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There was a fight on the roller hockey rink this morning. Anaheim bumped into Philadelphia at speed and Philly didn't like that so he elbowed Anaheim in the chest -- hard. Anaheim pushed back, shoving Philly into the goal where he tripped and fell. Swearing, more shoving, and then we spent the next five minutes keeping them separated.

This hockey rink is a remnant of first Internet bubble. Built by Netscape, the rink has held a game every Saturday since 1998. A majority of the folks who show up know each other, so the game is mellow. Finesse, not fighting. A fight is an unusual once a year thing.

When Philly, who I believed was at fault for this whole situation, got the bench, someone asked him what happened. His answer, "Anaheim ran into me and I protected myself."

One Eighth of a Second

I want you to think of the last time you were surprised. Good, bad, I don't care. When was the last time you were really surprised? Got it? Ok, now think about the very first thing that you thought about the surprise. I don't want to know how you eventually handled it; I want you to think about your instantaneous first reaction.

How do you react when you're surprised? Is this how you always react when a surprise lands? My guess is yes.

On the hockey rink, Philadelphia puts up his shields when he's surprised. It's a natural reaction, protecting yourself, but what's interesting isn't Philly's very sensible reaction to the perception of being attacked, it's everyone else's interpretation. We all saw him hold up his arms in defense of Anaheim's unintentional attack and we all thought, "Man, Philly. What a goon."

In any group of people larger than one, these instantaneous reactions to unexpected situations happen a lot, and understanding their range and impact is important to navigating awkward, tension-filled, and professionally tricky situations.

The Jerks

These are knee jerk reactions, and the first thing you need to know about them is that they should be first viewed without judgement. I'm not a psychologist and I don't know why some people are aggressive knee jerkers and others are passive. I don't know if these reactions are a function of upbringing or genetics, but I do know that we as a species have little control over these initial reactions and there are many of them.

In my head, the complete set of reactions fit on a spectrum that is labeled Fight or Flight. The first step in understanding a knee jerk reaction is first figuring out where on this spectrum the reaction lies. Is this a person who is going to take on the surprise or are they going to let it wash over them? Will they bolt? Will they wilt? If there is one thing you want to know quickly about those around you, it's their penchant to fight the surprise or flee it.

Again, no judgement. A person who automatically has the fight instinct is not necessarily a jerk -- it's just the default instinct when the world unexpectedly and rapidly changes. I know who on my team will attack a surprise. They'll leap on it. I also know the ones who will silently digest the surprise. I know who is going to come back three hours or three days later with a totally different attitude because they'll have actually processed the surprise.

The base assessment of fight or flight gives you a starting point regarding what might first happen when a surprise lands, but there are other instantaneous reactions that occur and understanding them gives you an idea of what you need to do next, if anything.

For the sake of this article, my assumption is a surprise has landed and it's bad news. These reactions apply regardless of the type of surprise, but let's assume it's professionally bad news with negative consequences and it's being delivered in a group setting. Here's whom you might see across the table:

Dr. No. Denial. That's the reaction. Doesn't matter if the surprise is reasonable, understandable, or well explained. Dr. No's only reaction is a fighting "No".

• "No, I'm not going let her go."
• "No, I'm not moving organizations."
• "No, we're not shutting down this group."

Remember, knee jerk reactions are not rational, they are not considered, and while they are tactically interesting, they are not strategically useful. Dr. No's denial is not her actual thoughts on that topic, it's her reptilian brain reaction to a surprise.

No.

If this is a group surprise and Dr. No is sitting in a conference room full of people throwing down the No, there's a chance for everyone to go off the rails. Well, Dr. No said no and I agree, so NO AS WELL. The time immediately after the surprise goes down is not the time to take any action except to allow folks to react. There are going to be Nos as well as a bevy of other reactions and your job, if it's your meeting, is to let folks talk -- let them react. The goal with Dr. No and everyone else in the room is to get their reaction out so that we can figure out what to do next.

The follow-up: The good news is that Dr. No has got it out of her system. She's expressed her displeasure, which is half of the game. The next time you chat, there will be residual No, but Dr. No knows that she's been heard and will be willing to brainstorm what to do next about the surprise.

Raging Bull. Perhaps the most dangerous of the reactions, Raging Bull wants to fight. They're taking the surprise personally, they're going to say No, and they're going to pick a fight. The Raging Bull is Dr. No with attitude.

The move with the Raging Bull is to know that it's coming, to know that you've got a Raging Bull on your hands. If you have any control over the surprise, you want to put the Raging Bull in a safe situation where they can react to their heart's content without afflicting psychological damage on others or sparking a mob mentality where they infect a mindless horde of mini-Raging Bulls. If it's a pure surprise and it's a group setting, my advice is to end the meeting as quickly as possible. Like Dr. No, Raging Bull is expressing his shock. Unlike Dr. No, the Raging Bull isn't going to feel complete until they've got the emotional satisfaction of picking a fight with someone else.

The follow-up: Everyone needs time to contemplate a surprise, but no one needs time more than Raging Bull. Each knee jerk reaction scratches a particular psychological itch and in the case of Raging Bull, they believe that getting someone else to participate in their mental and verbal freak-out is somehow going to help.

It's not.

Of all the reactions, Raging Bull's behavior is the one that I've found to likely to repeat itself after the fact. Raging Bull will often continue to pick fights days after the initial surprise, which is why it's your move to get them thinking, as quickly as possible, about what's next. What are we going to do about the surprise? What specific thought does Raging Bull have which is crucial to successfully navigating this surprise?

Still Water. This reaction reads like flight because they're not fighting. In fact, they're just sitting there, but Sill Water is taking it all in. They're not missing a thing and in their complete silence, wearing their poker face, they are meticulously processing, they're evaluating all possible permutations, best and worst case scenarios, and potential impact on their day to day.

This processing results in one of two very different Still Waters. There's the true Still Water who is going to maintain the calm demeanor for the entire duration of the surprise. See, this Still Water's processing has resulted in a comfortable plan. They believe they know what to do about the surprise and this realization has brought them peace.

The second Still Water is mentally losing their shit. Sure, externally they look calm, but internally their processing has resulted in increasingly loony nightmare scenarios regarding the surprise. Without quick action, Insane Still Water will find reason to become a Raging Bull.

The follow-up: You want to get to Still Water as quickly as possible in a safe location after the surprise because Still Water isn't still. Unlike Dr. No and the Raging Bull who had their opportunities to weigh in, Still Water is still in their head and the longer they remain in the head, the higher the probability they'll tell themselves a tale that will drive them insane.

You need Still Water to say out loud how they feel about the world suddenly changing. Like Raging Bull, you need to engage Still Water in the surprise and move the problem out of their heads and onto the table where everyone can take action.

Distiller. This is my favorite knee jerk reaction because the Distiller attacks the surprise with questions. Why did this happen? How come we didn't see it coming? Ok, what's the impact? Right, what are we going to do?

This is a fight reaction, but a constructive one. The Distiller is as uncomfortable as anyone with the surprise, but their coping mechanism is aggressive understanding. They're not going to stop asking questions until they feel they've got a complete understanding of what actually happened.

In a group setting, I let the Distiller have free-reign during the landing of the surprise because their incessant questions are helping everyone in the room contemplate what actually happened. They focus the surprise on facts rather than feel.

The follow-up: You're going to feel you've got a good idea where the Distiller is at because of their endless questions, but now's a good time to explain that everyone comes down from a surprise in different ways, which is why everyone needs that personal follow-up. Yeah, a Distiller can turn into Raging Bull after a night's sleep. Still Water might go Distiller. You just don't know who is going to walk into the building 24 hours after the surprise. This is why most surprises are engineered to occur late in the week; there's a belief that all the knee jerks are going to calm down over the weekend. Maybe. More on this in a bit.

