There is nothing like the sheer physicality of childbirth to make make one wish for a pause button.

It wouldn’t have to be much. A simple button to press that would freeze the pain and exhaustion, give you time to make a cup of tea and have 5 minutes rest and recuperation before going back into the fray.

No such button exists, despite how much we might wish for it.

For Natalie and I, the process of having Eloise took a very long time – we were awake for almost 48 hours. During the process, I remember wishing for a pause button – something that could give Natalie a break for a few minutes and let her get some rest. I also remember realising that this was impossible. We were committed and there would be no rest. It was a fact of life that Natalie and I (mostly Natalie) would have to keep enduring the fatigue and pain until Eloise was born.

It goes further than this though. By being alive we are fully committed to living life as long as that might go on. Whether or not we realise it, each day inexorably progresses without pause regardless of whether we want it to or not. Even when you feel as if you are standing still, and not going anywhere, you are still moving. Life is persistent and omnipresent.

There is no pause.

Thirty days ago exactly Eloise arrived. With no doubt seeing her come into the world was the most amazing thing I have ever seen and felt. I’ll always remember when she was first, blue faced, blood smeared and still connected, put onto Natalie’s chest.

I think I held my breath until Eloise took her first. She didn’t cry. She just lay there – it looked like she was sleeping. Then, after her lungs lurched for the first time and her chest rose, my heart collapsed into a million pieces.

Absolute joy and relief – like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. The sort of emotion that made us both cry uncontrollably – she was so perfect. We were so lucky.

I have never been so exhausted, exhilarated and emotional all at once.

A whole life now exists because we made it.

Stop. Think.

We made a life.

Building Been Born Yet in Ruby on Rails was my way of learning enough to have the confidence to try slightly more aggressive things in the future. In this post, I hope to be able to explain the process I’ve gone through in the hope it will make it easier for others who are interested in doing the same thing.

Why Been Born Yet?

I’ve tried to build a Rails application before, but I think the key difference this time was motivation. My wife and I are about to have a baby (due tomorrow actually) so it seemed that something to do with babies would be advantageous. Having seen http://hasasteroidwonderlandbeenborn.heroku.com/ from a friend at work, I thought I could build on this idea and turn it into a handy web app for people who wanted to be able to tell friends, family and co-workers when their child was born.

What does it do? 

Been Born Yet does two simple things.

1. It allows people to create a customised landing page (which they can share with anyone) which lets others know if their child has been born yet. Friends and family can visit this page and sign up to be told when the baby is born.

2. Once the baby is born, parents can simply login, provide basic details about their new child and all of the waiters will automatically be notified by email.

Everything that the app does other than this is complexity that I didn’t have to have. Extra features you see on the site now are additions I’ve made as I though they sounded cool.

What’s in V1?

Having read Eric Ries’, “Lean Startup“, I was very keen to make sure I didn’t muck around and released a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as quickly as possible. This would let me learn whether or not this is something people would use. Having started many apps and online business ideas before (many with Michael Morris), I was sick of wasting countless hours of valuable personal time without actually having anything live to show for it. A string of registered, yet unused domain names was enough motivation for me to keep things as basic as possible to start with.

For me that meant the following:

• I cut anything I could (for example, the site originally launched without sub-domains supported)
• I did not allow myself to do any front-end design until the site was mostly functional (The purpose of this project was to release something that worked and helped me learn to program in Rails. I do need to get better at web design as well, but that’s was not what my primary objective is for this project
• I started with plenty of time to spare
• I asked the incredibly generous friends and the rails community for help after I’d spent a minimum of a few nights looking for an answer myself
• I used Heroku for hosting rather than potentially less expensive for convenience and speed
• I used gems to provide functionality rather than re-inventing the wheel (although, Devise may have actually slowed me down in retrospect).

The fact that our babies due date is relatively fixed didn’t hurt either, as it forced me to focus and get something up in time to let our friends know. I’d strongly suggest that if you’re looking to start a project that find and set some sort of deadline. Find ways to make it fixed.

What to do first

To get my head around the basics, I used a few great online resources:

• RailsTutorial.org (I had used this previously to try and complete the lengthy tutorial, but never finished)
• TeamTreehouse (aka ThinkVitamin) – excellent video resources
• Rails For Zombies (especially the slides – they were amazing as a cheat sheet)

I also set myself up using BitBucket (I use github at work, but it is a little expensive for private repositories) so that I could work across multiple computers easily.

