No, I am better than that! » Writing

From the mind of a 12-year-old Rick

Rick Osborne — Sat, 23 May 2009 22:40:44 +0000

I got some mail today: an envelope from my grandmother. I had, apparently, mailed her a stack of short stories and poems when I was twelve. She’d kept them all that time, now returning them.

In a word, they’re terribad.

But, because the Internet is where we’re supposed to do stupid things so that they will live on forever, I present to you some poetry from the mind of a 12-year-old Rick. Clickety-click for the full size version, as I will not transcribe it.

“Off Exhibit” is now in progress

Rick Osborne — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:52:39 +0000

Because I’m crazy and can’t seem to just take a break and relax now that I’m done with school for a while, I’ve committed to write my second novel in one month. For the next 30 days, my writing goal is three thousand words, or about 3½ hours per day, every day.

I’ve got the first chapter of Off Exhibit up on Google Docs, and will be adding it to Scribd and Authonomy in due course, but for now here’s the teaser:

Alan Radcliffe needs a story that will get his Journalism professors to take him seriously. When he sees a young zookeeper fall into a lion exhibit at a small zoo, a lioness guarding her from the other lions, he knows he’s got the makings of a heroic human-interest story that will get him more than he could have hoped for.

He can’t help but be drawn into the lives of the keepers, and the story gets better with each person he talks to. They are all there for the love of the animals, making self-sacrificing compromises in their lives so that they can survive on the barely-minimum-wage salaries that are typical of the industry.

Even the zoo itself it an underdog story waiting to be written. Crowds are thinning as parents cut back on entertainment expenses. The zoo stands on the cusp of an ambitious and crucial expansion plan that will either make it or break it.

But the more Alan digs, the more the little things start to poke at him. Why doesn’t he trust the owner, Martin? What else could possibly being going on, off exhibit?

It will be interesting to step outside of Trust Network and write about something different for a while. Computer geeks are fun to write about, but geekery comes in many forms. I’m looking forward to it.

The Pomodoro Technique

Rick Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:48:42 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve been a developer on a team. Many of my time-management techniques for squeezing uninterrupted hours out of my day have gotten rusty. And now that I’ve moved into a position where coding is the exception rather than the rule, finding that time and focus has gotten even harder.

A few days ago, Peter Bell got my attention with this tweet:

Ever do solo development? Want to figure out how to adapt lean/xp to do solo coding better? Join our new group:
http://groups.google.com/group/solo-scrum

One of the posts in the group was from the venerable Mark Drew about the Pomodoro Technique:

only one day using the 25 minute “full concentration” technique
and suddenly I have become a lot more focused

Something recommended by both Peter Bell and Mark Drew? This, I had to see.

I’m going to oversimplify a bit, but it turns out that the Pomodoro Technique is both dead simple, and all-too-familiar:

Turn off, log out of, or otherwise disable anything that might break your concentration. Close your email, Twitter client, and anything that might pop up a notification. Turn off your cell and close your office door. It’s okay—you won’t be gone that long, and the world will still be there when you get back.
Grab a timer and set it for 25 minutes.
Focus on your work for that 25 minutes, not letting anything interrupt you. Whatever it is, it can wait.
When the timer goes off, stop right there. Drop your pencil, take your hands off the keyboard, or whatever.
Take a break—at least 5 minutes.

Here’s the funny thing: not only is that how you get coding done, but that’s also how you write a book. Trust Network was written in 15-, 30-, and 45-minute sprints. I followed the exact same procedure, and had the exact same phenomenal results.

Today, I got through five 25-minute sessions. It got to be a little ritual: log out of all my notification add-ons, close my email, etc, then work for 25 minutes before logging everything back in for a break. Most of my breaks were longer than 5 minutes, and weren’t so much breaks from working as they were breaks from working on that one project. But that’s okay! Those five sessions got more done on that project than I’ve been able to do for almost 3 months now!

I even set aside one of the sessions to write my own Pomodoro Timer AIR app. It’s nothing more than a big tomato with a countdown timer in 25- and 5-minute intervals, but it does exactly what it is supposed to do: let me focus on work without the tick-tick-tick of a clock.

There should be an embedded Flash AIR badge here.

As I see it, the key to the Pomodoro Technique is having the resolve to completely disconnect for that time. It’s a leap of faith that the building won’t catch fire around you, but you’ve got to be able to cut that cord.

If you’ve been finding your focus wandering or that you’re just not getting as much done in the same amount of time as you used to, I’d recommend that you give it a try.