If you haven’t heard of it, Rework is a treatise on how workplaces can be structured in the 21st century to optimise profits and employee satisfaction. It’s speaks specifically from the perspective of a small software company, but many of the ideas are generalisable to other workplaces.

I took some notes this time round on the points that really resonated with me. Reproduced here for your reading pleasure:

Learn from success; build on what works.
A lot of notable “Internet-famous” writers talk about using failures as learning experiences. This sounds great in theory, but in practice what is much better is to learn by doing what works. Instead of aiming for failure, aim for small, steady victories building towards bigger successes.

Find out what works and then double down your efforts on those things.

All “Plans” are really “Guesses”
Traditionally, planning and estimation are hideously inaccurate. Instead of trying to make your planning perfect, instead you should recognise planning for what it really is: guessing. Instead of a “business plan,” have a “business guess.”

Guesses should be organic. They grow and change as your current situation and knowledge do. Guesses provide a rough guide as to how you can move forwards – they aren’t set in stone.

Be a Starter
Don’t be an entrepreneur. Be a starter. Focus on building things that you believe in.

It’s what you DO that matters
What you plan, say or think doesn’t matter. It’s what you do that has a visible effect on the world.

Decide WHY
Think about why you’re doing what you’re doing – whether it’s an art project, a start-up or writing a book. Once you know the reasons, decision-making on a daily basis becomes trivial. Make all decisions inline with your “reasons why.”

Build a Business, not a Start-up
Focus on delivering value in exchange for money. The word start up is charged with a lot of connotations that have absolutely nothing to do with building a business. Some of these connotations (the phrases “venture capital” and “exit strategy” come to mind) can actually be toxic to the development and growth of a business, especially in the early days.

Cut out the “good” to make it “great”
Do few things, but do them well. Cut out the stuff that’s just “OK” to highlight the remainder, which must be exceptional.

Ignore the details
At least when you’re starting a project, you don’t need to know all the details. Work out the “broad strokes” and then drill down to the details later when you need to – but not before.

Decisions = Progress
Make decisions quickly. Procrastinating by putting off decisions or waiting until you have “more information” is deadly for small businesses. Make decisions quickly and cheaply, and then change them later if necessary.

Launch!
Get your product (book, software, painting, song) out there. It doesn’t exist until it’s out there in the world, and your first version is always going to suck. The quicker you can get it into the marketplace, the quicker you can get feedback and work on version 2.

And besides, real creators ship.

Avoid layers of abstraction
Avoid reports at all costs. Lots of numbers and undue verbosity are the enemy – aim for simplicity. Choose diagrams over statistics, prototypes over requirements and so-forth.

Aim for Quick Wins
Iterate, iterate, iterate. Aim for small projects that can be delivered quickly. If you must have a big deliverable, break it down into shippable units. Iterating quickly leads to quick wins that feed motivation. If you’ve been working for 2 weeks with nothing to show for it, it’s unlikely you’re going to be excited about the next 2 weeks.

Don’t be afraid to quit
Don’t be a victim to the sunk costs fallacy. If you estimate something will take you 2 hours, and 4 hours later you’re only halfway through, maybe you just need to let it go (or get some perspective from another person).

Always “park” new ideas
When ever a big idea for a project for feature hits you, don’t jump straight into implementing it. Instead, park it for a few days. Revisit it, and if it still makes sense, then it’s time to think about really doing it.

Appeasement is dangerous
In a small business you need to be able to be honest. If you think an idea is shit, you need to have the kind of work environment where airing that is acceptable.

Apologise for real
If you mess up, be honest about it. Don’t use the typical line, “I’m sorry if you were disappointed…”

If you’re sorry, say it! Don’t weaken your apology by littering it with conditionals. And don’t leave it there – take full responsibility for correcting the problem.

Culture is not something you create
Company culture is the byproduct of consistent behaviour. Culture grows by itself based on the values you encourage. You can’t artificially create a culture by

It’s not a problem until it’s a real problem
Don’t invent problems to solve. There are plenty of real ones out there for you to solve – especially if you’re running a small business.