One of the best things about working using git is that I can look back through my commit history and see how I pieced things together. I made sure to write quite descriptive commit messages mainly so that I could cement in my head what I was doing.

By thinking through what I wanted my site do to, I realised that I needed three Models:

• Babies
• Parents
• Waiters

Parents could have many babies (who belonged to a parent), Babies could have many waiters (who belonged to a baby). It took me quite a few tries to get these associations working properly (especially once devise came into the picture to authenticate parents), but one of the advantages of working using git in conjunction with the free BitBucket.org repository hosting was that I could create new branches to try and get a new feature working. If I got stuck, I could swap to a different branch and work on something else for a few days while I had a chance to think the problem over. It was amazing how many things clicked into place overnight once I had time to think the problem through a little more.

Slow, gradual progress

Once I had this basic structure mapped out, I could take things one step at a time. Initially I begun by only adding parents and babies – waiters could come later (they were a non-essential feature as the site could work without them). Authentication, notification emails etc, could all come later. Once I was confident that each piece was working correctly I added a new one.

A good example of this is that although it was tempting to try and add authentication straight away, I knew this would be a bit tricky, so only once Parents could create babies properly did I try and retrofit Devise authentication into the equation (Note: Devise actually made things really tricky, especially once subdomains were added into the equation).

One of the things I found most difficult about the process was figuring out what to do next. Keeping a README.mdown in my project was a really great place to create a to-do list of bite-sized tasks I could add. Throughout I made sure that there were two parts to the list, things that HAD to be done before the site was functional, and things that were OPTIONAL and could wait until after launch. After that, my nightly routine was to open up the project, look at the to-do list and brute force my way through the problems until I got stuck. I’d then either try and find decent tutorials via google, or, if things got really bad after a few days, reset HEAD to a stable point and start again. Using branches was helpful here (most of these were only local branches). Sometimes I just had to ask for help and this was an excellent experience.

You can see my initial commits below (for those who are interested, I’ve uploaded screenshots of all of my commits into the gallery below):

Asking for help

Perhaps the nicest part of building this app has been discovering just how awesome people are if you are gracious and ask nicely. The Rails community in Melbourne has been so helpful. Each time I’ve been genuinely stuck on a part of my app, there have been several people (especially via twitter) who have been happy to help.

Throughout, a combination of the tools below has made it really easy to find and ask for help when I got really stuck.

• Twitter – If you have the right twitter followers, Twitter is perhaps the most powerful way to get help in conjunction with a well prepared question or gist. It is especially useful for recommendations about the right gem to use for different purposes or to find out what to search for to solve your own problem. Often finding the right search term is half the battle
• Stack overflow – great for asking questions and finding excellent answers. The voting mechanisms mean it is easy to identify which answers others have found most useful. Be sure to let people know if their answer has helped you.
• Friends (Michael helped me with some of the harder bits (subdomains were tricky). To make the most of his time, I came prepared with a list of 3 things I couldn’t quite crack and we got through them really fast)
• Gist (part of github, gist lets you share snippets of code and is very handy)

A word of caution to the lazy. As a n00b developer, I’m very aware of the fact that I need to ask for a lot of help – it’s partly the idea of reducing that reliance that drives me to want to learn more in the first place. It’s important to be aware that other people don’t have to help you and to respect their time. I only asked for help after I’d spent a good few days banging my head against a wall and trying to find a solution myself. If you don’t try and learn independently (using tools like stackoverflow and google) you won’t get anywhere.

Launch before you feel comfortable

Fortunately for me, I felt some very real pressure to get the site live. If I didn’t have the site live at least 4 weeks before the due date of our baby (28/12/2011) there was a very real chance that we wouldn’t get a chance to actually use the site for our baby at all. This was excellent as it meant that I was forced to put the site live before I felt like it was completely ready.

On the night beenbornyet was deployed, I realised I wasn’t happy with the design and that there were many features not yet in place. I had only spent a few hours designing the site as I promised myself I wouldn’t spend much time here. It felt very raw (& still does). I spent 30 minutes just before launch hacking out css to come up with the much simpler design you see now as I thought it would be easier to maintain than the original design. It could be improved, but I can do that later.  When you look at the design of forums like Essential Baby (which is an excellent pregnancy resource btw) you realise that design is really not driving use. The key was to SHIP IT!

