In in my last post about perfectionism, I’ve ended up posing a question: what makes an accomplished perfectionist? In other words, how does one balance the act of accomplishment with a strive for perfection? It’s a pretty thin line if you ask me, and in this post, I’m going to shed light on some of the techniques you can use to achieve that.

Accomplished perfectionism is the fusion of two separate genes: those that empower a person to get things done as quickly and efficiently as possible, and those that compels him or her to do their best possible job on these things.

To illustrate, take a look at the following phrases which are more likely to be said or thought by a carrier of each of these two genes:

Being a perfectionist myself, I totally resonate with the phrases said or thought in the Perfectionist column. That’s why I set out to research practical ways to help me make the transition to be a high achiever while maintaining an adequate sense of perfectionism. I’ve found many resources on this subject, so I thought I’d do myself and my readers a favor by compiling all findings in a comprehensible format which can be quickly learned and adopted to create the best possible mutation of these two genes.

Personal Attitudes

Change starts from within. If you really want to lose your neurotic perfectionism and embrace a more healthy one, then there are few things you need to change on the inside. Elizabeth Scott has set of great tips on how to tackle your inner change:

See the Positive. If you’re struggling with perfectionism, you probably have honed the skill of spotting mistakes in even the best works of others and of yourself. You may just naturally look for it, and notice it above all other things. While this habit may be difficult to just stop, you can soften your tendency to notice the bad by making a conscious effort to notice all that is good with your work and the achievements of others. If you notice something you don’t like about yourself or your work, for example, look for five other qualities that you do like. This will balance out your critical focus and become a positive new habit.

Work Habits

The next things you need to work on are your everyday working habits. Whether you work as a freelancer or at large multi-national cooperation, you need to consider implementing the following changes in order to accomplish more and be happy about it:

1. Do no more than what is necessary. It couldn’t get simpler than that. But since that’s easier said than done, Donald Latumahina at Lifehack has few more tips regarding this:
   1. Set a clear expected output.
   2. Write down the expected output in a prominent place.
   3. Realign yourself with the expected output every now and then.
   4. Stop when you already get the expected output.
2. Work with inverted pyramid structure. This is actually a very useful tip if you think about it. The idea is to do the subtasks from the most important down to the least important.
   
3. Set a deadline. By setting a deadline, you are forced to prioritize the things you are doing. This way, if the time is up you can still deliver the best possible output.
4. Maintain focus on completion, because that’s what matters. At the end of the day, people who master the art of the finish will be recognized, no matter how relatively imperfect their jobs were.

Conclusion

I hope during the course of this and my previous post, I’ve given all of you perfectionists out there a reason to rethink your strategy towards work and life and making appropriate changes that will ultimate lead to a happier and more peaceful life.

I’d like to end this post by sharing a fabulous quote from Stephen Manes’s book: Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days:

Congratulations!  You’re not perfect!  It’s ridiculous to want to be perfect anyway.  But then, everybody’s ridiculous sometimes, except perfect people.  You know what perfect is?  Perfect is not eating or drinking or talking or moving a muscle or making even the teensiest mistake.  Perfect is never doing anything wrong – which means never doing anything at all.  Perfect is boring!  So you’re not perfect!  Wonderful!  Have fun!  Eat things that give you bad breath!  Trip over your own shoelaces!  Laugh!  Let somebody else laugh at you!  Perfect people never do any of those things.  All they do is sit around and sip weak tea and think about how perfect they are.  But they’re really not one-hundred-percent perfect anyway.  You should see them when they get the hiccups!  Phooey!  Who needs ‘em?  You can drink pickle juice and imitate gorillas and do silly dances and sing stupid songs and wear funny hats and be as imperfect as you please and still be a good person.  Good people are hard to find nowadays.  And they’re a lot more fun than perfect people any day of the week.

Further Reading

During my research for this post, I’ve come across few great articles that I think are worthwhile to read. Some of them have been used or linked to from this post:

• Perfectionist Traits: Do These Sound Familiar?
• Overcoming Perfectionism: How To Develop a Healthier Outlook
• Restricting The Creative Perfectionist
• 10 Tips to Be Accomplished and Instead of Just Busy
• How to Become an Effortless Achiever
• The Art of the Finish: How to Go From Busy to Accomplished
• Top 10 Traits of Highly Successful People -That You Can Learn!
• Productivity Tip: How Not to Overspend Your Time On a Task
• Effective is Not the Same as Efficient

If you’re anything like me, then you’ll resonate with symptoms of what’s called perfectionism. Being a perfectionist at work and college is something I’ve been very proud of, despite not being fully aware of it. Everybody I came to deal with including my boss and colleagues was impressed by the level of sophistication and professionalism I’d go about completing my tasks.

This, of course, also had its toll on me most of time. Long working hours in the office (by choice) trying to get that deliverable up to my standards and still meeting that deadline was the norm for me.

Then a couple of days ago I came across an article that was like a revelation. It made me realize that now I’m at this point in my career life where I have to make serious changes to my work habits if I want to be an accomplished person. This post is me trying to analyze that change and hopefully helping fellow perfectionists along the way.

I’m pretty sure you are probably wondering now: why is being a perfectionist something you would want to change? How does it ruin one’s professional life? Doesn’t it make you, I don’t know.. better than the others?

