MightyZot

Get Paid Less…

2009-10-21T01:11:06-05:00:00

Today’s article is going to be controversial. As well, I wasn’t able to find sources to substantiate the content of the article, so it is largely supposition based upon my personal experience. What’s worse is that it’ll likely be pretty short and not my typical diatribe of pros and poetry. I’m going to talk about getting paid less than what you’re worth and why that is actually a good thing.

During the past twenty years I have worked for several software companies with countless technical types. Seems like there is always someone complaining that they don’t make as much money as their friends, or their colleagues, or that they’re not getting paid what they feel like they’re worth. I’ve heard many times statements like:

“I was hired well below what I should be making…”

“Based upon research that I conducted on salary.com, I’m not even making the median salary…”

“My friends are making more than me and we’re doing basically the same stuff…”

“I’m buying a house and …”

“My wife is having a baby and …”

“I’d like to buy a new car and …”

“I don’t have enough money to support my crack habit and …”

You’ll find countless references on the net regarding how to command higher salaries. eHow, for example, has several articles explaining how to negotiate higher salaries. (see How to Negotiate a Higher Salary, How to Negotiate an Even Higher Salary, How to Negotiate Salary After Job Offer) One colleague of mine went so far as to reduce the number of hours he worked per week to effectively give himself a raise that he thought he deserved. Whether or not he deserved the raise is not important. As well, whether or not you’re getting paid what you’re worth is not important either.

I can hear the bits and bytes screaming at me as you’re now pounding on your keyboard, beating on your chest, and scoffing at me with discontent. Stick with me here and I’ll explain why getting paid what you’re worth is not important (and not smart for that matter.) First of all, if you’re an outstanding employee, like you should be, there is no way for your employer to pay you what you’re worth – it costs too much. Second of all, you don’t want to be paid what you’re worth, because people who are paid what they’re worth are expendable.

You become expendable as your compensation rises to meet your worth because…wait for it……you are making yourself less valuable to the people who are purchasing your mad skills. When you’re working for someone else, you are selling them your worth. Your worth minus your salary and benefits is your value to the organization. When your value becomes close to or less than the cost of replacement, you simply aren’t valuable any more, and you’re likely to be replaced (or scrutinized, or hated, or made fun of, or talked about, clubbed, or whatever.) The point is…having zero value is not a good situation for you to be in.

A key performance indicator for many companies is revenue per associate. This is a number that you should know for both your company and your industry. If your total compensation is close to or above this number, then it’s possible that you have diminished value or perceived diminished value. As your compensation grows, you’d better make sure that your contribution grows, positively impacting your company’s revenue per associate indicator, and that your contribution is visible to upper management. Doing so keeps your worth out ahead of your compensation, thus preserving your value.

So, stop whining about not getting paid what you’re worth, figure out how much value you bring to your organization, and then negotiate your compensation based upon your value. Concentrate on being fairly compensated and happy, rather than overcompensated, negative, and miserable.

Chaos Management

2009-10-03T13:00:18-05:00:00

I’ve been tracking my time in one form or another for just under twenty years. Until recently, I must confess that my motivation for tracking my time has been largely accountability. Although I have never had issues remaining productive, I don’t have good memory for certain things. I remember numbers, equations, programming languages, solutions, etc, very well…I just can’t remember what I did yesterday! Even though I’ve never had someone ask me what I’ve been working on, or question my priorities, I’ve always felt the need to be able to recant that information should I get asked. More recently I’ve been using my penchant for time tracking to squeeze more things into my days and weeks.

My role at PaperWise has been evolving into more of a coaching, mentoring, and advisory role. A handful of years ago, I spent most of my time leading the Development and QA groups, as well as writing code for the suite. During that period I used a Franklin Covey planner to keep track of my tasks and prioritize them. I kept delegated tasks in my planner as well. Over time, I evolved the Franklin Covey system to suit my needs, removing the C tasks altogether and coming up with a better way to manage delegated tasks (better in my mind, that is.) That worked great while I was intimately involved with the day-to-day operation of the departments that reported to me. Once my role started changing to more of a coaching, mentoring, and advisory role, the system broke down. A lot of my self-esteem was tied directly to the tasks that I was able to accomplish myself, as well as the checkmarks that I got for helping others complete tasks that I delegated to them. Naturally, my self-esteem went down as I moved from delegating tasks to delegating projects and spending a lot more time communicating, motivating, and teaching.