When first launched, the site:

1. Did not allow for subdomains (eg. has[babyname].beenbornyet.com) – URLs were in the form http://beenbornyet.com/babies/23
2. Did not send notification emails of any kind, or use background workers to improve performance
3. Did not allow people to upload photos of their child, or store those images on AWS S3
4. Did not work on a mobile devices

In retrospect, this the best thing that could’ve happened. My wife put a notice out on her Pregnant Mum’s forum (Essential Baby) and people started using it straight away.

Seeing people use what you have created is the single greatest form of motivation

Where to next?

Since launching the site over 50 unique have been babies listed, including Baby Jesus (http://hasjesus.beenbornyet.com). For me, this shows that the basic concept is working and that more people will likely use the app if I:

1. Add features that make the app easier and more useful
2. Promote it well so that people know about it

Although the site was originally just a development challenge, now that I’ve made something that could have legs, I’m keen to learn as much as I can from a promotional perspective as well.

New features

To acheive these two things I’ve written myself a list of new features I’d like to add. As well as things that are basic UX/UI improvements (like sending notification emails), there are also things that will stretch my skills on this list from a development perspective

• SMS integration (I want to use Moonshadow to allow waiters to sign up to be notified by SMS – given the site has an international audience, this could be a little tricky).
• Reminder emails (to make it so that if a parent has a Baby with waiters, they are reminded before and after the due date to let everyone know)
• Notification card (It might be cool to integrate the site with an easy and innexpensive way to have little notification cards printed and delivered.
• Add the ability to upload ultrasound photos or videos to waiting pages like http://hascletus.beenbornyet.com
• Add the ability for the app to remove babies that have been around for a while to free up the subdomain address (currently these have to be unique)
• Add validation for waiter and parent email addresses
• Add social network sharing buttons to improve referrals
• Add a testing framework (I’ve been naughty / ignorant and haven’t invested the time required to do TDD, but given that the app is still relatively simple, retrofitting one shouldn’t be too hard…I hope)
• DONE: Use background workers to send emails (sending large numbers of emails to waiters currently makes the app slow right down while these are all processed. I want to learn how to use background workers to take this load and free up my Web Dynos.)
• DONE: Keeping costs contained  (Heroku is great, but it quickly becomes expensive. Currently I’m spending $40/month on something that doesn’t make me any money. I don’t mind paying it, but it’d be great to learn how to reduce costs and make use of Heroku’s cloud based dynamic scaling abilities)

Promoting the app

Now that I’ve built the app and it’s functioning in some form the next challenge is to promote it. Not really the point of this post, but it’s important to mention, as I’ve seen many people build a website and then assume that their work is done. Unless you’re facebook, this is hardly the case. More on this in another post.

Anyway, I hope this post is useful – one day out from the due date, hopefully over the next few days I’ll be able to swap the “No” to a “Yes”.

Thanks again to everyone who has helped me pull this app together.

I realized that the last few nights may be among the last Natalie & I have alone for years.

Soon, we will be secondary in a way I hadn’t fully comprehended until now.

My feelings, thoughts and well being will be less important than my child’s.

In order to be the best dad I can be I think I’ll need to find a way to entertain my individualism alongside this. I’m sure billions have managed this, but it’s still amazing to consider.

Lots to ponder ….

“Population 9 billion, all Borg“

exclaims Commander Data to the dismay of everyone on the bridge.

Although this is bad for the people of this fictional future-Earth, as a pending Father and on eve of the birth of the 7 billionth human, all I have to say is this:

If the Borg can only manage 9 billion, we’re screwed!

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not population scientist, and that much will become obvious as you read on, but all things considered the Borg are a darn efficient group of hive-minded, individuality shunning drones. They have many traits that make high-density-living something they are incredibly good at. Borgs, for example have the following traits which are desirable when supporting a large population on a planet with finite resources:

Are we more dangerous to Earth than the Borg?

Personal Space – Irrelevant: Living in an alcove is a space efficient way to sort out your housing.

Personal Hygiene – Irrelevant: It is far easier to disable nasal passages than to wash. Being asexual helps.

