Mark Gregory Turansky

Here’s a surefire, one-step way to sap your staff of two hours of productivity: 1) poorly schedule two hours worth of meetings!

Peopleware famously dissects productivity among thought workers and persuasively argues that environments conducive to developers getting into the “zone” and feeling the “flow” experience higher productivity than those that aren’t so hospitable. Task switching is considered harmful for those whose jobs require deep concentration, high creativity, and other pure thought stuff.

The meeting scenario in this picture may be mocked up, but it has happened to me in real life as I’m sure it happens in many organizations. It’s the quickest, simplest, easiest way to tack two extra hours onto the cost of those two hours of meetings.

How?

Because, like DeMarco and Lister point out, it can easily take 15-30 minutes just to get into the zone!

When the first alert pops up, I’m usually distracted enough from my task at hand. I need to find out where the meeting room is, maybe grab a cup of coffee, and I’ll probably need to use the restroom. That’s 15 minutes gone.

In between meetings we’re catching up on email. And if it’s a slow email day, we’ll read Slashdot or CNN because it’s just not possible to get deeply into the zone in that short window… just to have another alert pop up in 15 minutes. That’s 30 minutes more down the tubes.

After Meeting #2, we’re again catching up on email or making lunch plans. I don’t care if it’s a slow email day AND you brown-bagged your lunch, you’re still not getting deeply into the zone for meaningful work in this 30 minute window. We’re down a full 75 minutes so far.

And after lunch? Too many of other things can distract us from work: more coffee, restroom, email, chitchat in the hallway, food coma, etc. It’s easily another 30 minutes here to even approach the zone, let alone get into it deeply enough before the next meeting alert pops up…

Poorly planned meetings, spaced out as illustrated, are a guaranteed productivity killer.

The New Yorker has published an article on Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, a think tank that brainstorms new ideas, patents them, and licenses their subsequent ownership of that new “intellectual property.”

The point of incredulity, for me, came when I read this quote from Bill Gates:

They also came up with this idea to stop hurricanes. Basically, the waves in the ocean have energy, and you use that to lower the temperature differential. I’m not saying it necessarily is going to work. But it’s just an example of something where you go, Wow.

The article talks about Alexander Graham Bell and his genius, and how Myhrvold is inspired by Bell. But Bell didn’t simply think up the telephone and patent it; Bell actually invented the telephone!

Intellectual Ventures files up to 500 patents a year. There are no inventions here, mind you, just ideas. You know the patent system is broken when a company can obtain a government-granted monopoly on an idea like preventing a hurricane and sue the bejeezus out of someone who might actually figure out how to control Mother Nature.

Ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. It’s the implementation that is hard. The research and successful development of a seemingly impossible idea is worthy of a patent, not the brainstorming for the idea itself. How would you like to solve an impossible problem only to be rewarded with a lawsuit by a troll with a submarine patent who’s put zero work into solving the hard problem? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

The Great Indian Outsourcing movement will be over within two years.

That’s what an architect turned blogger who writes anonymously from Bangalore is predicting. The author is writing from the movement’s Ground Zero, so he may have better insight than the rest of us. But I’ve got good anecdotal evidence from a local outsourcing company that lends weight to his prediction.

I live and work in Charleston, S.C., an area known more for its beautiful beaches and gorgeous live oak trees than high technology (though we do have Robert X. Cringley). But Charleston’s location can attract businesses that don’t necessarily need high technology, just smart people. Outsourcing is one of those types of businesses.

I know personally a project manager at a local outsourcing company. Our daughters go to school together. We were talking at a recent birthday party about outsourcing, cost, and the availability of talent. Business is booming, but it has little to do with cost, she tells me. She says its the lack of local talent that drives most of their business. They deal largely with the marketing end of technology, making websites and fancy Flash applications. Madison Avenue marketing firms would rather hire local Flash experts, she says, but they’ve hired them all. They’d prefer the rapid turnaround that local talent can give them. There just aren’t enough talented people in NYC to fill the huge demand, so they outsource to Charleston, S.C. In turn, this local company sends the work to a development center they own in Costa Rica. Costa Rica is, I’m surprised to learn, a hot up-and-coming technology spot. And you don’t have to wait 12 hours for Costa Rican project managers and developers to reply to email or voice mail.

The Tired Architect - our Bangalorian blogger - talks about the availability of talent in Eastern Europe and China, and there’s obviously talent in Central America. Brazil is another up-and-coming technology hot spot.

I agree with The Tired Architect that India’s monopoly on the outsourcing market is over.