If you think about it (or have experienced it yourself) then you’d probably agree with me on this: perfectionism can get in the way of accomplishment. Well, at least a certain kind of perfectionism.

Neurotic perfectionism

In this life, there’s always the good and the bad, and when something good turn into a bad one, it’s because someone’s abused it.

Perfectionism works along the same lines. When abused, it turns into neurotic perfectionism. You’d know that kind when you notice:

1. a constant need for approval from others.
2. standards too high to achieve.
3. endless anxiety about making mistakes with no way to cope.
4. no role models of others who handle failures or successes well.
5. your coworker’s office looking like this:
   

A common mistake people make is to associate any kind of perfectionism with neurotic perfectionism. As you’ll see later on, there’s a healthy kind of perfectionism that I think we all should strive to embody.

Does the world need perfectionists or achievers?

Think about this: which one of the following two (hypothetical) people is more likely to get hired in, say, a high-profile fortune 500 company:

1. Niddeala is a college graduate, experienced .NET developer who has very professional attitude and delivers professional results. He is, to a certain degree, obsessed about maintaining the quality of work he’s known for, and thus spends an awful lot of time perfecting his job. His end-results are fabulous and quite often superior to his colleagues’.
2. Reehsab is a college graduate, experienced .NET developer who has worked with several companies on various .NET-based projects, including ERP and stock charting. He has a track record of successfully completed projects which he’s proud of and uses as his main selling point during interviews. However, he lacks dedication for creating quality results (in programming terms, for instance, that means the last thing he worries about are code comments and documentation). He is simply happy to get the task done and start a new one, because let’s face, he will not withstand working on the same task for far too long.

Any experienced hiring manager should be able to spot the clear sign of difference in perfectionism during the interview. But which one would he pick? Surely that depends on many other factors, including the manager’s past experiences with perfectionists.

But let’s say the manager’s given a third choice. All of the sudden, a third person named Reedeala pops in. The manager, still not decided who to go with, gives this guy a shot at an interview. After all, his CV looks quite interesting.

Reedeala‘s work speaks for itself. His 4 year experience working for 2 high-profile companies and helping them deliver .NET-based solutions to the market is impressive. He considers himself “a go-getter with attention to details”. His work is often praised for promptness and completeness. His previous managers speak well of his professional attitutde towards business.

As you can see, Reedeala carries the best qualities of Niddeala and Reehsab (hence his weird name).

So what am I getting at?

Perfectionist + Achiever = Every employer’s fantasy dream

No, not that kind of dream.

It just means: Reedeala’ is getting the job.

The reason is quite obvious, and it’s really the point I’d like to make in this post:

The world is now looking for the best people who can accomplish their jobs and still manage to deliver quality results. Those people are capable of spending just the right amount of time and energy on every task at hand in order to produce their best possible work in the shortest amount of time, or for meeting deadlines.

The world isn’t looking for perfectionists who abuse the time they’re given for each task trying to satisfy their desire for attention by worrying about smallest of irrelevant details and things that are just nice to have.

And just as much, the world isn’t looking for uninspired, unmotivated people who just want to get by.

The world is looking for.. accomplished perfectionists!

In the next post, we will dig deep to find out exactly what makes an accomplished perfectionist, which is the term I’m using to describe the person who gets the job done with a higher than ordinary level of perfectionism.

Conclusion

Back when I was in school, we were taught this little ditty: Good, better, best, never let it rest, ’till your good is better, and your better is best.

But my experiences so far have forced me to pose this question: is “the best” always better than “good” and “better”?

In other words, there’s a line that we always have to draw somewhere between excelling at our jobs and going over the line to becoming neurotic perfectionists.

See you next time!

I will elaborate on that so it makes little more sense to you:

There’s a common phrase I use quite often (especially at work) to describe the thing where you pretend to do something by acting as if you were really doing it, but never actually getting it done. It’s called going through the motions.

It amazes me how often we find ourselves inadvertently going through the motions of achieving things, doing everything we know we’re supposed or told to do, but eventually not reaching the finish line, or reaching it a bit too late.

I wasn’t aware of how guilty I am of this until I started my current job a couple of years ago and started to learn about the environment and work culture. Two years down the road, I’ve realized that what we actually do here at the company is far from trying to get projects done. We obsess very little about end results and a lot more about methodologies, frameworks, work policies, clearing our responsibilities and basically just getting the ball on to the other side.

Make no mistake, we do like to feel accomplished, and we’re actually getting paid to do so. But we’re lousy at that, and you know why? Because we think that by going through the motions of working on various projects, clearing many seemingly important tasks, being all productive and punctual, we’re bound to drive projects to the finish line. The only problem is, we usually don’t. Our projects carry on for years (I’m not exaggerating!). So what is it we’re doing wrong? Or to put it in a more general way:

How does going through the motions of accomplishing things not help us accomplish them?

Speaking for myself, I have always thought that by being productive, for instance, I should see flow of results and accomplishments. After all, I have just the right system, with just the right calendar technology, and to-do notebook, and task management philosophy. I can just turn the system on and watch it churn out what needs to be done.

What I didn’t realize though is that productivity is overrated. It’s not the goal but the means to an end. And so are all the other things that we do that don’t bring us that much closer to seeing our projects through.

It takes a really critical eye to spot those things, and it takes guts and bravery to decide that we’re no longer doing them, but instead focusing on more important things or tasks that are sure to drive our projects home.