Schools, Children, Old People & Recreation – Irrelevant: Borg children are brewed in maturation chambers until they are fully-developed & productive drones. Part of the hive mind and implanted with cybernetic systems, Borg children are able to comprehend vast amounts of information without needing to attend school or be cared for. I have also never seen a geriatric Borg.

Edible Food – Irrelevant: Nutritional supplements injected directly into one’s body removes the need to grow or prepare food for any sort of enjoyment. Imagine the energy that would be saved if humans didn’t need to cook. Borg don’t enjoy a nice steak. Borg don’t enjoy food full-stop.

Personal freedom & disease control – Irrelevant: The Borg employ a stringent policy on population control. Basically, if you’re infected with some sort of nano-virus, they’ll blow you up. If you’re no longer needed, they’ll blow you up. Saves on needing to provide borg-hospitals.

Biological urge to procreate – Irrelevant - Sex is something that just doesn’t make the cut for drones. Whether it’s because of the tight, polymer uniforms, or because irrelevant bits of anatomy have been surgically removed and recycled (most probably turned into the afore mentioned nutritional supplements), assimilation is a far more efficient way of increasing a population.

Recycling – We haz it: Being a species that largely assimilates anything and everything of value, the Borg are a resourceful lot.

So you get my point. Although they would have a massive power bill, if anyone could cram a lot of people onto our little planet, it would be the Borg. My concern is that in this fictional future, they could only get to 9 billion.

If Earth is at 7 billion now, 2 billion more isn’t that much of a stretch.

I suppose I’m worried. I’m worried that our biology and our instinctive drive to breed will be the death of us. We already know that there are too many people for our plant to support, yet we keep multiplying. Why?

As I mentioned earlier, I’m about to become a dad. Basically, I’ve never been looking forward to anything more. I’m sure that parenthood is going to be one of the fundamentally defining parts of my life, so don’t take what I’m about to say next the wrong way.

On self-reflection, the logical part of my brain now realises (and this hadn’t really struck me before impending parenthood) that the population of the world is not made up of a single unit of 7 billion people, it is made up of 7,000,0000,000 x my child (or your child). Each one of these precious individuals has to be born as a result of a mother and a father, in most cases, deciding to have a baby.

So lets look at the facts.

I know that:

1) The world is over-populated – perhaps chronically so.

2) There are not enough resources in several Earths to allow everyone to live the lifestyle I do

3) There are no current global plans to slow population growth

4) My wife and I are having a baby (maybe even a second in a few years).

What I don’t understand is how as a species we can rationalise our physiological and psychological desire to have children with the fact we know that the world cannot continue to sustain such a large population. The drive to have children is very strong – many would argue that reproduction is our strongest instinct – but this also makes it one of the largest and most complex challenges we must face. If we cannot control ourselves, we will likely breed ourselves to the point where we hit the hard limits imposed on us as creatures inhabiting a planet with finite resources. As Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the 1992 Earth Summit said,

Either we reduce our numbers voluntarily, or nature will do it for us brutally

I think the crux of the problem is two-fold. Firstly, our desire to reproduce is incredibly strong, but secondly, similarly to global warming, it is far easier to disconnect our own actions with those on a macr0-scale. One more child is not going to a difference.

For some reason I was reminded on “Who Sunk the Boat“.

So what to do? 

For me personally, my contribution is a) writing this article, and b) trying to convince my partner that having two children is enough. Biologically, this means that my wife and I have replaced ourselves. The circle of life is somewhat complete. I think it’s unreasonable to stop people from having children, but I can’t reconcile the desire to have more than two children with what I know.

Time will tell if this all plays out of course, but hopefully by writing this down it’s more likely to happen.

What are you going to do? 

A colleague of mine, Toby Hede, has just released something which gives me hope – http://www.storywallapp.com is a simple, digital equivalent to a physical Kanban wall and it’s really great.

The great thing about it is that it’s simple and flexible enough that it can be used however you think it would be useful. This is a nice change from opinionated software like Basecamp which says you MUST have projects, which must have to-do lists, which must have to-do items etc. The simplicity of this appeals to me and could be configured to closely match my current card system, which assigns things priority based on the energy level required. It also shows me at a glance what I can delegate and what I cannot (this really helps me overcome my desire to do everything myself).