The Handler. The first flight reaction sure doesn't feel like flight. The Handler is not surprised. In fact, they're fired up to handle whatever the surprise might be. They make it appear that they knew this surprise was going to occur. How'd they do that?

The Handler is a calm facade. Where the Distiller understands via questions, The Handler's coping mechanism is the illusion they've got it all figured out -- that they're 10 steps ahead of everyone else. This is a convenient reaction when you've got the Raging Bull standing on the conference table challenging anyone to hand-to-hand combat, but The Handler needs help.

The follow-up: The Handler crumbles hardest. The Handler is actually Dr. No except without the denial. There will be a quiet moment in the middle of the night when The Handler realizes absolutely nothing has been handled and then you'll see their actual reaction.

My Bad. This flight reaction is one of accountability. My Bad's impression is that they've personally done something to incur this particular surprise. They believe that if only they had done just one thing different, no one would've had to deal with the surprise.

There's hope inside of My Bad's reaction. Their empathy regarding the surprise is constructive, as opposed to the destructive social tendencies of Dr. No or Raging Bull, but you don't want them wallowing in their overdeveloped sense of accountability.

The follow-up: My Bad is not responsible for the surprise. While their sense of responsibility is admirable, My Bad needs to understand the actual cause behind the surprise. They didn't cause it, so they shouldn't feel it. They more they focus on feeling responsible, the less energy and focus they have for making progress.

We're Doomed. The most common flight reaction is also the reaction that, I believe, everyone is going to experience as they digest the surprise. Despair.

In a room full of geeks hearing a surprise for the first time, one of their first thoughts is, "How does this surprise fit into my mental system of how things work?" Failure to map the surprise into the mental model results in an uncomfortable realization: "The world does not work as I expected. Therefore, other surprises are guaranteed to happen randomly. QED. I have no control whatsoever. Shit."

The follow-up: A perceived lack of control or understanding of our world is a confidence shattering experience for the geek, and the best way to attack this despair is with a project. Doesn't matter if the project is surprise-related or not, the geek needs something to do. They need the blissful distraction of building something. It's during this constructive distraction that they'll actually figure out how they feel about the surprise.

I Quit. The last knee jerk is our strongest flight reaction. An extreme version of We're Doomed, I Quit does exactly what you'd expect: they threaten to quit on the spot.

They're not quitting. Well, they might, but not right now. You need to translate "I quit" into what they're actually saying: "I am very surprised and I don't like being this surprised." It's unfortunate that this is their reaction, especially in a group setting, because I Quit's attitude can create mass professional hysteria, which means this needs to be handled immediately. You can't wait until after the weekend to explain to I Quit that their reaction at this moment might be vastly different after a night's sleep. You need to hold up a mirror in front of them and ask, "No matter the surprise, why in the world would you eliminate so many options by quitting on the spot?"

The follow-up: I Quit will calm down and land on another opinion, but their knee jerk reaction is a sign of a larger problem. I don't know what your surprise is, but I know if someone wants to quit that, first, it's a big surprise, and second, they value their job second to their peace of mind.

Stages of Jerk

With people, it's never as easy as just a name. These labels for the knee jerk reactions are deliberately simple, but people are conspicuously complex.

As I hinted earlier, I've found it commonplace that you're going to see multiple knee jerk reactions as a corporate surprise is comprehended. These reactions, like grief, have stages, and your job as a manager or a concerned co-worker is actually not comparably complex. Your job is to listen.

The reason there's a knee jerk reaction is because the unexpected occurred. It kicks off the process of assimilation and that's what we care about -- the understanding of the surprise, not the reaction to it. While everyone has a different reaction, they're all going to end up trying to figure out what just happened, and part of that process is having someone they trust sit there and listen to their assessment. Verbally walking through our thoughts is one of the ways we organize and understand them and begin the process of finding a comfortable constructive conclusion.

I'm just as uncomfortable with a Raging Bull as anyone, but I know this knee jerk reaction is not who they are, this is just how they react. Understanding these varied potential reactions is just the first part of digesting a surprise - it helps you understand what to expect so you can begin to figure out what to do next.

The Editor and I don't argue, we discuss.

We're arguing... discussing over a glass of red wine my concern over our collective attention spans. Not just she and I, but everyone. The whole damned planet.

I say, "Information just keeps getting smaller. We're sharing our bright ideas in 140 characters now and no one is taking the time to construct a strategic thought. All these micro-ideas are free and everyone is taking them for granted. We're just tactically stumbling through a day full of intellectual sound bites stuffed with shortened URLs. There's no deep now. Just shallow passing seconds."

"No one is learning. There's no work involved in knowing a thing, so we're becoming mentally flabby. I want people to read more."

To which the Editor retorts: "I don't think you know what information is."

Hmmmm.

Information has a Hierarchy

So I looked it up. According to Ray R. Larson at Berkeley, information has a hierarchy that looks like this:

• Data - The raw material of information
• Information -- Data organized and presented by someone
• Knowledge -- Information read, heard or seen and understood
• Wisdom -- Distilled and integrated knowledge and understanding.

If you ignore the fact that the word information is used to define a hierarchy about information, this hierarchy makes sense, but it dances around a key point.

Another version of this hierarchy describes the same categories as above but focuses more on what happens to information once we get a hold of it. Not just consumption, but synthesis.

• Data -- Raw material. Facts. Got it.
• Information - Organized data. See what happens here? Someone showed up and organized the data into something else. Why'd they do this? How'd they know it was the right thing to do? Let's keep moving.
• Knowledge -- Information seen, heard or read and understood. To me this is when information is transformed by the understanding of why. Our data is organized into information and that is passed onto someone else who can now recognize the value in the information and thinks, "Oh, wow. Now I understand how a trash compactor works. Slick."
• Wisdom -- Distilled, integrated knowledge and understanding. The idea here is that higher order constructions of information are based beyond our ability to consume, combine, evaluate, and interpret information. The information becomes a catalyst for creation. Think of it like this: maybe a lot of people understand trash compactors, but you know so much about trash compactors that you could build one yourself and perhaps advance the art of trash compacting in the process.

Still with me? This is going to take more than 140 characters and there's a point. Just wait a tick.

Take a look at this list:

• New York is a city.
• It takes me about five hours to fly to New York.
• I've been to New York three times this year
• I never believe I'm in New York until I'm in a cab or smoking a cigarette.

Is this data, information, or knowledge? Or just four boring tweets? That would depend on whether or not you're interested in my experiences in New York. But what I provide in this list is the opportunity for increasing amounts of understanding, and understanding is the progression through, and synthesis of, increasingly complex pieces of information. Right?

There's another thread that ties this information together, and you may not initially see it, but if you've started mentally asking questions - Why does Rands go to New York? What does he do there? Did I know that he smoked? - you have started to find it.

I've begun to tell you a story.

A Shattered Narrative

The reason no one watches or cares about the evening news anymore is because there are a great many other ways to find your news. A weblog here, a Twitter status update there. In the deluge of information variety we've realized that the evening news is just one set of facts and just one carefully constructed story, and increasingly one with its own specific agenda. Who wants to be spoon-fed 30 minutes of ad-infested evening news when I can figure out what my world thinks is important by glancing at The Daily Show, Twitter, and NetNewsWire?

The traditional narrative has been shattered into bits of well-indexed information. Google wasn't the first indexing tool, but it's certainly the best. Still, Google is powerfully dumb. Yes, I can find whatever piece of information I'm looking for, but what's more interesting are all the related pieces of information. How do you query for knowledge via Google? How about wisdom?

