ryan / Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:18:20 GMT
Tags 43folders, merlinmann, outsourcing | 1 comment
Celebrated productivity stud-bunny Merlin Mann recently asked me to expand on my outsourcing post here at NRS for his readers over at the venerable 43folders.
Here’s a teaser:
In a matter of a few months, I’ve gone from being an obsessively micro-managing perfectionist entrepreneur who reserved even the most miniscule tasks for himself, to someone who gets assistance on an almost daily basis from no fewer than fourteen outside sources, from New Delhi to New York. And a wonderful thing has happened. I find myself robbed of all those enticing excuses to avoid doing what I ought to do, and I’m actually spending time on things that matter instead. I can honestly report that nothing I’ve ever tried, including GTD, has so radically transformed my ability to bring the big plans I have for my little universe actually to bear upon reality.
And the full monty.
ryan / Tue, 11 Sep 2007 12:18:00 GMT
1 comment
That is all.
ryan / Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:59:49 GMT
no comments
Nobody wants to be the only person to show up at a party. Not only does it make you look like a loser, but it undermines the whole point of going to a party in the first place. Nobody gives a damn how good the cupcakes are; if scarcely anybody shows up, your party is a failure. Equally, nobody goes to MySpace or Match for the cupcakes—or, to be more precise, the quality of the user experience. People flock there because that’s where everyone else is.
Check out the full text of my feature over at Vitamin Magazine.
ryan / Thu, 16 Aug 2007 02:55:01 GMT
Tags startrek | 2 comments
What does god need with a starship?
ryan / Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:52:56 GMT
Tags art, context, edwardhopper, philosophy, time | no comments
I went to see the Edward Hopper special exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston recently and, along with being reminded why Hopper is my favorite artist, I was reminded of the first paragraph of Robert Grudin’s Time and the Art of Living.
In a railroad car at nightfall, when the natural light outside has diminished until it is even with the artificial light inside, the passenger facing forward sees in his window two images at once: the dim landscape rushing toward him out of a pit of darkness, and the interior of the car, reflected with its more or less motionless occupants. At this hour most passengers unconsciously give allegiance to one of these two polarities of vision; and the individual momentarily aware of both may be struck by the profound, almost tragic duality between outer and inner world, between the rush of experience and the immobility of awareness. The uneasy contrast implied by this image is to my mind one of the special marks of our condition, one of the tragic divorces between our lonely humanity and the pulse of nature.
So much of Hopper’s painting seems to draw us to the haunting contrast between the inner and outer worlds. He loves twilight, and showing us private worlds glimpsed through public spaces.
Grudin’s book is also full of transcendent insights. It’s a philosophical treatise on time, productivity, and the human inability to quite get a grasp on either.
ryan / Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:07:50 GMT
Tags bullshit, corporate | 4 comments
I love the new corporate bullshit meme of no longer referring to the internet as “the internet”, but rather “the cloud.” I first noticed it in Walt Mossberg’s interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (guess which one used it) and I’ve seen it all over the place since.
This of course comes from the tradition of representing the internet (or a network in general) as a literal cloud in powerpoint and networking diagrams. It’s a sort of lazy stock-art gesture towards “a bunch of magic stuff happens here.”
What is simultaneously funny and pathetic about this, of course, is that the mentality of corporate IT is such that they begin to perceive reality as a representation of their crappy diagrams rather than the other way round.
Reality is only an ancillary concern. Apparently, it’s what’s on the damn slide that matters.
ryan / Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:42:21 GMT
Tags american, britain, independence | 3 comments
When I left for London in the fall of 2003 to take a research position at the House of Commons, the “Anglo-American relationship” was a favorite topic for commentary and adulation in America. The diplomatic discourse before the invasion of Iraq had fortified an already laudatory view among Americans of their British brethren as loyal allies in the face of international opposition. After a pre-war summit with President Bush, Tony Blair said of US-UK relations, “the key thing is that we have shared values and a shared determination to deal with the issue of weapons of mass destruction.” Since the latter of these never materialized, however, I am disposed to wonder if the former has any solid basis in reality either, or whether it isn’t just as much whimsical political thinking. Indeed, living and working through what was truly a very anti-American year in London made me question the use of “Anglo-American” as an appropriate adjective not just for “values” but for any word other than perhaps “invasion.” As Jane Walmsley, author of Brit-Think, Ameri-Think: A Transatlantic Surivial Guide, writes, “the longer I stay [in Britain,] the more aware I become that we are very different peoples grown far apart since 1776. I submit that the so-called special relationship…is now one part history and one part wishful thinking.”
