A Remarkable Blog

My two-year-old daughter is learning to express her opinions in new ways.  When asked to come to dinner or pick up her toys, she thoughtfully responds “No thanks.” 

Most times when we ask people for help or participation (in something like a Remarkable Tribute, for instance), we don’t get an outright “no thanks.”  We get “Great idea, I’ll try to think of something to say” or something like that.  We get procrastination and well-meaning folks wanting to submit something perfect.  So, what do you do?  You have to make it easy for people to participate.  Give them permission to make it easy on themselves.

With my daughter, we are experimenting with asking multiple choice questions to get engagement.  “Do you want to pick up the dolls or the blocks first? ” we say to turn the request into a game.  The specifics also help her to focus on what is being asked.  Also, going back to the purpose is important.  “Let’s clean up the room, so that we can get out the coloring books” can be a great motivation.

This is not to imply that your friends and family are like two-year olds (please don’t misunderstand), but I think there is some human nature in all of us, no matter our age.   We do better if the request is easy to fulfill, specific, and tied back to a larger purpose.

With your next tribute, you can take some of these tips with you:

• Give people specific ideas about what to contribute.  Ideas here include family recipes, a birthday greeting, a “what we think Bill will be doing after he retires” prediction, pictures of kids in superhero costumes, pictures of plants from your garden, etc.  Be specific so that people don’t experience writer’s block.
• Give people permission to contribute something small.  Everyone wants to submit something perfect.  Articulate, clever, and meaningful words combined with the perfect professional images.  That isn’t that realistic however.  A simple greeting and a picture you might already have around will make for a great tribute, when combined with the same from other friends and family.
• Give people a deadline.  That helps everyone to share the sense of urgency.  Especially if the deadline is tied to an event, holiday, or party.
• Give people a sense of why their contribution matters.  Remind them of the tribute recipient and what they mean.  Remind them of how much this tribute will mean to them, now and in the future.

We so appreciate your enthusiasm for Remarkable Tributes and wish you much success with your future projects!

Relationships are a bit like a square dance or the waltz-style community dances you see in Jane Austin movies.  People coming together, moving apart, ebbing and flowing as the music moves.  It is the strange thing about social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn to see friends or colleagues from different parts of your life and career all in one spot.  Worlds colliding.  Most relationships are about coming together and moving apart, hopefully to come together again.

Remarkable Tributes makes me think of this dance, as the tributes themselves are a coming together.  Usually prompted by an occasion or event.  Motivated by the love and respect for someone remarkable, a group comes together each doing a part to create a lasting tribute.  For a moment, they collaborate.  They connect.  They create together. 

The music will go on.  The dance will continue.  Their paths might never meet again.  However, the tribute lives on as do the feelings and memories.

I was reminded today of the similarities between organizing your sock drawer and developing robust and reliable software code.  So, in the spirit of public service, I offer three pieces of advice that might be useful in both situations:

Photo by ColoredSoxRock on Flickr

1.  Cleaning Up Starts with Cleaning Out

The first step to cleaning out a sock drawer is to dump it out.  Get the drawer empty.  Then start adding them back in an organized fashion.  Matching up pairs and aligning them efficiently.  Not all the socks need to make it back into the drawer.  You may find the ones you don’t use are better given away or put elsewhere. 

Same with software code.  When you are the midst of development, features and ideas tend to collect.  Discipline is hard to maintain throughout a project and it is crticial to not put problematic features back into the code once you remove (or de-emphasize them).  Some bugs are just not worth fixing.  Save the code base and jettison the feature that no one was going to use anyway.  Be ruthless about the features that make it into the software.  37Signals calls this being a “software curator.”  If you had a museum, you can only display so many pieces of art before it becomes a warehouse.  That is the curator’s job to decide what is worthy of display.  Same with software and same with your sock drawer.  Don’t keep them, if they don’t count.

2.  Match Pairs

Socks come in twos (unless you buy from that company that Seth Godin talks about who sells odd batches of unmatched socks).  If you are like most, you want them to match (and you don’t have to rummage around in the dark in the morning to find the appropriate pair).  So, in good light, match the socks and organize them into pairs.  That is how you use them.  That is how they should be organized.

When prioritizing critical features for a release (like a private beta release, for instance), it is important to group in priority the features that are used together.  Providing an incomplete (and less than stellar) experience for your users doesn’t help you much, even if they are the loyal friends-and-family type that agreed to test the software early.  Things that go together should go together. 

3.  Close the Drawer and Walk Away

Sometimes perfect is the enemy.  Make sure you understand your goals.  If the goal is to have a sock drawer that is filled with socks without holes in them, in matched sets, so that the drawer can close, then align all your activity to that.  In the end, call it “done” and walk away.

Software is even worse.  Like a fine art project, is it never “done,” but rather it is “abandoned.”  So, you have to be good managing separation anxiety to finish a software milestone and turn it over to users (especially early in the game).   Especially because at the moment of the release the countdown starts for the next one.  Close the drawer and move onto the next.

The process of development has been packed with learning and excitement continues to build.  It is not too late to sign up for the beta at www.RemarkableTributes.com.