So, for the past few weeks I have been researching time management techniques, trying to find something that allows me to get the checkmarks that I need in order to feel accomplished and is flexible enough for me to get things done in-between meetings and helping people. What I found was time budgeting and time blocking. I believe these two techniques, used in tandem, to be the solution to my problem.

Time Budgeting

Rather than making lists of things, and checking those tasks off as you get them done, time budgeting involves predetermining the amount of time to spend on certain aspects of your life. You can then allocate time for projects or tasks. Creating a time budget is very similar to creating a money budget. I’ll walk you through the process that I used to develop my own time budget. You’re also welcome to download and utilize the Excel spreadsheet that I created to manage my budget.

Like a money budget, in a time budget you set realistic goals regarding how you spend your time. And, very similar to money budgeting, time budgeting probably doesn’t work unless you keep track of how much time you’re spending for each allocation. Sometimes you’ll come in under budget and sometimes you’ll come in over budget, so don’t worry about being 100% accurate.

The articles that I’ve read indicate that time budgeting can stop you from falling into a few productivity traps. First, it can help you stay away from neglectful prioritization. I’m very guilty of getting stuck in this trap. Neglectful prioritization occurs when you give the majority of your attention to something until you feel like you’ve neglected something else. To keep from dropping the ball, or a spinning plate depending upon your favorite analogy, you refocus your attention on the thing that you feel like you’re neglecting…until you decide that you’ve been neglecting something else. While this type of prioritization can make you look and feel productive, it also causes stress, missed deadlines, and upset spouses. (I have an account at Allison’s Floral.)

Second, budgeting your time can help you become proactive about your time instead of reactive. Email invariably sends me into reactive mode. The fires must be put out, I guess. If you’re not proactive about at least some of your time, though, you won’t have any to spend on growth. Eventually, I suppose that you could be in danger of becoming the sum total of all of the smoke and ashes!

Lastly, there is a subtle form of procrastination that sneaks up on a person. It’s sneaky because you can procrastinate while being very productive. This form of procrastination happens to me because I like to finish tasks. If I’m not very careful to reduce projects to tasks granular enough that I can finish them without too much interruption, I have a tendency to work on lesser priority things that I can fit into the time slots I have available. As a result, I put off larger tasks or projects until they become neglectfully high priorities.

Time Blocking

Time blocking gives me the satisfaction of checking things off of lists, and making progress, without forcing me to find large blocks of time to fit large projects and tasks into. Instead of completing a single project or task at a time, I can spread multiple projects and tasks over time and make steady progress on all of them. Time blocks are allocations of fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour in length, that you can reserve for items in your time budget. As you complete each time block, you mark the block as completed. I love blocking time because I can have twenty four or more checkmarks every single day! :)

Articles that I found while researching this time management philosophy recommended lower resolution for the time blocks, thirty minutes or an hour. I chose thirty minutes for my time tracking purposes, and this is how the spreadsheet included with this article is structured.

The Process

Once I had the basics of the system down -- the time budgeting and blocking -- I moved on to implementing my new found time management system. To create the time budget, I started with a mind map. Mind maps are very powerful brainstorming tools that help you organize your thoughts. To build a mind map, you start with a main topic. My main topic for this exercise was “Work Time.” I decided to break my time into both work time activities and personal time activities, because lost time at home is as big of a frustration for me as lost time at work.

There are a handful of tools out there that you can use for mind mapping. I like to use MindJet’s MindManager application, but you can also use Visio’s brainstorming template. MindJet’s MindManager is very easy to use, since it is built specifically for mind mapping. The brainstorming template in Visio is clunky.

Try not to think so linearly while building your mind map. With a mind map, you have the ability to jump around from thought to thought and organize your thoughts as you go. And, it’s the ability to jump from thought to thought that makes mind mapping such a powerful tool. If you need to see your map in a more linear layout, both MindMapper and Visio can show your map as an outline.

While you’re building your mind map, think hard about what you really need and want to spend your time on. I discovered that I’m spending my time on many things that are just really not that important in the grand scheme of things. Axe the things that truly aren’t that important. Also, your work time mind map is a good starting point for dialog with the person you report to. You can use your mind map to discuss with them your priorities and make sure that your priorities are inline with company priorities.

