One paragraph describes something very cool, something that I’ve not witnessed in any companies I’ve worked for [1]:

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

Running websites with a global audience can mean that you’re effectively on call 24/7/365 which can be damaging to your health. The only way to get any sort of peace of mind is to make your systems robust by assuming and actually testing the worst case scenario.

Unfortunately this is at direct odds with producing new systems, and it can be hard to persuade your partners/bosses that it’s worth postponing the development of a new feature to revisit your infrastructure design. They may want you to pump out new features so that you can stay ahead of the competition, but in the end it may be your infrastructure that helps your maintain your competitive advantage. After all, if you get popular then those new features won’t matter if your infrastructure can’t handle the traffic, or you lose your users’ data.

Your competitive edge will come from the hard problems you have solved. Reliability, robustness and scalability are likely to be harder problems than most incremental new features you might want to implement, so I’d say focus on that infrastructure and make sure it’s solid; that is the way to get ahead and stay there.

[1] http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-using-aws.html

Recently I’ve had no problem working out what I need to work on as there’s usually something that sticks out as the thing I want to do least. Often this is the one that will offer the most value, but there’s something putting me off.

Other times it will be as Paul suggests, the idea that keep surfacing when you allow yourself a moment’s contemplation (like in the shower).

Another signal I listen to though is when I find myself hankering after biscuits and coffee. When that happens I have to ask myself, do I really want these things or am I just tired? If I’m tired I’ll sleep; if I’m not tired then perhaps I’m bored. This signal is a wake up call to look at what I’m doing and ask myself whether I’m using my time well or not. Nine times out of ten the best thing for me is just to take a break, and return to the work later when I have more enthusiasm for it.

While it feels bad to stop working I’ve found that when I’ve pushed through these barriers I’ve not achieved much given the amount of time spent. Better to take a break or do something else and return later when true focus is possible.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html

The key here is that if you ask for something and actually get it, it doesn’t count. You need to ask for so much that you’re rejected. The fact that asking for a ‘hello’ is potentially too much says a lot about our society…

If it gets to October 2011 and I still haven’t tried this, someone please nudge me!

http://rejectiontherapy.com/rules/

A number of things may then happen. They might get angry, retorting, “of course I’m fine!”, or they might tell you what’s really bothering them, thus sidestepping the complaining.

Probably the last thing you want to do is acknowledge or worse respond to the complaining. This person came to you because they thought you’d either patiently listen or join in; they’ve already decided they’re in the right and a head-on approach is likely to meet with stiff resistance.

So rather than get into an argument, you assume that there’s clearly something else more serious bothering them and take that angle, refusing to even acknowledge whatever petty issues they were moaning about before.

If you’re the dramatic type you could try saying nothing and giving them a hug in front of everybody. If anything it will ensure they don’t pick you next time they’re itching to have a good moan!

In the introduction she talks about finding the time to draw, reminding us that our inner voice is expert at finding something to tell us so we can feel ok about not doing something, be it going running or, in this case, drawing.

She then reminds us of a trick we’re all familiar with which she freely admits is ‘stupid’: Faced with the task of drawing your self portrait (exercise #1) you might feel overwhelmed and never start. Tell yourself you’ll sit down and just draw a couple of lines to get things started. Once you’ve got a couple lines down, tell yourself you might as well sketch the outline. Two or three iterations of this and the next thing you know you’ve finished.

When it comes to my work I have good control over my procrastination. I manage to keep it to a minimum and so enjoy good productivity. None of the tricks I might use in my daily work was helping with other activities in my life like drawing however, but Edwards’ ‘stupid’ trick worked for getting me through a painful first exercise. I put down a few lines, then an outline, then decided to do the eyes and nose. At this point I was so embarrassed by what was on the paper I seriously contemplated giving up. I decided that before giving up I’d at least sketch in the other main features. Once I’d done this, somehow it started to look a little less childlike. I soon found myself immersed in the process and after 40 minutes had a picture that I’m now quite proud of.

Now again with my Japanese study I recognised this kind of procrastination. Learning thousands of Japanese characters can seem a daunting, even impossible task; procrastination is rife. My target of 20 per day took a hit recently when I couldn’t study for nearly two days. That meant I should do 40 in one sitting, late on a Sunday, after nearly a full day’s work. Hearing my inner voice tell me that it’d be better not to force it or I won’t memorise them well reminded me of Edwards’ ‘stupid’ trick. I told myself I’d sit down and just do 10; not too daunting. 40 minutes later and I’ve gone through more than 40 and had a good laugh at myself in the process.

It doesn’t matter if you have a PhD. It may mean you can struggle tirelessly on a problem in your field but it doesn’t necessarily translate well into other areas of life (though it often can). What it does give you though is a keen sense of when you’re procrastinating. The first step is recognising that you’re doing it and I think that is half the battle. Once you realise, you can try this trick or whatever else works for you and pretty soon you’ll get so lost in what you’re doing you’ll forget you ever needed to push yourself to start.