If you're buying my definitions of the informational hierarchy, there's no replacing the process of understanding if you want to delve into more interesting forms of information. There's no replacing a human being combing through seemingly disparate pieces of information to evaluate, interpret, and combine it into something unexpected; into a new work. Into a story.

Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it's presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn't knowledge or understanding, it's merely connective information tissue. It's small bits of information carefully selected by those you've chosen to follow and its value isn't in what they send, it's how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.

This is what is going on all day. It will start with a random tweet about conferences and you'll think, "I don't understand why everyone goes to conferences". You won't act on this thought; you'll leave it buried in your head until you see that link on del.icio.us where someone important rails on the lack of women presenters at conferences. And in that moment, you'll remember that drunken thought you had at that conference last March when you discovered the basic truth about conferences: it's not what you learn, it's who you find.

From a disparate set of information, you continually find your own arc, your own story, and my question is: What are you going to do with it? You're an information nerd, you're adept at consuming massive amounts of micro-information, and those who watch you do this are saying you've got a short attention span, and you might.

But I think all this micro-information has macro-story potential.

Rands' Story Hierarchy

As we've established, there's information. Like everywhere. You, as a consumer of information, fall into one of three progressively complex buckets regarding this data:

• You can understand the information -- What does it mean? Why is it important? How does it relate to other things I care about?
• You can explain the information to someone else -- Hey Bob, this is what this means. I can explain it to you and impart my understanding.
• You can create more information, building something new and telling a story - Hey Jim, actually, we discovered a better way to do X. Bob and I were working on Y one time and realized that...

But Rands, I'm not a writer.

This is a poor excuse and the death of many a worthy story. The construction of a story has very little to do with writing. It has to do with the semi-magical process of you taking disparate pieces of information, combining them into something new, which includes your experience and understanding, and then giving them to someone else. Look around the walls of wherever you're reading this and pick two random objects. Got 'em? Ok, now tell me how they relate. No, you can't say, "They're both in the coffee shop". What's the first novel thing that crosses your mind about the intersection of these two items?

But you don't have a story, yet. Just like information isn't knowledge until it's understood, your tale isn't a story until you give it someone else -- until they have a chance to see what they think about your inspiration.

But Rands, my thought is really, really stupid.

I understand what you're saying but I don't think that's what you mean. I think what you're saying is, "I don't think that anyone will find anything of value in my thought," and you're wrong. You've got two things going for you. You've got the inexplicable moment of inspiration that created your idea, and it's the closest thing to magic you'll experience in your life. Second, you've got the entire planet listening and there's just no telling what any of those folks are looking for.

The value of the idea is one part that it is yours and one part that you gave it to someone else. It's you and something new.

Information Is Getting Smaller and Faster

Look at the historic progression of popular personal written information containers over the past 10+ years:

Home pages > Blogs > Lists of Links > Tumblr > Twitter

I see two symbiotic trends. First, I see a reduction in the average size of a piece of information. I see information that feeds our short attention spans. Second, and more important, I see our tools increasingly removing barriers from producing information. Remember when you needed a nerd friend to set up a weblog? Did you have any issue figuring out how to publish a thought with Twitter? I hope not.

Yes, these frictionless tools make it so anyone can say anything about any topic, but these tools are built with you in mind and I do mean you. Imagine if Twitter forced you to follow certain people. What if Facebook randomly added folks to your friends list? You know what you'd have? The evening news. Random stories from folks you don't know and probably don't trust.

We're in a share everything world and you get to choose your role. You can be overwhelmed and sit in the coffee shop with your friends and say, "Twitter: what's the point?" Or, you can jump in with both feet, grab those three random ideas and tie them into a story that no one has ever seen.

An Essential Skill

I wrote, edited, and published an entire book without physically interacting with a single person at my publisher. The t-shirt I produced last year and the one I'm doing this year were entirely designed, developed, and shipped by interacting with two different organizations that I never met. Paradoxically, it's never been easier to share or meaningfully interact with more people with less physical, in-person effort.

Your ability to compose and convey information as well as express yourself through your fingertips is a skill that is only going to increase -- and increase in value -- as people become more comfortable with their place in communities that span the planet, and as the tools to connect them become more commonplace.

In this digitally distant world full of information that appears to only be moving faster and faster, you get to choose: how much will I consume and how much will I create?

Jesse walked.

Monday is the day we set aside for new hires. All the new hires spend the morning learning about the company, figuring out how to create accounts, and becoming indoctrinated in company culture. When lunch time arrives, managers pick up their new employees and take them to lunch.

Their morning starts at 9am, and at 9:15 I got a call from HR: "Jesse's not here".

Bad traffic, miscommunication, there were a dozen good reasons he wasn't there, but I instantly felt a rock in my stomach: "Jesse walked".

A quick call to my recruiter and the mystery began to unfold, "Oh, yeah, he called just before 5pm on Friday and said he wanted to chat. I was off Friday, should I call him now?"

Yeah, call him. Tell me what I already know.

The recruiter discovered that Jesse was firmly ensconced in a cone of silence because his Friday call was his cold feet call. After three months of phone screens, interviews, offer negotiations, and acceptance of said offer, Jesse was calling to tell us that while he had resigned two weeks ago, a last minute counter-offer had shown up, and he'd decided to stay... at 4:45pm on his last day.

Jesse walked.

As I sat at my desk, lightly tapping the phone headset against my forehead, I thought how simple it would be to be pissed. In terms of respect, trust, and professionalism, Jesse had screwed me in just about every manner possible, but, in this case, the fault would be mine.

I had not explained to Jesse that he was wanted.

The Requisition Situation

This article is going to talk about the beginning and the end of the hiring process. I'm going to make sure you know two things. First, that you understand how urgent it is that you hire, and second, how to make sure those you hire actually show up. There's a huge pile work in the middle of this process involving phone screens, interviews, and offers, but for this article we'll just focus on the beginning and the end.

Let's start by understanding where this whole hiring process starts. We need to talk about requisitions.

In many companies, jobs are ruled by requisitions ("reqs"). These imaginary pieces of paper give you, the hiring manager, the permission to hire, but they serve two other purposes. First, they document and formalize the process of hiring a new full-time person, and more importantly, they give executives visibility into the state of the company's growth.

It varies by company, but reqs, specifically open, approved reqs, are one of the more popular organizational levers the execs have to control of the growth of the company. In software development, one of your larger corporate expenses is base salary, which means the moment uncertainty appears on you company's horizon, reqs (read: potential large expenses) are one of the first things to vanish.

This leads to the most important rule regarding requisitions:

Reqs vanish randomly, often without notice, without reason, and at the least convenient time.

In larger companies, the bureaucracy involved in actually getting an approved req is impressive. When the req is finally approved by the 17th person you don't know, you have a false sense of accomplishment. You believe this req is yours, but there is really only one way to make it yours -- make the hire.

It's not just corporate nervousness that causes reqs to vanish. Your boss, who you love, is a likely req stealing culprit. Anton's got a guy right now who is perfect for his team and we've only got one req. He can hire him right now and I swear we'll get you a req when you find someone.

You believe your boss. You trust your boss, so you give him your req and Anton's a happy guy and you feel like you've done the team a solid. Except when you actually find someone, guess what, you don't have a req. Neither does your boss because some time between when you gave your req and actually found someone for your position the first rule was invoked: every single req in the company was frozen.

I'm guessing 50% of the reqs I've managed to get approved in my career have resulted in a hire. Meaning, a flip of a coin would as accurately predict whether or not I'd be able to hire someone.