What kind of things are considered as “going through the motions”?

I’ll give you few examples to make my point a little more concrete. I’ll draw from my own experiences at work or in my personal life, and I welcome you to share your own in the comments.

1. Productivity always leads to more accomplishment. “If you are productive without harboring this intense desire for completion, you will end up just being busy. We all know the feeling. You work all day off of your to-do list. Everything is organized. Everything is scheduled. Yet, still, months pass with no important projects getting accomplished.”
2. More time spent equals more accomplishment. I will never understand why so many companies go to great lengths to emphasize importance of being punctual and sticking with the shift schedule, most of the time at the expense of employees’ productivity.
   In my opinion, one of the most important decisions any company must make is whether being punctual is more or less important than being productive. It’s unfair to expect employees to be strictly punctual and highly productive, especially if you’re making them work long hours.
3. Work policies. All those work policies that a company may (or may not) have in place to control its internal business operations do nothing but hinder employees performance most of the time. I’m talking about things like complex and intertwined organization hierarchy that forces employees to go through complex channels to achieve the simplest of tasks like making a purchase request, all in the name of “consolidating internal communication”.
   The trick is to be constantly re-evaluating the company’s internal policies, paying close attention to feedback from actual employees and their supervisors, and making appropriate changes as fast as possible to help employees stay focused on accomplishing their jobs.

But despite what’s mentioned above, the road to really being accomplished starts with you knowing what makes an accomplished person or company.

Accomplished people are different “species”!

To quote the author of the article that inspired this post:

From my experience, the most common trait you will consistently observe in accomplished people is an obsession with completion. Once a project falls into their horizon, they crave, almost compulsively, to finish it. If they’re organized, this might happen in scheduled chunks. If they’re not — like many — this might happen in all-nighters. But they get it done. Fast and consistently.

It’s this constant stream of finishing that begins, over time, to unlock more and more interesting opportunities and eventually leads to their big scores.

I took liberty of highlighting certain keywords in the quote that, when put together, gives you the traits of this species:

• obsession
• completion
• crave
• compulsive
• finish
• organized
• fast
• consistent
• big scores

What connects all of the above traits, which is also the point I’d like to make in this post, is the following observation:

To be an accomplished person, you have to see each and every task you do for a project in light of the expected project outcome. If it should contribute significantly to what you’re trying to accomplish, then go for it. Otherwise, skip it altogether or replace it with something more likely to get you there faster. Never go through the motions of accomplishing your project by performing needless or marginally significant tasks. Always crave to reach the finish line, or at least before that turtle does :)

A framework for being an accomplished person

In that inspirational post titled: The Art of the Finish: How to Go From Busy to Accomplished, guest writer Cal explains an overly simple framework for cultivating a passion and dedication for accomplishment.

I’ll be personally giving this framework a shot over the coming months. However, I may have a preference towards keeping the list described in the framework in a digital format using my PDA rather than plain paper, because I’m a fan of carrying less things around and making the most use of what I already have.

Conclusion

The truth is that being accomplished is hard work. It’s not pretty. If you really want join the elite group of accomplished people, then you have to be willing to put in whatever effort necessary to see the light at the end of the tunnel, whilst avoiding unnecessary diversions.

OK, enough serious talk. Time for some words fun.

I’ve told you how we use the phrase “going through the motions” a lot at work to vent off our frustration with the system. Well, we also came up with a whole list of abbreviations and derivative words for that: (dictionaries aside please)

1. Motion is a reference for the longer phrase (going through the motions).
2. Motionable refers to a task that (potentially) involves needless activities.
3. Motionization is how a whole bunch of needless activities fill the void left by removing the actually useful ones. Quite a mouthful, I know :)
4. Motionlessness is sort of a utopia where every task contributes directly to the accomplishment of our projects, and all those other pesky little insignificant tasks that suck up our energy are left in the dark for the rats to feed on (metaphorically).

I waited till today to write about it because it took a little while to sink in. I mean, it’s over! The ambitious plan that started early this year with my attempt to get into the field of usability and gain some credentials has now been realized.

For new readers of this blog, Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) is a certification offered by the world-renowned usability consulting company called Human Factors International as an entry-level certification for usability professionals. It’s the perfect kick-start for people who are passionate about this field of science like me.

My plan to achieve this certification involved traveling all the way to India for a 10-days training course in July. That went pretty well. I came back and had about 2 months to study for and prepare for the certification exam. I wasted no effort reviewing all the course materials and reading lots of online and offline literature on this subject. Finally, I devised a strategy for taking the exam that involved creating a reference sheet (PDF) to lookup any piece of information I may need during the exam (it’s an open-book one). The latter proved very useful during the 2.5 hours, 100 questions exam.

With this certification under my belt, I’m now ready to delve into the world of usability and human-computer interaction. As a matter of fact, I already have a blueprint for a usability career plan. The steps of this plan go something like this:

1. Establish professional credibility by way of certification and actual practice.
2. Work towards bringing usability knowledge and practices into my workplace.
3. Start a dedicated blog and write regularly about different topics in usability such as user-centered design.
4. When I feel confident with enough usability work to back me up, I will start giving public speeches and training sessions.