Two things will most likely happen:

1) You will catch yourself reaching to check your mail far more than you expect, resulting in an uncomfortable feeling that you’re addicted. Ignore it! It will pass.

2) You’ll also realise that you’ve just worked for more than an hour on something without being interrupted. How did that feel?

Lots of other things could happen too; you might feel more relaxed, you might notice people are interrupting you less because they simply can’t get hold of you, and they’re getting used to it!

In the majority of work there are few emergencies yet we allow ourselves to be on call every day. This is a relatively new thing (think back even just 5 years) and each e-mail is robbing us of our focus.

Remember it may only take 15 seconds to deal with an unimportant e-mail but each time one comes in your focus is derailed. Check your e-mail once every 2 hours though and you’ll burn through them at 15 seconds each without sacrificing focus.

If you don’t believe me, try it! It’s the only way to be sure. And if you catch yourself saying, “that’s all very well for you, but that simply wouldn’t work in my line of work”, ask yourself honestly if that is true. Given that we regularly deceive ourselves however, I’d recommend just trying it for a week.

What’s the worst that can happen?

During the last 6 months of my PhD I found ways to focus properly for long periods of time and as such finished slightly earlier than the average Computer Science PhD student.
After finishing I’d become so used to focussing that I figured it had become second nature to me. Not so.
After taking on various projects I found myself with three work e-mail accounts, a personal account and Skype vying for my attention every day. I discovered that just like everyone else, if my e-mail notifier is lit up telling me I’ve got mail I have to check it.

What if the sites are down? Maybe it’s an interesting opportunity? I’ll think of a reason for seeing what’s come in and nine times out of ten it isn’t important. Thanks to Notify deleting this unimportant e-mail takes seconds so doesn’t waste much time. Or does it?

15 seconds from start to finish: e-mail comes in, notifier lights up, I click once to see what it is and again to delete it. On the surface it looks like I only lost 15 seconds but in reality I lost much more than that because it broke my focus on the task at hand. What’s worse is I may have decided to respond to the e-mail which would take even more time.

So on the one hand it’s only 15 seconds, but they just keep coming in all day, breaking my focus. The cost mounts up quickly. If I just waited until a specific time of day to go through all the mail, going through each would take the same amount of time but wouldn’t cost me my focus. I could even leave e-mail until the late afternoon and give it my worst time (in terms of productivity) rather than my best time (the morning).

While writing my PhD thesis I started to get up at 6am every day as I found that it gave me several hours of space to focus before any e-mails might come in. I also regularly quit my mail notifier and otherwise protected this time in the morning from interruption. The result was probably the most productive period of my working career thus far, writing the thesis and even pursuing some new theoretical research in the process.

Last week I caught myself fighting the urge to check what e-mail had just come in and had to laugh. If the notifier wasn’t running then I wouldn’t think about e-mail for a second, so why have it running at all? I experimented with setting the notifier to check only once per hour (it was set to a shocking 30 times per hour) and have seen a modest improvement.

However, that’s still four e-mail accounts being checked every hour; which means it is then virtually impossible for me to focus for 90 minutes on anything.

My PhD supervisor Richard Neville gave me the answer to this problem some years ago but it’s only now that I’m taking it up: pick one time during the day when you check your e-mail and ignore it the rest of the time. That’s how he protected his research time and for my sanity that’s how I’m going to protect mine.

The attention-sapping power of e-mail is a bit of a hydra however, as you may still need to deal with:

• People expecting you to be readily available by e-mail many/all hours of the day.
• Dealing with junk e-mail.
• E-mail that you want to receive but don’t want to be notified about.

I sidled up, wanting to check out what was on offer without necessarily feeling obliged to order anything. It looked good though so I ordered pineapple and mint. A friendly guy called Fernando runs the place and is keen to make a difference.

The weather here in Edinburgh has been good recently; often at this time of year it’s already getting chilly but Fernando’s lucky as he’s just catching the tail end of the warm weather. The juice is good, but very cold. He explains that most of it is made from frozen pulp imported from his home country Brazil. While a bit too cold for my liking, it was pretty much perfect to have after training.

Perhaps it’s because I’m starting out on a business venture of my own, but I couldn’t help noticing some potential problems with this business. It’s in a prime location for selling coffee, and that’s what police boxes are traditionally used for. As such, Fernando gets asked for coffee around 50 times a day (his estimate). He has to turn away all those customers because they want hot coffee, not cold fruit juice. I suggest to him that he have some filter coffee and milk ready and at least convert those people into paying customers. If they like his Brazilian coffee maybe they’ll come back for more and try his traditional fast food offerings or juices.