From the moment there's a hint of an idea of a req in your future, you need to work on improving your chances that you'll be able to hire. And that means, as quickly as possible, you need to: find the person, phone screen them, interview them, interview them again, negotiate an offer, get that offer accepted, and get them in the building. Think of that as you're staring at your shiny new req. Think that the industry average for hiring against an approved req is 90 days -- three months -- and each of those days represents a day that someone, somewhere can steal your req. This is why you need to...

Spend an hour a day on each req you have

We'll talk about how to make sure they'll show up in a bit, but to start you need to get the pump primed. A former boss helpfully suggested, "Spend an hour a day on each req on your plate".

An hour?

If you've got an approved req, you have approval to grow you team. To add new skill sets. To build more stuff. In your role as a manager, I ask: "What's more important than growing your team?" No, this isn't a draconian hour; this is a daily reminder that you need to grind away at this req until you've hired someone.

Rands, I have no candidates yet. The req was just approved. I...

Again, reqs vanish. Randomly. At the end of each workday, you need to think, "Phew, no one stole my req."

Here's how to start:

• Search the web for candidates. -- Show me a stranger who will be perfect.
• Mail friends who might know the perfect person. -- Know anyone? How about you?
• Annoy your recruiter. -- Where are my resumes?
• Ping folks who have turned you down in the past. -- Are you ready now?
• Scan your inbox and sent folders for folks you need, but may have forgotten. -- Really, are you ready now?
• Read your job description for additional inspiration. -- Do I actually know who I'm looking for?

But isn't this why I have a recruiter?

It's terrific that you've got a recruiter. They're going to streamline your entire hiring process, but you still need to spend an hour a day for each req. A quality recruiter is going to find candidates, do time-saving phone screens, and they can keep in-flight candidates warm. When it comes to offer negotiation, they're great at providing you essential compensation telemetry and they're good at playing bad cop, but as we'll see, it's your job to demonstrate that the candidate is wanted.

I found them! I'm done!

No, you didn't, and no, you aren't.

No really! He verbally accepted, he starts in two weeks. It's a done deal.

No, it's not. If randomly vanishing reqs are painful lesson #1 of hiring, painful lesson #2 is: people lose their flippin' minds during job transitions.

Think back to your last job transition. Think about the mental turmoil. When did you actually fully believe that you were going to accept the new gig? For me, it's about two months after I started.

You keep recruiting; you keep searching for the perfect employee until your new hire is sitting in their office. It's not common for an accepted offer to be declined, but it needs to happen once for you to learn the lesson, to suddenly realize, "Oh, I need to start over. Crap."

Until he's sitting in the seat, in the building, badge hanging from his belt, you haven't hired anyone.

Deliberate Want

Michele's team was embarking on a new technology direction and while she had the basic talent in place, she needed two more hires and we had the reqs. In a recruiting brainstorm, I sketched out the type of person we needed. "Ok, we need Alex. He's the Sr. Architect at this other company, but he's the right combination of technical brilliance and architectural jerk. We need someone with that technical ability and the will to enforce it because we're starting from the ground up."

Her: "Why not hire Alex?"

Me: "He'll never leave his start-up."

"Have you asked?"

"No."

"I'll ask."

She did, and while it took six months, Alex, the perfect fit for the team and for the project, joined the team. Halfway through the recruiting stint with Alex, when it looked like he might not budge, I threw another perfect candidate on her plate and said, "Maybe ask him, too?" Sean was on the team a month after Alex.

Two hires I thought we had absolutely no chance of hiring. Both on the team in a matter of months. Your question is, "What's her secret?" and the answer is dangerously simple - deliberate, consistently expressed and reinforced want.

Both of the positions we had were attractive. Senior engineering gigs working on a 1.0 product in a name brand company. But these guys were the top of the field. Recognized names. There were any number of opportunities across the Valley that would be attractive. How'd we win?

We continually and consistently explained that they were wanted.

The idea of a new gig, a fresh start, is appealing because of its simplicity. You know nothing about your future team; you have no idea about potential death marches, or that guy down the hall that just bugs you for no particular reason. It's simple to think about the future optimistically because the future hasn't screwed you, yet.

This optimism fades in the middle of the night when you open your eyes, startled, and think, "Why in the world would I leave a solid gig with people I know and a bright future?" The reasons are myriad, but that's not the point. The point is for any big decision, you're going to question it from every single angle. You're going to have endless inner dialogues with yourself. You're going to talk yourself into the gig and then you're going to talk yourself out of it.

It's exhausting.

Michele's message during the entire hiring process was, "You are the best person for this gig. We want you." Remember that we're not talking about random, anonymous candidates; we're talking about handpicked candidates.

Before any interview, she'd drive to them, explain the gig, and begin, "You are the best person for this gig. We want you." After the first round of interviews, her message was the same, "See, this gig is perfect for you. We want you."

When we started the offer negotiations, she'd worked with the recruiter and knew exactly what we'd need to do to lure the candidates. She knew that base salary was a big deal for Alex. She knew Sean was going to be a stickler about stock. There was no offer negotiation because Michele constructed offers that were going to be accepted. She presented them: "This is the offer you wanted. This gig is perfect for you. We want you."

Once the offers were accepted, Michele didn't change her tone or message a bit. She'd had rockstars walk before and she knew the slippery inner dialogues that were going on. She knew that change begets more change and that the easiest time to lose someone was during that post-courtship purgatory between gigs. She had her team take them to drinks. She planted seeds of future work that would need to be done. She reminded them, "We want you".

This strategy reads like a massive ego-stroke for an attention-starved engineering rockstar, but it's not. Whether you have pre-identified a candidate for your gig or you're lucky enough to randomly find a great fit in a pile of anonymous resumes, the strategy is the same -- you consistently remind the candidate that they are wanted. In the mental chaos that is a career change, you and your gig are unchanging in your message. You're not coddling them; you're a constant amongst mental chaos.

Hire for Your Career

The strategy I'm proposing steps on a lot of recruiter toes. Recruiters are professional relationship people and their instinctive reads on candidates can be eerily accurate, but their job is the hire and once the hire shows up, the recruiter vanishes. The relationship is ended because the job is done.

Your professional relationship with those that you hire is never over.

If you're hiring well, you're hiring people not just for this job, but for your career. These are the people who, for better or worse, will explain to others what it is like to work with you. They'll explain your quirks, your weaknesses, and your strengths. When they eventually leave the group, they're taking your reputation with them. You may never talk to them again, but they'll continue to talk and my question is: what stories are they going to tell?

Your daily hands-on management of your hiring isn't just going to improve your hiring process, it's going to improve your career because you'll demonstrate from the first moment you interact with your future employee that you care.

Jesse didn't decide to turn us down at 4:45pm on his last day. The decision began long before that and I wasn't listening. I didn't hear the parts of his current job he loved because I didn't do the phone screen. I didn't understand his concerns about leaving the first job he loved since college because I didn't build enough trust in the interview. I didn't hear him drifting away during the offer negotiation. The last thing I heard about Jesse is he walked.

The first story I wrote for myself was a piece of fiction about God being sent to high school. I was, not surprisingly, in high school at the time. What was surprising was the vein of writing I found in myself. I sat down at the computer and the story just showed up -- seven pages of it.

As the creative burst subsided, I stared at those seven pages in the word processor -- Wordstar -- and I began to fret about line spacing, page numbers, and other formatting decisions. I was silently asking myself, "How am I going to make this palatable to the editor? To the publisher?"

My first story ever. Seven pages in and I'm worried that double-spacing is going have an impact on whether I get published.

Ambition. The great blind motivator. You gotta love it.

