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Sometimes I just want a blank sheet of paper (and sometimes I don't)
I call it the pushback moment.
It’s that moment when I am writing something - it might be a work document, or a presentation, or one of these articles - when it’s just not working. The sentences are tangled, the meaning is muddy, and I am not getting my point across.
That’s when I push back all of the papers and references and notebooks from my desk and reach for a fresh, blank sheet of paper (or, digitally, open another browser tab and create an empty document). And I ask myself a question: ‘What am I trying to say?’
Lessons learnt from five years of learning lessons
In September 2018, I challenged my architecture team to publish their thinking in public. I thought that, as people who aspired to set the technical direction for one of the largest banks in the world, we should have a clear, distinctive voice, and we should make that voice heard outside our own organisation.
My team quite rightly challenged me back. After you, they said. Why don’t you go first? they asked. I couldn’t think of a reason to say no, so I committed that I would write some articles and publish them on LinkedIn. They pushed me: how often will you write? I said that I’d try to do it weekly. How hard could it be?
Five years later, publishing this weekly newsletter has become part of my routine. As I approach that five year anniversary, I thought it might be interesting to spend a couple of weeks reflecting on everything I have learnt over those five years, and taking the risky step of making some predictions for the next five years. First, though, I’d like to write down the answer to a question many of my colleagues have asked me: how should they go about writing their own articles?
Thinking time, or thinking just in time?
One of the good things about working at Google is the opportunity for continuous learning, not just about technology, but about topics such as how teams work and how to manage one’s own time - all based on data and research.
One thing I learnt recently was how little time people at work typically spend thinking (not thinking in meetings, or thinking while they write code or documents, but just thinking): for most people it’s less than 30 minutes per day. This was a surprise, but feels intuitively plausible. If we think about how we spend our days, we realise that we spend most of our time running from task to task or from meeting to meeting. Scheduling time for nothing but thinking can feel self-indulgent, or as if we are not doing ‘real’ work.
Thinking differently about . . . collaboration
How often have you accidentally hit ‘reply all’ when sending an email? Or included someone on the cc: list that you didn’t intend to? I think that we all know the feeling of making that mistake.
I had a similar experience in my new job at Google last week - but it turned out to be a lesson about collaboration instead of a mistake.
I was editing a document using Google docs, and when I hit the share button, I was asked whether I wanted to share it with the same people as the document I had copied it from. I hit ‘yes’ - then realised that I had shared the document with about a hundred people, rather than the half dozen I had intended it for. I had a sinking feeling for a moment - then remembered that I needed to think differently about collaboration.