Werd I/O

I like the sound of the Objectives and Key Results system that Google uses:

First, you set up an Objective. Then you set up a number of "Key Results" that are quantifiable that will help you hit your objective.

Your objectives should be definitive and measurable. Don't say, for instance, I want to make my website prettier. Say you want to make your website 30% faster. Or you want to increase engagement by 15%.

This is great, but only if every single person in the company does it. If you limit OKR to certain people, for example engineers, then you create a two-class system: people whose performance is graded, and people who aren't. Everyone up to and including (and in some ways especially) the CEO needs to be a part of the system.

On a Google Ventures post about the system, Rick Klau clarifies:

Low grades shouldn’t be punished [...] OKRs are not synonymous with employee evaluations. OKRs are about the company’s goals and how each employee contributes to those goals. Performance evaluations - which are entirely about evaluating how an employee performed in a given period - should be independent from their OKRs.

Makes sense, right? It encourages employees to set ambitious objectives, and ranks the company as a whole on how its constituent members hit their targets. I think the transparency - everyone can see everyone else's OKRs - is an important facet of that.

Have you used them? How did they work out for you?

I enjoyed, but didn't fully agree with, TechCrunch's piece Silicon Valley Lost, And Found:

However, in other ways, what drew my mother and my grandfather here is very much alive. A desire for non-conformity and a grandness of aspiration still exists in certain entrepreneurs here. The 150-year-old Gold Rush mentality lingers on in the engineers who show up every year from all over the world to try their luck at starting new companies. The Valley’s unique cultural language around materialism and status persists. While it does get flashier every year, there is still a certain discretion about being well-dressed or having a nice car here, at least compared to New York or Los Angeles.

"Non-conformity and a grandness of aspiration" is what I love about working in tech. I find subversion comforting, so find a lot to love in cities like Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco (just like I enjoyed the anarchic artistic scene in Edinburgh). As well as the cultural environment in those places, which developed independently of the technology industry, I enjoy tech's ability to look at the status quo and decide that it can be made better. Contrast that with many industries, which remain stagnant, or worse, start to see themselves as institutions.

But let's not forget the petty bigotry and wealth-imbalance-related issues that have started to come to a head this year. Or the more-and-more audacious displays of wealth. That "discretion" about materialism that the author discusses is important to me; even in the short time I've been here, it's become more and more visible to me. I'm interested in what I consider to be the "real" Silicon Valley, by which I think I mean the "authentic" one: the one that's about making things better with your skills, rather than people turning up because they think they can make a fast buck.

The difference is illustrated ably, earlier in the article:

Working with bankers and traders also wasn’t the same as dealing with founders, engineers and hackers day in and day out. People were sharp, but they didn’t love their work - not the way my grandfather or dad did. Jobs in banking were a means to accumulate year-end bonuses and holidays. They didn’t spend their spare time messing with a half-dozen oscilloscopes or building makeshift telescopes.

Those people - the folks in the basement with their oscilloscopes and telescopes, tinkering on their own terms - are my heroes. The people with that nerdy tinkerer mentality, and the freedom to pursue it that is still fairly unique to Silicon Valley, are the ones who changed the world, and will keep on changing it.

It's not written about much these days, but out there in the rest of the world, engineers still draw scorn. You hear them being talked about as "back-room guys", with the implications that the other, "normal" people should be front of house. Geekdom is still niche, and in places, taboo. And that's one of the other things that makes Silicon Valley special - here, geeks have freedom to be themselves, outside these constraints. And it turns out that when they have this freedom, they create the world's most valuable companies, develop transformative technologies, and so on.

This is important. What worries me a little about the latest trends are that the engineers have been co-opted into a resource by incoming people with dollars in their eyes. Factories of willing developers are being established based on the promise of the previous generation, and the lottery-like idea that maybe your company will succeed to the tune of millions, or billions, of dollars. As one engineer told me at a well-funded company that will remain unnamed, "yes, you work weekends, but everyone else does too, so your coworkers kind of become your family." That's nothing short of a bullshit deal, and it seems to me that this kind of exploitation risks killing what's special about the Valley. It also perpetuates the inequalities we've heard so much about this year.

But the non-conformist geek engineers are still there, tinkering on their own terms, side-by-side with San Francisco's counterculture, which lives on. It's one reason why I've fallen in love with the #indieweb community (and its spin-off, Homebrew Website Club). These movements are no less likely to change the world, but they're on our terms, for us and for everyone, rather than the predatory desires of a generation of hopeful MBAs.

I hate gyms. At their best, I'll stick a podcast on, hook myself up to a machine, and do a circuit of resistance training to follow. If it's a good podcast, I will have learned something, but I don't think they're interesting, and I don't think they're real exercise. I also don't think that one burst of exercise is as healthy (or feels as good) as spreading exercise throughout the day. I've never been good about building them into my routine.