The cold is another problem: Edinburgh will become bitterly cold in the Winter. Sure it’s colder in many other countries, but the air in Edinburgh is damp because of the sea which makes 0C here feel worse than -10C in Finland for example. I suggest to Fernando that he should serve hot juice when it gets cold. He put some guarana in my juice; he could do the same for the hot juice and advertise it as a pick-me-up alternative to coffee. Again my concern here is that he’s started a business with good intentions, but good intentions don’t necessarily result in sales or profit…

The final problem was in another good intention. Fernando tells me before I’ve paid or tasted it that if I don’t like it, I don’t need to pay. The juice is good quality, so I can’t imagine anyone complaining about it. Personally I think this kind of thing makes customers uncomfortable. You’re standing in front of the smiling proprietor, and maybe you don’t like the juice. Do you tell him, or do you instead just feel uncomfortable and pay up? Or, do you tell him you don’t like it, he gives it to you for free, and then you feel uncomfortable because you’re walking away with something while giving nothing? Human beings like to reciprocate, and we have no problem with paying for something we’ve ordered unless it’s clearly low quality. If I order a super-hot curry and can’t eat it, it’s my fault if I don’t like it. As such I suggested that rather than create a possibly uncomfortable atmosphere, why not give out vouchers for a free drink next time? I think that’s much more likely to bring people back and keep everyone comfortable.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this business as the weather gets colder; will meaning well win over customers and make enough money to at least break even? I’m expecting that several changes will need to be made but I’d be happy to be proven wrong!

I heard this quote of Hamming’s recently and wondered where it came from. Turns out it came from the talk:

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work.

Makes you think! I’m not working on the kind of problems that Hamming would say are important but when I heard that quote I was immediately wondering about the importance of my topic and came to the conclusion that it was important in a somewhat small, way which I daresay is common of a lot of PhD topics (after all, there’s a strict time limit).

Some quotes from the talk that resonated with me:

If you believe too much, you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you’ll never get started.

Quoting Pasteur:

Luck favours the prepared mind.

On the role of the subconscious and immersing yourself in the problem:

For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention — you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

The last one is referring to what your subconscious does when you sleep. Hamming acknowledges that we don’t understand the subconscious well but that many have concluded that it can be a major source of inspiration. I myself have been surprised when working for days or weeks on a problem how you can wake up one day, look at the same pages you’ve been staring at the whole time and suddenly see something new in them. In those times it has always been a problem which has vexed me to the point where I’m thinking about it constantly, while walking to and from university (or indeed anywhere), in concerts etc. so my experience appears to agree with Hamming’s, though it would be a bit surprising if immersing yourself in a problem was a bad thing, right?

A couple of other points that may strike you as being obvious, but I can’t say I keep them in mind enough personally:

You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed says, “Yes, I’ve stood on so and so’s shoulders and I saw further”. The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.

You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it. After all, if you want a decision ‘No’, you just go to your boss and get a ‘No’ easy. If you want to do something, don’t ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don’t give him a chance to tell you ‘No’. But if you want a ‘No’, it’s easy to get a ‘No’.

That last one reminds me of the saying, “it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission” although he seems to be talking more about turning up in your bosses office Monday morning with some results which you didn’t have ‘permission’ to commit time to. I’ve done this and was reprimanded quite harshly (though only verbally), though that was my fault for not making it clear that it had been done on my own time. Well worth doing if you believe it’s the right thing to do.

Then, as to why he didn’t seem to be getting assigned the computer time he needed by the secretaries:

Answer, I wasn’t dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that—I wasn’t dressing properly. I had to make the decision—was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better?

Put another way: “The appearance of conforming gets you a long way”. Effort expended getting past people’s preconceptions just because you, say, dress casually, is wasted effort! Again even my limited personal experience has shown the benefit of this kind of conformance; it needn’t even be painful if it’s just a case of putting on a nice shirt and tie!

Here’s the full transcript (including Q&A). A quick search didn’t turn up the audio unfortunately; if anyone knows if it’s available please post below.

Research is communication. If you’re not writing, you’re not doing research. A strong statement, but hard to argue with when you consider that if you had a great idea but failed to share it with even one person, you might as well not have bothered.

Here’s one way in which you might increase your output while simultaneously sharing your work with more people: when you have a new idea, start writing it up as a paper before diving into the implementation. Doing so should make apparent any holes in the hypothesis and will force you to be clear about what it is that you are aiming to investigate.

As for the sharing, you now have an actual artifact that you can show people and get feedback on. In the draft paper you will have outlined the problem, approach etc. clearly and so it should now be in a form where a colleague could understand the content and give useful feedback.

It won’t always be as simple as that of course, as perhaps your colleague won’t understand and if that is the case, the blame most likely lies with how you have presented the material. It is important to bear in mind that this colleague can only read your paper for the first time once. It is therefore very important that when a first-time reader is confused by what you are presenting, you fix it before showing it to others. If in the end your paper is easy to read and understand, then this will be beneficial when your paper is reviewed for publication.

Key points:

• Never make the reader feel stupid.
• The reader/reviewer’s misunderstanding is your fault.
• Examples early and often.
• Could you explain it to someone while walking in the woods, with no whiteboard or visual aids?
• Be aware of how first-time readers react to your paper/presentation and improve accordingly.