Today I had three long meetings, several other distractions, plus I was one of the speakers at the Seattle Tech Startups meeting tonight. In between, I got a few hours of coding. In short, I did a lot, but it seemed like a totally non-productive day. Two observations:
- There are lots of way to measure productivity. I learned things at all of my meetings. And, each one might pay off in the future. So, it wasn't a waste of time, though it didn't help with my current deadline.
- I knew going in that this would happen. It's almost impossible to avoid non-productive days in any project. While you can't really schedule for such days (and I've certainly seen it tried), I think you need to take it in stride and move on -- and hope you don't have too many of them. Tomorrow, I'll be spending four hours in UX office hours at StartPad, so I'll just have to be super-productive the rest of the day.
One of the things that Tom Music presented was the idea of "Speech Patterns" (like design patterns for public speaking) for planning a speech. I really liked the idea and will probably use it in the future -- I think it will work well with the way I plan speeches.
Jamie Riche of Ideal Communications described the Johari Window, a cognitive modeling tool that I had not heard of before, and discussed various aspects of giving and receiving feedback. Now I have an explanation for my desires to share and get feedback! I'm definitely going to have to read more about this.
2 comments:
Yeah, those 'meeting days' can be a killer -- that's one of the reasons we set up Hops and Chops -- to try to aggregate bunches of lunches/coffees/quick-meetings into a single session. Also gives the benefit of real-time intros. And, of course, the beer doesn't hurt.
Good luck with Day #19!
Dave
Thanks for the kind words!
I really enjoyed your talk about your experiences as a fundraiser for a quarter, and I'm glad we got the chance to chat later on in the evening.
Now to go check the latest Puzzazz!
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