My career and livelihood also demands that I sit in front of a computer all day, at high levels of alertness. This isn't a recipe for good health, and it's not uncommon (although, I think, less common now!) to see laptop warriors swigging at soda or chugging a Red Bull to keep their energy up. I don't want to be that guy, and the two to three cups of coffee I drink a day already worry me.

I grew up in Oxford, a town where walking is easy; it was as fast to walk the two miles into the city center from my house as it was to catch the bus. So I learned to walk everywhere - something I continued to do when I moved to Edinburgh, and something I still try and do here in the US. It's harder here, even in cities like San Francisco; in some parts of America it's actually a kind of taboo to walk instead of take the car. I hear there's also some kind of obesity epidemic these same places. I'm shocked.

Walking everywhere - six miles or more a day, according to Fitbit - has always been my number one form of exercise. Here, I have to be a bit more careful about it. My work is based in Austin (I'm the outlier here in the Bay Area), and don't have an official office, so I could just pay for something that suited me; I chose Local Office, a perfectly-placed spot in West Berkeley that meant I automatically had a 3 mile walk built into my day. I took another hour to stroll around for lunch, and I had my six miles. This last year, I started to build in other forms of exercise; sometimes, when nobody was in the office and I was at a stopping point on whatever I was working on, and nobody else was around, I'd drop and do 20 push-ups. By the time the office closed, I'd worked my way up to 100 a day. (And lost over 15 pounds.)

Local Office is sadly gone. These days I often work out of RockIT Colabs, a coworking / maker space (they have an office upstairs, 3D printers and welding stations downstairs) right on the edge between Chinatown and the Financial District in downtown San Francisco. The community is perfect for me, but even factoring in my BART ride from Berkeley, the exercise isn't quite there. For some reason, I've also lost my habit of jumping up from my desk and walking around or doing some intensive exercise whenever I hit a stopping point. (The ability to drop and do some exercise with impunity is one of the few benefits of working from home over a shared office space.)

I'm having once again to think more explicitly about exercise - I'm definitely gaining weight, despite mostly eating well and doing the right things - and may, once again, have to try and join a gym. Or I might consider becoming a runner. Or something else.

If you're sat in front of a computer all day, what do you do to keep yourself healthy?

The moments when I do my best thinking are always the quiet ones. All my devices are off, there's no sound around me except for (when I'm lucky) the gentle breeze through the trees, or the swish of far-off cars. My mind is at peace; uncluttered and uninterrupted, while at the same time free to meander.

Which is at odds with where my brain is for most of the rest of the time. Compared to many of my peers, I use a relatively small number of devices on a regular basis: really just one phone and one laptop. Nonetheless, I find myself checking social media potentially hundreds of times a day. I'm a dopamine addict, and I'm pretty sure it's killing my creativity, concentration and productivity.

I'm not alone. Earlier today, Tantek Çelik adapted an old saying for the modern age:

In the land of the distracted, the singularly focused person is king.

But how negatively is social media affecting the way I think?

Note that the problem is with multitasking, not lack of focus. Unfocused thought can be an advantage:

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to outline the surprising benefits of not paying attention. Sometimes, too much focus can backfire; all that caffeine gets in the way. For instance, researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity—people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. Other studies have found that employees are more productive when they're allowed to engage in "Internet leisure browsing" and that people unable to concentrate due to severe brain damage actually score above average on various problem-solving tasks.

The results regarding multitasking, however, are not so positive. Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford, noted the effect of multitasking on students at his institution, specifically with respect to smartphones:

The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. [...] We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted.

They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And even - they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks.

Furthermore, just as second-hand smoking has effects beyond the original user, this multitasking behavior affects others too:

On a test following the lecture, students in view of multitaskers performed significantly more poorly than those who weren't in view of multitasking. The difference was 17 percent, enough to drop a solid A to a B-. Less surprisingly, a second study confirmed that the multitaskers themselves, not just those who incidentally witnessed multitasking, similarly suffered a drop in performance.

I've struggled with low self esteem for much of my life, which is associated with dopamine levels, and may make me more susceptible to this kind of addiction. Regardless of whether there's any truth to this or not, in 2014, I want my brain back.

Already, I've reduced my social media usage by posting to my own site here at werd.io rather than directly to the silos in question. This month, I'm reducing the number of quick-fix sites and networks I participate in, and have already jettisoned Instagram and Snapchat. It's not that I'm becoming an Internet hermit; instead, I want to focus on the kinds of content and interactions that are enriching to me. If I'm learning, growing and being productive, that's great. If I'm persisting because I get superficial rewards with no real lasting value to me, then it's time to jump ship. Long-form communication and engaging conversations are important.

As is spending more time with everything switched off, a cup of tea in my hands, leaves rustling in the breeze.