Nicholas Zakas' Personal Blog A deviation from my usual tech writing

Be here now

The words rattled out of my high school music director's mouth as I and a few dozen other adolescents were off in our own worlds when we should have been rehearsing. Vic was an excellent music director, a tall man with gray hair and a mustache who always wore a handkerchief around his neck. No one would ever mistakenly believe that he had a job outside of the performing arts. He addressed each of us by our character names, not by our real names;  we were our characters for the 2-3 hours of rehearsal time and he made sure we knew it.

"Be here now," he would exclaim whenever the group lost focus. Which was frequent because, of course, we were teenagers. "We all have other things to worry about, but while you're here, focus on what we're trying to do. Leave your baggage at the door of the auditorium - you can pick it back up on your way out."

We all would refocus for at least a short period of time. That's really about all you can expect from high school kids who are all hanging around after class to sing showtunes and perform jazz squares in front of their friends. Years later, in my profession as a technologist, the lesson I didn't quite understand at 16 has become incredibly clear.

Being a technologist leads to meeting other technologists. They can introduce you to more technologists and before you know it, you're surrounded by them every single moment. Technologists are great: intelligent and opinionated and frequently lacking the eloquence to deliver his or her thoughts in a way that is palatable to those around them. And they love their toys. Specifically, the type of toys that are powered by microchips and connected to the Internet.

Technologists also tend to pride themselves on being excellent multitaskers. Why just watch TV when I could also be doing my taxes, following Twitter, and updating my Facebook status? Look at everything I can accomplish in the time you're just doing one thing! Thus, the iPhone became a must-have accessory for technologists due to its enabling of this behavior everywhere. Gone were the days when one might stand in line and start a conversation with the person in front of you. In its place, a line of multiple people each hunched over with a little black box in their hand trying to see what else is going on in the world. One might say that these people are everywhere but here now.

We feel that all this multitasking makes us more efficient. Yet studies are starting to show that ours brains are just not wired to  handle this type of processing. In fact, the more multitasking that you do, the worse your performance becomes. Even though we feel superior for accomplishing many things at a time, we're actually performing these tasks at a lower level than those who are shuffling fewer tasks. What's more, there is a high correlation between those who multitask and those who suffer from anxiety. It appears that the brain just doesn't like constant context switching to keep up with doing multiple things at once.

If you look at the computer screen of the average software engineer, you'll likely see the following:

1. Instant message client
2. Twitter client
3. Web browser (for Facebook, personal email, etc.)
4. Text editor (for writing code)
5. Mail client (for business email)

Some others might augment their desktop with additional information about weather or stocks. I know that I found myself switching attention between these, plus my stock ticker, constantly throughout the day. I felt like the day was moving incredibly fast and I was fighting to keep up. Switching back and forth furiously I started to find that I was missing important details. As it turns out, this is very common among multitaskers.

Last year, I made a decision to start making my daily workload easier: I stopped checking personal email during weekdays. That was one less thing I needed to do at work while I should be, you know, doing work. A lot of my friends rolled their eyes, some were angry that I wouldn't be responding immediately, and almost all thought I could never do it. Now, a year and a half later, people just know that this is the way I deal with personal email. What I found most interesting in my experience was how my life felt almost instantly less stressful. One less thing to do. Phew.

I later had a discussion about this with my friend Nicole as she explained her growing frustration with the amount of things she had to do. She had started taking a mindfulness meditation class and really enjoyed it (she then wrote about it on her blog). Around the same time I happened to see Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows (a book about our multitasking Internet culture) on the Colbert Report. He mentioned that the more we multitask, the worse we get at deep thinking. I know this because I have the video playing in the corner of my monitor while I'm writing this post.

Since then, I've been actively trying to limit the amount of multitasking I do. When my stock ticker mysteriously stopped working on my desktop, I just removed it instead of trying to fix it. The same with my Twitter client. My stress level started to drop. At home, I stopped eating in front of the TV, instead sitting at the dinner table. I made lists of tasks to complete and made sure that they were listed in priority order so I could read from top-to-bottom and focus on each individual task. When I'm writing, I now keep my IM client closed and force myself to finish the article before moving on to something else. And whenever I catch myself multitasking, I whisper, "be here now."

