Category: Culture

Unreachable Time and a Rant Against Voicemail

I’ve been at my employer for over 3 years now.1 The entire time I’ve been here my voicemail message has said the following:

“Hello, you’ve reached Chris Koerner. I’m often away from my desk and don’t respond quickly to voice mail. The best way to contact me is to send me an email at me@work.net or if it’s urgent call me on my cell at 314-555-2456. Thanks!”

So, don’t leave me a VM, try my cell or email. I’ll answer my cell from a work-prefix number when I’m at work.2 I respond to email in a few hours at most.

My wife finds it amazing that I’m able to do this. That my boss doesn’t prevent this or that I haven’t gotten in trouble yet. Here’s my secret. I never asked my boss how I should make myself accessible and spend my attention. I decided that. He trusts me. I said, for me, the best way to get my attention is via email or cell call. Voicemail sucks.

Short of that. I’m unreachable. I think that’s important. Even with all the responsibilities I have and all the various ways to get in touch with me, sometimes I will not be available. I might be busy with a big project and a deadline. I might be in a meeting.3

I’m still accessible – even faster than voicemail! – and I’m polite about it. The important thing for me is making sure that the time I have allotted to get work done is as productive as possible. I use the tools I have – email, phone, IM – in the best way possible. To me, being accessible via voicemail is the same as being accessible via fax. Ancient, cumbersome, and a pain for all parties involved.

Voicemail is slow. Like most folks I read much faster that someone can talk. If I’m familiar with a topic I can quickly read an email and respond.

Voicemail also introduces ambiguity. Did they say ‘Six five seven two” or “Six five six two”? I’d have to play back the message if I missed a number, address, etc. 4

The tools we use should make us more productive and efficient. We should delight clients and co-workers with our responsiveness. Clunky, outmoded tools like voicemail don’t help us. I encourage you to look at how you’re using things like voicemail and see if there isn’t a better, more productive and friendly way to manage your attention and time.

Leave me a voicemail comment with your own ideas.

Lumpy Links

Here’s a lump of interesting articles I’ve come across over the past few weeks.

I got to see Jeffery Veen present at WordCamp San Francisco a few weeks ago. This video really hits home regarding some of our work at Mercy.

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Moving Past Default Charts (in R) – did you know R can make pretty charts?
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The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling – to say more would spoil the story.
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Ryan Goodman talks about why culture is the important part of any analytics project.
“Driving a culture where people think visually is not about a faster way to create bar charts. After carefully walking through the “people” aspect of driving a visualization roadmap, I asked the attendees (60/40 mix of business and IT professionals) to collaborate in micro round table discussions focused on technology. First, they took turns painting a perfect picture of what the optimal technology mix would look like. Immediately after they went through the self admitting process stating their organization’s current deficiencies. Sure enough, discussions evolved from technology to “people and process” and the body language quickly changed watching from the front of the room.”
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Michael Jordan (no, not the athlete) on the delusions of big data,
“Now, if I start allowing myself to look at all of the combinations of these features—if you live in Beijing, and you ride bike to work, and you work in a certain job, and are a certain age—what’s the probability you will have a certain disease or you will like my advertisement? Now I’m getting combinations of millions of attributes, and the number of such combinations is exponential; it gets to be the size of the number of atoms in the universe.


Those are the hypotheses that I’m willing to consider. And for any particular database, I will find some combination of columns that will predict perfectly any outcome, just by chance alone. If I just look at all the people who have a heart attack and compare them to all the people that don’t have a heart attack, and I’m looking for combinations of the columns that predict heart attacks, I will find all kinds of spurious combinations of columns, because there are huge numbers of them.

So it’s like having billions of monkeys typing. One of them will write Shakespeare.”

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The UK government is working on a huge (some might even say ‘Big”) data sharing program of anonymoized health data. One of the concerns being raised? Communication of what’s being shared and how.
“Many of the concerns care.data critics cite in opposing the program, such as patients being under-informed, doctors being at risk of losing their patients’ trust, and insurance companies having access to the data“

Disqusting

A Sponsored Comment can use all types of media to get the point across, just like any other Disqus comment. But they’re not part of the discussion happening on that page. Comments to the ad are driven to a separate landing page just for that ad. This keeps the core commenting experience uninterrupted and publisher communities just as they were. That’s the best of both worlds.

So Disqus, one of the larger comment plugins used on many sites, just added sponsored comments to their product. Yuck. Not only that, but the replies to said comments – which I bet are going to be a cruel and negative cesspool – will live in their own little bubble.

How quaint. from their website, “Everything you need to build a community, turn down the noise and turn up new revenue.” You had me at community, and lost me immediately after.

I have to agree with Matt,

“I was just reading some comments the other day and thinking how it’d be great to see some sponsored brand content there instead of users, like there already was on the rest of the page. Glad there’s a solution for that on a global basis now.”

This is probably a good time to highlight other, non creepy, solutions for comments on your site. Say Jetpack or Discourse?

Tim Cook

Part of social progress is understanding that a person is not defined only by one’s sexuality, race, or gender. I’m an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic, and many other things. I hope that people will respect my desire to focus on the things I’m best suited for and the work that brings me joy.

What a guy.