To God and Back Again was never finished, let alone published. It's sitting on a 3.5-inch floppy somewhere in a file format I'm certain will prevent me from ever reading it again, and, that's probably best. Old writing is like an old girlfriend: the memory is better than the reality.

Since high school, I've continued to write constantly. Journals, physical and online. There was a weblog way back when, and then there is this one, which, 15 years after my first foray into independent writing, actually resulted in published work.

The lessons I've learned in that time are myriad, but today I'm thinking about simplicity.

The Writing Tools

For first drafts, I use one of two tools: a Moleskine notebook or TextEdit.

The choice of which to use often comes down to location. Is where I'm currently sitting MacBook Pro friendly or not? If that answer is yes, I'll fire up TextEdit and get started. As sophisticated tools go, TextEdit is bare bones. It's just a simple text editor (Sentinel, 15 pt, FTW) that allows me to do rich text editing, search and replace, bold, italics, and the occasional underline.

That's it. No macros, no line numbers, no revision control, just pure writing simplicity.

This requirement of simplicity is rooted in my belief that choices are distractions and distractions are the leading cause of you not writing. And I think you should write more, which is why my holiday present for you is OmmWriter.

Let It Begin

Let me start by saying that I didn't write this draft in OmmWriter. I used that fine tool for a good two weeks before I returned to my pleasant, vanilla TextEdit, but that two-week journey is worth understanding.

OmmWriter is a full-screen text editor with an intense focus on simplicity, and when I say intense focus, I mean a maniacal focus on stripping away every distraction that might prevent you from writing... and then providing a subtle set of new distractions. Briefly:

• There's no menu bar. You must be in full-screen mode. If you leave full-screen mode, the full-screen window calmly fades away.
• In full-screen mode, there are three gorgeous white backgrounds to choose from: snow, white, and white-pattern. That's it.
• Applications preferences are built right into the writing area and are represented with glyphs. These minimalist preferences allow you to choose a serif, sans serif, or script typeface, and one of three typeface sizes.

My favorite feature of OmmWriter is the soundtrack. The application comes with seven chill songs, which are designed to stay the hell out of your writing way. More importantly, the application provides seven keyboard soundtracks. You pick the sound that occurs when you're typing, and it's not a solid, repetitive sound. The keyboard sounds have variation and generally don't annoy. My favorite is #7, which I call: "My old school typewriter and I sitting at the bottom of a well".

OmmWriter leads with a simple idea: creativity has a soundtrack. Think about how you begin an intensely creative act. You get your environment just so. You brew the coffee, grab the right mug, which you then place in precisely the correct location on your desk. Your feet flat on the floor in front of you, your spine is straight, and you look directly the screen. Let it begin.

And sometimes it does. It just starts flowing, and the number one rule regarding flow is: "Ignore it," because any observation of flow risks that flow making a run for it. Your goal is to just sit there and not listen to the music.

The folks behind OmmWriter are aware of this ephemeral soundtrack, and they've done everything in their power to give you a fighting chance to get in the creative flow. The experience of first firing up and using OmmWriter is akin to the sensation of putting your head on a down pillow; you can't help but say, "Ahhhhhhhh".

This divine experience, even if you're not a writer, is worth the download of the free beta of OmmWriter, but it's also the reason I've stopped using it.

A Peculiar Creative Flow

My test of OmmWriter was a holiday letter to a friend. After some tinkering, I settled on a clear white background and the bottom-of-the-well typewriter soundtrack. I sat cross-legged on my couch and began. The full-screen editing made sure I wasn't distracted by icons dancing around in my dock. The delicate soundtrack gently nudged me along when I stared at a half-written paragraph too long. An hour later, I had a comfortable first draft.

As I'm apt to do, I let this draft sit for a day. During this lull, I continue to write in my head. I know what paragraphs suck and I'm instinctually aware of what I have not yet written. My issue during this time was that I could not get the OmmWriter soundtrack out of my head. Rather than thinking about how bad the end of my letter was, I was craving the calming clickity-clack sounds produced by my keyboard while in OmmWriter. Rather than thinking about the writing, I was thinking about the tool.

Having been writing for close to two decades, I've learned that the more I write, the less I need. Every feature, preference, or choice that your application gives you is a ripe opportunity to think about writing rather than actually writing.

OmmWriter is a gorgeous experience that you can't miss. What they've chosen to strip away from a traditional word processor is impressive, but what they've designed to surround you in as a comforting, artistic, and inspiring experience is even more impressive. It's not a tool for everyone, but it's worth, at least, a first draft.

Happy Holidays.

On my list of creative management solutions to dire situations, I offer the rolling whiteboard.

The rolling whiteboard was a curiosity at the start-up. Not a full size whiteboard, but a door-sized whiteboard on wheels, suitable for rolling into conference rooms and cubicles alike. I never knew who owned it; I just grabbed it in a moment of desperation.

It was end game. The time in the project where you pay for every single shortcut you've taken, for every specification you didn't write, and for all the warnings from engineers that you've ignored. All the data is grim. Bug arrival rates are skyrocketing while bug resolution rates are pathetic because, uh, well, engineers are still finishing features.

Like I said, grim.

The endless stream of bad news was grating on everyone. We were already three weeks into working weekends with no end in sight. A normally pleasantly pessimistic engineering staff had gone uncomfortably quiet. Everyone was staring at "the date we can't miss" and thinking, "I guarantee we're missing it".

I needed a game.

An Entertaining System

As I said before, geeks are system thinkers. We see the world as a very complex but knowable flowchart where there are a finite number of inputs, which cause a similarly finite set of outputs. This impossible flowchart gives us a comfortable illusion of control and an understanding of a chaotic word, but its existence is a handy side effect of a life staring at, deducing, and building systems. It's also why we love games -- they're just dolled up systems -- and the more you understand this fascination with games, the better you'll be at managing us.

As with all mental excursions with geeks, there's a well-defined process by which we consume a game, and it goes like this:

• Discovery
• Optimization, Repetition, and Win
• Achievement

Discovery -- From confusion to control

The initial joy of a game for the geek is discovery. This is a delicate balance of confusion and progressive disclosure. A game is initially attractive because it starts chaotic and unknowable, but even in the chaos, there's always a hint of the rules... of structure. What are the specific rules that govern this game? And how might I learn them?

A geek is searching for a single source of joy in this initial state. It's the sense of discovery and progress toward a currently unknown goal. I want to see the engine that defines this particular universe... I want to see its edges. We're looking for those edges because as soon as we find this wall, we know this is a containable and knowable place and that is comforting because the game becomes a controllable thing.

There's creative flexibility in rule discovery and pacing, and it tends to be a function of the size and the intent of the game. The beauty of Tetris is that the initial rules are immediately obvious. But the wonderful curse of a massive online game like World of Warcraft is that while there are rules, they are vast and, as we'll see in a moment, they are changeable.

This discovery is the hook where a geek is going to know in just a few minutes whether this particular game suits their particular appetite. But getting past the initial phases of discovery doesn't mean you've successfully engaged the geek. The real test is...

Optimization, Repetition, and Win -- A paradox and a warning

With the basic rule set discovered and defined, the process of optimization begins. Ok, I get how it's played, how do I win? This is the phase where, now equipped with the rules, the geek attempts to use them to their advantage.

There's a discoverable structure to the rules. There's a correct order, which, when followed, offers a type of reward. It's the advantage of thinking three blocks ahead in Tetris or holding onto those beguiling hypercubes in Bejeweled. This is the advanced discovery of the system around the rules that leads to exponential geek joy.

There's a paradox and a warning inside of optimization and repetition.