Forget rules – communicate
Ignore conventions of formality when writing emails or using other mediums to communicate with others (colleagues, customers, coworkers). Instead, focus on getting your message across and being authentic.

Inspiration is fleeting
Being inspired to build something gives you superhuman powers. You can easily achieve in days what would ordinarily take you weeks. But inspiration is fleeting – it comes and goes without regard for what you want or need.

So with that said, take advantage of inspiration when it strikes. Drop every thing and create.

The post Rework – Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson appeared first on Corey McMahon.

• By giving anyone with a computer access to the entirety of human knowledge.
• Creating a meritocracy; anyone can publish their writing, music or art and have it thrive or fail based on how well received it is by the “unwashed masses.” The gate-keepers (record company executives, magazine editors and such forth) are irrelevant in this context.

An interesting emergent phenomena is that these two factors are often at odds with one-another. Creating things that don’t suck requires competency, and competency can be achieved through study and research. But the amount of information available for study is practically limitless, and the creation of a meritocracy can (ironically) actually raise the bar when the playing field is inhabited by millions of participants.

Regardless, the people thriving in this ecosystem are the ones creating value, building a presence and engaging with like-minded Internet users. As the old adage goes: “you gotta be in it to win it,” or rephrased for this context: “publishing content is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for #winning on the Internet.”

A useful way of thinking about it is by considering whether you’re a producer or a consumer. Do you spend more time consuming on the Internet (reading and researching) or producing (writing, publishing and commenting)?

Personally I tend to be a consumer. My analytical and results-driven brain loves exploring causal links and building a more finely textured understanding of the world through countless hours of research. There is a place for consumption, as long as you’re aware of a few things:

• Reading for the sake of learning is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Researching and planning is a great way to start the learning process but can only take you so far – and you reach the limits of this kind of learning surprisingly quickly without reinforcement through practical application.
• It’s incredibly easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re being productive by reading when quite often you’re just reading and not actually extracting any value from the activity.
• No one ever achieved anything solely by researching and thinking. If your goal is to do great stuff (start a business, build meaningful relationships or create art) you need to step away from the RSS reader, Wikipedia and social networks and actually make stuff.

Producing, on the other hand, is beneficial on two fronts. Firstly, you receive the explicit benefit of having “built” something – especially if that something resonates with a broader audience, bringing you fame, riches and glory. At the same time, building things is one of the best ways of learning. Think about it this way: it might be difficult to do great work without spending time researching and learning, but it’s absolutely impossible to do it without spending any time producing.

With this in mind, it makes sense to aim to spend much more of your time producing than consuming. If you tend towards consuming, it isn’t a problem as long as you’re aware of it and actively take steps to manage it. The following steps have helped me personally:

• Cull your “inputs” mercilessly. If you aren’t receiving value from a source, stop listening to it. This includes social media, blogs and websites.
• Limit your time on social media. Do you really need to know what that guy from college you haven’t seen in 5 years had for lunch? Social media is junk food for the brain – treat it as such.
• Decide which projects are important to you. This is the most important (and maybe most difficult) one on the list.
• Make time for those projects. Add it to your calendar and then don’t skip it.
• Plan. It’s easy to forget about this one, but you’ll regret it if you do. Remember what they told you in high school: if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

The post Consumer or a Producer? appeared first on Corey McMahon.

The concept of deferred life which is the notion of putting off today what you really want to do, because you believe that what you need to do today is what’s expected of you.

It is not the notion of “not paying your dues” or not working hard to build a foundation for success, those are two different ideas.

It’s important to understand that what’s deferred is your sense of passion, what’s deferred is your sense of enthusiasm – the integration of what you believe and what you care about.

I believe it is a deferred life plan to go off and sell a product you don’t believe in, or to study an area that is of no interest to you because you believe that it is somehow going to prepare you for an opportunity yet to be determined.

I think it is not the deferred life plan to work very very hard to get experience in an area that you care about, or to work your way up through a business where there is a product or principle or service that you truly believe in.