Most Americans, whether through willed ignorance or circumstantial insularity, can get along just fine with a completely superficial knowledge of British society. I call it the Masterpiece Theatre Mentality: viewing Britain as basically a more polite, formal, and classy version of us, Uncle Sam with a top hat and cane. I’ve seen it many times in London: American tourists cooing reverentially whenever they hear a vaguely British accent, going on about how “sophisticated” it sounds—even when it is the British equivalent of an Arkansas drawl.
Yet the British don’t have the luxury of a cursory acquaintance with us, for American global policies and culture—from Iraq to iPods—are ineluctable. When I travel abroad I am always unsettled by the worldwide obsession with America, the fact that US politics are discussed more often on the streets of London than in the cafés of Pittsburgh. Since they know us better than we know them, I tend to trust the British assessment of us rather than our rather cloying tea-and-crumpets conception of us—and their stance is not exactly one of reciprocal admiration or fraternal embrace. To be sure, Britain today is probably the most virulently (if not statistically) anti-American nation in Europe.
In the country that is popularly supposed to hold that title, France (where I have also lived,) anti-Americanism seems most often an inward-looking critique of French culture rather than any sweeping statement about external reality. As Adam Gopnik observed that summer in The New Yorker, “What is striking…in Paris this year is the absence of anti-Americanism—of a lucid, coherent, tightly argued alternative to American unilateralism that is neither emptily rhetorical nor mere daydreaming. In fact, it is easier to find this kind of argument in Britain than in France.” Of all the self-described “anti-Americans” I have encountered abroad, the British ones have certainly been the most acrimonious.
I shall never forget George Bush’s visit to London that fall. Out the window of my office beneath Big Ben, I had a front-row view of the more than 100,000 angry protestors who marched past Parliament on their way to a huge anti-American rally in Trafalgar Square, which I observed later that evening. While most anti-Bush sentiment (which I share) must be decoupled from proper anti-Americanism (which I don’t), the many defaced US flags and the hateful slogans that I encountered that day were about more than our current president. In that year, I often found myself in conversations with Britons who proudly called themselves “anti-American,” and I have been blamed because of my nationality for everything from global warming to increasing rates of obesity in the UK. I’m not alone in this observation; the American author Eric Schlosser noted that October in The Guardian, “I can’t remember another time when having an American accent provoked as much immediate hostility from Brits….”
Britons clearly appreciate the profound political and cultural chasm between our two nations, even though most Americans are oblivious to it. That Britain and America are two nations separated by a common language is true, but not in the sense that that cliché is usually employed. Our mutual intelligibility creates a sense of commonality that is, I think, largely illusory. Let us not forget that nearly every political value and aspiration of our nation’s founding grew directly out of the Founders’ abhorrence of the English political system—a system which endures largely intact today as it was in 1776. The essentially libertarian philosophy in which the US Constitution was framed has endured in American culture, even if many Americans aren’t explicitly aware of where those values come from: whether on the Left or Right, we are suspicious of government intrusions into our lives and are (or at least used to be) loath to accept imperialist expansion abroad. By contrast, the notion of government as a shepherding, omnipotent parent remains quite acceptable to British political sensibilities. This is the cultural legacy of aristocratic rule, deference to a supposedly benevolent Big Brother. The difference in the way our two cultures understand the roles of government and social hierarchy is certainly not the only thing that divides us, but it is for me the most telling.
