Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
The best way to make something a permanent solution is to call it a temporary one. That is one of my motto’s at work.
Note that is not any data center at my company. Although I did used to walk by a desktop computer in a hallway that had a big sign on it that said do not shut off, production. Production for what i had no idea nor did i want to ever find out.
A few years ago a guy I work with sent me a TED talk video of Simon Sinek. After watching one of his videos I immediately watched the second one. Both were very fascinating. It inspired me to want to read his book start with why. The reviews however basically said if you watched the TED talk then you really don’t need to read the book. At the time I didn’t.
Over the summer someone at work challenged me to come up with my personal brand. I floundered for a while not knowing what to do since I am terrible at self-promoting or so I thin I asked the same coworker for thoughts on where to star on doing an exercise like that. He suggested going back to start with why He also pointed out that there is or was a course that Simon Sinek offered that helped people come up with their personal why.
What my coworker said made a lot of sense I ended up buying the book even though the reviews suggested I might not need i I’m three quarters of the way through and it’s been pretty interesting It is an easy read however very insightful information.I started reading the book in August I noticed that the course my coworker mentioned was being turned into a book that was published in September. Once I am done with Start With Why I hope to get that book and read it next.
Over the past year and a half my team has been working on ways to improve how we work. There are many aspects of this, and I am deliberately being vague with the high level. One part of this improvement goal is to transform into a high performance team. Turns out that isn’t just some buzz term. There really is a definition for it and proven ways to get there. Going into this process I had no idea! Kidding aside this renewed focus at improvement has had me fascinated.
One of the trainers who I am generally friendly with recommended to me several books to read to help better my understanding beyond the training classes and coaching I have gotten. The first one I read was “Teamwork Is an Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility” by Christopher Avery. I thought it was a fascinating read. Much of it was common sense but still I found myself not doing much of what it suggests. It also made several points that were counter intuitive in todays business world but after reading the book and talking to others that I trust their judgment the concepts really made sense to me. Ever since finishing the book I have been trying to adopt the concepts for myself and in hopes that my team also adopts them. One major point of the book is i can’t expect the team to do what I want. I can only influence them by my own actions.
I read the book on my commute home from work. It was a good read and as much as it wasn’t as exciting as a novel I was very pleased I read it. So much so that I want to read more books like it to help in my quest to be a better manager and a better member of a team.
This wasn’t the first book I have read for this initiative but it is the first one I am blogging about. I am hoping to write some more posts about some additional books that i have found were extremely valuable.
Recently there was some communication snafu of some kind at work. No damage was done but it highlighed the point that people don’t always take into account that we work on a global team. You can’t just say something happened today at 6. What day? 6AM or PM? What time zone are we talking about? Those are all the questions that come to mind when you make a generic statement like that. After that my boss suggested people set their computer clocks to UTC. If you don’t know UTC is basically the renamed version of GMT. Almost everyone dealing with global locations from the military to most major corporations keep time in UTC. Otherwise scheduling is a nightmare. Servers, and other devices are already keeping time in UTC, so my bosses suggestion was that we set our local computers time to UTC. He offered a way you could setup outlook to display two time zones as well so you could see your calendar in local time as well as keep UTC time. Both were good ideas. When I used Outlook on Windows I actually did use the two time zone option but apparently that isn’t available on the Mac version of Outlook.
I thought setting your computer clock to UTC was a good idea but would cause other issues when trying to keep time out of work. The idea did remind me that I had a clock app that i could run and keep in my menu bar that would list out multiple time zones. Not quite the same thing but it is very useful. What I ended up doing instead was set my watch to UTC. I forgot that I had the option to have two time zones on my watch. The dial hands can display normal local time and I can have the digital display show UTC time. That minor realization has already paid off a lot when coordinating calls this week durring the big storm.
I have apps on my iPhone and iPad that also help me with world clock calculations. I do use them often, but instead of having to do the time zone math, thinking in UTC is a big help. I have written a bit in the past about keeping time in a global team. I am writing again because of this minor adjustment to using UTC on my watch had a pretty big impact and I am always amazed at something so simple as keeping time actually can be very difficult sometimes.
UTC on my watch
Work using UTC for everything
Scheduling meeting and events accross time zones
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