What I’m really hoping to achieve is something bigger which is to bring the science of usability into this part of the world and make people (especially those involved in IT) aware of it’s critical importance. I honestly hope to look back on this post one day and say with confidence that I’m at least one step closer to achieving this grand plan of mine. It’s not completely selfless, as I’ll hopefully become famous for this effort. But in doing so, I’ll also make the lives of many, many people easier since the institutionalization of usability means we will start making (and using) many products that are usable, useful and effective. Everybody’s life will be easier. It’s what computers were always meant to do, and it’s up to us to make them do just that.

Believe it or not, there came a period when I kept thinking "the web sucks, there’s nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to watch!". I would launch the browser, and stare for a while in the blank white canvas, thinking: "so now what?". I had no good use of the web except for emails and chatting.

That was between 2004 and early 2006. Sometime mid 2006, I discovered something that would make a bigger impact in my life than anything I’ve ever tried before!

That thing was Netvibes; a wonderful online service that puts everything you’d ever want to do on the web in a single customizable page. The odd thing is, nowadays, I don’t use Netvibes (for some reason). However, credit goes to Netvibes for introducing me to the wonderful world of really simple sex syndication, otherwise known as RSS feeds

So I went ahead and gave it a shot. I added some preset feeds for popular sites and later discovered some more on my own, such as LifeHacker.

Fast forward to this day: I am one hell of an RSS addict who realized so many benefits from using RSS that I can’t even count. However, it occurred to me yesterday why not think of the top 5 things you achieved by using RSS?

So here they are. While reading this, try to think of things you achieved by using RSS and share them in the comments section.

1) Realize my career passion

Since I got my undergraduate CS degree in 2004, I’ve been trying out so many things in hope of discovering that one true passion that would shape up the rest of my career. I started with web development, moved to system analysis, contemplated software engineering, project management, and even business administration. However, I never really felt at heart that any of those is what I’m meant to do.

That was until one day I discovered a blog about software development called Joel on Software. Amongst many things, Joel writes about elements of interface design and human factors that I found immediately fascinating.

Long story short, I began exploring more in this field by subscribing to dozen blogs that explore software usability. The more I read about it, the more I realized I’m meant to do this.

Right now, I’m preparing for a masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction and, moreover, I’m launching a dedicated blog that talks about this stuff (stay tuned!).

2) Learn about wonders of Web 2.0

Netvibes takes the credit here too. What I have seen after Netvibes were a bunch of similar sites (Pageflakes, YourMinis, etc) that had something in common. That thing was elements of Web 2.0, so I set out to find out what this term I kept hearing about.

Fast forward April 15 2007, I gave my first ever public speech about Web 2.0, which has now become yet another passion of mine, all because of the many blogs I subscribed to that that explore this topic in depth (e.g., Read/Write Web).

3) Develop my presentation skills

Readers of this blog know that I have an inexplicable love for public speaking ever since college. Again, with RSS, I wanted to take this to the next level by learning how to be professional speaker. Many blogs offer wealth of information in this regard, most notably Presentation Zen. One of my career goals is to be a renowned public speaker in what I do.

4) Learn about blogging and starting my own blog

Before this blog, I had this cheesy creepy site that I spent about a month coding. It was what they call "Web 1.0"ish. It had this god-forbidden guest book like the old days. It was basically a piece of crap.

Then I learned about blogs and blogging as a consequence of using RSS. Beginning 2007, I started this blog to be the place where I write about things that are interesting enough to share with the rest of the world. Furthermore, I subscribed to dozen blogs that teach the art of blogging, most notably Daily Blogs Tips.

5) Enhance my writing skills

When you start such a venture as a blog, your success depends, among other things, on how good a writer you are. You learn to write in order to capture attention and present worthwhile content. That’s exactly what happened with me. Of course, I have not developed my skills out of thin air. Again, I’ve subscribed to many blogs that offer tremendous insight into proper copywriting, such as ProBlogger and Copyblogger.

Conclusion

I guess the point of all of this is to prove that if you’re not using RSS, then you’re likely missing out on a lot of good stuff. I may be an extreme example, having more than 100 subscriptions in my news reader of choice, Google Reader. However, you can subscribe to only dozen sites and still manage to keep up with them on regular basis. This will not just save you time, it’d open your mind to bigger realm of possibilities!

* Image of RSS Icon by contentXXL

Four months in the making, the curtains are finally drawn on my first ever public speech which was, by all measures, a big success!

Of course, when we’re talking success here, we’re talking relative one taking in consideration this being kind of my first public one and the fact that it’s the first time I’m presenting this widely popular phenomenon, known as Web 2.0.

That being said, the speech wasn’t without fair share of flaws. I received some valuable feedback from the audience and the organizers. However, the general feedback was that this presentation was so awesome it’s a shame many people couldn’t make it. Well my friend, that is a good enough testament, for me, for now!

Let’s take a look at the good, the bad and the ratings.

The Good

• My passion for the subject was apparent and people appreciated that.
• I kept the audience attentive due to:
• • Proper use of visual aids
  • Constant change of voice pitch
  • Body movement
  • Some jokes here and there :)
• I got the message home and I was able to explain some very complex ideas of Web 2.0 to people who never heard the name before!