The British Big Brother mindset is probably most evident on the London Underground. To understand this, you must realize the Orwellian nightmare that is contemporary London life: it is quite possible for a Londoner to be on camera, watched and recorded by government and corporations, from the moment he walks out his door in the morning until the moment he returns at night. Cameras abound, on street corners and lamp posts and trees, in shops, on the subway trains, and, yes, even in some bathrooms. Some of the more discomfiting cameras are even remote controlled, following you as you walk. In the subway, this presence is unusually acute. It is not a solely passive surveillance either. I once heard an announcement in a monotone male voice reverberate for all to hear on the station-wide loud speakers: “this is for the man in the yellow shirt carrying a boy on his shoulders down the escalator. What you are doing is dangerous and you should stop. Thank you.” One hesitates to pick one’s nose. Another announcement I heard: “the beggar at the bottom of the stairs is a known drug user; do not give him money because he will only use it to buy drugs.” Now, you might argue that there were legitimate reasons for both of those very public acts of humiliation, but I suspect in America we would just leave well enough alone. A former teacher of mine used to wear a button saying “I’m not your mother,” and I think that fairly well sums up the American approach to other people’s ill-advised behavior. Not so, the British. Consider the enormous “Smoking Kills” label that almost completely covers British cigarette boxes, dwarfing our relatively small and less assertive “warnings,” or the recent proposals to institute a tax on high-fat foods to keep Britons thin, to say nothing of the exorbitant income tax rates and 17.5% sales tax which bolster all this governmental hubris.
However, the most striking differences between US and UK politics are the formal ones. The United Kingdom is still just that: a kingdom. The British monarch, head of the official state church, has far more actual power than any of her European counterparts; she can even select the Prime Minister in the absence of a clear Parliamentary majority. The Prime Minister holds Royal Prerogative powers, which are formally delegated to him by the Queen, including the power to make war without consulting anyone. (The military and cabinet swear allegiance to the Queen, not to the British people or Parliament.) Because of these powers and because discipline within parties is very strictly enforced, the leader of the Parliamentary majority (the Prime Minister) holds nearly the absolute power that the monarch once enjoyed, making Britain effectively an unchecked dictatorship between elections. Britain has no significant checks and balances, and no equivalent of our Supreme Court since there is no written constitution to be interpreted. All is done in the name of the monarch, just it has been for over a millennium, lending a wash of mystical legitimacy to political initiatives (all bills receive “Royal Assent” before becoming law.) The aristocracy endures, with hereditary Dukes, Earls, and Barons holding state-recognized titles, which divide society into fundamentally different categories. The ancient aristocratic estates own the majority of land in Britain, which is why it is difficult to own land there; it is merely leased for 99 years from the local lord.
Though I am very fond of Britain, I am completely baffled why most Americans should assume that this (frankly, rather medieval) political culture should have any “shared values” with our own modern democratic-republican (lower case “d” and “r”) political culture, which in fact more closely resembles that of France. Some have used Iraq to establish a dichotomy, with the US and UK (among others) on one side and “old Europe” (France and Germany) on the other. This is not only diplomatically counterproductive but proceeds from a false premise. We should appreciate Britain for what it is: a culturally distinct nation with a proud history. We should not admire Britain for something it is not: just a slightly more “European” version of America.
ryan / Wed, 27 Jun 2007 07:56:43 GMT
Tags apple, mac, microsoft, safari, windows | 1 comment
If Mac is only secure because of its small marketshare—which is a plausible, if unverifiable, claim—then why is it that the moment Safari was ported to Windows, it was hacked every which way?
If hackers only care about “market share,” why was a browser with 0% of the market (Safari on Windows) so readily hacked and not Safari on the Mac (with a significantly higher share at the moment)?
Can this really be because hackers have better tools to detect vulnerabilities on Windows? I doubt it. Rather, it looks to me like Windows is simply a platform so rife with holes that even Apple developers have a hard time making secure, which is really saying something.
ryan / Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:00:47 GMT
Tags gtd, outsourcing | 12 comments
My main man Merlin Mann just posted an interesting missive to the kiddies over at 43folders. Merlin seems to share my intoxication with the concept of “outsourcing your life,” which has proliferated recently thanks to Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Workweek book, probably the most practically inspiring and thought-provoking book I’ve read since Getting Things Done.
