Recently I took my daughter’s Mr. Potato Head to work. He sat in a nearby cubicle staring at a monitor for a week.

Why?

I needed to make a point.

My company has contracted with an outsourcing firm. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. I understand there are good offshore firms out there. And ours does have some good people.

Unfortunately, the one assigned to me doesn’t fit into that classification. He’s unskilled, unwilling to ask questions, and a maverick on top of everything else.

It got to the point where he was taking almost a third of my day between reiterating instructions, reviewing broken code, and analyzing assignments to see if he could handle them.

This has been going on for weeks. I have been documenting, reporting, and doing measurements, which when reported to upper management, was greeted with, “it’s a problem, and we’ll get to it.”

In frustration, I went to my project manager, and I told him that I was struggling. To which my manager, who has another project with the same sort of resources assigned, quipped that a potato in the chair would be better.

“Because zero productivity is always better than negative.”

So Mr. Potato Head came to work with me. He may not be producing any code, but he isn’t distracting me either.

Upper management has seen him, gotten the story, and is moving to make changes quicker. It’s something that all the hard numbers couldn’t get them to do.

And that’s a step in the right direction.

Photo by beeep

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This article came together as a result of serendipity. I had opened up my browser, and happened upon the article from Zen Habits, “The Illusion of Control”. Leo talks about some aspects of control, from our children, to tracking things to an obsessive level of detail, to overly planning trips.

Then I flipped over to my email, where I saw a plea from a member of a mailing list that there were too many emails coming through to him, and could everyone please only send one to the email list per day?

I smiled as I read the email, thinking how interesting it was that this man found it easier to request others to modify their behavior, rather than modifying his reaction…and deleting the email he couldn’t handle.

As humans, we want to be in control. We want to have the sense that we are not at the mercy of the whims of the universe. But we’re not.

I know as soon as life seems to get crazy, I immediately try to corral it, making lists and plans and whatnot. It gives me the feeling of being in control, but in reality, I’m not.

A 90+ year old friend of mine says that she can’t control anyone but herself, and she’s not successful at that most of the time either.

How much energy do you spend trying to do everything you can to ensure an outcome? Does it work for you?

It’s OK to make plans. Just don’t plan the outcome.

Photo by Sean MacEntee

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“With enough thrust, pigs fly just fine.”

So now that you know they can fly, what else have you thought was impossible?

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If you have followed anything on the blog in the past two weeks, you are probably aware that I made a rather sudden shift on hosting providers. I promised details, and here they are.

When I first shifted to WordPress, and bought my first domains, I went with GoDaddy. The reason was that they were cheap, and I needed cheap back then. So I signed up, bought my two domains, and launched into the world of WordPress!

Need a Map? Sorry! We Don’t Have One!

Unfortunately, they were very difficult to navigate. I couldn’t get anywhere I needed to be without at least three tabs in my browser, and I often spent time clicking myself in circles. (And I KNOW how to use the Web!)

It was one of the poorest-designed interfaces I had ever seen. In fact, when a non-profit I was involved with needed to make a hosting switch, I purposely told them not to choose GoDaddy because the person who would be managing it would have found it near impossible to navigate the site.

Support could be difficult, too. I learned early on that email support was worthless and the only way to get real help was to call. Which meant at least an hour on the phone.

The GoDaddy Girls Don’t Bother You?

I am a female survivor of engineering school, and I have a rather tough skin. I’ve had every form of sexism thrown at me in my life, and I guess it doesn’t bother me too much. I had always been bothered by GoDaddy’s use of racy ads for the Superbowl, but I know sex sells. That’s life.

I always shook my head that female pioneers would lower themselves to be “GoDaddy Girls”, but I figured that was their personal choice.

The Hacking

It was about a year ago when I realized my blog had been hacked. My site didn’t come up, and files were corrupted everywhere. GoDaddy denied knowledge of anything when I contacted them, but a search on Google showed that they had experienced wide-spread hacking. The next day I received a call from GoDaddy and was told that GoDaddy WordPress sites had been hacked.

I cleaned up the blog from backups (thank goodness for backups!) and set my security permissions as tight as they could get. For good measure I changed my password from a 12 length random string to a 23 length random string.

But then I got hacked again. And again. And a fourth time. Each time I contacted GoDaddy, and they kept telling me I wasn’t up to date on my software (I was) and on one occasion that my password was obviously guessable. (23 random characters? Really?)

At this point I started thinking maybe I needed to move hosts.

Database Woes

About three months ago, I noticed something wrong with my database. It wouldn’t allow me to log in. I knew the password and login name were right, because the site was still up. After 45 minutes on the phone, we determined that the problem was that I was using FireFox. Their database panel sometimes didn’t work right with Firefox, and I should use another browser, I was told.

WTF?

