Are You a Happy Employee?
July 28th, 2006 by Dave Cheong
I used to work at a job that demanded 60+ hours a week from its employees. Maybe “demanded” is too strong a word - certainly the company seldom asked outright for us to continue working at 10pm on a Friday. However, when all your fellow team mates are still at work and have full intentions to be in the next morning, you feel pressured to doing the same yourself.
To be fair, I didn’t have to. No one was forcing me to do crazy hours. After all, my employment contract says I only needed to work 40 hours each week. However, as I learnt the hard way, these things often reared their ugly heads during annual performance reviews. If you were an employer, who would you reward? The guy who stayed till 10pm or the guy who left at 5:30pm sharp?
As it was my first job out of university, I wanted to impress and went along like everyone else. For three years I worked for this company content with the fact that every annual review I had was exemplary. I was performing well compared to my peers. I had this career thing worked out. I was on top of the world.
Wrong.
I’ve long since left that job, having burnt myself out completely. The thing that stuck with me most from my experience there was the fact that about three months after I left, people didn’t even remember my name or care about what I did or how I’d spent every weekend consistently at work for six months. I can’t blame management - after all the project has to survive the people involved in it.
Since then, I knew I would never be truly happy being an employee for another faceless company. I gave 150% for three years of my life. What did I get out of it? Recognition from my superiors? Respect from my peers? A mediocre bonus during Christmas for a job well done?
Perhaps that’s enough.
For some people, yeah, this is enough. For me, I’m just wired differently. I feel that God has given us the ultimate gift called Life. However, we only have this gift for a limited time. How long remains to be seen. He has left us with a choice to choose how we spend our time. This precious gift should not be squandered on doing things that don’t matter to us. Life is a collection of our experiences, thoughts and feelings. If our actions do not positively contribute to these things, are we not wasting our gift?
Why are we even bothering?
Do you want to spend 60+ hours a week working for someone who doesn’t know your name? Is it wise to sacrifice the best years of your young adult life enslaved to an organisation motivated solely by the bottom line and the share price?
No.
Every moment you spend at an unhappy workplace is another moment you don’t have to spend pursuing your dreams. Most people think pursuing dreams is a thing you do next year. The thing is, there is no next year. There is only now. You exist here and now. If you are unhappy with your current work situation, you owe it to yourself to do something about it.
Not next year. Not tomorrow. Right now.
There is never a better time to make a change. Ok, sure you might be better prepared next year or more financially secured. However, most of the time, the only thing holding us back, is our own fears. Nobody wants to fail. That’s true, but I’d rather not live my life knowing I didn’t try because I feared to fail. After all, our limitations are self imposed.
Ask yourself - Are you a happy employee? For some people the answer is yes. In which case, I’m truly happy for you. You are one of the relatively few people who are lucky enough to have found a vocation that is fulfilling. For the rest, if you are unhappy about your current work situation, you need to find out the reasons why and do something about it.
I’m not asking you to quit your job. I’m not asking you to throw away the four years you spent studying for it. What I’m asking is for you to look at yourself and your surroundings. Are you happy doing what you’re doing? Do you wake up each morning and look forward to doing your life’s work? Is it something you love and admire?
For me, what I want to do is transform “working for” to “working with”. As an independent software contractor, I think I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m responsible for my own career. I pick the projects to work on and the clients to work with. If I feel like it, I can take three months off between contracts.
However the reality is, I’m still committed to a 9 - 5:30pm work day, five days a week. My income is proportionately tied to how many billable hours I do. Ultimately, I’m building someone else’s dream.
What I aim to attain is to be a fully fledged Entrepreneur - building businesses that contribute real value to my customers in the industries I’m interested in and deeply passionate about. I’d like to wake up each morning, eager to check how things have gone on while I had been asleep. I’d like to spend the day, thinking about ways I can improve what I offer.
Being an Entrepreneur is not for everyone. I believe each of us has a calling, something we’re naturally pre-disposed towards. Steve Pavlina even goes so far as listing 10 reasons why you should never get a job. Life is a journey. It is about seeking this calling and fulfilling your life’s purpose. It won’t be easy. You will need to approach it one step at a time.
In conclusion, ask yourself - Are you a happy employee? If you’re not, why and what would you rather be doing? Seek your life’s purpose. Do what you have been put on the Earth to do. In the end, you will live a happier and more fulfilling life.