My work desk

Storywall uses localstorage as opposed to user accounts, which I actually think is a feature as opposed to a missing feature. For me, it means that my to-do list cannot follow me home. It stays on my work computer when I go home at night.

Simple, but to the point. I like it.

The MVP approach appeals to me as it suggests a more organic and feedback driven approach to solving what are often inherently complex problems. As individuals, we can deal with a limited amount of shit before we decide that a problem is not worth pursuing, especially where we have a choice in the matter. Understanding ways to cope with the less desirable aspects of an iterative approach is vital to making this work.

Many of us in the web industry have an innate desire to solve problems, that’s why we do what we do. The hidden cost (and paradoxically also the key benefit) of the MVP approach is that a limited feature set will polarise people far more acutely than would have been the case if you released something that was more feature complete. It will polarise more quickly and do so repeatedly throughout the process. Some people really don’t like change, yet an MVP approach requires it. As sensitive individuals, it’s important that we understand this side of the MVP process and develop mechanisms to help us cope.

Releasing projects takes courage.

For those who are truly passionate about their work, releasing projects involves baring a part of yourself to the world and inviting them to trample it – I think this is probably why so many projects are left unfinished or unreleased. We’re afraid of the criticism because it’s not always delivered in the constructive way it should be.

The Haters

If you’re releasing any product, regardless of whether your using a MVP approach or not, people will always disagree with the features you’ve built and the choices you’ve made. There is a no solution to this – people have differences of opinion. Most can express their differences of opinion in a constructive way and this is the core of the MVP approach, however there is a certain class of people who have an inability to voice this disagreement nicely. Let’s call them haters. I think of them something like “smokers” from the zombie game Left4 Dead. They have nasty tongues and you will be called a “cretin” and worse for having the audacity to modify their world.

Haters have a tendency to redirect their general discontentment with their lives and the status-quo (or changes to the status-quo) towards the easiest available target with as much vitriol as they can muster. As you’re website is not “feature complete” it is an much bigger target for them to exploit. The MVP approach will expose you to haters. Don’t expect that labelling releases as a Alpha or Beta to matter – it’s not what they want and that’s all it takes. Most of the time, especially when they make use of their vitriolic skills, haters are easily identified by your project team and also by the rest of the world. This is great as people are generally good at disregarding comments made by people who are obviously unbalanced. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt you or your team.

Solution: Be thick skinned.

“Be thick skinned” is something it’s much easy to say than do, but I’m sure it’s a skill worth developing. I don’t know how you do this and I have to work constantly to stop myself from taking things personally. A large part of my drive to improve things comes from my ability to care about the projects I work on and perhaps this is why I find this so hard. I’d love to know if people have techniques for coping with this.

Some other solutions include:

1. Take the high-road when responding to haters. In my experience it doesn’t really pay to respond to haters with angry responses. That just reduces you to their level. It’s far more effective to simply thank them politely for their time, summarise their remarks (removing any emotive references they may have included) and let them know you will consider their feedback in future iterations.

NOTE: It always pays to have someone else to proof-read your writing with the specific goal of removing emotion.

After you’ve just been slammed by some douché for something you’ve slaved over, the last thing you want to do is be civil to them – they don’t deserve it. It helps to keep in mind (especially if you’re responding publicly) that the audience for your reply is not the hater. It’s everyone else you’re trying to encourage to give you feedback on your site. This group needs to know that they can provide you with negative feedback in a constructive way without being crushed by a vengeful creator. Rephrasing the feedback in a way that removes emotion shows others how you expect future feedback. That’s the whole point of releasing an MVP and it’s vital you maintain that openness. In my experience, others watching the exchange will respect you for this approach.

So, regarding the haters. Be thick-skinned. Some of them may have good points. They just suck at being a decent human being. Write their feedback down sans-”dick”, and move on.

2. Show people that you’re being responsive to their feedback. If you’re asking for feedback publicly or within an organisation it pays to show people that their feedback is being used to create improved iterations of a site. One way of doing this is to maintain a link to previous iterations on your current version site. This lets people step backwards and see the progress that’s been made. I haven’t found a slick way of doing this, but ideally you could have some visible notes about the improvements made each release and why.

IDEA: I think it’d be great to be able to pull and overlay the issues/features/bugs logged into github over an iteration to show exactly what was improved each release. I’ve started logging user-feedback directly into github as issues to try and make this possible.

