How much can you get done in a day? A week? What amount of output is "average" or "outstanding" or even "acceptable" today? How do you even quantify the work? Is there a quick and easy way to measure what you "got done" today? Finally, what can you do to increase your output, you know, without really increasing your effort?
An entire industry answers questions like this, today. You can go to any bookstore and choose from dozens of business, management and personal development titles, to say nothing of Dreamweaver, XHTML and database books. I'll just answer, as the old mapmakers used to say "Here Lies Danger." Be careful, because there is much advice out there, and not all of it is good.
Can you measure a Web designer's output by the number of pages they create? I'm not sure. I have built fairly elaborate pages and placed content in them that would require several minutes for most people to read, in only a few minutes of my time. And I have labored long and hard on pages where seemingly nothing changed for days, as I worked out database calls, string comparisons and output styling. Well, how about lines of output, then? Is there some number above which you are a "good" Web programmer, but below which you are in line for a job that requires you to wear a name tag or a paper hat? I don't know the answer to that one, either.
I once worked for a man who did measure output that way. A Web page was 325 lines on Tuesday, and 400 lines on Friday, so I had only accomplished 75 lines over three days, to him. That figure, of course, was net. It didn't account for two hundred lines I had actually written, then discarded as they led me down another blind alley. It also did not reflect efficiencies in using the language's tools to do more with fewer lines. I will admit I may have placed a carriage return here or there within the markup of a page, just to generate the necessary line count improvement. Hey, if more lines was all he needed, I felt I owed it to him, my wife and VISA to provide it for him.
It's easy to think that if you can do six units of something an hour, one every ten minutes, then you can increase your output by coming in five minutes early, staying late five minutes at lunch, coming back from lunch five minutes early and staying late another five minutes at the end of the day. There's another twenty minutes, and so there's another two units, right?
Not quite, because not every thing that can be counted, counts; and not every thing that counts can be counted. Life is a lot more fluid than multiplication and division.
At some point on your personal journey to maximum productivity, or even optimum productivity, you will burn out. You will reach a place where additional time given to a task actually reduces output. There is a measurable improvement in people's ability to concentrate and work, if they just get up and walk around for a while every couple of hours. Get up, go and get a drink, step outside and see what the weather is like and then return to your task. So say the efficiency experts.
There are dangers here, too, though. This is about the time I run into my Director or Coordinator. So in their experience Mark isn't always someone doing heroic work hand-crafting Web pages and hammering out usability errors and validation troubles… he's the guy in the hallway. So be careful when you take your little productivity hike.
And at intervals, it is good to get completely away. We Americans are awful about using vacation leave we accumulate every year as part of our compensation. That's like walking away and leaving money on the table—and it doesn't help us to either produce more, or to produce better.
With that in mind, I plan to take next week off, do a little travel and see some family. There's nothing wrong with me today that a little baby-drool on the shoulder won't fix.
Take it easy, huh?
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Forecast Schmorecast: Microsoft Does The Right Thing
Just as with weather forecasts, sometimes technology forecasts go bad. In this case, I am pretty happy with the way things have turned out. It's going to get cloudy, and maybe it will rain here and there, but this will pass, eventually. The skies will clear, in time.
♪♫"The sun will come out, tomorrow"♫♪.
To recap, the browser wars of the 1990s brought a renewed focus on Web Standards and that brought out the shortcomings of Microsoft's long-dormant Internet Explorer. For years, Web designers and developers worked around issues with IE in order to get pages that looked right in that specific browser, and a tremendous number of sites and pages were built in this way. Under pressure from standards groups and a host of prominent Web gurus, Microsoft finally released Internet Explorer 7 which fixed a number of errors, but broke a huge number of Web pages. The problem was with the way IE had "always" interpreted pages, and how developers had worked around those issues.
