Now that hockey is over with and I’ve fully absorbed the championship I can move on to other things. Namely the fact that my perception of time seems to be speeding up. Case in point, I can’t believe it was nearly a week ago that I wrote my last post about the Wings winning the cup. That said I’m going to keep this short so that it gets done.

It’ll also be short because I think what I have to say is fairly common sense, namely that the more you think about and have to do, the less time you have for other things. Unfortunately (fortunately?) it feels like it’s doing nothing but speed up lately. Gone are the days when it felt like Friday was an eternity away. Now it’s more like I start worrying about the following Monday on Thursday morning. That’s messed up.

Perhaps a lot of people don’t explicitly think about what all this business about time implies in the more general sense. In many ways I feel it points to just how little we really understand about time as it correlates to consciousness. Not only does the passive experience of time flowing by seem to change pace based on your state of mind, we also actively deal with many different scales of time at once. Or at least people who are any good at planning do.

Music seems to change the way I perceive time quite a bit. I am starting to think that our perception of time is more influenced by the amount and type of information we have to process than how busy we are. Consider the very statement “busy work.” It usually means some set of mundane and time consuming tasks that probably make the unlucky individual feel like time is effectively at a standstill. Just because you’re doing a lot of stuff doesn’t mean you’re really thinking all that much and that’s when time seems to move the quickest.

I guess this wasn’t that short, and I’m not really done so I’ll split it into two parts. More later!

My sister Niku had her commencement ceremonies recently and in between feeling very proud of my sister for getting her degree in Microbiology I found myself reflecting a bit on my own accomplishments as well as the areas that I could do more. Objective self-evaluation can be a tough thing to do right and it’s something that I always strive to be better at. While thinking about this I started to try and come up with some of the core qualities that help successful people reach their goals.

There are a lot of different qualities that a person needs to embody to attain their goals. Of course, a big part of it is what the goals are. But I think that there are also some common traits that are perhaps the foundation of success. I was able to come up with the following: knowing how to plan properly, being persistent and being patient. (Note that they all start with the letter P, which is just a lucky coincidence.) My list probably isn’t exhaustive, but these seem like some of the most critical general traits.

To begin with, planning seems like an obvious one. If someone is not able to actually figure out what his or her goals are, how can that person possible accomplish anything? Past that she need to be able to reason out what the steps are to reaching a specific goal and then to be able to map out the steps for each of those subgoals. Being able to plan for a variety of circumstances is pretty critical too.

Persistence doesn’t really require much explanation. Simply put once the plan is laid out a certain level of drive is required to stick with it. Depending on how difficult the goal is a little more persistence might be required.

The last one is the most important one I think. Patience might seem a little odd coming after a trait that might seem at odds with it, but I actually feel they go together quite well. First, a person needs to be patient with themselves. Not complacent or making excuses; that’s quite a bit different. Patience is the trait that lets someone persistently execute his or her plan in an effective manner. Without patience emotion can take over and in my experience an over-emotional response won’t help at all.

On that note, if I had to throw in a runner up I’d say passion. Funny… That starts with the letter P as well.

This is one of those posts that I had a good idea for, started the post by just putting the title into WordPress and saving it as a draft. Now, two weeks later I have no clue what I was intending to write about. But that’s OK. I might not remember the specifics, but I remember the feeling, so I’ll just make it up as I go along.

What I mean by “getting mixed up” is having so much going on that at times you feel like your sense of focus is completely lost and you’re not making significant progress. It happens a lot these days and I see it as a consequence of the modern condition; people might not be producing meaningful output continually, but society does expect most everyone to be pretty much hitting on all cylinders non-stop. Productive or not, go go go is the way things are done these days.

Nowhere is this more apparent than work it seems. That’s pretty obvious right? I can’t really complain about it; I knew what I was signing up for when I chose this as my field. And honestly, for the most part it’s not even that bad. Sometimes it can be a little trying, but that’s when you really can see what you’re made of in my opinion. The challenge isn’t always just performing the task, but doing it in a positive way so that when you do succeed you feel accomplished.

Of course, you have to balance this with the knowledge that you’re being used.

But I digress. The fact is that getting mixed up isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At times it can certainly be stressful. And yes, if you let it go to far you end up killing your efficiency and getting much less done than you would if you’d focused (or been allowed to focus). But what can you gain from it? In this case I think attitude can make a big difference. Conditioning also helps too though… It’s only through years and years of “getting mixed up” that I’ve learned to see some good in it.

For example, it keeps you expanding your horizons and trying new things. In the software industry I think this is critical. One of my fears is getting forced into specializing in one area and then getting stuck doing that kind of work forever. That would really be boring and potentially limiting to the career as far as I’m concerned. Being able to move around and have a broad set of experiences to draw upon for your resume is definitely a good thing if you want to be anything more than a cog in the machine.

It has its advantages beyond resume experience as well. Personally I have a hard time forcing myself to be productive in something that I’m just not feeling. Call it a muse or whatever you want, but meaningful, truly creative output can’t be forced in my opinion so fighting your creative urges doesn’t really do you any favors. I struggle at it sometimes, but trying to attune myself to what I actually want to work on and then laying out plans on different timescales based on those desires helps me plot a sort of road map to my personal growth.

