Michael Bianco

Closing the Loop vs Completing the Project

Completing the project is crossing the entire thing off the list, eliminating the chunk of work completely. It’s moving a project from development to maintenance. Closing the loop is different. It’s eliminating the dependency that someone else has on you – or at least updating them on the state. Every project has dependencies, and if you are pushing for excellence your role is most likely key to the projects success. Leaving others hanging is the worst thing you can do. It’s when someone’s dependency on you becomes a blocker to the project or a drain on the projects momentum. And it’s one my biggest faults. I’m a recovering perfectionist. I love when things are complete and I can deliver them to a teammate or client…

Why I Break Up Task Lists

I’ve been using Todoist for a couple months now. It’s a great implementation of the Getting Things Done system. I highly recommend both. However, using a robust task manager doesn’t eliminate the trappings of a yellow legal pad: pages of tasks and ideas without context or prioritization. The lists can still get out of control. As a type-A personality, I love creating tasks and crossing them off a list: the temptation to constantly grow my task list doesn’t go away with a robust task management system. It only gets worse. Less Than Ten You can only do so much in a day. I’m optimistic. I enjoy looking at the day and imagining all that I can accomplish. But, I can only do 10 tasks a day. I’ve tracked, tested, and analyzed this…

Disruption Ahead: The Sharing Economy Revolution

Yesterday I used an Uber for the first time. I’m not in the city without a car a lot: I rarely have the need for a taxi. However, yesterday I needed to get across town as soon as possible: it was extremely cold and the buddy I was meeting only had two hours before he had to go. I didn’t want to waste 40 minutes of it in a bus. As I pulled up Google Maps a ad for Uber appeared at the bottom of the public transportation options. It promised 1/4 of the travel time. In context ads filling a real need I’m experiencing right now. Great job Google & Uber. What I Learned From the Driver I setup the app (awesome on-boarding experience; the app is great) and hoped in someone’s car within minutes…

Other’s Urgent is Not Your Own

I’m a people-pleaser. I love helping people, having a conversation, giving away my knowledge, etc. Over the last year it’s been important for me to learn to say no and not feel guilty. It’s easy for me to let another’s urgent become my own. Whether it’s a friend, a family member, a client, or someone within your organization. Defending your “domino task” – the one task that will move the needle and make the biggest impact – is incredibly important. It’s also really hard. Completely ignoring urgent requests of those around you isn’t possible, but helping the task along with a minimal effort is…

How I Learned to Stop Being Dominated by My Inbox

I Turned It Off Everyone complains about email. There’s a reason: it’s a big stack of todos without context, priority, categorization, and some emails are hard to quickly handle and sit there representing a bunch of non-project work that needs to be done. Message queues with no context destroy your productivity. They scramble your brain. The best way to handle queues – whether it’s email, text messages, project management, etc – is to turn it off and batch process in a constrained amount of time. Tim Ferris checks email only twice a day. This might be too extreme given the culture you are working in, but turning off your email for hours at a time could be a game changer. Try it…

How to Outsource Everything

There are only a couple things that I’m really good at. That list does not include sending invoices, copy editing, fixing cars, scheduling doctor’s appointments, making small WordPress edits, designing flyers, going grocery shopping, going through paper mail, processing paper receipts, bookkeeping, filing taxes, or 100s of other tasks. I can do all of those things, but they aren’t things that only I can do well. As much as possible, it’s important clear the decks and make sure you are concentrating on those items and eliminating any items that don’t fit within your unique sweet-spot. Think of delegation and outsourcing in terms of systems, not just people. Here are some examples: “Outsource” shopping to Amazon…

3 Quick Tips for Managing Your Inbox

Email is hard. It’s so easily abused and can be an enormous time suck. Here some quick tips that I’ve been trying to implement over the last couple months: 1. Unsubscribe from any newsletters you haven’t read in the last month. The information won’t disappear if you don’t read it. If it’s important, you’ll run into it somewhere else. More emails is more noise; kill the noise, be realistic about how many newsletters you can read. 2. Use Unroll.me to manage newsletters you want to read. This tool bundles all email newsletters into a single daily email, reducing noise throughout the day. 3. Setup Gmail filters for any transactional emails that you never actually read…

Manage Your Psychology

I make the most progress on programming, design, and other creative work in the morning. I process email best after accomplishing one big item. For me, A 30 minute meeting destroys at least an hour of productive work time; context switching has a high cost. I know these things about myself and try to mitigate any activities that trigger these “black holes” of productivity loss or momentum killers. Don’t let your workflow be defined by your surroundings. Know how you work and defend the process that works best for you.

Your Brain Isn’t for Remembering

I’m reading through the productivity classic Getting Things Done. This book has helped me create systems to manage the deluge of information thrown at us every day. The never ending stream of information is overwhelming if not managed with discipline and systematically processed using systems. That’s what this book is about: creating systems to manage constant streams of information. One of the main points that David makes is that our brains aren’t made to remember information when we need it. Our intellect is great for creative thinking, but remembering that you ran out of paper clips when your at Walmart isn’t where we excel – especially when we’ve processing information all day long…

Multi-Engine Rails 3.2 Testing Tips & Tricks, Part 3

This is a continuation of my second post on setting up a CI server for a multi-engine rails 3.2 application. Use `Pry.rescue {}` For Dynamic `binding.pry` Getting access to an interactive REPL is essential when debugging a web application. Better Errors does a great job when when interacting with the app directly (in rails4 this functionality comes built in). binding.pry is a great tool when interacting with your code directly in your development or testing environment. However, there are some cases where adding binding pry to just the right place is either painful or would require you to modify a external gem. An easy way to get around this is to use pry-rescue which will open a pry REPL wherever an exception occurs…

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