The Bad (learned lessons)

• I stumbled quite a bit in the beginning and said some nonsense stuff before I picked up pace and went into the flow.
• I think I was talking too fast even though my main goal with this one was to practice slower speech and more pauses. This may be understandable given the fact that the topic is quite big and complex and it had to be delivered in less than two hours.
• I also failed to achieve my second goal which is good straight-up posture.
• I’ve been told that I overdressed. A simple casual style would have done better job because I wasn’t in the position to talk to investors or pitch a product. I was merely volunteering to explain something to (mostly) university students.
• When most people put in the "umm", mine was the "ok?" which followed pretty much every statement and was a bit irritating and noticeable in the footage taken.
• In an attempt to create a connection with the audience, I inadvertently blurted out couple of words which I later discovered were unnecessary way of describing certain popular e-mail service that I’m not too fond of ;)

Ratings

The following graphs are for 4 key indicators as rated by the audience:

Conclusion

The whole experience was amazing!

It was the first one of a kind for me. For the first time, I got to present something I’m really passionate about. At the same time, all that reading I’ve been doing in presentation skills (kinda) paid off and I did something the audience have probably never seen before.

Would I do it again? Absolutely! I’m already getting invitations to do the same thing in some other universities and places. Also, since I got the general overview out of the way, now I’d like to dig deep into real-world applications of Web 2.0, probably starting with incorporating Web 2.0 services and technologies in the education system.

Thanks for all my friends who supported me in this one. I really appreciate your efforts. Also, big thanks for my blog readers who provided some much needed moral support. I owe it to you guys.

I guess that’s where the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none” comes from. It describes a “person who is competent with many skills but is not very good with any one particular skill”. Sometimes known as a “polymath“, Leonardo Da Vinci (pictured on the left) is seen as the one of the greatest painters of all time, and the man with the most diversely prodigious talent ever to have lived. Hey, the man is a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, and writer. Wow! Talk about a jack of all trades!

Now, while we know that having that much knowledge will definitely get you laid at some point, can you really do what this man did, metaphorically? I mean, is it possible for an average human being to know so much about so many things and still maintain acceptable level of human sanity? (ok you caught me, any man who grows this much hair isn’t sane in my book, maybe it was a different time, but I stand corrected!)

This is a question of specialization vs generalization. In other words, how much should you learn about each skill or set of skills in your life including, but not limited to, your job skills? An interesting post by Scott Young addresses this trade off with a neat little visualization called the “T” model. The idea is originally suggested by Ben Casnocha. In a nutshell:

Through this model your aim is to have a moderate amount of skill in a broad range of areas (the top of the ‘T’) and to have a lot of skill in a select few fields (the column of the ‘T’)

The point to take home is that you should make the inevitable trade off: decide what is it that you’re extremely passionate about, and give it the best you got! I mean, by all means, come right at it with a full swing! However, meanwhile, don’t forget about the things that you’re expected to be knowledgeable in, such as soft skills or presentation skills. Most often than not, those kinds of skills will be a prerequisite for your success in pursuing your passion.

Rethinking this model, I’ve noticed that sometimes the depth of your skills is a little more complicated than the above model. More precisely, I believe that leading up to our “expert” skills, there are other ones that we’re supposed to have knowledge in varying amounts or degrees of depth.

I drew down a little diagram to help me get my point across. Notice how the shape of the T is changed into a kind of funnel. I also flipped it to go along the axes.

So does this make sense? And what do you think of the indefinite circled tip at the top of the diagram? Do you think anybody ever has reached that point where he/she just knows it all! I don’t know, but I seem to think that we as humans are never capable of reaching that point because the more we discover about things, the more it’s obvious to us how much more there is to it!

I’m super excited to announce that I’ll be giving my first ever public presentation on a topic I’m super interested in!

I’ve done numerous presentations in the past, ranging from business-oriented to educational ones. But this one is different: it’s public! Meaning anybody can attend which brings a whole lot of different flavors to it. I’ve previously written on how much I love giving presentations, but I’m not interested in giving tired old boring presentation this time. You know, I’ve been studying for a while the art of giving winning presentations: reading relevant blogs, books, and even practicing some of that on the presentations I’ve been giving in-house. It’s really exciting to finally get to put those skills to a bigger test with bigger and more diverse audience.

Plus, how wonderful is it to get to talk about a phenomenon as huge and relevant to our lives as Web 2.0? For the past year or so, I’ve been knee-deep interested in this topic, reading and following the news surrounding it on a daily basis. Since then, I’ve grown so fond of the power and influence it will have on our lives. For this reason, I decided it’s time to share all the knowledge I’ve accumulated with other people in order to spread and raise awareness about it.

So, about 2 months ago, I’ve contacted a local non-profit organization called ITDigest and expressed my desire to give out a public presentation about this subject. Something that is very introductory designed to enhance people’s overall knowledge of the principles and technologies surrounding it. They were more than willing to arrange that for me and even suggested it would be done in a local university. Ever since, I’ve scattered the web doing comprehensive research, gathering and putting together my material in a format that can be understood by novice and expert users alike.

And now: it’s show time! March 7^th, at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. For dear readers of this blog who won’t be able to attend, I’m going to have the whole presentation recorded and uploaded here soon after the presentation.

Anyways, wish me luck!

p.s., I’ve designed the picture above to be first in my presentation slides. Here is a bigger version of it, you’re free to use it with proper attribution.

Update 12/3/07: The presentation has been rescheduled to 15/4/07.

