The past few years I’ve been trying something with my wife. We have family 360 feedback sessions, very similar to those you might have done at work. What Is a 360 Review The idea came from work in fact. I really liked the format of 360 feedback sessions. For those not familiar, with 360 reviews, when a review cycle comes around, HR helps facilitate collecting feedback on an individual employee from their manager, reports, peers, and the employee themselves. The feedback is then synthesized to help the manager and HR get a good perspective into how the employee is doing – where they excel and where they can improve. The idea is that more data points leads to a better evaluation. How It Started When we had been married for about a year, I thought it would be great to do something like this. Feedback is something that should be continuous, but having a
Today is October 1st which means tonight I will be watching Donnie Darko for the 11th time. It is something I have been doing on October 1st every year – the tradition dates back to 2004. Why watch a movie every year? Why Donnie Darko? This experiment wasn’t designed with as much intention as you would hope – but it has turned out to be awesome nonetheless. The Mirror of Repeat Viewings See, the movie hasn’t changed in the past 10 years, but I have. With each viewing I see something different and I now realize how that tells more about who I am than anything about the movie itself. I stumbled upon a benchmark for measuring the pace of change in my life. Below I will detail my experience over the years. Why Donne Darko? Is Donnie Darko the only movie this can be done with? I don’t believe it is.
This post is the conclusion to an experiment about having no desk at work. After a month of not having a permanent desk I want to reflect on the experiment. Here is how my hypothesis stacked up. Analysis & Conclusions Hypothesis One: I will have less drop-ins I was able to get enough data on this to prove my pointIn total I sat in 12 different places during the 23 working days of the experiment. Of those places, the most common was a couch in the corner of the office that I sat at on seven different days. My average daily drop-ins was 0.78. However, when I started to develop a favorite, people began to know where to find me and the drop-in rate climbed to 1.43. Graphically, here are we can see the number of days I had each count of drop-ins. The highest counts were only achieved on
My Former Desk As of last week, this is what my desk at work looked like. There wasn’t too much to it as far as work spaces go: Macbook Pro 30″ Monitor Framed picture of my wife & recently-printed-from-the-design-team-printer picture of my son Headphones & Mouse Water bottle & bowl for afternoon snacks A few trophies I won at work events That filing cabinet under my desk is mainly storage for running clothes (only clean clothes of course). We have an active culture and every day there is some sort of afternoon activity; running, basketball, flag football, yoga, etc. My decision to experiment with not having a desk happened by accident. It started with my new laptop, a 13″ Macbook Pro Retina. It only weighs about 3lbs which is why I got it. I wanted to have something small and light so I can carry it back and forth to
“The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.” -Maimonides Data Driven Decisions I am a believer that one of the worst things you can do when making decisions is to do so without data. Worse than making a decision without data though is making a slow decision without data. Worst of all is indecision without data. In an effort to push my reliance on data even further, I am undertaking an experiment to make no decisions without data. I will instead defer those decisions to my Dataless Decision Coin. My Dataless Decision Coin This coin is not particularly special. It is a 1971 US $1 coin, commonly called a ‘Silver Dollar’. I’ve had this one for a long time. It was likely given to me by the Tooth Fairy in exchange for a small molar. You can however find a similar coin on ebay for