So working hard is not inconsistent with deferred life plan, paying dues is not inconsistent with the deferred life plan, but simply failing to do what you believe in is the deferred life plan.

Source: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1791

The post The Deferred Life Plan appeared first on Corey McMahon.

If we used all the available information we’d never make be able to make any decision, we’d spend all our time considering the options. This is true more than ever in the always-connected 21st century where we have immediate and almost inescapable access to the sum of all of humanity’s knowledge, and are constantly bombarded with information neither solicited nor filtered.

The aim of a heuristic is to produce the best outcome “on average,” which means if you take the average of all the outcomes over a long period of time (say an entire life), the heuristic will provide better than chance results. Sometimes heuristics cash-out like this, sometimes they don’t.

A large amount of the ineffectiveness and problems in people’s lives, I think, occur by selecting heuristics that don’t cash-out in this way. One example of a bad (but common) heuristic, is: “if I fail once at something, it’s best not to try again because I’ll probably get the same outcome.”

One heuristic I’ve been playing with lately is pushing forward and making in the face of uncertainty or doubt. More articulately: “if you don’t know what to do in some area of your life, just push forward and create.” This has interesting applications in many areas of life for me at the moment: programming, writing, playing music, business…

So far it seems to “cash-out.” Even in situations that seem hopeless – if you force yourself to make something, it gives you a tangible asset that you can hold up and say: “well, at least I have this to show for it.” Even if it sucks, it seems to leave you in a better situation than before you created it.

Another benefit is that it increases your chance of stumbling on something that doesn’t suck, or that creates opportunities. I believe the only way to succeed at anything is to play the odds. Do something over and over again and you’ll get good at it. Do something enough times and at a high-enough degree of quality, and eventually you’ll get noticed for it.

I don’t know much, especially when it comes to life advice, but I can offer this at least. Go out and make. You’ll feel better for it, and you never know where it might end up taking you.

The post When in doubt, make appeared first on Corey McMahon.

Deciding is hard, precisely because there are no perfect decisions.

But this didn’t sound right. I didn’t want to jump straight into the primary thesis of the post. I needed something to lead in with, so I changed it to this:

Decision making is an emotionally draining process…

Again, no dice. Too obvious, I felt bored just typing it. I ran through 3 or 4 other variations then realised what was missing. I needed an anecdote to lead in with. A couple of ideas came to mind, but nothing seemed to fit the situation well enough. Eventually, I just started typing:

I’ve been sitting here for the past 15 minutes writing and re-writing the opening sentence…

It seemed fitting, considering the subject of the post.

Why is decision making so hard for us? The reason is that deciding inherently involves removing all other possibilities. The etymology of the word, after all, is from the Latin “to cut off”:

Decide

“to settle a dispute,” from old-French decider, from Latin decidere “to decide, determine,” literally “to cut off“

As the result of social conditioning and our evolutionary psychology, our minds are wired to look for dichotomies in the world. We understand and process the world in terms of the “black and white”: good and bad, right and wrong, us and them, etc.

But the world isn’t like this. The world is inherently constructed of the in-betweens, the shades of gray, the non-binary probabilities.

When we make decisions we want to be “right,” whatever that means in the context of the current situation. But therein lies the problem: most decisions are made on partial information. Especially when it comes to the big decisions such as those to do with work, relationships and life, there is no guarantee that one decision will be right.

Another problem is that the outside world expects us to be consistent. Those who frequently change their minds or express uncertainty in the face of their decision making are seen as weak, lacking confidence or not having leadership capability.

So frequently we “un-decide.” Un-deciding isn’t just not making a decision: it’s not making a decision but acting like we have. Un-deciding is when instead of drawing a line in the sand and taking action, we go and ask our boss “if it’s alright.” Instead of being decisive and taking responsibility for the outcome, we defer responsibility to a higher power.

We do this because deciding is hard. Deciding involves disappointing people who don’t agree with us. It means putting in hard work with no guarantee of a pay-day. It means maybe turning out to be wrong.

