outward not upward

This is just a quick post on one way that I’ve realized I think about my commitments. This model works best with the tasks you select for yourself, but there are plenty of variations to which it also applies, including assignments from your school or place of work.

In a nutshell, the Over-Under Model states that what you want to do and what you’ve committed to affect you in different ways psychologically. Specifically, you place things that you want to do beneath (under) you, and you place what you’ve committed to (either to yourself or to someone else, tacitly or verbally) above (over) you. Read the rest of this entry »

I bill myself out as a “software developer.” This is fair, I think, since I’ve written a lot of software over the past ten years, and this combined with my college education has enabled me to develop solutions to rather large and difficult problems.

Sometimes, though, we all need to reminded of the basics. It’s been a couple of years since my basic data structures and algorithms class, and it’s now gotten to the point where the difference between a red-black tree and a leftist tree is pretty fuzzy. Fuzzy to the point that I’m not sure I ever really grokked the difference.

So, it’s time for a refresher. I don’t have a copy of Leiserson/Rivest/Cormen handy, so I’m just going to use what’s on the shelf. Here’s the rubric for each topic: Read the rest of this entry »

Productivity expert and jet-setter extraordinaire Tim Ferriss has a proposition for you. Work four hours a week, he says, and you’ll find that you can become wealthy while still having time to do all the things you want to do.

Ferriss emphasizes the idea that (i) reducing information overload and (ii) outsourcing tasks, combined with (iii) remaining-results oriented will result in a tremendously liberating situation where the practicing individual has copious free time on a weekly basis in which they are free to travel the world, or even have multiple, parallel mini-careers. This sounds excellent, and I was enraptured by the notion at first (as were, seemingly, the millions who have firmly planted FHWW on the New York Times best-sellers list). I was especially turned on by the inspiring presentation Ferriss gave with Marci Alboher for Authors@Google.

Shortly, though, I became aware of an insidious side-effect of this kind of workload reduction, which was initially veiled by my selfishness and my entrepreneurial sympathies.
Read the rest of this entry »