Joe Hackman — Page 2

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February 16, 2018 by Joe Hackman Leave a Comment

I’ve been waking up the last couple of nights at 3AM, unable to sleep, and trying to solve the mass shooting problem in my head. More than that, I suppose I am also feeling helpless, because the responses I see to the tragedy indicate to me that there is little common ground on solving this problem but there should be. The quick fix the most vocal among us are advocating for is stricter gun laws. No doubt eliminating guns would make a difference, but I don’t see that happening and if history is any indication, it is likely to have unintended consequences.

Most humans just want to live, love, and experience life. They go about their business, rarely engaging in any significant conflict. The majority has never been the problem. It’s clear if you look back in history, certain kinds of leaders in an effort to maintain absolute control, have left a body count in the millions in their collective wakes. They’ve chosen other tribes, religions or races to direct any anger experienced by those they should be protecting. Disarming these scapegoats first or just choosing people with inferior resources to protect themselves has fit histories tyrants modus operandi. Based on this I understand that people will resist giving up their ability to defend themselves. It also indicates the danger that humans can go along with some pretty horrific themes if we don’t take the time to learn history and avoid repeating it. Sadly, many leaders continue to single out certain ethnic/religious/tribal groups today for self-serving purposes by dividing us. Certain hate crimes have been on the rise and some religious and ethnic minorities around the globe have experienced a sharp rise in oppression and victimization in recent years.

Maybe it is time we question everything we think we know, and come up with ideas on what can actually get done. Start by looking at the root causes and work on solutions to them. Build on successes and be willing to consider alternatives that might not fit the ones our leaders have paraded before us as the simple fixes. Imagine if you had the power to prevent the Florida shooting. I believe that tragedies are averted every day, and not with weapons or words but by the actions of normal people who choose to do something.

The morning of the Florida shooting I sat in a room with some amazing, caring people at my Rotary club. We were all gathered for a very special occasion, the Rotary speech contest. We brought in 8 extraordinary high school students to give their speeches about changing the world. These kids did nothing short of blowing our collective minds. Two themes emerged. The first was kindness, smiles and being good humans changes everyone around us for the better. The second was that kids are experiencing tremendous stress and many of them seriously ponder suicide (about 1 in 4!). They weren’t just talking, as one of the students put it, they were doing. She had gone to her parents concerned about the mental health of her classmates and they told her:

There are two kinds of people in this world, people who complain and people who do.

That young woman went on to fund training for teachers at her school to better understand the signs of these stresses on our kids and to be prepared to help. She now runs a non profit you can support as soon I am able to link to it.

Another boy admitted that he struggled with depression and had considered suicide after failing to deliver his speech at our previous years contest. He was back and delivered the winning speech, inspiring us all and wetting some eyes in the process. He is now working on getting funding to have a full-time counselor to assist kids who are struggling with mental health issues at the school. Wow. Another doer.

As much as I wish there was a simple answer, somewhere to point my outrage, my helplessness. I cannot. I’ve already done that math over and over again in my head and I don’t see the present debates leading anywhere. All I can do is focus on the doer mentality. Instead of complaining about the deadlock, I can be the best dad I can be. I can continue to support anything and everything that improves outcomes for kids. As a Rotarian I can continue to participate in activities that provide opportunities to kids for clean water, shelter after a natural or man-made disaster, leadership and character development. Lastly I can encourage you to do something, anything, to improve the mental wellness of other human beings. Whether that means you just smile and say hello to strangers more or become a court appointed special advocate, Big, or foster parent. Whether you decide to improve outcomes by teaching chess or provide education opportunities to kids you will never meet. Teach kids they matter. If we see something that doesn’t seem right, we can get involved. Whatever you do, just do something. We can’t fix everything but if we can spare one parent and our country the agony of the senseless loss of a loved one, then it is worth it. If you see an argument going nowhere, don’t waste your time with it, focus on being a doer, like those amazing high school kids and others who have improved so many lives for the better with their good deeds. I am guessing most of you already are, as parents, as aunties, as uncles, as fixtures in your community. Thank you for making the world a better place. We can always do more.

