at your meeting invite is probably going to be two minutes
before it starts, when Iām looking for conference line details or checking
which room itās in. By then of course itās too late.
Recently Iāve started employing a new trick to deal with
this kind of thing for meetings that I host. First I send an email to the group
explaining what needs to be done (pre-work), suggesting that we collectively
discuss to share our thoughts, and mentioning that I will set up some time to
achieve this. Then I immediately follow-up with a meeting invite, into which I
embed that first email.
I havenāt heard any comments, good or bad, but it seems to
be working.
What does everyone think, though? Am I spamming people and
over-contributing to their already burgeoning inboxes? Am I solving a problem
that people donāt actually have and unfairly assuming that everyone shares the
same lack of organizational skills that I possess?
Microsoftās New Surface 3 Tablet Runs Full Windows, Not RT A while back I bought a Windows 8 tablet, but it broke within the first week. Itās definitely interesting to me though, and I would consider another now that the technologies involved have matured somewhat.
I use a service at home to unlock region-locked web content, particularly internet video. As Iāve mentionedpreviously, I run a Windows 2008 R2 server on our home network which is our domain controller, and (as a result) our DNS server too.
The service I use for unlocking content requires that you set the DNS server on the network to the values it specifies. Thatās not viable for me because of course the client machines need to use the internal DNS server in order to be able to find the domain controller, but no problem – the windows server VM can act as the DNS server just fine, handle requests relating to the internal network domain itself, and forward everything else off using the forwarders I specify (which come right from my content unlocking service).
This worked great until a few weeks ago, and then it suddenly stopped working.
I donāt know why and Iām not quite technical enough to fully grasp the details, but the problem was EDNS (whatever that is). The blog post Iāve linked above talks about it more depth, but the bottom line for me is that once I turned EDNS off everything worked fine.