3. Accept that you will never please everyone. This is hard. Within any project, there is usually a balance of time, money, feedback and effort to be struck. Within this balance there are only so many ways you can slice your iterations. Do you address X or Y? What happens if X and Y are contradictory? Some want more of X, some want less. At the end of the day, there are parts of any website that are subjective. Go with your gut and back yourself. Websites are strangely public beasts because it’s so easy for people to view and use them, however an iterative approach following an MVP launch is not a requirement to install a democratic process. Often compromise kills websites (think a busy corporate homepage) and with very few exceptions its difficult to think of truly great websites built by committee.

As professionals we need to back ourselves. Yes, anyone can use a website we create but its not true that they spend all day, every day thinking about web design, usability and development. That’s what we do, and that’s why we get paid to do it. Be accountable. Back yourself. You will be questioned.

This ended up being quite a long post, but I hope it contains some useful information. I’d love to know if anyone else has techniques for dealing with haters. If you do, I’m @tagell on twitter.

For me, coming to this realization was pretty profound. As someone with a strong desire to be productive, it has really bothered me recently that I haven’t had the headspace to really deep dive into major project work. I’ve felt as if periods of blissful concentration and useful problem solving have been just out of reach. Beyond yet one last minor task or piece of administration. This feeling has caused me some angst as I believe that you can only do really terrific or unique things when you have time to think about a problem in depth. As well as the angst, to try and get to the project work I’ve been working longer hours and neglecting other areas of my life. Time to try and fix things.

Note: I also believe that given the amount of unpaid overtime Australians work, there are others out there with similar personalities who might find they face the same situation.

How do you tell when you are overworked rather than unorganised?

Over the last year I’ve tried about six different online and offline methods for organizing myself including Basecamphq, Action Method, KanBan, cards, over-zealous calendaring, excel based WIPs, and paper based to-do lists. Largely, these methods have worked. I get a tonne of work done on a daily basis. I’ve learnt lots about ways to keep myself and my projects on-track. I’ve even devised my own system to help myself get better at delegating and prioritising my tasks (more on that in a future post). So, I’m actually pretty organised.

After trying all these different methods, I have realised that these while these tools may be fantastic, the reason I haven’t felt content with any of them is that I am using to try and mask the underlying problem that I simply have too much on my plate. I am overworked not unorganised. An overloaded system will never work as well as one that is running at capacity.

There is always more to do than can be done.

I’ll put it out there. I don’t believe that being overworked is something caused by the company I work for or by my manager. In my case (and this has taken me a while to underestand) being overworked is a self-imposed condition. Like any other aspect of my professional life I need to learn to manage it better.

The solution to overcoming overwork, I hope, lies in determining which of the things I’m working on are most important and then making them priorities to be knocked-off one at a time. While I may be asked to complete additional tasks, I need to communicate both to the business and to myself that accepting additional tasks will cause other projects to take longer. Either that, or apply stricter filters on incoming tasks to reduce the number of items competing for attention.

This is something that I’m really starting to understand as a result of working with a larger team and using more agile project methodologies. There is a direct consequence to accepting new tasks, namely that by taking new tasks it will take longer to complete other tasks. It sounds simple, but I have found it quite hard to communicate.

Establishing boundaries and cutting the cord. 

I have an addictive personality. Even though learning to say “No” and “Yes, but…” will help reduce the number of things I have to work on at any one time, I still need to set myself boundaries. Thanks to the omnipresence of digital to-do lists and computers, I find that the tasks I have accepted follow me everywhere to the point that I find myself tossing and turning at night thinking about all the things that need to be done or working back late at night. They niggle at me until they are finished, but then it’s straight onto the next thing. It’s a crazy battle as there is always more to do than can be done. 

To try and fix this I realise that I need to cut the cord in order to switch off – I need to sever my ability to do or think about work outside of work hours.

So far I have:

1) Set my work password to a really long randomly generated string I cannot remember. I can only find this string at work or in emergencies.This stops me from checking my work email at home or checking up on projects on password protected staging servers.

2) Taken work email off my iPhone and home computers. I’m addicted to email as it is so by removing my work email I’m helping myself kill this addiction.

