Category: Play

Packing a Carry On

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Carry-on slash day bag for my flight and 10-hour layover in Brussels. From top-left, like a book:

  1. 13″ Macbook Air
  2. Laptop Charger
  3. Lightning and Micro USB extendable cords – rather than charging each device with its own proprietary charger, I bring these little guys. They can pull out to be about 2 feet long, but coil back into themselves when not in use. Astonishing how nice it is to avoid charging cables in my bag, and largely inspired my almost-totally-cable-free carryon.
  4. Stainless Steel water bottle (Colorado state flag!)
  5. Nikon camera on loan from my Dad (Thanks Dad!)
  6. Mini Listerine, since I always feel gross after a flight. A little mouthwash is really refreshing, I think. It’s new and sealed since I’ve had half-full ones tossed by the TSA without even a moment of hesitation.
  7. Airborne – because I live in fear of getting sick while travelling.
  8. Kindle
  9. Kindle Light – because airplane overhead lights are irritating to my seatmates, and don’t provide enough light to read by.
  10. Wireless headphones – earbuds really irritate my ears after about an hour of use, plus they have cords, so this is a great way to kill two birds for me.
  11. These three devices are all portable USB chargers, from Anker, Jackery and Anker, top-to-bottom.
  12. Not sure what to call this. A blindfold? An eye cover? A nap enhancer? The headband also has a little pocket for earplugs, which is awesome.
  13. International power converter, with built-in dual USB ports.
  14. Gamestorming, a great book I wrote about previously – we’re spending this upcoming week setting up a roadmap for our team’s next six months, so the materials and activities in this book will be very helpful.

All this, plus if there’s a bit of space, my standard Dopp kit (deodorant, toothbrush, etc)

Holacracy, Flat Hierarchy, and You

subtitled; Knowledge Workers are still Workers

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I will start by warning you that this is a fairly long piece for this blog, and earnest. You’ll find no animated GIFs beyond.

What I Read to Get Here
I recently read a pair of articles, one about Medium’s internal structure, and one about the new internal structure at Zappos. This is interesting because both of these companies are signing on for a new idea; Holacracy.

I’ll be referring to both of those articles and the Holacracy site and wiki. I’ll try to use quotations liberally so that you don’t have to read those pieces if you don’t want to – I’ll keep them in context, and I won’t try to make the quotes say or mean things that they don’t. Even so, for the full picture, you should read at least the two articles yourself.

Continue reading “Holacracy, Flat Hierarchy, and You” →

wd-50 and the BMOAT

I remember, back in 2010, my good friend (and groomsman!) Pat proposed to his wife-to-be – she said yes (naturally), and to celebrate Pat took a number of us to wd-50. We had a seriously long and mind-bending tasting menu experience in their wine cellar special-occasion room, and that evening still stands in my mind as the Best Meal of All Time.

Hearing that wd-50 is closing makes me sad, but it also makes me remember that truly one of a kind, really touching evening, and feel glad, and grateful, to have had the opportunity to have such a meal with such comrades.

5 Thoughts About Unlimited Vacation

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A post on Paper Planes got me to thinking about vacation, and the nature of paid time off, and the way that great ideas can collide with the real world in unexpected ways. I also took a second look at Jacob’s great post about open vacation policies when writing this post.

  1. Open (or unlimited) vacation policies have counterintuitive results: again and again it turns out that when folks are simply given no upper boundary on their time off, they tend to take about average offered elsewhere, or somewhat less than average.
  2. We’re social animals: even with an open vacation policy removing the limits that an employer places on an employee, there exist other limits. Specifically, how much time off does my boss take? What about other folks on my work team? What are the consequences of taking frequent or lengthy vacations? These limitations aren’t placed on the employee by the employer, but rather exist in the mind of the employee – and prevent them (us!) from taking as much time as we perhaps need – or deserve!
  3. “What is measured can be managed” has a reverse: to offer an unlimited vacation policy, and then proceed to track the days taken off, resonates in an uncomfortable way – if after all, the policy is unlimited, why track? If the goal is to avoid managing the days off taken by employees, then measurement seems dissonant with that goal. I acknowledge this may be the result of legal requirements placed on HR by outside bodies – which is a difference that makes a difference.
  4. Track or not to track? Jacob says you must track vacation days for a few reasons, but mostly to ensure that there isn’t any implicit (or explicit!) biases at work. Mathias reports that they did not track days at first, but ended up tracking days off in order to require them. Automattic does track time taken off, likely for the same reasons that Jacob espouses it.
  5. Minimums and Paid-Paid Time Off: Companies have started to take the above four points and push the open vacation idea to the next level – minimum vacations, as described by Mathias, where employees have 25 mandatory vacation days. Or Evernote, who pays employees $1,000 when they take a week off, to ensure, one imagines, that they relax to the max.

Some part of this discussion reminds me of the discussion in Freakonomics, where Dubner and Levitt discuss a day care center that had a small number of parents who would consistently arrive late for child pickup – in order to fight against this, they imposed a $3 fine, and the unexpected result was that even more parents arrived late, the day care center replacing a moral penalty with a tiny financial penalty.

When we remove the upper limit of paid vacation, and also remove the motivating factors of the use-it-or-lose-it system, folks are left only with their own interpretations and psychological barriers – which lead to fewer trips to Aruba. And no one wants that.

(Yes, Daryl, I read Mathias’ company as “Tavis” as well. )