A strong foundation can weather many trials. What else can we do to give kids a better foundation to weather life’s challenges?

How to reclaim your Email inbox

January 9, 2018 by Joe Hackman Leave a Comment

One of the downsides to technology is the hold it has on us at times. You see people walking down the street checking their phones oblivious to the world around them. Or how about those people sitting across from each other at a restaurant on their phone, completely absent from their potentially beneficial physical experience? The phenomenon has actually made driving less safe, in fact the CDC reports that 9 people are killed and 1,000 injured each day in the US involving a distracted driver, a growing number of which involve cell phone use. There is a very strong neurological case for why we feel so inclined to review and respond to each of these inbox/social media stimuli – a hit of dopamine. So that’s why our inbox is sacred ground, and we need to re-claim it. We can no longer blame OCD or some work obligation. We need to become present, and claiming your inbox is one way to get there.

Outlook and Android Here

Context is important, to clarify this is written by a Microsoft Outlook and Google Android guy. Many of our peers are using the latest iDevice and Google Apps. So your solution may need to be different from mine but philosophically and scientifically it could be the same.

The first step

When I read The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (with a shout out to the best local book store ever), I learned how wrong I was about a lot of things. Such as being great at multi-tasking. Or that an indicator of effective mental capacity was how much one could keep track of in their head. Or that being great at serving customers was about checking any new email frequently and responding quickly (still somewhat true, more on that later). This book forces you to own up to your shortcomings in the area of neuroscience, and to start to make changes to terrible habits that you had little understanding of the consequences of. Admitting that was the first step, some of the immediate goals after reading where to:

Focus on single related tasks, humans are terrible at multi-tasking and changing from one activity to another frequently.
Get as many things out of my head and stored in a logical and easy to access way.
Limit stimulus that had a dopamine loop, distraction – dopamine – distraction – dopamine – distraction – dopamine.

Now that we know why, we will have to save much of the “how” for later, because it would be more of a series of blog posts. For now let’s focus on how your Email inbox became a key battleground for all three of these items.

My easy to follow flowchart for Email processing.

The Inbox Battleground

There really is no place so sacred in a business persons life than perhaps their Email inbox. This is where so much critical correspondence enters and leaves your work activity stream. For most, the inbox is treated as a todo list. If something is there it probably means there is an action related to it that has yet to occur. The reality is, even with great effort to the contrary our inboxes are full of useless distraction. Most of it serves one purpose only – other than perhaps an unhealthy hit of dopamine, a priority for someone other than you. That might sound rash, but if you do not make an effort to claim your inbox as sacred ground, you will find that statement to be true. In fact Statista shows that even in 2017 where relatively good anti spam measures are in place, over 50% of Email is still spam. This is an improvement since a high of over 71% in 2014, but still a tremendous amount of useless messages. So to reclaim your inbox, the first priority needs to be ensuring that as many irrelevant or non critical messages are not there. This can be accomplished by taking the following steps:

Ensure that your email provider offers great anti-spam service.
Perform an Opt out frenzy
Create folders and rules to sort messages to them based on organized criteria.
Stay diligent, stay the course
Constant Improvement

Now let’s see what it looks like to address those steps, one at a time, and work to reclaiming your inbox.

Reduce SPAM

No-one should have a high tolerance for poor anti-spam filtering. If you’re serious about reclaiming your inbox, you need to be prepared to shop around for a new Email provider if necessary to address this. Speaking from experience both Google Apps/Gmail and Rackspace have quite good filtering. Your mileage may vary, and you may have something even better. Quality filtering involves two criteria:

Little to no spam arriving in your inbox
Extremely rare false positives

Many providers will have you thinking the above are difficult to impossible, do not accept that. If you have both of those criteria well at hand, you have a great anti-spam provider. Here are some additional things you can consider to improve this regardless. You should know how to or be prepared to:

Consider a change, test out a new provider, see how they handle your messages, you can forward your old address to the new one and get an idea.
White list your friends and any domains and Email addresses that you want to make sure you receive messages from.
Black list any you discover that have nothing positive to offer and never will.