In this part, we’ll turn our attention to the computer keyboard. This mildly sophisticated device has received the least amount of innovation in the brief history of the computing era. This is understandable, given the simple purpose of this device which is either typing or sending commands. In the typing department, one of the most notable innovations, in my opinion, was the introduction of the natural keyboard layout in 1992 by Apple and then later in 1994 by Microsoft. The latter has gained wide popularity and adoption which proved that overall people were concerned about the ergonomics and fitness of their computer usage experience. For me, I never really bought into this layout, I guess because it kind of broke my natural typing orientation.

But what I really want to bring to your attention today is a key innovation regarding the second purpose which is sending commands. Historically, most of the improvements in this area have been on fitting bunch of extra keys around the keyboard to act as shortcuts for commonly used commands. This is great! But the genius guys at Humanized have gone a step ahead and crafted a wonderful and versatile software that is way ahead of its league. What this software can do is something I’ve never seen before, and I’ve seen a lot on similar grounds. So read on to find out how this software promises to revamp your whole computing experience for good!

Hi, my name is ENSO

They called it ENSO, a Japanese word meaning “circle”. It is drawn in circle (duh!) that symbolizes enlightenment, strength, and the universe. The reason it’s a partially open circle is to also symbolize that it is not separate, but is part of something greater.And it’s certainly is. ENSO does not replace anything in your desktop. It just sits quietly in the back waiting to be summoned to perform wonderful things for you. What kind of things? Glad you asked! Let’s run through some of the cool features ENSO gives you out of the box.

I can start your favourite applications, files and even websites

ENSO Launcher is the part that can do all that and then some. While there are numerous so-called “application launchers” out there, this one does it differently, and does it with a style!

The idea here is that if you’re the type of person who relies heavily on using the keyboard or if you’re typing something and don’t want to switch over to the mouse, you can fire up quick commands in a human-natural form to open your favourite applications. Wherever you are, it goes like this:

1. You hold down the Caps Lock key
2. Meanwhile, you type “open …” followed by the name of the application.
3. Just release the Caps Lock and there you go!

While this may seem like a lengthy process, it happens really quickly. This is because the ENSO is very smart in the sense that:

1. You don’t have to type the full name of the application because ENSO filters the available results as you type more characters.
2. You can press TAB to auto-finish the command

“C” is highlighted because it’s the only character I’ve typed after the “open”. That’s all I need!

The rest of the choices, shown above, are ones you can also choose by navigating down the list with the Down arrow key.

Now, what if the thing you want to start isn’t an application but rather a file, folder or a favourite website. Well, why not teach ENSO about so that next time you’ll be able to start it just like we did above. Let me show you how that is done:

1. Navigate to the file, folder or website of your choice.
2. Highlight the address (usually up there on the address bar in Windows Explorer or your browser).
3. Issue the “learn as open …” command.

Next time, it doesn’t matter which application I’m in, all I need is “open r” to start my news reader

I don’t know about you, but for me that’s a brilliant simple way to teach a software something. It’s also natural to think about it. “Learn” or “Open” are all words used by humans and now my computer understands them, now that’s what “humanized” is all about!

There are host of other commands (as of the current version) that you can also play with:

• go {window name}
• close
• maximize
• unmaximize
• minimize
• open with {program}
• quit
• undo unlearn
• unlearn open {command name}

Wait, I can also help you with your writing

This is yet another part of ENSO that can do wonders for you. Ever needed to run a spell check on something you wrote on a website or some application but the functionality just wasn’t there. Perhaps you wanted to do simple calculation on the spot without having to break your concentration by opening external application? Well that’s what ENSO Words is all about.

The way it works is very similar to the Launcher. You select the text and issue the desired command. If it’s a spell check or calculation commands, ENSO Words will replace your text in-place. If the text isn’t replaceable, as if you’re reading off a webpage, ENSO will remember the result and let you put anywhere else where there’s an editable area.

In addition, it can do any of the following things (as of the current version):

1. Define any word you select or give you synonyms for it.
2. Calculate any four-function mathematical formula you have at hand.
3. Count the number of words or characters.
4. Transfer your text into upper or lower case.

Conclusion

While I didn’t cover every command in detail, I hope this quick run-through gave you a good idea of the capabilities of this innovative software. It goes without exaggeration that once you try ENSO and get a good grip of it, you’ll learn to appreciate it so much that it would feel awkward if you have to do the simple things it lets you do without it. For me, I was addicted from day one and now consider it an essential part of my productive computing arsenal.

Still, other people, especially in the publishing industry, use voice, or spoken words, as a means to dictate text as well as to tell the computer what to do. Voice recognition, as a technology, has evolved rapidly in the last decade that it’s now considered a very productive and feasible way for interacting and typing text given the right circumstances. Obviously, using voice is the most natural way for us to interact.

But what about the other popular mechanisms, namely the mouse and the keyboard? The question that inspired this post is: has these two mechanisms reached a point where it seems “natural” for us, as humans, to use them to interact with our computers? If no, then can we add a “human” touch to these devices to make them easier and more natural to use?

The answer is: we certainly can! In this post and the next one, I’ll let you in on some wonderful applications that can dramatically shift the way you use your mouse and keyboard, respectively. The beauty of these applications is that you don’t have to abandon what you’re already used to, you just need to get used to wonderful new interaction techniques that can vastly improve your interaction experience using these devices.