The idea is simple—labor arbitrage 101 and the theory of comparative advantage. Hire folks in the developing world to do the menial (internet- and phone-based) chores of your life so you can focus on things you do better. I’ll share below some of my personal experience putting this technique into practice with my own work, and also discuss a little bit of the politics, economics, and even emotions involved.
A case study
On a given week, no fewer than five firms in the developing world help me do the work that keeps my little companies going. (Not to mention considerable automation thanks to Amazon web services.) One of those firms (a software development consultancy) does very high-quality, sophisticated intellectual work equal to or exceeding that of American firms we’ve dealt with, but in this article I’m interested more in the little tasks that a person might not otherwise think to ask another person (or company) for help with.
Don’t mistake me for some big-spending mogul, however. My main company, Lovetastic, may technically be an investor-funded start-up based in Lower Manhattan, but we spend less than $100 a week on outsourcing. If it weren’t for this fact, our employee-free company wouldn’t be able to get nearly as much work done as we do, no matter how hard my partner and I worked.
Right now, my assistant Suresh at GetFriday is my point-man for this work. He helps me find new firms to handle work I need help with, and acts as a liaison once I’ve found them. Suresh also helps me filter through support e-mails—responding to commonly-asked questions with standard replies on my behalf, and forwarding anything to me that doesn’t fit into the 80% of most common inquiries. He does all sorts of one-off research, such as finding contact information on the net, and he even once called around Boston for me to find out which Starbucks was open latest. (I got the results in a meticulously-prepared spreadsheet.)
Suresh works in a Windows-only environment, but we’ve somehow managed to find a lingua-franca in the form of PDFs. I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap (Mac version)—which is incidentally the most amazing non-Apple consumer product I’ve ever used in my life—and I use it to very rapidly scan in documents. I can then send them to Suresh for maintenance, categorization, filing, etc. In fact, I recently scanned in a whole magazine that I wanted to archive (which took about a minute), and forwarded it to Suresh, who then sent it back to me as a searchable PDF with all the ads removed for easy reading and archiving. Incidentally, a welcome side-effect of having a remote assistant has been that I’ve been going almost entirely paperless. I keep all of my documents in PDF form, encrypted and backed-up to Amazon S3. My GTD “reference” filing system has suddenly become much easier to maintain, and much more useful on a day-to-day basis so I can shuttle documents across the Pacific with ease. I haven’t touched my labeler in weeks.
I don’t answer the office phone anymore. Voicemail gets transcribed and sent to me as an e-mail so I can respond in the most efficient way rather than getting distracted and interrupted all day.
Very soon, we’ll no longer be batch approving a lot of content on our personals site directly; we’ll be outsourcing the approval process automatically the moment someone uploads a photo, improving the user experience and making the site cheaper for our customers.
These are just a few examples.
Making good use of outsourcing requires considerable creativity: a podcasting example
One caveat is that I actually have trouble coming up with work for Suresh to do on a regular basis. An amazing amount of pointless, tedius tasks in life actually require one’s personal presence: stuff like dealing with the DMV, calling up credit card companies, etc. Other stuff simply takes longer to convey to another person (especially someone on the other side of the ocean who isn’t entirely familiar with your culture) than it takes to do it yourself.
And as I discover better technological tricks in my life, this issue only becomes more salient. When I get an iPhone, for example, I imagine that I’ll be calling Suresh less frequently to look up little tidbits of info on the internet for me while I’m out and about. (Right now, it’s actually far less painful to call someone in India and ask them to search the internet than for me than to wrestle with my Treo’s nearly unusable browser.)
But I am particularly proud of one way I’ve used outsourcing to work smarter and more effectively. We do occasional podcasts at Lovetastic, which consists of my interviewing artists and singer-songwriters who might be of interest to our customers and then releasing those as sleekly-edited radio-style interviews on the site and on iTunes. The editing process is enormously tedious and often takes me upwards of 20-30 hours to turn a two-hour interview into 30-40 minutes of talk and music. Sure, I’m a slow and completely retarded amateur when it comes to audio editing, but that’s beside the point. Now, I send the raw audio to Ashish at a transcription firm in India, who promptly sends me back a flawless transcript in text form. I then mark up that transcript by hand in red ink and scan it rapidly to PDF. I send the edits along with the raw audio to a firm in Argentina who edits it all together as a seamless podcast. The whole process costs us less than $75 and saves me vast amounts of work.
