I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
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?’
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.