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Time Boxing is an Effective Getting Things Done Strategy
July 26th, 2006 by Dave Cheong
Given a task, there are essentially two ways we can approach it. Either, we can work as hard as we can until it is “done” or we can fix the amount of time we have available and do the “best” we can. The latter approach is known as “Time boxing“.
Time boxing is a very simple technique we often use in software development. It is an effective technique for tracking progress and simply getting things done. From a planning perspective, time boxing is useful, especially when things appear complex or daunting initially and we are unsure of how to begin.
From a personal management perspective, I’ve found that time boxing can greatly improve our productivity and effectiveness. Because it’s simple, anyone can do it - including you. I use it when working on open ended tasks, like writing, where neither the scope or the quality is well defined.
This article briefly discusses how we can apply time boxing to our daily lives and get things done.
What is time boxing?
Time boxing is about fixing the time we have available to work on a given task and then doing the best we can within that time frame. So instead working on something until it is “done” in one sitting, we only work on it for say 30 mins. It is either marked as done at the end of this period or we commit to another 30 mins at a later time or another day.
In software development, an agile team releases new versions of a product to the customer for testing in fixed length iterations, say weekly. The customer and the development team work together to identify the features to be included in each release based on the relative priority and complexity of each task.
What’s special about Time boxing?
There are always several things competing for our time. At any moment, each of us could have hundreds of outstanding things to do. This question immediately become important - How can we ensure we get as much done as possible?
I believe time boxing is special for four reasons. Firstly, by consciously being aware of time, it allows us to focus on doing the things that matter most. Secondly, it serves as a reality check on how much time we spend working on open ended tasks. Thirdly, because of the fixed time constraints, it can be an effective tool against procrastination. Finally, it allows us to work on things during the free gaps we have between our commitments and appointments.
Focus on doing the things that matter most
If the time available we have is limited, a rational person should immediately think about prioritising their outstanding tasks based on what’s important and urgent.
By using time boxing and ranking our outstanding tasks, we make ourselves consciously aware of how much time we have available. This allows us to focus our energies towards things that matter most. In this way, we get things that matter most done first.
There are many techniques for ranking tasks and I won’t go into them in this post. However, it’s worth mentioning “Quality Function Deployment” - which is a technique we use in software development and engineering to translate customer requirements into engineering specifications. In the simplest sense, for each feature, we multiply a number representing a customer’s perception of its importance by another number representing an engineer’s estimation of the complexity. The final result is ranked and the relative ordering gives us an indication of what we should implement given a certain time constraint.
Limiting the time spent on open ended tasks
Do you know people who are perfectionists? Those who are constantly tweaking things to make them incrementally better or just different? To a certain extend, I suffer from a perfectionist personality which is why I find working on open ended tasks difficult. I’ll use some examples relating to my writing to illustrate: Should this sentence be structured in a passive voice? Does this paragraph look ok here? Are there enough anecdotes in this article?
Because by their nature there is no distinction between done and not done, an arbitrary open ended task can take anywhere between 1 min and 3 weeks. Time boxing is particularly useful as a reality check when working on open ended tasks. By limiting the time we spend on a given task, as long as it is complete though not perfect, we can objectively decide when something is done. This frees us up to work on the next task.
Effective tool against procrastination
In my experience, people procrastinate for two reasons - firstly, when faced with a complex task they are unsure of how to start and secondly, the prospect of having to do something they’re not particularly interested in doing.
- As a tool against complex tasks: Time boxing is useful here because it allows us to work on complex tasks over several iterations or in bite sized chunks. For example, writing a good article is a complex task for me and it is rare to be able to find one block of time in which I can write an article from start to finish. For me, it is more effective to write as best as I can within a fixed period, constantly refining and repeating this process until I finish.
- As a tool against uninteresting things: Time boxing is useful here because it allows us to commit to an undesirable task for only a limited amount of time. It’s a lot easier to start working on something we don’t like if we knew we only need to work on it for the next 30 mins. For example, if you have to clean a messy house, instead of trying to get through the entire house in one go, try only doing as much as you can for 30 mins. When you have another 30 mins to spare another day and feel so inclined, you can continue.
Using free gaps between commitments
The composition of a day from person to person and day to day is different. For some of us, our calendars are completely filled with appointments and meetings. For others, our days are relatively unstructured. Irrespective of our calendars, we often have what I call “null” time. That is, gaps between commitments in which we are either waiting for something or have free brain cycles.
Examples of “null” times are: At the station minutes before the train comes. In the car on a winter morning whilst waiting for the engine to warm up. At the desk, after you have kicked off a full compile on a complex codebase.