So today, we’ll start with..

The Legendary Mouse

What can you do beside clicking your way around?

Let’s start at the beginning. A computer mouse is the second most natural input mechanism after the voice. Why? Simply because it’s a physical device that we can control, hold, move around and even play with. It was invented in 1964 by Douglas Engelbart who gave it this nickname because of the tail that came out of its end.

There hasn’t been any major changes to the way the mouse works since its invention. Certainly, there were improvements in the design and operation which included:

• More ergonomic designs
• Elimination of the “tail” (cordless mice)
• More buttons
• Scrollwheels
• Higher precision using optical and laser beam instead of tracker ball

Nevertheless, the concept of using the mouse remained the same: you move it around and click on things that appear on your screen. In my opinion, the act of clicking or double-clicking (triple-clicking? give me a break!) on graphical user interface (GUI) elements has some major shortcomings, despite being customary:

1. It forces you to precisely position your mouse cursor on the exact element (e.g., button) that you need to trigger. An offset by as little as 0.5cm could lead to a totally different and undesired action.
2. It is slow, especially with the default OS settings.
3. On the long run, and if used excessively, it can lead to serious health issues, most notably numbness and tingling in the thumb and index finger that may develop into Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS).

Fortunately, there are things you can do to make using the mouse a more productive interaction device. For example, you could:

• Cut the clicking in half! Yes you can do that if you make the middle mouse button, for instance, act as a double clicker. (Cool Mouse can help you do that [Windows only])
• Increase the speed and acceleration of the mouse, so the cursor moves a lot faster with the same physical mouse movement.
• Have the cursor smartly snap to elements you’re likely to move it to, like the stupid “OK”s on dialog boxes.
• Using the scrollwheel on the mouse instead of clicking the scrollbar found on most GUI screens.

However, I’m not satisfied with the above improvements. Remember, my original purpose in this post is to “humanize” my interaction using the mouse. What do humans do when they communicate? They talk right? Cool! Thanks for the info :)

But seriously what else do they do? Along with verbal communication, we also do a lot of gesturing. Formally speaking, A human gesture is a:

a form of non-verbal communication made with a part of the body, used instead of or in combination with verbal communication. The language of gesture is rich in ways for individuals to express a variety of feelings and thoughts, from contempt and hostility to approval and affection.

So what happens if we port this exact concept to the world of computing? Well, we could flip a computer off since it was unable to install any updates but insisted that we restart anyway, although that probably won’t be of much use beside letting some steam off.

However, there’s a smarter way. We can fire up mouse gestures!

The Power of Mouse Gestures

A mouse gesture is a way of combining computer mouse movements and clicks which the software recognizes as a specific command.

My bet is that we’ve all been doing mouse gestures without even realizing it. Have you ever done a drag-drop operation (no, not this kind)? That’s a mouse gesture! However, the beauty here is that this idea can be generalized much further to include virtually any application you use and any gesture movement you dream of!

Being able to issue an appropriate gesture for an appropriate action using your mouse doesn’t only make things easier, it makes using your mouse “feel right” again. For example, to delete something, say incoming email, instead of the usual way, why not quickly draw an ‘x’ in any size you prefer:

Cool, huh! Let’s see how you can do the same and much more.

StrokeIt: Free Mouse Gesture Recognition

I’m a PC user so I’m sticking to what I know and I know this: StrokeIt (download) is one of the best, if not the best, free mouse gesture recognition software for Windows. In fact, it’s partially what inspired this post. I wanted to tell everybody about this great little appplication and what it can do for you. The rate of recognition is unbelievably fast and accurate. It runs out of the box with a myriad of gestures and associated actions. And here’s the punch line: you can teach it your own gestures the way you like them and associate these gestures with specific applications or make them global to every application on your system.

To start off, you should recognize the repetitive tasks you usually do with the mouse and define a gesture for them. You can use one of the built-in gestures (which correspond to the English alphabets) or again you can draw your own gesture.

Secondly, you should define the mouse button that triggers the drawing. For me, I’ve set the middle mouse button.

Here is another favourite gesture of mine: a close gesture which closes the current application. It’s drawn exactly like a “C”. Remember, your “C” doesn’t have to be a perfect half-circle, it can of any size and you can also draw it backwards.

Can you already see the benefit of drawing such gestures instead of, say, reaching for the red ‘X’ button or closing the application from the taskbar? I think the benefits lend themselves pretty clearly:

• It’s faster.
• It’s more flexibile.
• Above all, it’s just more natural!

Conclusion

With just little bit of learning and getting used to, mouse gestures can provide the next powerful and intuitive means for us to interact with our desktops. However, they’re not meant to completely replace clicking on various GUI elements, but rather complement them with more human-friendly actions (i.e., drawings) that provide alternative ways to achieve the same thing.

But wait, here’s an idea: Can we completely elminate clicking altogether? Think about it: A desktop-based interface that features the same graphical elements you’re used to (buttons, lists, etc), except you don’t need to click to move around. You can do so with mere gestures, like hovering back and forth over a button once!

The question is: after getting used to, would this kind gesture-based system make its way into mainstream acceptance? Or are we so hooked on clicking that we can’t imagine a world where computer mice are buttonless?