3) Bought a new computer for home so I don’t have to take my work computer home. I’m currently teaching myself Ruby on Rails and I love my side projects, so having a computer at home is essential. Lugging my work computer home meant that I kept getting sidetracked back to work. The next step for me is to set up separate personal and work dropbox’s instead of sharing them.

4) Swapped to Post-It notes organised on my desk for task management and removed electronic task lists completely. This stops me from thinking, organising or adding to my to-do lists outside of work because I cannot see them.

5) Tried to be more disciplined about leaving work on time. If I’m working on something really engaging then I’m happy and I’ll keep working, but if it’s something that can wait till the next day I need to learn to walk away if it’s past time to go home. Having a pregnant wife who needs my help at home a lot more makes this much easier, but it’s still something I have to keep an eye on. Also, if I work back later, I make sure to make up the time elsewhere by getting a coffee on the way to work etc.

Hopefully this combination of things will let me a) remain organised and productive at work by being able to work on fewer projects at a time, b) reduce stress by understanding that my mental health is more important than productivity and c) let me spend more time with my family and on my personal projects outside of work hours.

It’s going to be an interesting experiment methinks…I’d love to know if anyone else has any techniques they use to keep their lives under control.

Basically, I took from the episode that:

• Knowledge workers are in high demand – global demand for skilled knowledge workers will/has already outstripped supply
• It is incredibly expensive to replace a knowledge worker (up to 250% of annual wage, which is HUGE) – I’ll explain why this is so high later.
• Knowledge workers are easily migratory – we can pick up and start a new career on the other side of the world without too much re-tooling or re-learning
• Businesses and managers need to start thinking of employees as assets rather than expenses (see quote below)
• We need to adopt less confrontational ways of dealing with staff turnover – Ian talks about creating alumni’s of past staff and highlighting their achievements rather than treating them as traitors.
• As knowledge workers, we make ourselves more valuable by ‘working around’. The more we see and experience, the more we know, the more we can do.

I really liked this quote:

This is I think fundamentally where you see managers who are taking a perspective on people in two different ways. You have one set of manager who looks at people and they fundamental think of people in terms of expense and it makes sense because business schools we teach people to use financial statements and on financial statements labour is typically treated as an expense. Interestingly enough buildings are treated as assets. So when you ask a manager what do you do with an expense? You reduce an expense. What do you do with an asset? You generate a return from an asset. Does it matter how much an asset costs? No, it’s about what the return can generate. So if I care to spend that $1000 and get a 10 per cent return or $10,000 and get a 10 per cent return what would I do? I spend $10,000 because I would get a better return and this is the way we need to think about people right. So if I’m going to have a workforce that’s been there for a long period of time, I have a tremendous human capital, an asset. I have tremendous relationships. They know people within the organisation and outside of the organisation. The managerial challenge here is not how can I reduce my expenses, it’s how can I generate a higher level return for this wonderful asset that I have. This is I think the thing that differentiates the successful and the unsuccessful organisations.

Why is it so expensive to replace an employee and why are they assets?

From what I understood, the basic reason it is so expensive to replace an employee is that the longer someone stays at a business, the more deep knowledge they possess about how that business works. More than that, they also have a deep knowledge about who to talk to within that business – they accumulate a social capital the longer they stay. This concept really makes sense to me as someone who works in a giant organisation like the University, which has over 5000 staff I believe. From both my own experience and from watching new recruits, it takes months if not years to find your feet largely because you need to understand the silos, terminology and jurisdictions that only become apparent by doing hard time.

The interesting thing is that apart from the cost of replacing someone (creating job descriptions, getting approval for them, advertising, recruitment yada yada yada) there are much higher costs I hadn’t considered. These include:

• The social capital that employees create for themselves over time. They know who to ask to get things done
• The business knowledge they accumulate over time
• The networks and connections they make both within and outside the company.

When you think about it that way, it’s easy to see how people can be so expensive to replace. It also makes it really obvious why it’s important that businesses do more than give lip service to the phrase “our people are our greatest asset”. It’s actually true.

If that’s true, why are knowledge workers stronger when we ‘work around’?
If one was to have many sexual partners, you could probably surmise that all this accumulated and diverse sexual experience would mean that they were better at sex could you not? Basically, I understood from this podcast that the same is true for knowledge workers. Let me explain…

If you were a web designer who worked full-time for a single company, would you be more or less creative than if you worked part-time for two or more different companies?