Time boxing can be immensely useful during these “null” times. If you knew the train will come soon, the car will warm up in moments or the code will compile in a few mins, you can choose to use that time effectively and work on a relatively simple task you know can be done within that short “null” time.
In conclusion
Time boxing is an effective way for getting things done. By fixing the amount of time we spend on a given set of tasks, we can focus on doing the things that matter, give us motivation to start, prevent overruns and use our “null” times effectively. In contrast, if we worked on things until completion in one sitting, we’re less likely to start on complex tasks, more likely to overrun on open ended tasks and leaves us with less time and motivation to work on the next set of tasks.
If you are interested in finding out more about time boxing, you may find these links useful:
- Wikipedia’s entry on Time boxing
- Time boxing for top team performance
- Steve Pavlina’s perspective on Time boxing
- Four things that reduce software quality
- Managing product development
- Quality Function Deployment
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Grocery Shopping - for Smart People
July 17th, 2006 by Dave Cheong
If you’re anything like me, you’d find doing grocery shopping to be a big waste of time. Yeah, I know it’s pretty essential, but even so, I don’t have to like doing it. I find every time I go grocery shopping, I spend hours upon hours looking for things. I’d pace back and forth, going from aisle 4 to aisle 10, only to be back at aisle 4 half an hour later. It’s simply frustrating.
Last week, I thought there must be some way to optimise grocery shopping. For most people, grocery shopping is a weekly routine. If an average family spends 2-3 hours each week shopping, in a month that’s 8-12 hours. I can write two articles in that time! Or watch half a dozen episodes of StarGate. There must be a way to make things more efficient (and hopefully in the process, less tiresome).
So, let me introduce to you the “Grocery Shopping Helper“. I spent 30 mins last Saturday afternoon writing this simple one page application. It’s not fancy by any means. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles. But it does the job. My wife and I tried it out yesterday, and it saved about 40% of the time it usually takes us to get our weekly supplies.
Here’s the deal. The thing about doing grocery shopping is most people do not know where things are kept in the store. Yeah, there are those signs above very aisle, but they have two problems - either they’re not descriptive enough or you have to physically walk all the way there to read them. The other thing about doing grocery shopping for me at least, is returning home after my wife sends me on an errand only to find I had forgotten something. When you’re time starved like I am, driving all the way back to the mall isn’t exactly my idea of spending time wisely.
So how do we solve this? The simplest and most elegant solution I could think of was having a map of the store. Imagine having a map identifying where each item was. You’d only have to walk from one end to the other end of the store in one fell swoop and pick each item as you go pass!
This is exactly what the “Grocery Shopping Helper” is designed to do. Given a list of grocery items and their corresponding aisle at the supermarket, this simple tool will generate a formatted page of all the grocery items you’re ever interested in, either sorted alphabetically or by aisle.
Using it can’t be any simpler.
- Start by making a list of the items you are interested in. Not just the items for this week (like a conventional shopping list), but for ALL the items you are, might be or used to be interested in.
- Just for the very first time, go to the store and note down all the aisle numbers against every item you have on your list. Your supermarket customer service might already have a list defined, so ask them first.
- Come back to this site and enter each item into the text area below (separate the description from the aisle with a comma).
- Generate a report alphabetically by clicking the ‘Generate‘ button. Print it in landscape and stick it on your fridge for future reference. This is a convenient lookup index which you can use to find the aisle by the item description. You only need one of this.
- Click the browser’s back button. Select the “Sort by aisle” checkbox. Generate a report by aisle and print it in landscape. Unlike the previous report, you should print as many copies of this as possible. You will need one of this every time you go to the grocery store.
- At the start of each week, get a fresh aisle report and stick it on your fridge.
- Each time you run out of something, say milk, place a mark in your aisle report next to the item indicating the quantity you need. You can use the alphabetical report to look up the aisle number.
- Take each weekly aisle report when you go to the shops. Simply walk from one end to the other end of the store (ie from the first to the last aisle) and pick up the items with marks alongside as you go past them.
That’s it! Simple and elegant! Armed with your weekly aisle report, you never need to walk back and forth searching for items and you never go home forgetting anything. You can look at a sample report or go to the application and try it out for yourself. It’s completely FREE.
Grocery Shopping Helper - grocery shopping for smart people
Feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment if you find this lifehack useful. Also, if you have any suggestions for improvement, I’d love to hear them and am willing to make changes to incorporate your needs if possible.
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