The paradox involves the implications of winning. Geeks will furiously work to uncover the rules of a game and then use those rules to determine how they might win. But the actual discovery of how to win is a buzz kill. The thrill, the adrenalin, comes from the discovery, hunt, and eventual mastery of the unknown, which, confusingly, means if you want to keep a geek engaged in a game you can't let them win, even though that's exactly what they think they want.

Think of it like this -- does it bug you that there's an absolute high score to Pac-Man? It bugs me.

To get around this entertainment-killing paradox in subscription-based games like World of Warcraft, game designers freely change rule sets as part of regular updates. The spin is, "We're improving playability" which translates into, "The geeks are close to figuring it out and we can't have that because they'll stop paying."

This paradox does not apply to all games. It's hard to argue that there is much more to learn about Tetris, but folks continue to play it incessantly, which leads to the warning.

There's a socially frightening act inside of optimization that normal humans don't get and it's the calming inanity of intense repetition. In a game like World of Warcraft, many of the tasks involve an exceptional amount of repetition. Repetition like, "Hey, go kill 1,000 of these guys and come back and I'll give you something cool." Yeah, 1,000. If each kill take a minute, you're talking about sixteen hours of mindless hacking and slashing. This is not a task that requires skill or thought... and that's the point.

If you walked in and looked over my shoulder at troll kill #653, you'd think I'd dropped into a twitchy-fugue-like mental state and I have. I am... a machine. Machines don't have a care in the world, and that's a fine place to be. This is the act of mentally removing ourselves from a troubled planet full of messy people, combined with our ability to find pleasure in the act of completing a small, well-defined task. This is our ability to lose ourselves in repetition and it is task at which we are highly effective.

In the defense of game designers, there are no quests that read "Go waste sixteen hours of your life doing nothing". They are more elegant with their descriptions; they splice all sorts of different tasks together to distract you from the dull inanity of large, laborious tasks. But they know that part of what makes us tick is the micro-pleasure we get from obsessively scratching the task itch in pursuit of the achievement.

As I've never designed and shipped a game, I can confidently and ignorantly say the compelling magic in games comes from the design in optimization and repetition. This is the portion of the game where we spend the most time and effort and derive the most pleasure. It is this abstract mental state we long for when we're not playing.

But there is one last phase to consider, achievement.

Achievement -- Who cares if you win by yourself?

Once a geek has learned the game by discovering how to win, they become interested in advanced winning. They're interested in how their win fits into the rest of the world. They want to compare and measure and answer the social question, "Is my pile of win bigger than yours?" They believe they've mastered the game, but reputation -- achievement -- is nothing unless someone else can see and acknowledge it.

Before the Internet, winning was a private thing. You entered your three-letter name into the local Pac-Man machine and then anonymously stumbled off in search of Donkey Kong. In an interconnected world, games became social, and once we discovered each other in these virtual worlds, we looked for a means to compare our feats. We began to understand that achievement was not just becoming great at a game, but being recognized for being great.

Achievement can be as simple as a score, a numeric means of comparison, but the more sophisticated the game, the more complex the achievements. In World of Warcraft, you'll be busily into your seventh hour of mind-numbing troll extinction when you see that night elf run by with... what's that? A staff... where the hell did she get that staff? It's sweet. My world will not be complete until I own that staff. Now, what was four more hours of troll killing becomes the quest for the staff.

There's no well-defined rule that says, "To win, you need this staff". Sure, it might make those next 200 kills easier, but that is not your entire motivation. For you, the staff is your own personal badge of mastery, and you don't wear a badge for yourself, you wear it for others to see.

Most achievements do have an empirical value, but that's not what makes them important. The point of an achievement is to have someone you know or don't know look at your Violet Proto-Drake and say, "Holy crap, do you know what he had to do to pull that off?" It's wondering exactly how far you'll go to get the Legendary badge on Stack Overflow.

In a world where we spend a ton of time with people we'll never meet, achievements are the currency of respect and identity.

The Rules of the Game

Now that we understand how games float the geek boat, we can tease out rules you can use to build your own business-centric games. This is will take a creative leap on your part because I don't know how your particular situation is grim. Perhaps your bug count is crap like mine? Maybe you can't hire fast enough? Maybe you can't measure how screwed you are? I don't know what game you need, but I know you need to follow the universal rules of games:

The rules need to be clear. Whatever game you design must stand up to scrutiny. Test the rules with selected geeks before you roll it out. Find the holes in your game before you're standing in front of the team describing a game that makes no sense. Ambiguity, contradiction and omission are the death of any good game.

The rules must be inviolable. Enforce rules with an iron fist. A rule not followed is twice as bad as a poorly defined one. A violation of the rules is an affront to a geek. They react violently to violations of the rules because it's an indication that the system is not working. Rules make a game fair, and when they stop being followed, the geeks stop playing.

The playing of the game must be inclusive, visible, and broadcasted. Include everyone on the team. Those not on the team should be aware of the progress and implications.

Only use money as a reward as a last resort. It's a knee-jerk management move to use money as an incentive. Problem is, money creates drama. Money makes everyone serious, and while you may be in dire straits as you design your game, you don't want the team stressing about who is getting paid; you want them to stress about the work.

This is not to say that rewards in a motivational game are verboten, but step away from the money and think about achievements. One of the best trophies I've awarded was a horrifically ugly ceramic blue rhino the size of a pit bull. The winner proudly displayed the rhino achievement in his office for years.

It's not a game. Just because I'm using the word game all over this article doesn't mean it's trivial, simple, or something not to be taken seriously. Your geeks will treat the game as a motivational tool as seriously as you choose to treat it in building and rolling it out -- because they want to win.

The Whiteboard Game

Everyone was working on a Sunday night as I stared at the blank portable whiteboard in my office. A weekend of hallway conversations, bug scrubbing, and informal testing confirmed what I already knew: the product was shaky, the bugs we were discovering were alarmingly bad, and there were too many of them.

Ok, a game. The game will be called Focus and it will concentrate and structure our attention on the worst parts of the product. I listed the 10 worst bugs I'd found during the weekend on the board. Next to each bug, I drew four boxes:

• Root cause
• Fix identified
• Fixed
• Tested

I grabbed a handful of dry erase pens and rolled the board into the architect's office and said, "This is all we're working on".

He stared at the board for 10 minutes and finally nodded, "Good, but each person needs their own color and you should assign points for each of the boxes. 10 points for root cause and fix identification, 5 for fixes and tests."

"Points for what?"

"Points for points. We're geeks."

"And everyone has their own color?"

"Yeah, so we know who has the most points. Give me a blue pen, I've already got root cause on bug #3."

"Blue?"

"Yeah, I'm always blue."

In Silicon Valley, you burn a lot of calories.

It's not just the daily burn of your gig, it's everything else involved in staying afloat in a valley which is constantly reinventing itself. You sign up for every new service and spend the prerequisite 3.7 minutes to determine "Does this matter?" You surf the web, you tweet, you update your Facebook, all of which brings a constant flood of new data that needs to be sifted, sorted, and assessed.

You have compatriots in this caloric consumption. They randomly walk into your office or your life and with them they bring additional reasons to burn more calories. Have you seen this? You have to try it. In fact, I'm not leaving until you're jumping up and down excited about this very important thing.

We are part of an industry that is addicted to enthusiasm, to getting things done, and discovering the new, but sometimes the right move is stopping and putting this world on hold. You need to learn how to build quiet moments of nothing as a measure of balance.

... Which is why I go to a bookstore.

An Essential Exercise in Inactivity

The moment I walk into a bookstore I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it's the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it's the social reverence for the library-like quiet -- you don't yell in a bookstore, you'll piss off the books.