You can go to a bookstore and buy a five year old HTML book that said if you type in "that" you will get a page that looks like "this". And it would, but not in Internet Explorer. Microsoft's new browser was better than IE6, in a technical sense. It was truer to the way the W3C said markup should work, and it was more like the best browsers in the world. But IE7 was only an incremental improvement, and it caused any number of problems as it encountered pages with various hacks and tricks and work-arounds. Microsoft now had religion, but if IE7 wrecked the Web, what would happen when a newer, better and even more standards-compliant IE8 was unleashed on an unsuspecting planet?
Back on February 20th, I wrote about Microsoft's proposed solution. They floated the idea of a fix that involved opting-in for better performance. Now, and forever more, developers would have to include a specific, almost-proprietary and otherwise-unnecessary <meta> tag in their pages in order for IE8 to use all of it's new and improved rendering skills. No books available today teach this method. No classes taught today teach this method. There would be a dozen years of material and tradition out there with no reference to this at all. But, if you knew about it, and if you included this <meta> tag, it would trigger the improved, higher-fidelity rendering performance everyone craves.
Well, apparently all of that is out, now. Microsoft will release a new Web browser the way everyone always has. It will include by default improved support for both markup and CSS and, yes, it will play Hell with pages designed with IE4's, IE5's and IE6's flaws in mind. We went through much the same agony with Netscape's Navigator, which stayed at version 4 for many years longer than welcome.
So how does this affect us? Well, we can be thankful the result is almost not at all. There are very few areas where we have hacked pages to act in ways they were not meant to. I am sure these things will be taken into account in the next design and templates. The news for us is mostly good, as pages will appear more alike in Opera, Safari, Firefox and (wait for it…) Internet Explorer. This is as it should be. ABC doesn't check how Grey's Anatomy looks in Panasonic and Sony and Toshiba televisions. Why should we have to jump through so many hoops testing in half a dozen browsers because someone made a mistake a dozen years ago and decided to go their own way for several years?
There is going to be some noise for a while. The situation has been likened to Microsoft ripping-off the Band-Aid™ instead of peeling it off. But that just means we are that much closer to the day when all of this is unnecessary.
April showers bring May flowers, we were taught as children. We may have a few more bumps in the road as I layer on ever more metaphors, but things are improving and one day we will look back at this time and laugh. There may be a little rain, now, but there won't be the storm I was worried about. Wear your galoshes and try to enjoy it.
♪♫"The sun will come out, tomorrow"♫♪.
To recap, the browser wars of the 1990s brought a renewed focus on Web Standards and that brought out the shortcomings of Microsoft's long-dormant Internet Explorer. For years, Web designers and developers worked around issues with IE in order to get pages that looked right in that specific browser, and a tremendous number of sites and pages were built in this way. Under pressure from standards groups and a host of prominent Web gurus, Microsoft finally released Internet Explorer 7 which fixed a number of errors, but broke a huge number of Web pages. The problem was with the way IE had "always" interpreted pages, and how developers had worked around those issues.
You can go to a bookstore and buy a five year old HTML book that said if you type in "that" you will get a page that looks like "this". And it would, but not in Internet Explorer. Microsoft's new browser was better than IE6, in a technical sense. It was truer to the way the W3C said markup should work, and it was more like the best browsers in the world. But IE7 was only an incremental improvement, and it caused any number of problems as it encountered pages with various hacks and tricks and work-arounds. Microsoft now had religion, but if IE7 wrecked the Web, what would happen when a newer, better and even more standards-compliant IE8 was unleashed on an unsuspecting planet?
Back on February 20th, I wrote about Microsoft's proposed solution. They floated the idea of a fix that involved opting-in for better performance. Now, and forever more, developers would have to include a specific, almost-proprietary and otherwise-unnecessary <meta> tag in their pages in order for IE8 to use all of it's new and improved rendering skills. No books available today teach this method. No classes taught today teach this method. There would be a dozen years of material and tradition out there with no reference to this at all. But, if you knew about it, and if you included this <meta> tag, it would trigger the improved, higher-fidelity rendering performance everyone craves.
