I like being able to knock things out in a day at my day job at Playdom and being efficient is very important part of my job.  But what I found are four things that I do that helped me become a lot more focused at work and helped me stay focused at work.  They're ordered in the amount of impact they had on my life:

1. Get Some Sleep

Lots of studies have shown that folks who get at least 7 to 8 hours of good rest a night are significantly more likely to perform better at work.  Good sleep at night is THE most important thing you can do to stay focused.  The less sleep you get, the more you will suck! Be wary of relying on sleep aids to get your sleep.  Studies show drugs like Ambien increases your risk of cancer.

2. Turn Off the Ding

Turning off the email ding noise on my desktop, laptop, iPhone and other devices was a huge help.  Whenver the ding would tell me I had new mail, I'd stop what I'm doing and go look at the email like a lion looking at a big fat steak.  It was stupid and pointless and distracted me from what was important.  The minute I turned it off, I was able to reclaim a lot of my focus.  

3. Stop Eating Lunch At Your Desk

Sure, maybe you'll finish that cover letter, that one less email, that extra whatever it is.  It can wait 15 bloody minutes.  Get up, ask a friend to eat lunch with you and have a face to face conversation with them.  Hell, go for a walk together.  The point is, get up and move!  When you're working at your desk for 3 hours, eating lunch at your desk and then working for another 5 hours, you begin to lose track of time.  Your mind isn't given any chance to stretch and enjoy the break in the monotonay and have a good conversation with someone.  When I stop eatting at my desk, I find that I'm able to stretch my brain mentally and focus so much more because I was able to take a moment to relax.  That lets me refocus when I'm back!

4. Drink Water

No, don't get that 5 hour energy.  Coffee, screw it.  Get a glass of water like your mama used to make you do.  Chances are if you're tired and cranky you need water and a snack, we're just like little kids!  When I was tired at work I used to grab a cup of coffee to help me out, but it ended up making way more tired.  Grabbed a liter of water and felt like a million bucks.  Turns out, lack of water can mess up your eltrolyte balance and cause fatigue.  Drink up!

In a tip of my hat to Tim Ferris, author of the 4 Hour Work Week, I automated parts of my life that were mundane or easy to automate in exchange for getting some of my time back.  With my job getting more and more demanding on my time, I had to find ways to automated parts of my life so I could find time to take care of myself by going to the gym, meditating, and doing the things that I love to do.  Chores are an important part of life, but skipping out on things that I loved was making me miserable.  So I decided to do what any good engineer does, automate it!

1. Hire Housekeepers  (Time Saved: 1hr/week)

No it's not just for the rich and famous, Aboda has an amazing service that is affordable and they do just about everything.  I let them in before I leave for work and ask them to close up when are done.  They visit about once a month and saves me over 4 hours of cleaning a month (1 hour a week) cleaning up the place.  Their cleaners are very friendly and I've never had a problem with anything getting stolen.  

2. Couriers (Time Saved: 1/2 hr/week)

New York City makes extensive use of couriers to make their trips.  Seattle has them as well and they aren't that expensive. Can't get out of the office and pick up something, get a courier and have them get it for you.  I had an item that I just had to get that day and couldn't wait, so I hired a courier for $20 and they got the item and even made an extra trip for free.  Time saved, 1.5hrs.  

3. Dry Cleaners (Time Saved: 1hr/week)

I used to wash all my own shirts and hand iron them each week.  It took a long time to do this and it was pretty relaxing, but as the needs of my job picked up, I found myself running out out clean clothes are more importantly, clean clothes!  Cleaners are a great way to help recover around 30-45 mins a week for a guy and probably way more for a girl with dresses.  Most of them even have door to door delivery + pickup for the same price as dropping off in the store!  Time saved: 1hr a week

4. Automated Bill Pay (Time Saved: 15mins/week)

This is a no brainer, your bank has online bill pay, schedule your bills to be auto drafted.  Glance at them each month and make sure that you're not getting billed for crap or stuff you didn't buy/use. 

