December 12, 2007
If you tend to perform tasks you’ve never performed before, what does this mean for education? Does your school teach you to solve problems, prioritize tasks, and prepare you for non-assembly-line jobs?
“Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep?” (Seth Godin in Sheepwalking)
Maybe teachers should ask harder questions — questions they’ve never answered — and allow students to use “real life” tools.
Here’s what just about every exam ought to be: “Use Firefox to find the information you need to answer this question:” And as the internet gets smarter, the questions are going to have to get harder. (Seth Godin in The Wikipedia Gap)
In the past, you had to memorize knowledge because there was a cost to finding it. Now, what can’t you find in 30 seconds or less? We live an open-book-test life that requires a completely different skill set. (Mark Cuban in Time magazine)
I’ve called this intellectual self-sufficiency, the ability to search out answers for yourself.
How about these test questions? (Internet and cell phone allowed.)
- What can you buy with 1 yen, in Japan?
- Find a picture of Rio de Janeiro taken today.
- Who is the most famous author of all time? Defend your answer.
- Your friend is visiting downtown Boston and calls you for help. Help her get to D.C. You’re in Provo, Utah.
The answers don’t really matter, but the process does.
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December 11, 2007
Golf provides another metaphor for getting things done. Take #2 on “crankable widgets”.
Growing up in Las Vegas, our favorite place to hit golf balls was Desert Pines. It was 30 minutes away, but it boasted a double decker driving range and automatic tees. After each hit, the tee dropped into the floor and re-emerged with a new ball. You could hit ball after ball without the pesky work of bending down to tee them. You could keep your stance and stay in the zone.
Imagine “teeing up” your tasks. Thoroughly prepare each task so the actual work of doing it is a simple, fluid stroke. Poorly prepared tasks require you to lean down. Well-prepared tasks are ripe for the hitting.
Bad: “Do taxes”
Good: “Find W2 forms and receipts in folder. Call accountant to setup appointment.”
Bad: “Christmas shopping”
Good: “Spend 10 minutes with pen and paper brainstorming what David might like for Christmas. Ask Mom for suggestions. Wait a few days to think about it. Order it online.”
Can you see how using concrete words makes each task easier to grasp? These changes may seem obvious to you, and perhaps you won’t need this much description. Be as descriptive as you personally need. But you’ll be surprised how fluidly you’ll move from task to task if you’ve taken the time to describe each task specifically and concretely.
December 10, 2007
The concept of transforming my tasks into “crankable widgets” helps me Get Things Done.
Imagine what it’s like to work in a factory: You are responsible for your part of the assembly line. The work may not be easy, but you know how to do it. You do it over and over. You are cranking out widgets.
Now think about your real job. It may not be like the factory at all. You create/troubleshoot/analyze things you’ve never created/troubleshooted/analyzed before. Experience helps — Phil Windley calls it “tacit knowledge” — but each particular task may be slightly new to you. Before “cranking” out each task, you must figure out exactly how to do it. Thinking must precede the doing. That’s why you’re called a knowledge worker.
If you find yourself procrastinating a task, it may be that you don’t know (exactly) how to do it. Your task needs more brain time. You must transform your task into a “crankable widget” — something you know exactly how to do.
Answering questions like these can help:
- How do I do this task?
- What part of this task is new to me?
- If I were to watch a movie of myself doing this task, what would I see?
- If I were to delegate this task to someone else, how would I describe it?
Sometimes a dreaded, procrastinated task becomes easy and even fulfilling after I’ve taken time to think about it.
(Thanks to David Allen and Merlin Mann for teaching me this concept.)
December 7, 2007
I received a phone call that impressed me. It was like this:
“Richard, I’m afraid I can’t help with the project like we had planned. Some things have come up, and I no longer have the time. I just wanted to let you know. If I can help in the future, I’ll call you again.”
Flakiness is so common, but here is a guy who didn’t flake out. He communicated “no” just as clearly as he had communicated “yes”. I no longer had to wonder.
“No” isn’t mean or rude. If you can’t realistically commit, “no” is courteous.
“No” is a way of prioritizing. If you say “yes” to everything, you haven’t prioritized.
As someone who tends to say yes and overcommit, I’m impressed by this example of saying no.
December 6, 2007
As amazing as the Internet is for commerce, communication, and education, it might have been better. Imagine opening your email and not finding any spam. Imagine your children or your little brother not happening into any pornography.
Pete Ashdown spoke at the Utah Open Source Conference earlier this year. He touted the virtues of the Internet for open communication and open government. He said the Internet is the “only working anarchy” and we “shouldn’t change it.”
At the same conference, Phil Windley quoted Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet, as saying he would have liked it different. “Vint wishes that the original design of the Internet had required that each endpoint…be able to authenticate [itself]….”
Vint is saying every computer on the Internet should identify itself. Anonymity allows bad actors to go unregulated. If authentication and identity were built-in, perhaps we might reduce Internet maladies like spam, phishing, and predatory porn.
Pete, Phil, and Vint are smart people. But they seem to disagree about whether the Internet needs change.
The H2M and CP80 proposals imply that something is broken about the current Internet. If so, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine changing it. People built the Internet and people can change the Internet. It’s supposed to serve us, not the other way around.
I tend to agree that we can do a better job of protecting children from pornography. I’m not sure what the solution is. Perhaps it’s H2M or CP80, or maybe something else. But if we believe the Internet is broken and can be better, we have every right to fix it. To quote Bill Cosby’s father:
You know, I brought you in this world, and I can take you out. And it don’t make no difference to me, I’ll make another one look just like you. (Wikiquote.org)
