Hyperbole

La Presse canadienne, 27 mars 2012 :

«très bonne»

Réjean Tremblay, dans le Journal de Montréal, le 26 mars 2012 :

La ministre Michelle Courchesne, qui a été très bonne, Régis Labeaume et

Une chance que son Jules-Fournier est déjà gagné, parce qu’il a maintenant le style d’un élève du Cégep qui écrit son épreuve uniforme.

↬ Treat yourself as your favourite colleague

Colin Marshall, on his old blog (which had an amazing name : The War on Mediocrity), had a post that came to my mind just after writing my first post, Your work’s output is someone else’s input. In Future Colin’s servant, Mr Marshall explains a quite potent point of view :

It’s almost funny, the degree of power I wield over Future Colin. I control whether he’s in shape or out of shape, whether he has a lot of money or a little money, whether he’s experienced or inexperienced, whether he’s prepared or unprepared to face the world and its myriad challenges. He’s helpless without me, nothing, a babe in the woods. My job has me constantly rolling out the red carpet, clearing his way and scheduling his minutia. Were I to fall asleep at the switch, he’d be finished.

If you subscribe to his view, we can safely assume that your work’s output will one day become your input. We’ve all once mashed our keyboards in order to finish something quick in order to get done, only to rediscover this work as a pile of unusable mustard. Acting on this means, for example :

• for programmers, commenting your own code, even if you don’t plan on sharing it,
• for writers, leaving yourself a thread of thought as you save your document and shut down your text editor,
• for artists, leaving yourself a clear task for your next workday.

This means treating yourself as your favorite colleague, to whom you would never leave a messy project or unclear tasks and goals.

Drôle d’«erreur à éviter»

Annie Bourque, collaboration spéciale, La Presse, 29 février 2012 :

6. Gérer colères et émotions

[…]

7. Respecter la hiérarchie

Ajoutons respectueusement «8. Oublier la formulation de ce dont on fait la liste». À moins que cela ne soit un appel à ne pas respecter sa hiérarchie?

↬ Your work’s output is someone else’s input

We can GTDize our life all we want and Zero our Inbox like a pro, but we must remember that these methods/philosophies/lifehacks rely on the concept of actions that we will subsequently compile into lists and (hopefully) execute.

That’s good.

But go one step further : Your work’s output is bound to become someone else’s input. Your research paper on X can either become a reference for A, a basis for periodic reevaluation for B or a model for C. The data you compiled for this year’s financial statement may very well be useful for someone who wants wo aggregate all the departments together.

How can we execute on this? By taking cues from the scientific work ethic.

• Provide context : Clearly explaining why you come to conclusions so-and-so will help the future reader of your work to evaluate if and how your conclusions can be taken as they are, or if more research would be welcome.
• Bundle with data : Along with that .doc or .pdf, provide your reader with the spreadsheet you used. For a small group, email is good (clearly label it as «For Reference»). If you publish it on dead trees, printing an URL for the file seems fine. (Oh, and by the way : please never hand out a non-searchable PDF)
• Call to actions : Explain clearly what you mean by what you say. If no conclusion can be drawn, don’t hesitate to suggest ways to go down the same path to look for other possibilities. Even if these are mere suggestions.
• Offer tests : Your call to action should be conditional. “Provided nothing changes”, “If we don’t reduce the deficit by X”, “Unless competitor X enters the market”, etc. This way, what you say is taken as work, not gospel.