5. Car Wash (Time Saved: 30 mins/week)

Gone are the days that I hand wash my truck anymore. With a deluxe car wash on the east side including interior vacuum for $9, it's so easy to get this done.  Time Saved: 1 Hour every 2 weeks

Total Time Saved: 3.25hrs/week

Over a year ago, I was talking to Greg Gottesman of Madrona on a good book to read on leadership and he recommended an unusual title to me.  The biography of President Truman came up and he recommended it as a great read and a good example of great leadership.  The book was massive, a hefty 1,000 page book with very small print and a brief section of photos in the middle.  This book is not for those with short attention spans.  

Too Long, Didn't Read:

1. Be vocal on what you believe in so that people don't decide for you.  
2. People's selfishness can put lots of things at risk, set selfish people right by acting swiftly and forcefully.
3. Never accept inferior work and do the right thing, you will earn respect from people who really matt
   er.

1. If you don't decide to stand for anything, others will decide for you

Shortly after the unexpected death of Roosevelt, Truman found himself in the dark and trying to fumble his way into office.  Always secretive and played his political cards close to his chest, Roosevelt didn't give much for Truman to go off of.  When taking office, people were wondering where he stood on the policies that have been set into motion by the existing administration or would he branch into his own version of policies.  With little go off of, it was a difficult and hard position to fill.  

Because of all the information he needed to absorb, he ended up spending so much time trying to understand the existing situation and not focusing on what he was going to stand for.  He was trying to fill in for someone else's policies and that made it very difficult for the nation to see what he believed and stood for.  The nation just saw an average joe sinking in the weight of the office.

Once Truman caught up with the situation, something changed.  He started announcing his stance on issues and speaking out on things that he believed to be right.  Sure, he upset some people and others rallied behind him. However there was much less uproar over having silence from the President. 

What I Learned: If you don't stand for anything and don't speak out on what that is as a leader, people will decide what you will stand for and chances are you cannot possibly meet everyones expectations.   The result is that you will fail everyone.  Stand up for what you believe in.  Be vocal and loud.  Without passion to fight for what you believe is right, people cannot rally or support you.  People need someone to believe in.

2. When people get selfish, you need to be selfish too

During the strikes of the railroad union, the entire nations infrastructure came during a screeching halt. During World War II, the entire nation depended on the rail system to move critical war supplies around the states.  The rail road workers were being treated unfairly and the management of the railroad companies were enjoying generous profits and eager not to share them.  President Truman was known to not mess around with contractors who were being selfish, so he called them into his office.

President Truman gave them a jaw dropping mandate.  Solve the strike in 72 hours, or I'll draft you and the railroad workers into the military by presidential order.  It was a gross abuse of presidential power, but it was effective.  Within 48 hours, an agreement had been drafted and the nation was back to getting critical war supplies.

What I Learned: When people's selfishness gets in the way of things, it's important to set them straight firmly and swiftly.  Letting things go longer just lets people get more entrenched in their ways and it should be handled quickly.  It may require doing something uncomfortable, but chances are everyone will thank you when its over.

3. Never accept inferior work

Truman's reputation for making sure suppliers did what they were supposed to do became legendary and helped catapult him to the status of President.  He had zero tolerance for sloppy workmanship and corrupt politicians selling contracts to contractors who did cut-rate work and cut corners.

When we was working in Kansas City building county roads, he encountered companies that charged twice the market rate and did a crappy job in building roads.  Not only did he withhold payment, but forced the contractor to fix the broken roads and bring them up to code.  Ever after his boss, Mr. Pendergast (known for his corruption) called him and asked, "I hear you're making quite a ruckus over this roads" and asked him to back off, he refused.  He earned the respect of Pendergast as being the honest members he could count on.

What I Learned: Doing the right thing is never easy and will often cause a lot of problems.  Chances are the people who are making the noise benefit from cutting corners and even though its not easy, push through and the right things will prevail.  Doing the right thing also earned Truman as a reputation of being a beacon of honesty in a corrupt area.  Warning:  This was a double edged sword for Truman.  He was often passed up for positions that sometimes required politicians to look the other way over shady dealings.

I've gotten the honor and privledge to speak at Startup Weekend Nov 11th to the 13th about Agile development!  I created a special version of Scrum called "Startup Weekend Agile" that's adapted to work in the condensed 48 hour timeline.  The whole goal is to help teams improve their ability to deliver a functioning and working product in the condensed weekend.  Readers of my blog get a special sneak preview of what Startup Weekend Agile is and how it works.  Thanks for reading!