A bookstore is where I rediscover that while I might be addicted to the non-stop calorie burning Silicon Valley lifestyle, I also need the serenity only found in the deep quiet of the consideration of nothing. Considering nothing takes work and practice, and the act contains a contradiction: the more I think about what I need to do, the less I'll discover the thing that I don't know that I'm looking for.

It's confusing, but you need these skills because you have days full of somethings. Your day is probably spent at one of two sides of a spectrum. You're either reacting to whatever is showing up on your doorstep or you're proactively looking for new things to place on your doorstep so you can figure out what to do with them. Reactive. Proactive. It's how you spend your entire day.

Excursions to the bookstore are essential exercises in inactivity where the whole world stops being a thing to do.

My most recent trip to my local Borders was in the middle of a two-week period where I'd spent time in both Tokyo and London. Forty hours of flying resulting in five days of meetings which required constant thought, creativity, and focus. During a brief stint back in normality in the States, I had instructions to acquire a children's book for a nephew.

Now.

The children's book section at my local Border's has been voted "Most Likely to be a Total Fucking Disaster" for three years running. Combining this unique cluttered chaos with a head full of jetlag means my head is overflowing with disorganized somethings and I'm predisposed to be annoyed. Even worse, I'm not looking for a specific book. I'm running on "get something he'd like" orders, which means I need a modicum of inspiration in order to be successful.

I need to discard everything in my head that's preventing me from looking and being inspired.

This is a surprisingly hard mental maneuver because you and I are both used to days that are not only full, but full with well-defined things to do. A lack of structure, direction, and measures throws your brain into fits and this usually when I throw my hands up in frustration and walk out of the bookstore. My brain is rejecting the unstructured ambiguity involved in the search for the unknown.

Look in my head when I start: Where I am? This looks like the children's section, but this part is full of toys and I need books. I haven't read a good book in forever. Ok, keep moving until something looks right. Since when did they sell candy at a bookstore? Edward Cullen Sweet Tarts? Please. You know, I don't even know what day it is. Ok, dinosaurs, he likes dinosaurs. Wait, can he read?

My analysis is: "this place is fucking confusing" and I think I'm talking about the bookstore, but I'm actually talking about my brain.

Up To Nothing

Go back to work and think about your average day. How often are you not clear what you're doing? How often is the goal of the next 30 minutes completely undefined? Yes, you've suffered through meetings where there was no clear agenda and you felt like you were wasting your time, but that's still a known quantity -- I'm currently in the poorly run meeting scenario. Been there, done that.

What happens when there is no meeting, no burning task, no one in your office? You wander, you surf the web, you stare at that calendar on the wall and think, "Why do we have leap years again? I forget." And then you feel bad. I should be working. I should be doing something. They're not paying me to reverse engineer leap years. I have things to do.

You've built this guilt into your office. It's why your screen is not facing folks who walk through your door. You're worried: "They might see me doing nothing".

You're not up to nothing. You're aimlessly mentally wandering -- an act made famous by every bright idea ever had in the shower. Think of that moment. Your body is busily on task with the cleaning and what does your brain do? Sure, if you're stressed about layoffs, you're going to worry about layoffs, but those mornings when nothing is pressing -- what happens?

Your brain builds something from whatever mental flotsam and jetsam is in your head. Perhaps it's a useful thing, an answer to a question you didn't know you needed. Perhaps it's just an interesting combination of thoughts put into a story. It's dreaming, but you're awake.

Back to the bookstore. Remember my orders, a good book for the nephew...

If I survive the mental rejection of ambiguity, the next moment I need is one of discovery. In order to ground myself in the silence, I need to discover a single bright and shiny thing and there's absolutely no telling what that thing is until it shows up. It might be based on my mood, the last ten things I cared about, a random word someone said to me, my favorite color... the list is endless, indefinable, and entirely locked in my head.

But there is nothing ambiguous or unclear about the discovery. It's obvious. It fills an immediate gap I did not know I had.

In this bookstore excursion, it's a black book. It's odd to see a black book in the endless rainbow of the children's section, but there it is. Black cover with masking tape surrounding what looks like a handwritten title: Wreck This Journal. Ok, interesting. I flip the book open to the handwritten instructions:

1. Carry this with you everywhere you go.
2. Follow the instructions on every page.
3. Order is not important.
4. Instructions are open to interpretation.
5. Experiment. (Work against your better judgment)

And there it. Exactly what I needed. A reminder of why I go to the bookstore in the first place -- to mentally stumble around, defying my better judgment, in a nourishing environment of nothing.

Wreck This Journal was created by Keri Smith, who calls herself a guerilla artist, and I've no idea what her book is doing in the clutter of the children section. It's a journal dedicated to its own destruction. One pages instructs you to Rub Dirt Here. Another asks you to scribble wildly using only borrowed pens (document where they were borrowed from). The journal is full of ideas to create unstructured moments of seemingly meaningless activity designed to get you to stop and let something else in.

Don't Look For It

Stop and let something else in. It's a confusing skill, which starts with a question: how are you going to find what you don't know you need by not looking for it?

A day in high tech rarely encourages the activity of doing nothing. Nothing is not cost effective. Nothing is not something you'll put in your review. Nothing gets a bad rap and the more I attempt to define it, the less useful it will be to you because what I need out of nothing is different than you.

Moments of nothing are not moments of creativity or consideration. (They might be.) These moments don't last long because your brain can't sit still; it's been trained to burn calories all the time. (The longer it sits still, the better.)

Your brain instinctively and naturally attempts to build something given whatever world it's currently in. In a bookstore, with effort, I can shed the somethings of my everyday and find the nothing that I don't know I'm looking for. (And that rules.)

The brother-in-law lives in the 'burbs and needed five trees removed. Not big trees -- 10 to 15 feet tall, six-inch trunks. Not a problem.

I live on the edge of a redwood forest in Northern California. There are sturdy oaks, playful maples, lovely madrones, weed-like bay laurels, and, of course, giant redwoods. But the pleasure of living in a forest has a tax. Trees fall and trees die, and in a forest of any significant size, this is always happening.

You need a chainsaw. In my case, I need three. There's Junior, who is great at handling the small jobs. He's light and ladder friendly.

Then there's Marty. He's the everyday mid-sized saw that is enough to handle almost any job. Marty would be perfect for a job in the 'burbs.

Last, there's the Rocket. Any tree is the Rocket's nemesis.

Even if you've never handled a chainsaw, you've probably used a handsaw. It's a physical, grinding affair. It's fun for about three minutes and then you start wondering... am I making progress? The brother-in-law had taken it on himself to use a handsaw on one of the trees. In his three minutes he'd sawed off... a branch.

When Marty and I showed up, we dropped all five trees, cut up the trunks and branches, and stacked them into disposable piles in an hour.

The lesson: the correct tool is exponentially more productive.

That's a long introduction to say an obvious thing, but I'm going to make it even longer. Take a moment and step inside the mind of the brother-in-law. I've got several trees I want to get rid of... and what do I have in the garage? Two hammers, a paint can full of nails, some leftover wood and... a saw. Perfect. A saw.

Context shapes perspective, so thanks to the contents of his garage, he knows of no universe where there are chainsaws. He's heard of them and suspects they're much faster than the laborious sweaty grind of this sawing, but there's no chainsaw here, so he's semi-happily hacking away. To me, standing there with my arsenal of chainsaws, it's absurd. It's a criminal waste of his time.

The lesson again: the correct tool is going to make you exponentially more productive.

The Foamy Rules

As an engineer, there is a short list of tools that you must be rabid about. Rabid. Foaming at the mouth crazy.