Comparative advantage
This whole outsourcing thing, especially in the case of India, has a sort of unsettling imperialist feel about it. One hesitates to be the big-shot American ordering people in the developing world to do our boring tasks. I shudder at the thought of ending up like a figure out of the British Raj—someone like Ronny Heaslop in Forster’s A Passage to India. But the mutually respectful cordiality of the actual experience, combined with my recollection of the basic facts of globalization reminds me that outsourcing is, more often than not, the opposite of exploitive.
There are 37 bajillion people (give or take) in the developing world sitting around twiddling their thumbs in relative poverty while we fat Americans sit around wasting our expensive educations filing things, replying to repetitive emails, and Googling for showtimes at the local multiplex. Meanwhile, we hoard our wealth by recycling it within our own economy and throwing it into places where we don’t have a comparative advantage. We hire brilliant well-trained college grads here in America to do menial cubicle work that they’ll end up hating because it’s a waste of their talents. We have the best educational system in the world (particularly our public universities,) which attracts the best and the brightest from the world over. Yet much of this wealth is squandered by employing people doing stuff other than where their best talents lie, simply because they happen live nearby.
Right now, our comparative advantage as a nation lies in developing new markets and innovating intellectual and cultural products. Other countries can manufacture t-shirts for the Gap better than we can, because their relative costs of living (and therefore labor and materials) are low. What they’re not so great at is designing shirts that people everywhere will want to buy. For whatever reason, that sort of thing seems to be something we Americans do well. We should focus on what we do well. The standards of living in the developing world will never increase until we start sharing the love with them and giving them some of the work that they’re better at.
This is why protectionism is damaging to global development and the fight against poverty. It’s also partially racist. If an Indian or a South Korean can do work for less money and with equal quality that an American could be doing, why should we be wasting our time and effort holding that work from those workers who are quite happy to have it? Are Americans somehow more entitled to wealth and work (and less obliged to be economically competitive) than our colleagues in India? Isn’t it wrong not to leave the data-entry and sewing to the folks who count those jobs among their best opportunities in life? Because we can afford it and have the infrastructure to support it, we should then reallocate the displaced American workers to more productive (and comparatively advantageous) jobs.
(For a thoughtful, evidence-based smack-down to all the arguments against outsourcing, read the excellent article “The Outsourcing Bogeyman” from Foreign Affairs.)
ryan / Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:24:27 GMT
Tags notrocketsurgery, rubyjudo | 1 comment
I’m very pleased to announced a little fork in this blog, which will hopefully allow each segment of our seemingly bi-modal audience (business/design folk and programmers) to get the content that they’re interested in without the extraneous stuff.
I kept catching myself hesitating to post either too technical or too bitchy articles on NotRocketSurgery for fear of turning off one or the other branch of our theoretically bifurcated audience. Or perhaps I should say, our theoretical audience.
This blog, NotRocketSurgery.com is becoming my own forum for the sort of rants and foul-mouthed innuendo you’ve come to know and love from postings like The Mile High Club: 37signals, fuck yeahs, and productivity stock-art. I look forward to being freed by this greater focus to post much more frequently here on things like design, usability, life hacks, GTD, “enterprise” antics, and all the rest. Considerable gentle derision and loving sarcasm ensue.
All the juicy Ruby tidbits, brilliant hacks, and technical screeds are heading over to RubyJudo.com, where my colleagues Jonathan Dance, Dylan Fareed, Craig Schiffbauer, and the mysterious Kit can post their technical snippets and tutorials without having their code be sullied by my invective. I’ll also be posting technical and ruby-related stuff over there myself as well.
For my comrades in indolence, here’s the link to the new feed.
Huzzah.
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