The Presentation

Goals of Startup Weekend Agile

1. Reduce the risk of taking too long to deliver a solution by the demo on Sunday the 13th.
2. Reduce the risk of executing on the wrong idea, wrong solution or something that doesn't matter to the customer.
3. Facilitate discovery of the unknown.  If you don't know what you need to build, there needs to be a structured way of discovering how to build it.
4. Allow the team to quickly change directions when new information becomes available.

When something is made just for you, it's got something special to it that you can't describe. I'm not a small guy at 6'1", so it's hard to find shirts that fit me well, especially dress shirts.  What ends up happening is that I try to find something that fits me in the stores, but they often have too short of sleves or the shoulders and sleeves fit, but the center section is so big a whale can slip in there.

I got frustrated and gave up, that's it.  I'm getting a shirt made just for me.  For the first time in my life, I was given a shirt and it fit perfectly.  No problems, no tight spots, no short sleves, no nothing.  Just a beautiful shirt that felt great and made me feel awesome.

There's something magical about something made just for you, whether it's dinner with your loved one (Jess?), a coffee just the way you like it or a custom shirt that fits you every way you'd like.  What you get when you have something made just for you is the personal touch that makes it unique and fits your needs exactly without compromise. 

I was feeling creative tonight so I ended up making my own squash soup from the Food Network recipe bin.  It was really simple and tastes AMAZING! 

Ingredients

• 6 cups (about 2 large squash) seeded 2-inch wide chunks butternut squash
• Melted butter, for brushing
• 1 tablespoon kosher salt, plus 1 teaspoon
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper, plus 1/2 teaspoon
• 3 cups chicken or vegetable stock
• 4 tablespoons honey
• 1 teaspoon minced ginger
• 4 ounces heavy cream
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Directions

Recently Franck and I had the opportunity to meet up with Susannah Boyle's classroom at Cleveland High School to talk about why engineering and science is important to study and how it relates to video games.  It was a great opportunity to affect young minds into pursuing a career that's in high demand and give students a chance to meet someone who was where they were and the choices I made that took me to where I am today.

The first thing we started was a fun exercise where we turned the classroom into a graphics card to render a picture on the screen, a classic space invader icon! I handed out 110 slips of paper to the students with the address from A1 to J9 and whether the cell was off or on.  If it was on, it got a piece of paper, if it was off is was left blank.  What we ended up with was a cool spacer invader made with post it notes.  It's a great way for students to see what is happening inside of the computer and how it draws images on the screen.

In the next example,  we focused on a game that everyone knows, angry birds.  We talked about how the game uses common single and multi variable equations that they are learning now in algebra to calculate the tragegtory of the bird.  These equations are also used to calculate the forces on the objects it collides with in the game.  I could see the math teacher beaming with a new way to connect with students!  

Lastly, we talked about how did we get into engineering when we were little. I had discovered my dads apple IIc in the basement and found a disk that taught programming using a simple set of picture.  I ended up falling in love with the computer and loved everything that I could do with it. My crowning achievement was writing an application that printed a happy birthday banner for my little brother.  Right then, I knew what I wanted to do.  I hope we had a positive effect on the kids and I hope one of them decides to be an engineer or scientist!

I didn't get a good night of sleep the night before due to having a cup of coffee a bit too late in the afternoon, so I arrived in the office wth a sleepy look on my face.  Coffee in the AM was not cutting it and wasn't really waking me up.  That's when I remembered what Brandon makes once in a while, grab a 5 hour energy, vitamin water and Emergen-C.  It's a gigantic vitamin cocktail that woke me up.  I described it as my body "vibrating", it's wasn't etirely pleasant.  If you need to be awake and you didn't get good enough sleep to cover you, this will do the trick.

The "Brandon"

• 1 Bottle of Vitamin Water (any flavor)
• 1 Bottle of 5 Hour Energy
• 1 Packet of Emergen-C

Drink a bit of Vitamin Water to make room for the other ingredients.  Mix in the Emergen-C first so that the fizz doesn't bubble over, you need at least 2 inhes at the top of the bottle.  Then pour in the 5 hour energy and mix well.  Drink slowly over the course of the morning, you don't want to be buzzing all day!