The technologists with whom I work are frequently not here now. I firmly believe that in order to do the best job possible, you must be able to focus on whatever is happening now. It enrages me to no end when a meeting starts and everyone is on their laptops doing something else. There is no way that meeting can be anything close to productive. Arguments about whether or not there should be a meeting in the first place aside, if you're in a meeting, you should be paying complete attention so that you can get out of the meeting as quickly as possible. The only time I bring a computer to a meeting is when I'm presenting. Any other time I carry with me a notepad and pen.

If I'm running a meeting, I usually ask everyone to close their laptops and put away their iPhones before we get started. Be here now. All of us. If there's something so important that you can't afford to put your laptop away for the entirety of the meeting, then you really shouldn't be in that meeting - you should be tending to whatever crisis requires your full attention. The interesting thing is that, while people groan, my meetings tend to finish early and achieve their stated goal.

I'm not completely satisfied with my current mode of thinking. Years of multitasking have most assuredly wreaked havoc on my neurons and it will likely take some time to get back into the deep thinking mode. I definitely want to take a mindfulness class and need to continue to work to focus on individual tasks one at a time. In the meantime, I will continue to look for easy ways to eliminate multitasking and continue to whisper to myself, "be here now."

The evolution of a speaking style

A couple of months ago I was giving what would turn out to be a really fun talk at the jQuery Conference in Mountain View, California. Prior to going up, someone said to me, "you know, you're a much better speaker now than when you first started." I was taken aback, both by the graciousness of the compliment and the attention that this person had paid to me over the years. This is the type of compliment that everyone wishes they receive and yet seldom do. And such, I began to ponder what I'd changed in speaking style over the years to arrive at being "much better" than I was.

As some people know, I have a background in acting. In high school and college I managed to get involved in all manner of performance, including musicals, dramas, improv, dancing, and even standup comedy. Stage fright has never been a problem for me - sure, I get nervous, but it's a nervous excitement that pushes me. If I were to compare the type of speaking I do now to any of the other performance types in which I've participated, I'd say it's closest to standup comedy. I don't say that because technology is inherently funny, or because I'm inherently funny, just that it's the same type of work.

In standup comedy, you are the actor, the writer, and the director all rolled up into one; if you bomb, you have no one to blame but yourself. You prepare like crazy, trying to understand your audience and practicing material over and over. If you're lucky, you pull someone in to critique you, but the final responsibility for the performance lies squarely on your own shoulders. Any part of it could go wrong: you could create the wrong character, the writing could be horrible, or the delivery could be off. All of these are still present in speaking at conferences.

So what happened to me? Looking back to four years ago when I gave my first public talk, I think almost everything was wrong. The character I chose unconsciously wasn't terribly effective - he was this aggressive lecturer, desperately seeking to prove he knew what he was talking about. He spoke at you instead of to you. I remember reading a comment from someone saying that he liked my content but not my speaking style. Looking back, I completely agree. The style wasn't conducive to my goal of teaching.
Seeking to improve, I sought out role models to emulate. I saw a lot of talks, watched a lot of speakers that were good and a lot that were bad, and came out with a lot of ideas. There are a few people in particular that stick out to me:

• Nate Koechley - When I got to Yahoo!, Nate was the resident rockstar evangelist. He traveled all around the world giving talks...and they were all damn good. The thing I loved about his presentations was the story he weaved into the talk. It wasn't just a bunch of random data, it was a journey along a path to discovery. I also loved his presentation slides - he had this great way of including photos that really brought the deck to life. Those who've been in my recent talks will note a liberal use of photos in my slides.
• Bill Scott - I also met Bill working at Yahoo!, but the first time I got to see him talk was actually once he left. Bill came back to Yahoo! to do a talk and the one thing that stuck out to me about his presentation was the tone of voice. Instead of sounding like a lecturer, Bill sounded like a guy who just having an informal conversation with a friend. In effect, the audience and he were sitting around a dinner table discussing technology. The talk was entirely comfortable and you felt completely comfortable asking questions because of the personal connection. Ever since I saw that talk, I tried to change my tone into more of a conversational one (I frequently also encourage people to interrupt me as I'm going along).
• Jonathan Coulton - Okay, JoCo isn't a speaker, he's a comedian singer/songwriter. But as I said earlier, I compare public speaking to being a comedian, so where better to look for inspiration? The thing I love about JoCo is his ability to banter. In between songs, he seemingly just says whatever comes to mind without attempting to be funny. The humor comes on its own through his wit, but there aren't any jokes per se. Because of this approach, he can easily react to outbursts from the audience - it's all just coming out of his mouth as it flows into his brain. He tends to say "um" and "ah" a lot, which we're always told is a Very Bad Thing for speakers. Yet in this context doing so actually makes him seem that much more human, and that's important in getting the audience to react positively. For instance, I love the small bit of banter at the beginning of this clip.