Once I had created the mind maps for both work time and personal time, I started building my time budget. When you create a money budget, I think it’s a good idea not to try to budget 100% of your income. Similarly, don’t try to budget every bit of your work time and personal time. You’ll most likely get frustrated and stop using your budget. Some articles that I read suggested starting with a low number like 50%. I was comfortable starting with 80%.

To build the time budget, I created a spreadsheet in Excel. The spreadsheet contains the work time activities from my time budget and then I estimated how much time I should devote to each activity. Because there are many things that I want to accomplish, I ended up breaking my time budget into two different budgets: one budget for week one, and another budget for week two. By squeezing everything that I want to accomplish into one week, I didn’t feel like I was giving enough attention to those activities. As a result, I decided to rotate them. You may find that a single and consistent time budget works for you.

Building a budget is not effective for me unless I track how well I’m doing with regard to the budget. Included with the time budget in my spreadsheet is a breakdown of every day of the week, Monday through Sunday, in thirty minute intervals from 6am to midnight. I’m usually awake at around 6am and I generally don’t go to sleep until midnight, so I figured the aforementioned arrangement was adequate for my tracking purposes. I can use these breakdowns, which are included as additional sheets, to plan and track tasks. As I complete tasks, I simply associate them with items in my budget (by referencing the cells containing the budget items) and then mark them with ‘X’ to indicate that they’re completed.

My spreadsheet automatically tabulates the time I spend on each budget item as I mark ‘X’ next to tasks, provided that the task references are set to cells containing my budget items. This is quite handy and the spreadsheet is available as a download. (Time Budget)

To make this system work, I think you’ve got to stick as closely to your budget as possible. Otherwise, you risk falling back into old habits. One of the articles that I read suggested using a kitchen timer, or egg timer. I purchased Egg, a software-based egg timer, to use to keep me on track. As soon as the egg timer goes off, I’m moving on to the next thing!

Now I feel like I’m in control of my time, rather than letting my time control me! Here are some time management resources that you may find useful:

http://litemind.com/time-budget

http://litemind.com/time-blocking

http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/11/procrastination-hack-1025

http://www.franklincovey.com/blog/tag/franklin-covey

http://www.davidco.com/

b != P (beauty != Perfection)

2009-09-08T14:05:34-05:00:00

Manual Labor

I find occasional manual labor projects oddly satisfying. I’ve spent the majority of my career sitting behind a desk programming, or otherwise working on a computer. Putting a little bit of muscle behind a task gives my mind a chance to wander. Working on something manually taxing allows me to think of things out of order and without context. It gives me time to think about relationships.

The Art of Wandering

Relationships allow me to go from one topic to another without worrying that I’m becoming divergent or distracted. In fact, I guess the act of becoming divergent is what I’m really after when my mind is wandering. I’m after the distraction that I get when I’m using my legs, arms, and hands to do the work, instead of my head.

Wandering involves starting with a topic or idea that I hear in a song that I’m listening to while I’m working. Or, sometimes it starts with a comment that I make to myself with regard to the task I’m doing. Many times I am thinking about things that I’ve worked on the past week, or people that I’ve talked to. Regardless, wandering always seems to start with a single thought or idea.

Making Connections

Once I have a single thought or idea in my head, my first inclination is to find the humor in it, or to try to make it funny in some way. For me, humor involves forming a relationship between a starting topic and something else. Webster’s online dictionary defines humor as discovering or expressing and then appreciating the ludicrousness or absurdity of situations.[1] My humor could be called rather ironic, so many of my interpretations involve puns and distortions of reality. English is a great language for this process, in my opinion, since it is so inaccurate. There are lots of words and phrases in English that mean one thing in one context and something else in another. And, there are lots of words that are close in spelling and pronunciation. As a result, it’s not difficult to change the meaning of a topic or thought, giving rise to the discovery of new thoughts and relationships.

After making connections in a humorous or absurd fashion, and discovering new thoughts and relationships between topics, I give these new thoughts and topics some consideration. After repeating this process a handful of times, I’ve discovered that there are epiphanies lurking in the shadows of the relationships that I’m exploring…which leads me to tiling the floor.

Tiling the Floor

I spent the weekend tiling the floor of my basement. A few weeks ago I turned up our water pressure (yeah, I know.) Fortunately, there was a poorly constructed sleeve leading from our well to our pressure tank. Notice that I said fortunately. For a couple of years I’ve been talking about removing the carpet and doing something different with our basement. It’s amazing how motivating forty gallons of water can be!