Well, apparently all of that is out, now. Microsoft will release a new Web browser the way everyone always has. It will include by default improved support for both markup and CSS and, yes, it will play Hell with pages designed with IE4's, IE5's and IE6's flaws in mind. We went through much the same agony with Netscape's Navigator, which stayed at version 4 for many years longer than welcome.
So how does this affect us? Well, we can be thankful the result is almost not at all. There are very few areas where we have hacked pages to act in ways they were not meant to. I am sure these things will be taken into account in the next design and templates. The news for us is mostly good, as pages will appear more alike in Opera, Safari, Firefox and (wait for it…) Internet Explorer. This is as it should be. ABC doesn't check how Grey's Anatomy looks in Panasonic and Sony and Toshiba televisions. Why should we have to jump through so many hoops testing in half a dozen browsers because someone made a mistake a dozen years ago and decided to go their own way for several years?
There is going to be some noise for a while. The situation has been likened to Microsoft ripping-off the Band-Aid™ instead of peeling it off. But that just means we are that much closer to the day when all of this is unnecessary.
April showers bring May flowers, we were taught as children. We may have a few more bumps in the road as I layer on ever more metaphors, but things are improving and one day we will look back at this time and laugh. There may be a little rain, now, but there won't be the storm I was worried about. Wear your galoshes and try to enjoy it.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
How do you learn?
How do you learn things? Ever think about that—about how you learn best?
Some people are definitely wired to respond better in one channel than other. And some tasks lend themselves better to one channel than other, too. Some people learn best when they can read about a subject. Give them a book and a few hours and they will come back understanding how to fund their retirement account. There isn't a lot to be gained by making someone stand in line at two or three banks, brokerages and insurance companies, learning how to open up an IRA account.
Some folks can do pretty well just sitting in classroom situation and having someone preach to them. Maybe they're good note takers, or maybe they are just good listeners. That's how I got through most of my elementary and even junior and senior high classes, really. Maybe sixty percent of whatever I learned in school was just reciting things someone else had poured into me at one time or another. Classroom work involves both visual and aural input. You see things and you hear things and the hope is that you will absorb some measure of it and not be Left Behind.
Others are do-ers, and other tasks are best learned by example. You can read about driving a car and learn a lot of the theory and rules of the road and so on. But you really don't get the tactile feedback you need to process to actually learn to drive a car. There is a crown in most roads and you need to apply a little pressure on the steering wheel to counteract the tendency for a car to drive itself into the weeds. But how much pressure is needed, and for how long? What if you need to turn a corner in a crowned road? We won't even get into the absurdity of trying to learn parallel parking from a chapter of Driving For Dummies.
So, we have all kinds of people, and we have all kinds of processes and some of them lend themselves well to the task in only certain circumstances. This is why we try to touch on so many of the senses in our workshops. There are many pages or slides involved in teaching HTML, but you really aren't going to learn the language that way, are you? Each contains a lot of information, and probably all of it is important in one way or another, but you don't have to read every word from the overheads to "get it". It would not be very effective if I just stood at the front of the class and read the information to you, either. I can't think of anything more boring than having someone read me a slide that I can see for myself. And when you're bored, you start thinking about what's for dinner, tonight, and whether or not your income tax refund has arrived yet and whether you should replace your wiper blades out of this paycheck or whether you could wait for anoth—what? Wait, what did he say about image tags, again?
I try to keep things moving, so you don't have time to linger on any point long enough for laundry or grocery shopping to intrude. When we look at workshop feedback, most of my responses come back saying the pacing was either just right or a little fast. It's rare that anyone says they were too slow or too fast, and I'm happy with that because I know the misery of listening to someone droning on and on about something nobody in the room is interested in (including, often enough, the speaker).
