I just wanted to share/remember this great blog series from Merlin Mann at 43folders.com that outlines how important it is to have a limits about who, when and how much access other people have to contact us. Here's a bite of it.
"For myself, I think it’s critical to set reasonable expectations about how, when, and where people can expect to have authentic, honest-to-God contact with us, and here’s why: if you leave every channel open to everybody and anybody, all the time and without limit, you necessarily prevent yourself from ever stepping away from the fray for long enough to focus. You’ll never make the time that it takes to produce the sort of good work that theoretically made you so appealing in the first place."
It has been getting ever clearer to me as people start to ask me for my opinion and what my team has been doing this week, that I have arrived in middle management. Hmm... So now the question become how to be a good middle manager. I read a few things like Joel Spolsky's thoughts on middle management. Which gives me some hope that yes there is a good reason to have people doing middle management. So now the issue is just how to do it well.
One of the big issues that I think anyone in management faces is trust. This is proboably doubly so if your in middle management. Because now you not only have to have people that you can trust to do good work (which thankfully it seems that I do) but you also have to be able to explain to anyone else how your method of management works and does indeed get the most out of people.
To be honest my experience of managers is that they have had a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards managing me and consequently I think I've been a fair bit less productive than I couldhave been otherwise. So, somewhere between micro-managing and "I don't care what you do just don't bug me" seems to be the happy medium that I'm looking for.
The other new aspect of this is the planning, and strategic business development side of things. This is both exciting and somewhat daunting. This is the part where we choose a direction and hope like heck that when we reach the next measuring point that it worked and we're making more money or at least making the same money. And here my true colors show. Much as I'd like to be a risk taking business adventurer, I lean towards conservativism, which I am pretty certain in the web world leads to business death.
So, here's to growing into something new. Hopefully, Ths doesn't make me really annoying.
I received this from Joanna in my email. And tonight it was cloudy. I even put it into my calendar. Guess now I'll never see Mars as big as the moon...
Two moons on 27 August
27th Aug the Whole World is waiting for...
Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting in August. It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will culminate on Aug. 27th when Mars comes within 34.65M miles of earth. Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27th 12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287.
Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again.
One of the fun/interesting things that I have had the chance to do over the past couple years is to be involved with the Canadian Centre for Ocean Gliders. It's a group that uses unmanned autonomous vehilces to take scientific measurements of water data and then use that data to see what can be learned about the ever changing nature of the ocean.
Dean, Matt and I had all have had a turn at one time or another deploying and watchingthe glider travel around Saanich Inlet and. Now that both Dean and Matt have moved away from the Victoria area, I'm the local expert. So, I've agreed to spread myself a little thinner and help deploy this very cool vehicle for another mission. We'rehoping to launch the glider int he first couple weeks of September. If you're interested I'll be setting the tracking page on the Gliders site to follow the gliders progress.