Hopefully you can get spam under control, if not then maybe you need a more intensive solution. Do not accept less, life is too short to waste away droning away sorting and deleting useless Emails. Having been in the IT industry for much of my career this has been paramount to effectively using Email in business.

Opt Out Frenzy

It seems obvious If you didn’t sign up for something or aren’t interested (or will never read it!), request to be removed or use the unsubscribe option. An alternative to unsubscribing is to black list the domain. It seems harsh but that is often the best way to go particularly if you feel the senders organization has nothing positive to offer. In some cases it is faster to just blacklist. Over time you will start to get a feel for which companies to make a legitimate attempt to reduce and which ones need the nuclear (welcome to my blacklist!) option.

Creating folders and rules

Given that we’ve established how your inbox is sacred, we need to simplify what that means. The simplest test is to aim to have only messages that require priority up to the minute responses, or require action within a relatively (to be determined by you) time frame. This can be a lot of messages for some people, if you’re one of them you may need an additional step beyond what is being discussed here, but this should be a step in the right direction. Here are some things to do to make your inbox more actionable and sacred, you should be prepared to and learn how to:

Create folders that organize by topic
Use rules/filters to move messages to topic folders or for messages you cannot manage with black lists or anti-spam
Give your rules names that make sense, I use two major formats one is “Move items to (Folder Name) by Domain” and “Move items to (Folder Name) by sender

Topic Oriented Folders

Earlier we talked about how humans are terrible at multi-tasking. This means we work best when we work on similar tasks together and don’t jump around much. Obviously things of the utmost priority (hopefully only what is in your inbox) merit this kind of multi-tasking. You can’t exactly leave a critical request laying around for days while you wait for other similar requests. You can however leave lower priority items hidden away in your unread items, sorted by folders, for eventual efficient review and action at a time of YOUR choosing. You can set aside time to look at them when you’re mind is tired from doing your high quality work for the day, or for a time when you are focused on a certain topic area. In my case this is things like:

Rotary (checked the day before the weekly meeting)
Makers/IOT (later afternoons or during cleanups*)
Manufacturing Industry Advocacy (during focus times while working on the Manufacturing Advocates Podcast or periodically during cleanups*)
Social Networking, etc. (During time emphasized for the Podcast, Inbound Marketing, or during cleanups*)

*A cleanup is a time when you can go into the “Unread items” in Outlook and sort through messages sorted by their topic folders and often mark huge numbers of them read saving you hours of time wasted on low priorities. 🙂

All of these items have their time and place, but not when you are fresh and capable of your best work. That’s when your sacred ground is most sacred, reclaim it and perform at your top level for the things that matter most to you. In the next step we’ll review how to automatically get content into these folders so it bypasses your inbox.

Rules and Filters

In order to get messages into your topic oriented folders, you need to learn how rules work to automate this process. In Outlook, there are rules that allow you to use a wide range of criteria to accomplish this. These are some best practice tips for doing this:

Update an existing rule whenever possible rather than adding a new one.
Be prepared to use a separate rule to move back certain items that might match another rules criteria but should be in your inbox.
Be clever and unafraid to learn, rules are extremely powerful, you may find uses for them that go well beyond what is talked about here.

Stay Diligent

Another bit of neuroscience to keep in mind is that it can take a while to form a habit but once you do it is difficult to undo. Use this to your advantage, form a habit of being diligent about performing the positive tasks related to the reclamation of your inbox. Embrace the dopamine your brain likes doing things that serve you, your family and your customers best. Don’t stop performing that simple test when you see something new in your inbox and decisively deal with it or save it for a time where you can handle a group of them together.

