me.andering – Willem van den Ende

I’m back from holiday and looking to get my swing back with writing.

perfect stranger by daniel sandoval

Before the holiday I wanted to write a post on agile software development and risk management, but it seems the dog ate my fieldstones for that, so I’ll write about the risk of not writing instead.

I liked Johanna Rothman’s advice in The Gift of Time

The best way to prevent writers block is to write

For me it seems writing alone is not enough, it is publishing that gives me focus to go for it. A large collection of notes seems to hinder publishing, because it means I have to chose which of the notes to work into a post, which might mean procrastination. Call it publishers’ block instead of writers’ block if you want, but the end result is the same – less interesting things published than possible. I get around to posting event announcements and reports of those events, because there is some time pressure: announcements after the fact don’t make sense, and reports are more interesting for readers during or right after the event.

Even the draft for this post has been laying around since before my holiday and it contained this advice by Mike Cottmeyer :

It took weeks to write a post because I wanted everything to be perfect… I couldn’t let anything go. The guy I was working for at the time gave me the best advice ever… he told me to get over it. That’s easier said that done… but you know what… that is just what I did. I got over it and started writing.

So I’m taking that piece of advice right now, and may take the next one:

Try to limit your writing to two hours. [...]The idea is that you want to set limits and create a little pressure to perform.

I know from my coaching practice that setting defined timeboxes helps, doing it regularly: even better. How that works and to what I’m applying it right now, I’ll write now publish about it later

Johannes Link is starting something that I would like to support and promote:

a “ development project for bored consultants”

contact Johannes if you’d like to spend (at least) one day per month in a project with other agile consultants and you are willing to give this project priority on that day.

(more…)

Chris Matts is drafting comic strips on real options and financial options in the new decision coach blog he and Olav Maassen started yesterday.

I particularly liked the draft on Financial Options, it explains a number of not so intuitive financial instruments and techniques (e.g. naked short selling and futures) in such a way that I find them easy to understand, and possibly explain them to others. Not a bad thing to have in turbulent financial times. Chris’s goal is to make them  understandable by ‘basically everybody’ – I encourage you to go and read it, and give him some feedback on bits you don’t understand.

La vida robot How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship. inspired me. It shows how college kids built an underwater robot with passion, ingenuity, the courage to ask for help and an 800 dollar budget.

What Juergen Ahting writes here is connected:

So the next time a manager tells us e.g. “Yes we should do that, but we haven’t got the right people / enough resources / … to succeed.” we should test him by asking “And what are you going to do about that?”.

In my experience, with a big budget it is hard to get things done. The team is overstaffed, and the incentive to set priorities is low. When I hear someone complaing about lack of budget, I am happy – I see an opportunity to do what matters most.

I’m working with Nynke Fokma on some budgetless websites right now. It’s fun, useful and goes way faster than a fully funded CMS project I was on. We are working from passion instead of a budget.

So, next time a manager tells us “This project is fully funded”, we could test them by asking: “What would you do if you had one tenth of the budget?”