Graham Chastney

Some people’s blogs are full of lists of thing – I’m not a huge fan of lists for lists sake, but thought I would make an exception. An exception for no particular reason other than I thought I would, and it’s my blog, so I get to decide.

These are the top 10 posts for the last 90 days:

1. Rich Pictures
2. Team Development: Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing
3. A Lack Of Planning On Your Part Does Not Constitute An Emergency On Mine
4. Friday is no longer the end of the working week
5. Tension Headaches: My Journey So Far
6. Let’s hear it for the New Dorks
7. The New Work-Life Balance
8. Concept of the Day: Cognitive Surplus
9. Windows Live Writer Dictionary – Hack
10. Playing a new game
11. What do I know?

For anyone listening – the one on Windows Live writer hack is no redundant and has been for a very long time.

and these are the top 20 search terms:

1. rich picture
2. rich pictures
3. rich pictures examples
4. graham chastney
5. forming storming norming performing
6. a lack of planning on your part
7. group dynamics forming storming norming
8. nice quotations
9. rich picture symbols
10. "a lack of planning on your part"
11. ssm rich pictures
12. lack of planning on your part
13. forming in team development
14. rich picture example
15. quotes about reading
16. cultural plasticity
17. "lack of planning on your part"5
18. focussing on work
19. forming storming norming performing diagrams
20. forming team development

Interesting to see that people were searching for me by name.

and this is the top 10 list of visiting countries for the first half of 2010:

1. United Kingdom
2. United States
3. Australia
4. Canada
5. Germany
6. India
7. Malaysia
8. South Africa
9. Singapore
10. Russia

and in that time this is the mix of browsers used (which has changed significantly from the previous 6 months):

I could continue but I can sense, already, that you’re not really that interested.

Although I’m not a huge fan of lists – I am quite a fan of statistics.

I took a short sabbatical from twitter and facebook over the last two weeks – no updates and only the occasional message checks.

It was an experiment in focus. What would happen if I put it to one side and focussed those cycles on something else for a while?

When I started out on this experiment I was just going to ignore the updates, but I soon realised that I needed to be a bit more proactive because the lure was too great. This was particularly true when I was sat somewhere and my itchy fingers would get going on the BlackBerry. In the end I deleted all of the clients from all of my devices, this made the break much cleaner – and easier.

While two weeks isn’t long enough to really change habits it did help me to see areas of my life where things needed to get back into focus. One particular area was my abuse of thinking time. I hadn’t realised how much I had filled up all of the pondering time with stuff – checking twitter, reading facebook, etc..

You might have noticed that I’ve written more on this blog in the last two weeks than I have for a good while. It’s not the writing that takes the time when blogging, it’s the pondering. No pondering time meant no writing time. Creating pondering time resulted in a creation of the writing time.

My last two weeks have felt a bit like going on a nice long walk – time to think, and cogitate.

It also felt a bit like going through a form of detox.

I will be back, but I’m not sure in what form, and I may well leave again.

I’ve witnessed the entropy of many a fine concept in my time.

For those of you who have forgotten your schoolboy physics a quick reminder on what entropy is – and there are a lot of fine definitions, but I want to focus on a simple illustration. Entropy is what happen to your kettle after you have turned it off – it cools down until it is at room temperature. All of the heat dissipates until the temperature of the kettle is no different to everything else around it – well almost.

Within the IT arena we come up with all sorts of good ideas, but I’ve seen many of these ideas go through the same entropy cycle.

• The cycle starts with an idea.
• The idea warms up things around it as people subscribe to the idea and see it’s relevance.
• The idea gets developed into a concept and a way of thinking beyond the first idea.
• Thought leaders start to understand how the concept could be applied within their context – whether that’s a business, an organisation, or from a personal viewpoint. These thought leaders make the best use of the concept and it makes a real difference to their context.

At this point the system is still being heated up – the concept is still cooking, but entropy is about to kick in.