Constant Improvement

You’ve probably heard the saying at some point to the effect that if you’re not improving you’re declining. There are dozens of books written about this subject, but it is true. Anyone who has formed the positive habit of working to be the best they can be at their craft or role know this. It is doubtful that you are not one of these people, or you probably would never have gotten to this last paragraph of this article. Thank you for taking the time to read it, and you are likely to have something to add. Comment where you saw it shared or here on the blog. I love hearing from people interested in being the best at what they do. – Joe

Welcome to my horribly neglected Blog

March 7, 2017 by Joe Hackman 1 Comment

As I was updating my bio to be um… a bit more up to date and current, I noticed that the last new post was from October 2015. It’s official, I have horribly neglected this blog. The good news is, I have more ideas and content ideas now than I have ever had, so it is likely I’ll be sharing more ideas here in the near future. In the meantime here is a little photo history of what I’ve been up to since 10/2015.

It’s Time for Email 2.0

October 1, 2015 by Joe Hackman 2 Comments

Email has not evolved nearly as much as it could over the years. There is an opportunity for some major improvements by extending the capabilities available to users and administrators alike. Microsoft and Google have built very stable and robust offerings in the space while companies like Rackspace have built on those offerings. However one thing that is severely lacking is real innovation.

What’s the last “big thing” in Email you can remember?

Bam, bam, we all hate Spam

We’ve all struggled with Spam or Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). Few companies do a truly good job of preventing those annoying and potentially damaging messages from arriving in your inbox without causing you to dig messages out of quarantine. It’s an area where a lot of resources and energy have been put.

We all hate Spam and as luck would have it, this article is the result of a brain storming session after personally dealing with a recurring Spam issue.

Over the last few months I’ve been receiving pairs of messages (one to each of my major accounts) that are UCE. I have no idea what’s at the end of the rainbow, it could be malware, it could truly be an attempt to sell products, the what is not important. The what we can do about it is. In this case I ended up blocking Amsterdam in it’s entirety, from Emailing to my domain. Luckily I have the luxury of doing this, many people would not.

This was not the idea, but rather one of a two components, for my inspiration to improve Email.

4AM Idea Generator

Not too long ago I read this really fantastic book called “The Organized Mind”. The book led to a greater understanding of how our minds work and things we can do to improve our performance. One of the things the author discusses is the importance of letting your mind wander.

Never under-estimate the potential power of relatively mindless work.

For me the best places to let my mind wander are cleaning or organizing, sitting in a chair with a notepad nearby, driving on a long trip, or walking/hiking alone. Last night I took some time to organize a recently created work bench in our garage and in the process unpacked many boxes of stuff that had been stowed away since our move last year. During this remedial task, my mind wanders quite a bit, this type of work is food that my brain needs.

What this extra mind wandering time had done in conjunction with my Spam war against Amsterdam the previous day was to shift some creative energy while I was asleep to the subject of Email. So at 4AM in the morning when I came off my first 5 hours of my sleeping cycle (a frequent occurrence) I started brainstorming a way to solve one of the issues with Email – dealing with highly circulated Email addresses.

What is a highly circulated Email address? It’s simple, it means you have an address that has been in circulation for a long time and has been harvested by everyone and their brother, sister, cousin, aunt, uncle, neighbor and distant relative. Highly circulated Email addresses and their hosts are tested much more often by viruses, spam and malware.

So now that the fuel has been provided, I am now looking to others who have a desire to contribute, while I further investigate Email innovation.

What would you change about how Email works?

I was recently reminded of the importance of multidisciplinary thinking by my friend Bindu Garapaty, that is don’t just ask one discipline (e.g. Email Hosting Providers) for their ideas. Ask people of all walks of life and professions. Ask the users, ask the administrators, ask artists, ask scientists, anyway, you get the idea. So I am asking you.

This is about starting a conversation with anyone who wants to have it, about what can improve with Email. I made three pages of notes early this morning, but I’ll take anything you’d like to share, if you’re up for it, to contribute to this theoretical body of work. Your contributions can be anonymous or I can attribute them to you. You may participate in the comment section or via my contact form.