I knew it was time to move. I had found another hosting company, HostGator, through an e-course I had taken, and had great experience setting up my husband’s domain. Their online chat people were fast and friendly. I starting making plans to move when the hosting contract came up for renewal in 2012.

But then came the elephants.

Elephant Hunting In Zimbabwe

You’re probably thinking, “OK, she’s lost it. Elephants?”

Yes, elephants.

I read a story about how the GoDaddy CEO went on an elephant hunting trip in Zimbabwe and had killed an elephant. Various reasons were given, including it would keep people from starving (because elephants eat all the crops). Bob Parsons was proud of this! He videoed the mess, then tweeted it.

That was the final straw.

I love elephants. When I was in engineering school, developing my tough skin, I spent at least an afternoon a week at the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison. I loved watching Penny and Winkie the elephants.

Nowadays I support the Elephant Sanctuary, where elephants have a place to live out their lives in peace and freedom. Some of these elephants were tortured and abused, and were rescued. Others were seized by the USDA. Winkie, my friend from Madison, is there now, after the zoo decided to close the elephant exhibit at the USDA recommendation.

Shooting an elephant is not OK in my book. In fact, I think unless an animal is sick or will be eaten, there is no grounds to kill.

I knew I had to move hosts. Immediately.

I knew I would lose a bunch of money on my domains, and the hosting. But after talking it over with my husband, he agreed I needed to move immediately, regardless of the financial hit. “Right is right,” he said. “Do it.”

So I spent a week transferring, backing up, moving files, watching domains sit in limbo and finally, pointing the name servers to my new host.

All is good now, and things are back up and running.

Oh, and I checked with the HostGator people during one of the chats I had while moving files. Their CEO is a family man and doesn’t hunt.

Photo by thomascrenshaw

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am taking two weeks off from blogging. Enjoy this article from the archive! This article was originally published on 19 July 2007.

I am a great believer in doing things in concentrated bits. A few years ago, right after I found Flylady, I tried her timer method. Her mantra of “You can do anything for 15 minutes” hit a sore spot one day and I decided to prove her wrong — that cleaning the dining room would take way longer than 15 minutes, and it would definitely kill me to do it.

I was wrong. I set a timer, and managed to knock out all the cleaning tasks in the dining room with 2 minutes to spare. Since then I have been a great believer in timers and timed bursts of activity, where I focus on one thing.

I ran across The Power of 10 Minutes over at LifeDev, and I decided to come clean with my secret methodology. Glen believes in 10, I still like 15. But I also think the length of the time depends on the person. Some may work best at 20, others at 5. And there have been days when I have done 5 minute sessions because I just could not stay on track.

Here is the basis for my method: I set the timer for 15 minutes and I tell myself I will stop after 15 minutes. The catch is I have to work at the task at hand for the time, and not get distracted. When the timer goes off, I assess what I have accomplished. Usually, I will either have completed the whole of the task with time to spare, or in the case of larger things, I will have completed a lot more than I expected.

The key is using a timer, and stopping for a break when it goes off. Just looking at a clock won’t work. The timer doesn’t lie. I have timers everywhere: three or four portable beeping ones around the house (yes, there is one next to my computer, to limit surfing), one on my PC that I programmed myself, and a couple on my iPod. So I always have one with me.

If you are having trouble getting something started or think something is too big to tackle, set a timer and try out the method. I will guess you will be very pleasantly surprised with the results.

Photo by Seth Tisue

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I am taking two weeks off from blogging. Enjoy this article from the archive! This article was originally published on 20 July 2007.

This comes as a response to an article I read in Lifehacker about defragging your home. This concept appeals to me, as I am a computer geek. But let me put it into other terms for those of you not familiar with it.

As a computer disk gets full, the computer will start to write things into areas that may not be the best suited for it. When you defrag your computer, you put things back where they should be, opening up all sorts of empty space on your hard disk. If your drive is fragmented, the computer has to spend more time and energy to get the pieces back together when it needs them.

So defragging your home would be when you take all of the stuff that is where it doesn’t belong and put it away.

I’m pretty good at keeping up with the clutter, thanks to my past experience with Flylady and GTD. I put things where they belong, and everything has a place it belongs; I also police the spots where things seem to accumulate daily and put the things away.

So here I’m going to look at this from another perspective: defragging my life. How many things in my life are where they don’t belong?

I would classify some of these things as the thoughts that happen at random. The “bring toilet paper upstairs” thought in the middle of a meeting. The “you should really have the tires looked at” thought in the middle of a coding session. The “wow, the vegetable garden really needs weeding” thought on the way to put the trash out. If I let those thoughts continue, I find that they keep running around in my head. However, if I write it down in a place I know I will come back to, I find that the thought ends up in its proper place – captured in my system.