Some Background

Turns out this phenomena we're talking about, one's creative flow, or simply the "flow", is a long-known one studied and proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The Wikipedia's entry on this subject states that the:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

So you'll know you're in the flow when..

• you're resistant to anything that tries to interrupt you or put you out of it
• you lose all sense of time
• you forget about your basic needs like hunger or sleep
• you don't feel like what you're doing is work as much as trying to achieve that goal you set out to achieve

Rings any bells? I bet everyone of us has experienced all or some of these symptoms at some point in time. I know I did. At my previous job, I used to diss off people who'd interrupt me during peak working hours for trivial matters. I got a reputation for being cranky or having "the bad day", but really what it was is just me trying to keep the pace of my flow going in order to fix that nasty bug or roll out that long overdue feature. But now I know better, because with these rules, I know exactly how to initiate and maintain a creative and productive working session. So let's explore these rules in details, shall we?

Preparation: What needs to be done beforehand

Because maintaining a steady flow of creative ideas requires complete focus on your goal and ultimate objective, you will need to take care of the following 3 things first:

1. Set up your own conductive environment. It depends on your preference whether you want to work within stimulating and active environment or prefer secluded and quite environments (like me). Also you might want to play some music along, you know the kind that gets you going.
2. Master the tools of your trade. In my opinion, nothing kills creative flow of ideas like getting stuck on some technical issue related to the tool(s) you're using during your creative session. A basic competency of these tools is a must to minimize disrupting your flow.
3. Allocate enough time that you think will take you to finish the task at hand

Define your scope

Some people have a habit of drifting out of their real goal when they follow their natural progression of ideas. You know what I'm talking about: you're trying to do something and it leads to something else seemingly related, and before you know it you're tackling a whole different problem than the one you set out to do. While this is clearly a prospect for innovation, when your creative energy is shattered among several different problems, it quickly wears you out and you end up achieving none, or at least not the one you were meant to achieve. This is why you need to consider the following 3 points which will help you "tunnel" your creative ideas into something productive and worthwhile:

1. Define a clear purpose. You're going to need a clear goal to focus on. Decide on what you want to create and by all means avoid vague goals. This is your ultimate objective and achieving it will likely trigger the end of your creative flow and make you feel good about yourself!
2. Identify a compelling motive. Why is your goal important to achieve? When you answer this question, you align this goal with your real-world objectives which will give you powerful driving force towards achieving it. You know, most short- or long-term goals, like our new year's resolutions, fail to see the light not because they're impossibly unattainable, but because we failed to associate them upstart with a compelling motive that keeps us going at times of weakness.
3. Architect a worthy challenge. There are tasks that are just too darn easy to need your full creative energy. And then again, there are those that are too damn difficult that makes you want to kill yourself. More so than often, we get to choose how challenging our tasks should be. If so, then you need to know that on a scale of of 1-10, where 1 is trivially easy and 10 is impossible, the optimal creative range is 5-9 with a 7-8 being ideal. A wise man once said:
   

   Achieving flow is a fine balance from feeling bored to feeling overwhelmed.

Ready? Go!

That's it! If you have all those elements (preparation + scope) figured out and accounted for, then you're ready to start. It will normally take you 15 minutes to begin to enter the flow state. Within 45-60 minutes, you'll be riding the waves of your creativity! But then again, it all depends on you and the nature of your task. Save and use the following figure to help remind you of the stuff we talked about today. Wish you all the best!

I consider myself a rare breed in this sense. Not many people love to give out public speeches, and certainly a whole lot of them dread it. Seinfeld has a famous quote that goes like this:

According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.

While I could not find a particular study that proved this fact, I can understand why someone would have such fear of public speaking. There are many reasons to that, including:

• Audience disapproval or criticism of your ideas, speech or even looks.
• Connection to bad experience of giving public speech in the past.
• Being incompetent in the subject.

On the other hand, I believe there is only one reason why people, like me, would love to do public speeches. Are you ready? Here it is: egotistical recognition!

OK, I’ll admit that I have no basis for this theory at the moment, but the more I think of it, the more it makes sense to me. To start off, note that I’m not talking here about the ultimate reason of giving a public speech, presentation, key note, or even a training session. Each one of those activities has one or more practical objectives that the speaker would like to achieve by the end of his speech. But if we strip the speaker of those objectives, what reasons are left for him to actually want to do the purposeless presentation? Turns out, there are quite a few:

• Impress somebody or someone
• Showoff something or some quality in himself
• Prove someone’s right or wrong

All three of those reasons lead to increasing our own or people’s positive perception of us, which in turn feeds our demanding ego. Now, if I apply those in my case, I’ll get the answer I’m looking for. Here is my reasoning:

• I said that I’m a “shy, quite, almost introverted” type of person, right? Well, turns out that being such kind doesn’t do your ego any good. So what I need is a way (a social activity) that gets me the recognition, approval and admiration that I’m looking for without making me change my ways. Public speeches perfectly satisfy this need for me.
• “The more people attending, the more excited I get”, that’s what I said right? Well, let me restate this now:
  “The more people attending, the more people there are to give me the recognition, approval and admiration that I’m looking for”.

See, easy isn’t? Now, if we put back the speech objectives that we stripped the speaker from, we come out with a quite an obvious conclusion, which is my point in this post:

All public speeches inevitably deliver a form of ego-boost for the speaker, whether that’s the speaker’s intention or not.