• The concept starts to enter the mainstream.
• Consultants start to see the concept as a way of generating more work by helping organisations to apply the concept to their environment.
• Product companies see a whole new revenue stream from delivering products targeted at delivering the concept.
• Because it is something tangible the products become synonymous with the concept in the minds of those that use the product.
• The products enter the mainstream and become the concept and consulting review from the concept starts to decline.
• At this point the consultants start to look for the next concept to jump onto leaving the old concept to the product providers.
• The concept entropy is complete.

SOA is the last years concept, Cloud is this years. SOA has just finished the cycle, Cloud is on it’s way through the products phase.

I said at the beginning that a kettle cools down until it is just like everything else around it – well almost – and it’s that well almost that is important. The extra heat that the concept has generated doesn’t die – it’s just been dissipated throughout the other systems. The products that get delivered to enable a concept still live on making a difference to the way that organisations work. The products aren’t delivering the concept, but the residue of the concept that lives in the products is making a difference to systems around them.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post describing how Friday was no longer the end of the working week.

Well it’s also true to say that 5:30 (or 6:00 or 6:30) is no longer the end of the working day.

For most people, myself included, the end of the working day is not marked by the point at which you leave an office or walk away from a screen.

However much we’d like to be able to put our life into little boxes, we don’t work that way. I can’t make myself only think about work things at work anymore than I can make my brain only think about leisure things when I’m not working. I try to minimise it by making notes, or adding things to lists, so that I can focus on the area that I need to be focussing at a given time, but I can’t completely compartmentalise.

I don’t have a big switch in my head that turns it from work mode to home mode “Engage work mode” “Work mode engaged”.

Keeping a work-life balance cannot be about hours, it has to be about focus and attention. When I’m “working” I’m focussing on my work, when I’m not I’m trying to focus on something else. Focussing on something else, of course, requires me to have something else to focus on – that’s the lesson of cognitive surplus.

The level of focus is now the way that I measure my work-life balance. Too much focus on work and it’s a problem. It’s not the volume of hours, it’s the level of focus and attention. I can cope with my mind reminding me of something I was supposed to do at work, or even of fashioning a good idea in my leisure time, but I’m unlikely to let myself get dragged deep into research on  the thing I’ve thought about.

Just this weekend I thought about a good way of visualising a problem I was trying to get my head around. I took out a note pad and pen scribbled it down in a few minutes and then forgot about it until today. I could have taken the idea and built it into a fully fledged resolution to the issue, but I wasn’t going to let my weekend be dominated by it.

Like many companies my employer requires me to book my time to particular activities. Fortunately I only have to book my time on a day-by-day basis, I don’t have to account for each bit of each day. If I did it would like quite odd, and very random with 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there. That’s the nature of my job. If there were a good way of measuring focus it would be a better way of measuring my contribution.

Personally I don’t measure the hours as part of my work-life balance – I measure the attention. Too much attention on work and I take steps to make sure that I have other attentions outside of work.

Being a bit of an information addict, I need to recognise that focus requires me to remove the distractions. You’ll have noticed, if you were watching, that my twitter activities have dropped off significantly (almost to nothing) over the last week. They had become a distraction and needed tackling, my contribution may increase, but for now I’m keeping away.

Once upon a time man roamed the earth looking for food in those days the ability to find food was power.

Then we learned how to cultivate crops and farm animals. Land became power.

As the land became used up we needed to protect our land so weapons became power.

Then the industrial revolution happened making facilities and factories power.

Then we saw the dawn of the Information Age and facilities became less important because we didn’t need them to process information. Information became power.

Then an interesting thing happened – information became FREE. If information is free it can’t be power.

All along people were connecting with people, making deals, giving the inside track, offering advice, ignoring organisational structures, giving and receiving favours, dining together. People were making relationships.

Then along came the start of something new, it got fancy new names like “social media”,“social networking” and even “business networking”, but really it was just another way of making relationships.

It’s those relationships that make things happen. Relationship is power.