I have a tendency to start a whole lot of things, particularly books and craft projects, when there really isn’t room for them. So I end up with bits and pieces scattered. I can’t remember where I was in the new book or the old book, and the craft project never gets finished, because I have moved on to something more exciting. So to defrag this is to keep everything together, and to prevent fragmentation in the first place by doing one thing at a time. It takes a conscious effort to do this, as my craft projects are pretty large, and take a long time to do. But I can complete them, and feel really good when I do so.

Preventative action, that keeps me from getting fragmented in the first place, is being very deliberate about what I am doing at any time – and giving my full attention to that.

Photo by everdred

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I am taking two weeks off from blogging. Enjoy this article from the archive! This article was originally published on 27 July 2007.

In the article over at Lifehacker, Chris Brogan commented on how he could make a quicker reboot for life. I find this an interesting topic…and like Chris, I see this from the perspective of a computer.

But I’m going to look not only at what a reboot is, but why I may need one.

As a programmer, I find that I reboot about once a day. Since I shut my machine down every night, this generally means that I reboot when I add or change software, remove software, or things are just not performing as well as they should be.

In life, adding or changing software that requires a reboot is analogous to adding a project to my projects list. I have to sit down, rearrange the rest of my life, see if there is anything that can be dropped as a result of this project (since some of my new projects are expansions on old ones, or follow from an “investigative” type of project).

For example, I had a project where I was going paint my office. This completed, I realized I needed to do more work in there, namely getting something on the windows. So the new project became “Make window treatment for office.”

Another example is the project of deciding what to do about a broken piece of household equipment. The possible results: repair, replace, or do without. Both of the first two options will require a new project. In order to “reboot” this, I close out the old project, and add a new one with an associated next action.

In the case where things are not performing as well as they could be…bad performance on my part is usually caused by either becoming fixated on one projected (software hanging) or too much going on at once (memory overload/fragmentation). A reboot is analogous to sitting down and getting my system back in order.

Fragmentation is usually caused by me putting the things I think I should be able to accomplish at the moment on the list; experience proves that I am not a good judge of how much I can actually accomplish, and I also get paralyzed if I don’t think I’m accomplishing enough.

So how do I prevent reboots? I have to make sure that my projects are in order, that I have closed out what is done and examined any projects to come out of them. This avoids the nagging feeling that I am “missing something”. My next action list keeps me from becoming too fixated on a project, and I have to remember to check it often. And disciplining myself to not become overloaded or fragmented.

When I do have to reboot, these are the things that I do to make it go quicker:

• I make sure I am doing as few things as I can at once. Like a computer, the less my brain has to shut down in memory, the faster this is going to go.
• I have a complete list of the “threads” in my memory. I make sure I capture everything and get it into my system. This saves me the time of having to do an emergency mind sweep. I still do a mind sweep once or twice a week, but I find it’s more productive when I’m not pressured to move on.
• I try to make sure my life is defragmented as possible. This means stuff is where I can find it; my desk is orderly and neat; I know where my project list and next actions are.

I have found that if I do the things above in both my computer and my life, I have much better performance.

Photo by Patrick Hoesly

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When I chose the word “grow” as my theme for the year (see Planning for the New Year), I realized I was going to have to make myself accountable. So here is my March checkin:

February Accomplishments

• I finished the clearing spaces course
• I read four books; two were non-fiction

I did not accomplish what I set out to do, and partly that was because I didn’t keep those goals firmly in front of me. Lesson learned.

March Goals

• I will complete the Build-A-Better-Blog course (second time through).
• I will pull out the NaNoWriMo 2010 book and flesh out the plot.
• I will restart my cleaning schedule in the 13 zone format.
• I will finish the mobile blog theme that is in the works.

Photo by iChaz

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From his recent newsletter:

Since the distribution rights for my second book How To Make Your Dreams Come True have now reverted to me, I have decided to make it available free of charge on this website.

You are reminded that although it is free of charge it remains fully copyrighted and that all rights are reserved. You may distribute the file to other people provided that you make no charge and make no alterations to the file. In particular you must show the authorship and copyright information.
Any other use of the file or any parts of it requires my permission in writing.
To download the file in Word format:

How To Make Your Dreams Come True

What a great thing for him to do! Thanks Mark!

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When I chose the word “grow” as my theme for the year (see Planning for the New Year), I realized I was going to have to make myself accountable. So here is my February checkin:

January Accomplishments

• I started walking again in the mornings
• I started a course in clearing spaces in my home (I’m halfway through)
• I have knocked 14 blog maintenance items off the task list
• I have finished reading and reviewing two books for the blog
• I have made significant progress in a self-study course on self-development

This in spite of two rounds of illness and the onset of Girl Scout cookies sales.

February Goals

• I will finish the clearing spaces course
• I will complete the Build-A-Better-Blog course (second time through).
• I will finish the scarf I have been making since July
• I will pull out the NaNoWriMo 2008 book and plot out a timeline to finish and edit it.
• I will restart my cleaning schedule in the 13 zone format.

Photo by iChaz

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