Egomania and work life balance

I had an interesting chat at lunch today about work / life balance. Those of you who follow my twitter stream will find this ironic, but I actually feel like I have a pretty good work / life balance.

I don't log in after I've come home for the day, and I don't work on the weekends, and I don't carry a blackberry. There are, of course, rare times when I do all of those things (except for the blackberry), but its not very often. I'm also happy to say that the same statements apply to my teams at work.

Yes, some people stay later than me, some come in earlier, but generally we are all pretty balanced with work, and I actively throw people out of the office in the evenings because I don't want them to work crazy hours.

There are people, however, who put in long hours, check email every few minutes, and log on all weekends. I'm willing to bet that this isn't really required, and in my mind is a symptom of one of two possible team problems:

Its either a lack of distributed knowledge, or a lack of trust.

In the first case, the obsessive emailer has become a locked source of knowledge in the team. Everyone comes to her with their questions, and she feels compelled to respond so that others aren't held up. On the surface she feels like she is helping the team, but in the long run she is hurting the team. She is training people to rely on her when they don't immediately know the answer to their own questions. In effect, she has become the safety net. This leads to her working longer hours because she has to handle disruptions during the day and her own job at night.

In the second case its a lack of trust or empowerment in the team. In this case the obsessive emailer has become a locked source of decision making for the team. He has to weigh in on every decision no matter how small, and will become offended if others take action without consultation. He ends up working long hours because sometimes its just easier to do it yourself.

In both of these cases the obsessive emailer is really suffering from the idea that they are more important to the project than they actually are or they have made themselves critical where they don't need to be.

In my teams, I encourage everyone to use mailing lists, wikis, and documentation to overcome the first problem. If you are going to answer someone's question, make sure at least one other person learns from your answer, that helps to distribute knowledge throughout the team and makes it much easier for individuals to rotate in or out.

I also avoid weighing in on every decision in my teams. I encourage people to make their own decisions. Yes, sometimes they'll screw up, and that is ok. The best people you can have in your teams are the ones who screw up in a new way every time. That means that they are taking risks, and learning from their mistakes.

Don't let yourself become a team bottleneck, and don't loose your own work / life balance. Take a step back and see what people do without you. I'll bet you find that they get on ok.

New lines added to severedelays.org

Last night I upgraded the service running at status.severedelays.org (html, xml, json) to include current status for the London Overground and Docklands Light Rail (DLR). This rounds out the service nicely for London.

The last couple of weeks have also included a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make the service scale. I'm pretty happy about where it's at, and am now ready to include new transit networks and new developers.

If you would like to work on a current status API for your local transit network, get in touch with me. Severedelays.org would like to host your data. It's trivially easy to add new transit networks to the service. For example, take a look at the work required to add the London Overground.

This process makes it easy to add new lines, stations, or anything else with data available on the web. My next task for the service is automated service aggregation. I'll be providing aggregates of service levels for each line in the system. So you'll know how often it runs without disruption, and what the likelihood is of it running without disruption tomorrow.

There are hundreds of great applications to be written with this data. Drop me a line if you are interested.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis.



Crisisofcredit.com



The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.



For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit jdjarvis.com.