This is an obvious list of tools and there's nothing here that you haven't heard before. The news is that you need to care. You need to be able to explain in great detail why using green-colored text on a black background is THE ONLY WAY TO CODE. You need to be a zealot about your tools and zealotry starts with fit.

I was a database guy then I was a shrink-wrap guy and then I became a web applications guy. Each of those professions came with their own set of bright and shiny tools, but the tools were not important. Even a specific feature inside of that tool is not that interesting. I believe you can be just as productive sitting inside of a rich development environment such as Xcode as you can inside of TextMate and a slew of terminal windows. The point is not which tool, the point is that the way that tool - your tool -- looks, feels, and functions fits how you see, move, and work.

These are my foamy rules and they may differ wildly from your list. That's cool. My development experience is different than yours. I started working with computers before the mouse which means I trust my keyboard more. Integrated debuggers had just landed when I began developing which means, yeah, I like debugging at the command line. Again, the point is to get foamy, because what makes you foamy makes you your best.

My foamy rules:

My tools appear deceptively simple. TextMate. Terminal. Transmit, LaunchBar, DropBox. The mean time to get one of those tools set up is just a few minutes. I can build out my development environment on a new machine in a half-hour. This has a couple of handy implications. My tools are readily available and lightweight. I can download and install everything except for an operating system in a short amount of time. Similarly, setup and configuration of these tools is close to zero.

You might think this setup means I'm expecting my computer to randomly explode. No. These tools are not simple; they are well-tuned. A TextMate user knows it's an onion application. You can keep pulling back the layers and finding new functionality, which is going to make your development experience faster. The same goes for Terminal and LaunchBar. The base functionality just works and if you have a particular development itch you want to scratch, the tool can scratch it.

My tools do not care where my work is. How many times have you experienced this? You write a quick script on your local machine to do something clever. You fine tune it and then plop it on your server and rediscover the rule -- there's nothing quite like production.

Any tool that does not allow me to develop live in production is slowing me down. When someone showed me how to set up Transmit to do editing on remote files, I saw hours of heretofore unknown production debugging issues vanish.

Yes, editing locally is fast, especially when you live on the edge of a redwood forest where DSL latency blows, but a tool which doesn't allow me to develop over the wire isn't a tool, it's a debilitating hindrance.

Rands, edit? In production? Are you insane?

No. The tangential background rule is: "If you don't know what you're doing in production, you don't belong there".

There's a corollary, which is: "I don't care where my work is". This is recent foaminess brought on by Dropbox. For non-production work, like, say, writing a book, I don't want to think about where the most recent version of the work is sitting. Yes, I'm talking about version control -- but shh, don't call it version control -- just call it Dropbox. Providing I have a network connection, this tool magically refreshes a shared directory sitting on each of my machines. I can't think of the last time I worried about which version of a document I was on, and that means I'm spending more time working than worrying.

My tools are designed to remove repetitive motion. One of my first algorithmic holy shits was during my second computer science class as we were learning sorting algorithms. The professor elegantly walked us through the construction of different algorithms, explaining the pros and the cons, and then he landed Quicksort. Holy shit.

It wasn't just the elegance. It wasn't the recursive simplicity, it was the discovery that with imagination there were approaches that were wildly more efficient -- and simpler. Whether you're formally trained as a computer science nerd or not, you've learned the value of efficiency -- to make each action that you take mean something. You know that when you're efficient, you have more time to do what you love.

This is why I have a simple requirement that any tool I rely on has complete keyboard support. I will fall back on the using the mouse for one-off activities, but for any action I take that I know I'm going to do again, my question is, "How do I make this action cost less?"

Think of it like this. What if I told you that each time you wanted to save a file, you had to stand up, climb up on your chair, and jump up and down, yelling, "I would like to save my stuff now!" The first time you had to do it, it'd be kind'a fun, but after that it'd drive you bat shit crazy. It's a similar feeling each time I reach for my mouse. I feel I'm engaging in an unnecessary task, which is always going to waste my time, because with a mouse sometimes you miss and missing is a tremendous waste of time.

Finding any file or application is, ideally, four keystrokes. Cmd-Space (LaunchBar), Letter #1, Letter #2, Return. Sometimes I get lucky; sometimes it's three and you know that puts a smile on my face every single time it happens.

My tools only do what I've told them to do. Back when Dreamweaver first landed, I wanted to love it. I was so tired of the repetitive motion of developing HTML pages and the idea of a tool that was going to visually handle that laborious process was appealing. Problem was, Dreamweaver changed my code... without asking.

It what?

Dreamweaver was attempting to be helpful, but the moment it reformatted my code, I threw a fit. YOU TOUCHED MY CODE. Dreamweaver never recovered from that horrendous first impression.

My impression and my opinion of robust integrated development environments is that they can do a lot of good in terms of helping you visualize what the hell is going on. Borland developed some of the best environments for building code back in the day, but I still find myself with extremely primitive development environments where I'm tweaking code in TextMate and debugging inside of a couple of Terminal windows.

Yeah, I know all about the glory of integrated debugging and I see all you Eclipse guys having a ball, but what I found in many years of development is that embracing the fancy tools means spending time tinkering with your tools to get them to behave how you want.

The corollary to this rule is: "My tools don't have a lot of moving parts". Dreamweaver-grade code offenses are few and far between with solid development tools, but the fancy still comes with a cost. You may be fully willing and foamy to embrace that cost, but I'm not.

Am I more efficient than you? Maybe. Do I know where I stand relative to my tools? Yes. Do I have to relearn my development process when the people behind an elegant tool shoot for more elegance? Nope.

My tools are my tools. Choosing a thing makes it yours. The choice is the result of that unique mix of logic, superstition, stubbornness, and experience that fits you.

You read that right. Green text. Black background. I'll tell you why right now. I'm an old school DOS guy. My first word processor was Wordstar and that's the word processing program I came to associate with the fugue-like state of maximum productivity: the Zone. This is why I continue to favor colored text on a black background in my current favorite editor, Textmate. The coloring reminds me of an primal safe place where the tool is serving its purpose -- to get the hell out of the way so I can go be exponentially more productive.

This is why, as engineers, we stick with something that works for us. This is why the ancient likes of vi and Emacs continue to flourish. Once we find a tool that works for us, once we've chosen that tool, it becomes ours and remains ours. It allows us to get foamy.

An Evolving Foaminess

My brother-in-law doesn't need a chainsaw. When I took out his five trees, I eliminated half of the population of trees on his property. While a chainsaw is a delicious combination of sound, power, and sawdust, my brother-in-law didn't choose a home where the trees are on the offensive, so he doesn't need defensive weaponry.

He does need to know about a universe where chainsaws exist because every moment of his time is valuable. What differentiates us from the monkeys is not our ability to pick the right tool for the right job, but to pick the best tool.

And you never stop looking -- this is why the last foamy rule is the most important: my tools are always fighting for their life.

My current tool set is influenced by all of my experience. Yeah, the elegant simplicity of vi is attractive to me -- it reminds me of the uncomplicated early days of development, but vi can't compete with the holy shit I experienced when I first ran into TextMate. This tool is always five steps ahead of me. I love that.

But TextMate, like all of my tools, must evolve.

Try this right now. Stand up and walk into the office of the best developer in the building. I promise two things: they will be happy to, at length, foamily show you their development set-up and you are guaranteed to learn, at least, one thing about moving faster. Perhaps it's a tool you've never heard of or maybe it's the way they deftly manage a tool you've taken for granted.

I don't know what you're going to learn, but I do know you'll see one thing that will instantly and obviously make your universe a smaller, more productive place.