But not deciding is worse. When we put off making decisions, we live half-heartedly and without conviction. We convince other people and (worse yet) sometimes ourselves that we’re being productive and working towards goals when, in reality, we’re not doing anything.

Deciding means taking responsibility and having the courage to confront being wrong, and it’s the only way to move yourself, your organisation and the human race forwards.

Can you decide?

The post Un-deciding appeared first on Corey McMahon.

His main point is that our self-correcting mental “alarms” don’t go off when we invest money poorly, because we’re not spending the money in a self-indulgent way. Because investing doesn’t provide an instant reward in the way, for example, buying a Ferrari might, we somehow manage to convince ourselves that we’re doing the right thing, even if the investment is a bad one. It’s the twisted logic of: “it hurts so it must be good for us.”

The same could be said for how we choose to spend our time. Check out this quote from him below:

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly…

… But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

This kind of thinking is a false heuristic. It’s a mental shortcut that makes it easier for us to form an opinion, but simplifies reality in the process. Correctly formed heuristics are incredibly important: they enable us to make complex decisions quickly while achieving (on average) the best possible outcome.

On the other hand, heuristics that lead to net-negative outcomes on average can be said to be “false,” and should be avoided at all costs. While both forms of heuristics simplify reality, the core difference between them is in the details they omit in this simplification. True heuristics simplify away the inconsequential; false heuristics simplify away the essential.

The dangerous thing about this particular example (like the bad investment analogue) is that we expend resources (time, money) and also experience a negative outcome (feeling overworked, being poorer). If we’d chosen better tasks / investments to spend our time / money on, we’d still spend the same amount of resources but would experience a positive outcome. We’re still “walking the same distance,” but the path we choose will lead us either to riches or ruins.

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html

The post A False Heuristic: It’s not fun, so it must be work appeared first on Corey McMahon.

There is an incomprehensibly large number of different possible paths that we could take. Jobs that we could go for, people that we could meet, cities that we could visit or live in… It can be completely overwhelming trying to pick between them.

From what I can tell from my short time on this planet, it seems like there are three criteria that we should use when making long-term lifestyle choices.

Interest

Some things are just unnaturally interesting to us. We might pick up an instrument one day and just become totally enthralled with it, without having any experience or knowledge about it. Or we might pick a book off the shelf while browsing the library and end up spending an hour reading about a topic we’ve never encountered. Interest is a signal that something resonates with our personality.

Bliss

AKA pleasure. A lot of the time, if doing something makes you “happy,” there is some deeper reason. This isn’t true all of the time, of course – taking drugs is an excellent antithesis to this point. But think about donating to or working for charity – the majority of people who take part in charitable activities say they feel happy afterwards. Bliss implies that we’re doing something aligned with our world view.

Intuition

Sometimes something just feels right. I don’t believe in the supernatural, so I don’t think intuition is in any way related to “infinite intelligence” or “god” as many imply. Instead it seems that the brain is responsible for these “gut feelings,” which occur as the result of the rapid synthesis of disparate pieces information by subconscious thought processes.

There is an important addendum to this philosophy: reaching out for these things in the long-term might mean doing things in the short-term that contradict them. Want to become a doctor? You’re probably going to have to put up with years of boring lectures. The same holds for becoming a musician and having to perform tens of thousands of hours of practice. The important thing is to keep coming back to these criteria and making sure they still hold overall, despite short-term boredom, unhappiness or discomfort.

The post On Choosing appeared first on Corey McMahon.

That is, we’re getting better at doing more with less, but not coming up with new ways to apply the labour that’s freed up as a result – at least not at the same rate that we’re increasing our efficiency. This is a problem; we’re getting rid of jobs but not creating new ones at the same rate.

So the question is: do we need to re-evaluate our attitudes towards jobs and employment? If we’re decreasing the total number of man-hours required in the workplace, why are we simply firing people? Wouldn’t it make more sense to increase hourly-rates and employ more people for less hours?

In the words of the author:

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff – it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

The post Are Jobs a thing of the Past? appeared first on Corey McMahon.