If you’re open to it a sort of cross pollination can occur between ideas at times too. Recently I’ve been working on house music, wanting to get into hands-on crafting and realizing I have very little art in my home. The more I let those things percolate in the back of my head I started to get some really cool ideas for some light-fixture sculpture that I want to try my hand at that sort of fits with that “musical aesthetic” or whatever you want to call it.

I guess the take home message is to try and look for the good in your situation no matter what, even when it’s stressing you out. Turn that stress into creative energy and then act on those plans and you’ll feel good about what you come up with!

I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd basically non-stop for the past two days now. It’s probably because we heard that tribute band the other night that got me going on this kick, but also because the philosophical nature of a lot of their lyrics is hitting close to home at the moment. The music itself is sublime (Gilmour is one of the greatest guitarists of all time in my opinion, saying nothing of the fantastic bass playing that Waters provided while he was with the band) and when you combine that with their lyrics I can easily say that Pink Floyd is one of the greatest - quite possibly the greatest - bands of all time.

Anyway, one of their songs that I like the most is “Breathe” off of The Dark Side of the Moon. I’ll let the lyrics speak for themselves in this case:

Breathe, breathe in the air.
Don’t be afraid to care.
Leave but don’t leave me.
Look around and choose your own ground.

Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.

Run, rabbit run.
Dig that hole, forget the sun,
And when at last the work is done
Don’t sit down it’s time to dig another one.

For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave.

I really need to learn to play guitar. Then I need to magically learn to play guitar like David Gilmour.

Coming up with a good idea is hard more often than not. For instance, I’ve been struggling for five minutes now with how I want this introductory paragraph to sound. But, while doing this is, perhaps, somewhat challenging at the moment, it’s no where near as hard as coming up with a good idea for a product.

The reason why is pretty simple. In general, a product will have many more concerns than something else that requires only (or mostly) creative thought. For instance, a painting has primarily aesthetic concerns. A piece of technical writing is (from a certain point of view) more complex. It needs to concern itself with both aesthetics (lexigraphic and syntactic) and functionality, as well as some other things. A product often has aesthetic, functional, business (economic), technology, manufacturing, marketing, supply chain, and competitive concerns, and many others. This isn’t to undermine the skill it takes to create a painting. In some cases a piece of art completely qualifies as a product (graphic design for instance). It’s just trying to show that a good product that will be successful is an inherently complex thing to come up with.

So, this is a problem that I’d like to try and figure out how to mitigate to some degree, because software can almost always be thought of as some type of product. No, it won’t always be sitting on a store shelf, but for it to be successful it will need to deal with the majority of the elements I listed, and some I didn’t. It’s a pretty simple concept, so I won’t bother spelling it out. The point is that coming up with a way to get to the good ideas early would be a really great thing. Less time wasted chasing ideas that go no where and more time focused on something productive.

So there needs to be an analytical method to evaluate if an idea for some software product (really any type of product, even a work of art or novel) is a good idea. This is a fairly challenging thing, actually. How can you know if something you come up with will be successful before you create it? Worse yet, something as complex as a product might have mostly good ideas and a couple bad ones and it won’t be successful. How do you identify these issues as early as possible and then correct them?

In general, it’s just a resource problem. If you had unlimited resources (including time) you’d just do every halfway decent idea that came to mind and see how it worked out. That certainly is an “analytical” method. Design it, build it, and see if they come. Of course this is completely unrealistic, even for huge corporations with tons of resources. It may be analytical, but it certainly isn’t optimized. So we need to do something much quicker and get to the gold as fast as possible without throwing out too much in the process. But none of this is really that hard though, if you think about it. It comes down to a couple primary points.

Come up with as many ideas as possible, even if most of them are crap.

First of all, the more ideas you come up, the better your chances are of coming up with one that’s good. That’s simple enough. Secondly, if you come up with lots of ideas, and get in the habit of doing so, then those ideas also feed each other. So it isn’t just a linear increase, but rather some sort of mild exponential ratio of good ideas to mediocre or bad ones.

Have a procedure for evaluating ideas as quickly as possible.

Over time I’ve come up with a pretty tight list of things to think about when doing a quick evaluation of an idea.

• A brief description of the idea
• What are any other offerings and how would this improve upon them
• Who the target audience is
• General types of technology involved
• Possible business models
• Long-term growth/development potential

Simple enough. The idea here isn’t to write pages and pages, just enough to encapsulate the thought. Then, I do some pros and cons, maybe 3-4 of each. If a number of these ideas are of the same type, then that makes it easier to compare them. Sticking to the same method each time, and then doing pros and cons helps take any emotion out of the decision.

Nothing I said here is groundbreaking by any means, but sometimes getting a little methodology going can go a long way. I’d like to hear what other people do to organize their thoughts and decide what ideas are worth persuing, or perhaps I’m somewhat alone in my analytical approach to everything.