There’s definitely arguments against this line of thought, but personally, I think I’d be more creative if I was creatively challenged to work on more problems than less. From what I remember from Visual Communication & Design at school, this is why you get hit with such a heavy and constantly changing workload. By continually having to solve creative problems from a different perspectives to meet different needs you can’t help but become more effective as a designer.

When you consider designers who work for a big corporates with dominating and rigid brands, it’s hard to easy to see how over time your creativity might start to wane (I henceforth refer to this as the “which shade of blue are we going to do it in today?” effect). While from a business perspective this isn’t a bad thing (strict brand representation is largely about consistency after all), from the perspective of an individual seeking professional growth and experience, I can see why working around and having the chance to solve unique problems on a regular basis is so attractive.

Maybe this is why so many large companies use outside creative agencies to get unique design work done despite having significant internal teams. It also explains why I find it so rewarding to work with contractors – they bring a different perspective to problems that is gradually beaten out of people who stay at the same place for a long time. I wonder if working around is the reason why some of the best designers in the Melbourne community are freelancers?

It makes me wonder if working for a big corporate full-time causes design atrophy? How can I stop myself from suffering a slow and painless creative death?

Avoiding a slow and painless creative death

It’s very easy to listen to a podcast like this and get disheartened with the status quo so that’s why I’m now making myself consider what I can do to fix things given that I am currently a full-time employee. How can I have my cake and eat it too?

Some things I’m going to try include:

• Find hard problems: Really big organisation are often like many medium and small business cobbled together. This means there are always unique problems to solve – you just have to find them. I’m going to try and find these problems (especially hard ones) and try and solve them.
• Flexibility within constraints: This was a key tenant to the recent Web Brand Guidelines and templates we created for the University, but what it means to me in this context is that even though by virtue of working for a company with a strong brand, I must adhere to things like colours, logos etc, there are plenty of challenges within these constraints. Once the mandatories are taken care of, there is plenty of room to express my creativity through user interfaces, page layouts, better interactivity and more.
• Hire great people: Working with freelancers and different types of people is a great way to expose myself to new working techniques. I’ve learnt tonnes from @kolber, @tobyhede, @misscocoa and @gilesng simply because they have diverse skills and look at the world a little differently from me. Larger businesses usually have the money to be able to hire people to assist on project, or in times of peak demand, so I’m going to make the most of this fact to work with people I think I can learn from and by inspired by.
• Get uncomfortable: I’m currently trying to make a habit of venturing outside my comfort zone by attending and hosting more co-working opportunities. This will expose me to new/more people. Another component of getting uncomfortable involves making sure that I’m paid market rates for my skills and not simply accepting the rate you started earning the day you walked in the door. Times change. Rates of pay change. Skills become scarce. We need to capitalise on this as big business (and any business for that matter) has a tendency to act in its own interests – you need to continually ensure your interests are represented at the table.
• Get what you can for free: I’m going to start trying to learn more from people within my company. From my experience so far this is actually harder than learning from those outside the business, but it’s low-hanging fruit and something I’d like to do more of (perhaps it’s time to finish the Mentor Me application I’ve been building to teach myself Rails – I’ll write a post about it soon). As well as learning from those within your organisation, this extends to finding ways to use the resources your company has (space, project money, free-time) to do the first three things I’ve mentioned above. For me, this means using some of the lecture facilities around the University to host educational talks on various web technologies (so far we’ve done Javascript, Jquery, git basics, git theory and there’s a lot more that we could do).
• Chase flexibility: Being able to do the things I’ve listed above (especially working offsite), means freeing up my calendar so that at least once a fortnight (more if I can) I can go and co-work with others with different skills. Even if I have to work on the same projects, at least I will be surrounded by people solving problems for other people. Hopefully osmosis will ensue.

If this stuff doesn’t satiate my creative needs, I think I’ll look at ramping up my freelancing again. While it is tempting to moonlight to get the extra experience I crave, having done this before (and being drained by it) I think going part-time at my current job is a better option. Moonlighting is great in short stretches, but longer term I find it doesn’t leave me the time I need to relax, exercise, spend time with love ones and recharge creative batteries.

I’d love to hear from others who have faced the conundrum of remaining creative in a larger corporate environment and how they went about maintaing their creative edge.