Organized work bench drawers, organized mind. 🙂

The Value of Testing Things to the Breaking Point

February 9, 2015 by Joe Hackman 2 Comments

Last Friday night I sat down anxiously to read more of “The Organized Mind”. Fortunately I had a couple of hours before my usual bed time to gather more valuable lessons. This book is already shaping the way I organize my tasks and more importantly it is providing me with a reference on how our brains work.

After gathering my highlighter pen, book, some note cards and a regular pen I adjusted the lighting and oriented a comfortable chair to accommodate the magic of learning and inspiration that was about to happen. After reading a number of pages and highlighting some content, my eyelids started feeling a little heavy. This is not an uncommon, but on this night it was evident that the eyelids were winning and before long I succumbed to the call of an earlier bedtime.

My “Eureka!” Moment

To give things a little context, specifically weather related, there is a bit of a rain and wind storm that’s been going on the last two days here in Northern California. The conditions have affected my sleep with the winds being loud enough at times to wake me up. During one of these brief episodes early Saturday morning I started thinking about an article written by one of my manufacturing clients. The article was part of Christian Frueh‘s quality management series, specifically his third in that series “failing more often: gaining for randomness and volatility“. There was one concept in particular, the idea that being tested to the point of failure leading to improvement. My mind drifted a bit as I considered some real world areas where this concept would have a huge positive impact and instinctively had to get up and write about it. 🙂

Things You Want Tested While House Shopping

If you’ve followed this blog recently you probably know that last summer my family relocated to El Dorado Hills. We’ve been holed up in “temporary” accommodations since the end of the summer. The house shopping process has not gone exactly like we might had hoped. It’s been an educational process though, and we’ve had a few near hits. One thing is certain, testing things to the point of failure is extremely valuable as a house shopper.

The Beautiful Oak Tree

One fantastic thing about the Sierra Foothills is the amazing oak trees peppered across the rolling hills. From fall to late spring (early summer on a rainy year!) the lush green hills stun you with their beauty. One big oak tree in particular is an actual “feature” of a house that we have considered making an offer on. The tree is both a blessing and a potential curse. You see, this particular tree is quite old and majestic. If it were to be badly damaged or die the value of the property in our eyes would drop significantly.

Remember those high winds I mentioned? If that old oak survives those winds, it’s probably in pretty good shape. We’d certainly have an arborist check it out if we were putting an offer on that house. What the arborist could not tell us is what would happen to the tree in a heavy wind storm. Only knowing that it’s been through several in just the last few months can tell us that.

The Drainage Problem

El Dorado Hills appears to be a mix of iron rich soil and granite. The presence of rock does make one feel more comfortable about how stable the hills will be during heavy rains. In December we had some incredibly heavy rains, with several large storms back to back. The area shed the water off as if it was built to handle these types of storms.

One house that we had our eye on and showed a lot of potential for our needs had a sudden price decrease recently. Great news, right? We learned an inspection report had revealed a drainage issue, among other things. There was actually water under the house in at least one significantly sized area. Heavy rains are a great test of roofing materials, gutters, drainage and grading. Imagine if we had purchased this home last summer only to learn about this later? Yikes.

Forest and Wild Fires

Before humans started building houses and more specifically, had the ability to contain wild fires, the forests were far more healthy. Fires would clean out the under brush periodically and cull unhealthy trees leaving a fertile environment behind for new healthier trees and shrubs to grow. I remember flipping through “Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849″ at a family members home and seeing a compelling visual history of this.

Many fires today are catastrophic, leaving nothing but charred earth and tiny charred stubs that were once fully grown trees. Our forests would benefit from more frequent failure and restoration of the more natural cycle. Last year the King Fire near Pollock Pines consumed 97,717 acres, 12 single residences, 69 other minor structures and caused 12 injuries. Here is a picture I took of the King Fire, from a very safe distance:

The King Fire on 9/17 from 40 Miles Away

The King Fire from 40 miles away on 9/17/2014.

Frueh’s article gave me a lot to think about and as the brief bought of “Eureka!” moment insomnia indicates, hopefully this will have the same affect on you. Without the insomnia, of course.