The process of tiling a floor is not difficult. To tile a floor, you need water, mortar, grout, some handy tools, a sponge, some rags, and some tile that you might find aesthetically pleasing. Of course, this explanation is greatly oversimplified. Since my point is revelation and not particularly tile, just a broad overview of the process will suffice.

So, you start by mixing some water with the mortar. I don’t get too carried away with measurements when I’m doing this type of work, so I mix in enough water to give the mortar a sticky consistency. The test that I use is to mix the mortar and then hold up my trowel. If I have the right water to mortar mixture, then the mortar will cling to the surface of the trowel and it’ll have a consistency close to that of toothpaste. Once you have the mortar mixed, you lay it down with a special trowel that has grooves in it, you lay the tile on top of that. (The trowel with grooves in it helps you apply roughly the same amount of mortar to the entire surface, so that your tile will set evenly.)

Setting the tile is fairly easy, especially if you’re not making any complicated patterns or cuts. If you’ve done a good job at selecting your tile, then it will be beautiful regardless of the intricacy of the layout. After the tile is set, and you have let it cure for a day or so, then starts the hard work. Now you’ve got to grout it to fill in around the edges of the tile. For me, grouting is a very arduous process.

Grouting involves mixing the grout with water until it’s about the consistency of Malt-O-Meal cereal. Then, you plop the grout onto the tile in blobs and use a tool called a float to work the grout into the grooves between the tiles. During this process you are spreading the grout all over the tiles. If you let the grout dry on top of the tiles, you’re in trouble, so I like to keep the tiles wet with a spray bottle as I’m working.

After covering the tiles with your grout and carefully working it into the grooves between the tiles, you let it sit for a while until the grout has a chance to set up. (You’d better keep that tile wet!) Finally, you go through the cleaning process to clean off the excess grout. Cleaning the tile involves carefully washing the top of each tile repeatedly with a sponge or rag until it’s clean. All the while, you’ve got to be careful not to mess up your grout lines in-between the tiles.

Many would agree, I’m sure, that tiling is a very arduous and taxing process. I’m completely wiped out physically after a few days of tiling. My knees hurt, my arms hurt, and I’ve lost skin from my knuckles. During this process, though, I’ve discovered a few things.

Revelations

While tiling my basement I came to several conclusions, or ideas. These ideas are philosophical, which gives me the distinct advantage that I am not actually required to prove any of them. (I have, though, distorted some facts to support these conclusions and included references where appropriate. J) You may call these epiphanies or revelations. Or, you may not. Regardless, here is what I was thinking about while tiling my basement this weekend.

Revelation #1 – Sometimes seeing in the light requires spending some time in the darkness…

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this topic, since it is not the main point of my post. To me, this revelation has profound implications. For example, can you truly empathize with someone that has a disability, if you don’t have a disability yourself? Or, can you counsel someone regarding their marriage, if you’ve never been married? Can you effectively lead or manage people, if you’ve never been a follower? Spend some time in the darkness and you will see in the light a lot more clearly.

Jennifer Rothschild, in her book Lessons I Learned in the Dark, says that we should look for the people who walk well and follow them.[2] People who walk well have spent time in the dark.

Revelation #2 – To make something beautiful, sometimes you need to spread crap all over it and then wipe it off…

The tile in my basement is absolutely beautiful. To make the tile beautiful I had to cover it with this nasty sticky mud and then spend hours cleaning it off. Even after I thought it was clean, the tile would start to dry, I would see a film covering it, and would have to clean it again. Again, not the main point of my post, so I’ll just point out a few examples that appear to support this claim.

the Holy mud company says this about their holy mud, “our masks won’t cleanse your soul, but they’ll do wonders for your skin.” That’s kind of funny, if you think about it.[3]

Saint Patrick reportedly said that he was like a stone lying in the mire and he who is mighty raised him from the mud and placed him atop the wall.[4]

Revelation #3 – Beauty does not equal perfection… (b != P)

Now we come to the point of the post. At the end of this train of thought leading me into the darkness of the mud and back out again into the light, I discovered that b != P. Beauty is not the same as perfection. Let me explain in more detail…

Beautiful Examples

While beauty is subjective, I believe that given enough time anyone can provide a sufficient number of examples to prove my point. For the purpose of this post, I’m choosing some of the things in life that I find most beautiful.