But not every technique is going to land with every student who attends every workshop, no matter how good a writer did the words, no matter how good of a graphic designer laid out the slides or pages, no matter how well the teacher speaks. At some point we all have to take some responsibility for what we learn.
In all of my workshops, I have places built-in where I stop and ask for questions, often reminding people of the last two or three things we have covered. "Okay, any questions about page headings? Any questions about lists? Everyone understand anchor tags?"
And I almost always point out that books are available that run to seven and nine hundred pages on most of these subjects, so we necessarily have to leave something out to get everything done in only two hours. Generally, we finish early and I always try to say something like "Okay, was there anything that you had hoped to learn today that we didn't cover?" We frequently have the use of the room for another fifteen or twenty minutes and I'm more than happy to talk about anything anyone brings up.
But most often, everyone gets up and leaves. I try not to take it personally.
Some people are definitely wired to respond better in one channel than other. And some tasks lend themselves better to one channel than other, too. Some people learn best when they can read about a subject. Give them a book and a few hours and they will come back understanding how to fund their retirement account. There isn't a lot to be gained by making someone stand in line at two or three banks, brokerages and insurance companies, learning how to open up an IRA account.
Some folks can do pretty well just sitting in classroom situation and having someone preach to them. Maybe they're good note takers, or maybe they are just good listeners. That's how I got through most of my elementary and even junior and senior high classes, really. Maybe sixty percent of whatever I learned in school was just reciting things someone else had poured into me at one time or another. Classroom work involves both visual and aural input. You see things and you hear things and the hope is that you will absorb some measure of it and not be Left Behind.
Others are do-ers, and other tasks are best learned by example. You can read about driving a car and learn a lot of the theory and rules of the road and so on. But you really don't get the tactile feedback you need to process to actually learn to drive a car. There is a crown in most roads and you need to apply a little pressure on the steering wheel to counteract the tendency for a car to drive itself into the weeds. But how much pressure is needed, and for how long? What if you need to turn a corner in a crowned road? We won't even get into the absurdity of trying to learn parallel parking from a chapter of Driving For Dummies.
So, we have all kinds of people, and we have all kinds of processes and some of them lend themselves well to the task in only certain circumstances. This is why we try to touch on so many of the senses in our workshops. There are many pages or slides involved in teaching HTML, but you really aren't going to learn the language that way, are you? Each contains a lot of information, and probably all of it is important in one way or another, but you don't have to read every word from the overheads to "get it". It would not be very effective if I just stood at the front of the class and read the information to you, either. I can't think of anything more boring than having someone read me a slide that I can see for myself. And when you're bored, you start thinking about what's for dinner, tonight, and whether or not your income tax refund has arrived yet and whether you should replace your wiper blades out of this paycheck or whether you could wait for anoth—what? Wait, what did he say about image tags, again?
I try to keep things moving, so you don't have time to linger on any point long enough for laundry or grocery shopping to intrude. When we look at workshop feedback, most of my responses come back saying the pacing was either just right or a little fast. It's rare that anyone says they were too slow or too fast, and I'm happy with that because I know the misery of listening to someone droning on and on about something nobody in the room is interested in (including, often enough, the speaker).But not every technique is going to land with every student who attends every workshop, no matter how good a writer did the words, no matter how good of a graphic designer laid out the slides or pages, no matter how well the teacher speaks. At some point we all have to take some responsibility for what we learn.
In all of my workshops, I have places built-in where I stop and ask for questions, often reminding people of the last two or three things we have covered. "Okay, any questions about page headings? Any questions about lists? Everyone understand anchor tags?"
And I almost always point out that books are available that run to seven and nine hundred pages on most of these subjects, so we necessarily have to leave something out to get everything done in only two hours. Generally, we finish early and I always try to say something like "Okay, was there anything that you had hoped to learn today that we didn't cover?" We frequently have the use of the room for another fifteen or twenty minutes and I'm more than happy to talk about anything anyone brings up.
But most often, everyone gets up and leaves. I try not to take it personally.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
