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Tag: productivity

Learn Street Epistemology To Deal With Difficult People at Work

Dealing with a stubborn coworker is something most of us dread. “Oh man, I have to talk to that guy again, ugh…” you tell yourself, especially in cases where you don’t have much leverage on the situation or the person.

And sometimes, the person you deal with seems somewhat reasonable, but the two of you see things so differently that you can’t seem to reach any agreement or even start to understand why your respective conclusions are so far apart.

Imagine you’re at work and you’re facing some of the following conversations:

  • An engineer tells you he strongly believes that project X doesn’t make any sense, because technology W is not good enough for it.
  • A product manager tells you he is absolutely convinced that using a certain approach to roll out a new feature is doomed to failure.
  • An engineering manager who reports to you is saying that without any doubts, person P on her team is really not good enough and is underperforming.

Ever been in a situation like that? I bet you have.

And what do these situations have in common? They’re all opinions and beliefs that people are dumping on you without context or facts.

When faced by such a situation, it’s tempting to shove it into someone’s face that they’re wrong, and press it to the point that it’s painful for them. There’s a certain satisfaction that we all get from “being right.” I know it, because I’ve done this myself in the past, and I’m not proud of it.

That’s also what most people do: they just reply with whatever opinions they have in their own minds at that moment. And the hope is that after some time of throwing opinions at each other’s face, the argument is going to sort itself out and help the two parties come to an agreement, or at least, to an understanding.

But reality is often very different from that, and without a more structured and pragmatic approach to such conversations, you’ll end up making decisions based on social status, feelings, beliefs, and personal preferences, which is the total opposite of what you want to do if you wish to make rational decisions.

My intent with this article is to introduce you to a conversation technique called street epistemology.

Many introductions to street epistemology have been written, and my key contribution here is to localize the technique so you can learn to use it specifically in a work environment. In particular, it will do wonders with colleagues with whom you have little leverage, generally because they are above you in the org chart—like your manager or your manager’s manager—or because they sit in a sister organization in which you have little political weight.

In this article, I will first briefly cover some examples of epistemologies to give you more context, then I’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to use street epistemology in a workplace environment. Finally, I have added plenty of links and materials at the end of this article if you want to dive further into the topic.

Making Teams Effective At Remote Work

On my quest to make my teams effective at remote work, I went through a boatload of content. Articles, podcasts, courses, videos, everything that was relevant, I consumed and annotated.

I reviewed 40+ resources about effective remote teams so you don’t have to. Here’s my takeaway.

Unsurprisingly, all the content offered by GitLab is brilliant. They really know what they’re doing, and the quality of what they put out there has been top-notch so far. I also didn’t want to use only them as an example, so I went out of my way to find other companies, and other examples of success to form an opinion that would be as objective and as realistic as possible.

After reviewing 40+ resources, spending hours absorbing and summarizing them, and boring my friends and colleagues about it, I thought I’d put everything into a nice little package to share what I’ve learned with others. This is what his article is.

The article is geared towards managers on how to adapt teams and organizations to become effective at remote work, and not so much on how to be a more productive individual within a remote setup.

If you’re an individual contributor, you will find interesting ideas in this article nonetheless, and also ideas on how to convince your manager to help your team and organization be effective at remote work, so read on!

To create the right environment for organizations and teams to be effective and successful, the topics you must cover are the following:

  1. Be explicit about which ‘remote’ you pick
  2. Set a culture of remote work from the top
  3. Embrace an async-first mentality
  4. Adopt management by objectives
  5. Don’t let individuals choose their WFH days
  6. Recognize the need for meaning and bonding
  7. Organize for physical and mental health recovery
  8. Adapt all the supporting organizational processes

The rest of this article dives into the details for each of those topics, and at the very end, I am sharing all the useful resources which I’ve come across.

Finally, note that this article explores all the main ideas and concepts for effective remote teams and organizations. However, it doesn’t cover how you would plan a transition and then execute this transition. I will cover this aspect in a future article. Join my email list to be notified when it comes out.

Kir: find commands by describing them from the shell

When doing system administration to fix a crash on some Unix-based server, I have run several times into the issue of trying to remember how to perform a certain task, but not remembering the exact sequence of commands. After that, I am always doing the same thing, and I have to resort to do a search on Google to find the commands I need. Those tasks are generally not frequent enough to be worth it to memorize the commands or create a script, but frequent enough for the process of searching to become really annoying. It’s also a productivity issue since it requires me to stop the current workflow, open a web browser and perform a search. For me, those things include tasks such as “how to find the number of processors on a machine” or “how to dump a Postgresql table in CSV format.”

I thought that it would be great to have some piece of code to just be able to query Google from the command-line. But that would be a mess, as for each query I would need a simple sequence of commands that I need to type, and not a blog article with fluffy text all around which is what Google is likely to return. Also, I thought about using the API of commandlinefu.com to get results directly from there. So I did a small Python script that performs text search that way, but the results were never exactly what I was looking for, since the commands presented there have been formatted by people who do not have the exact same needs I have. This is what brought me to implement Kir, a tiny utility to allow for text-search directly from the command-line and give the exact list of commands needed.

I am tired of logging into websites

With the number of Internet services and web apps growing, the amount of statuses and indicators is itself growing. At the end of the day, you end up logging into 20 different websites in order to get a single value from each of them. And there are so many of them, just to name a few: StatCounter, Google Analytics, Apple iTunes Connect, Flurry, etc.

I am really getting tired of logging into all these websites, and here is my plan to fix it.