Wood Grain

I find great pleasure in looking at my kitchen cabinets, entertainment center, and hardwood floors. Something appeals to me about the patterns and the flow apparent in the grains of the wood. The Brazilian Cherry stain applied to the wood, as well as the super glossy finish, accentuates the wood’s stunning appearance, especially when bathed in the sunlight that shines through the dormers in the morning. Maybe it’s the organic feeling that wood exudes, or the strength that it pervades. In any case, I imagine that few would argue with the idea that wood is very beautiful.

Yet, when you look critically at wood and wood grain you discover countless imperfections; countless imperfections, the sum total of which is possibly the beauty and pleasure that you experience upon examining the whole. The plant…the tree…and indeed the forest is not perfect, yet their beauty undeniable. b <> P

Golden Mean

The golden ratio, or golden mean, is a mathematical construct used in music, art, science, advertising, architecture, etc. It is all around you and it’s likely that you see it or hear it every single day of your life, even if you don’t know what it is. Golden mean is used to describe the relationship between a whole and two parts when the ratio of the two parts is the same as the ratio of the sum and the largest part, as shown by the diagram below.[5]

Although not to scale, the illustration is meant to represent that c divided by a is equal to a divided by b, or c is to a as a is to b. Fascinatingly, this ratio appears throughout nature. For example, you can find this ratio approximated in the separation of the spirals in sea shells such as the nautilus.[6] You’ll also find this ratio approximated by some proportions of the human body (research Leonardo da Vinci.) And, finally, the ratio between successive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, which is utilized in music and many other domains[7], oscillates tightly to and converges to the golden mean.

Surely such brilliant elegance is worthy of being called beautiful; however, the golden mean is an irrational number.

As you can see, the golden mean is as imperfect as it is beautiful. b != P

Prime Numbers

Prime numbers serve as the basis of all other natural numbers. Integers greater than one are the products of prime numbers.[8] Primes are beautiful in my opinion because they cannot be divided by any other numbers except themselves and one. They are unique. Dr Chris Caldwell, editor of Prime Curios!, calls them beautiful and states that prime numbers are key to the Internet revolution.[9] (They are used as a basis for cryptography algorithms protecting our transactions over the net.)

Julie Rehmeyer states in her article regarding the largest prime number known up to September of 2008, “Its size is mind-boggling. With nearly 13 million digits, it makes the number of atoms in the known universe seem negligible, a mere 80 digits.” She goes on to say, “But [the number’s] true beauty is far grander: it is a prime number.” I’m apparently not the only one to view primes as truly elegant and beautiful. As beautiful as primes are, their distribution has so far proven to be imperfect.[10] b != P

Anti-aliasing

This observation comes from personal experience. My experience comes from interactions with PaperWise users through escalations and other points of contact regarding image quality. I’ve seen our users scan images from 200dpi (dots per inch) to 600dpi (dots per inch.) The lower the quality, of course, the less resolution the resulting images have. Lower resolution images appear “blocky” or pixelated.[11] Users report that these blocky or pixelated images are of lesser quality, and hence less clear, than the original documents. Naturally, this is true because the human eye sees at a resolution of about seventy four megapixels.[12] The only way to truly cure the pixelation is to scan at that resolution or greater.

What’s interesting about this, though, is what we do to make images appear clearer. To make images appear clearer to users, we effectively smudge or blur the images. We call this process of blurring or smudging images anti-aliasing. This is done merely for display in PaperWise and the technique fools the users’ brains into believing there is more visual information in the images than there really is. In effect, you could say that we’re making the reproductions less perfect to fool the eyes and mind into believing that they are more aesthetically pleasing. b != P

Conclusion

So, after giving this concept of b != P much more attention than it probably deserves, I’ve come to the philosophical conclusion that beauty is not equal to perfection. What does this have to do with paper, document management, and workflow? Nothing specifically, except just to say that a beautiful or elegant solution is not necessarily a perfect solution. While we are not perfect, by any stretch of the means, our solutions are often times beautiful and elegant.

You may also find a copy of this blog article posted on the PaperWise blog. (http://paperlesstrail.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/b-p)

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humor

[3] http://www.holymud.com

[4] http://www.answers.com/topic/saint-patrick-saint-holiday-figure

[5] http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

[6] http://www.missioncollege.org/depts/math/keller/golden.htm

[7] http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_numbers

[9] http://primes.utm.edu/primes/background/introduction.php

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_numbers

[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelation

[12] http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html