Patterning parts of my presentations against these three, I arrived at a character that I think works pretty well: myself. I was definitely not being myself when I gave my first few talks. People who know me know that I'm about the least serious person you'd meet, I'm kind of geeky, I make really bad jokes and am incredibly sarcastic. I tried to suppress all of that early in my speaking career and it just didn't work.

Now when I go up in front of people to speak, I don't switch into a different mode, it's still just me talking about something or other. I make sure that I have good story to tell, that my tone is conversational, and that I just say whatever pops into my head as I'm going along. With a couple of exceptions, I don't try to be funny. Trying to be funny backfires way too often. If I happen to be funny as I'm telling my story, then so be it - but it's not really a goal. My goal is to provide information in a way that's easily consumable, and I do that by being myself.

Leadership lessons from Gordon Ramsay

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a big fan of Gordon Ramsay. I think he's one of the most interesting characters on TV and you can be sure that both Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares are set to record on my DVR. For those unfamiliar, Ramsay is usually shown on commercials screaming vulgarities at seemingly hapless chefs who are on the verge of tears. Yes, some people tune in to these shows to watch him explode over incorrectly prepared entrees and cold appetizers, but there are really important leadership lessons to be found if you strip away the obscenities from Ramsay's language.

Before going further, I first must say that I don't condone calling co-workers names or swearing at them, as Ramsay often does on his shows. What I constantly find impressive is how the contestants and restauranteurs responds to him. There is never a doubt, at any point in time, that Ramsay is in charge. Even when people start to yell back at him, he still appears cool, in control, and unphased. And at the end of it all, most of the people thank him for everything he's done. I really wanted to take a moment and think about how he accomplishes all of this and how it boils down to a few simple rules.

Don't accept mediocrity

Ramsay hates mediocrity. When he says something is "unexciting" or "safe", it's a bad thing. He doesn't want people to be average or dishes to be passable, he wants them to be great. His job, as he sees it, is to bring everyone up a level or two. This is what separates great individuals from great leaders: making the others around you better.

Sports are a place where this typically comes up a lot. In basketball, for instance, there have been many great scorers such as Allen Iverson. The reason he's talked about differently than players like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan is that Iverson was a selfish player while the others were selfless. Even today, players like LeBron James and Kevin Garnett push their teammates to be better, to keep working harder.

Gordon Ramsay does the same. Though some of his tactics are a bit over the top, in the end, everyone respects him for having pushed them harder. When he finally does say, "nice job," you know it's well-deserved.

Be equally quick to criticize and praise

It's hard for some people to realize when Ramsay is complimenting someone because he's so much more subdued than when he's criticizing. The important thing, though, is that he's just as quick to praise as he is to criticize. Ramsay isn't looking for an excuse to tear down the next hapless soul he comes across, he's just providing his honest feedback to the person. Whether that feedback be positive or negative, it comes just as quickly as is delivered with an accompanying about of enthusiasm or dismay.

I think this is an important lesson for leaders of all kinds. You won't be looked upon favorably if you only ever point out what people do wrong. You don't want to be known as the "bad news" person or the dark cloud that's always circling above. Making sure to find opportunities to praise at least as often as you criticize earns you much more respect from teammates.

Give actionable feedback

Whether the feedback is positive or negative, Ramsay always provides details. Always. Though he may drop a few f-bombs in the middle when complaining, he'll also say, "too salty" or "it's raw" or "overcooked" or "too dry." All of this is actionable feedback: the chefs can take that information and make adjustments to fix it. This is the mark of an excellent leader, someone who not only points out what is wrong but how to correct it the next time.

Positive feedback is also presented by Ramsay with details. Cooked perfectly. Love the seasoning. Tender and moist, delicious. Once again, this feedback is actionable because you know exactly what he wants to see the next time. Just saying "good job" doesn't mean much, saying it and accompanying with details about why something was done well is far more useful and the mark of a good leader.

Don't fight fire with fire

One of the most interesting traits of Ramsay is how he deals with people who are yelling and arguing with him. Normally, he's the one doing the yelling. If someone starts to yell back, Ramsay completely shifts gears. First, there's a bit of a test to see if the person will back down: he restates what he just said and asks the person to accept the feedback (using colorful language, frequently). If the other person still doesn't back down,  he actually gets quieter instead of escalating by increasing his volume to try to top the other person.

One of the most impressive things I saw recently on an episode of Kitchen Nightmares was when a chef lost it and started yelling at Ramsay. Ramsay stopped talking immediately, let the chef get his thoughts out, then calmly stated, "why are you doing this?" It was amazing how quickly things calmed down after that. Even for someone as loud and prone to yelling at Ramsay, it's important to understand the value of changing gears when someone else is riled up.

Discuss big disagreements privately

Although some contestants on Hell's Kitchen would certainly say that Ramsay "humiliated" them in one way or another, it's been my observation that he actually tries to avoid doing that. He'll give his unfiltered, direct feedback to whomever needs it. If that feedback isn't received, or he senses there's something else going on, Ramsay quickly asks the person to speak privately. Only in private does he say the things that could potentially give others the wrong idea.

I can't tell you how often I see people continue arguments via email or in a large group when they should be taken offline and discussed privately. There is no better way to communicate clearly than to talk face-to-face with someone. I've personally experienced drawn-out arguments come to a close in just five minutes of personal discussion. Without an audience, people are free to drop their egos and defense mechanisms, and things get done much faster and more amicably.

Be willing to apologize

As I mentioned previously, I'm always impressed at how Ramsay stays in control no matter the situation. It doesn't matter who's yelling at him or even if someone threatens to beat him up (as happened last season), he stays incredibly poised and calm without backing down. I love watching how he reacts in different situations to keep control. One particularly interesting moment happened on season five of Hell's Kitchen, where on chef named Robert had a nasty altercation with Ramsay.

During the heat of competition, Ramsay had taken to calling Robert "Bobby" instead of his name (or other choice of nicknames referring to his weight). Robert grew angrier and angrier, and as a result, his performance suffered and Ramsay called him on it. It was clear that Robert was incredibly upset, moreso than just your average contestant that Ramsay yelled at.

Robert requested that he speak to Ramsay in private, and Ramsay agreed, calling him up to his office for a closed-door meeting. Once inside, Robert calmly explained that "Bobby" isn't his name, it's his father's name, and indicated that he does not have a good relationship with father and doesn't want to be reminded of him. He said being called "Bobby" brought back a lot of painful memories and that's why he couldn't perform as well as he liked in the kitchen.

I waited in anticipation to see how Ramsay would handle this situation. At this point, though, I should have guessed. He apologized. But he didn't just say, "I'm sorry." Instead, he spoke with the same level of detail as if he was providing feedback on his own behavior. He said that he didn't realize calling him Bobby would be so painful, he apologized and said that Robert had his word: he would never call him Bobby again.

It was a particularly poignant moment and it really opened my eyes to Ramsay's thought process. He knew, in this case, that he had unintentionally caused emotional harm to someone. He wanted Robert to pick up the pace, yes, but he had no intention of taking him back to a painful moment in his life. By apologizing to Robert, sincerely and completely, he gained Robert's respect and they have a good relationship for the rest of the show until Robert was excused for medical reasons.

Leadership lessons abound

As with any skill, it's important to look for people from whom you can learn, and leadership is a skill just like any other. I once again want to state that I disagree with Ramsay's constant name-calling and vulgarity to get his point across. It makes him a more interesting TV character, but that's not the part I'd advise anyone to emulate. Rather, his actions and attention to detail are truly impressive. His ability to keep calm in all situations, the way that other rally around him, and how almost everyone he comes across eventually ends up grateful for his advice and assistance. Clearly, there's something going on here.

People respect strong leaders even when those leaders have glaring weaknesses. Sometimes, they respect leaders more because of those weaknesses and human frailties. So I'll keep looking for people from whom I can learn the delicate skill of leadership, and I have no doubt that there will be more surprising sources in the future.