“What gets measured gets managed”

That quote is a relatively common business adage which is attributed to a ton of different people – so many that I’ll just consider it public domain. The reason for this post is just that I’d like to draw attention to it and maybe as you read this post, decease you can think of how this can be used to help your own productivity and success.

As with any business advice, ed this tends to be more digestible with some anecdotes so I’ll give a couple of examples of how this has helped me lately with running LyricWiki.org.

Example Uno: Server Uptime

Without a doubt, sickness the biggest problem with LyricWiki up until recently had been uptime. The site was constantly slow or completely unavailable from its inception. The reason is that we were always short on servers since the company had minimal capital, and setting up new servers took a great deal of time and fell on my shoulders during a time in my life where I always had at least one fulltime responsibility other than LyricWiki.

When I cut back my other job a bit to give me more time to devote to LyricWiki, one of the first things I set out to fix was the reliability of the site. In order to know if it was improving, I would need to know how long the site was down each month so I could track whether the number of minutes was going up or down.

I created a small spreadsheet to track outages, and each time the site went down I logged when the outage was, the duration (in minutes) of the outage, which server(s) had the problems, the apparent cause and whether or not the cause was resolved. Much to my surprise, I didn’t really need to graph this over the months. After the first couple of days, it became very apparent that there was one huge problem still lingering and it would be worth my time to automate a fix to it instead of responding ad-hoc each time the problem cropped up.

I whipped up the code to solve the problem while I was on a layover in Philadelphia, uploaded it when I got home – and the site stayed up for almost a month straight! That’s pretty huge. I don’t think that had ever happened in LyricWiki history until just now. Very cool.

Example Dos: Intractable To-do Lists

A major personal time-management problem I had recently was that I couldn’t tell if I was just spinning my wheels or if I was actually making progress on my backlog of LyricWiki tasks. It felt as though I was getting emailed so much work that I barely ever got to break out into the tasks on my talk page let alone the “Mid-term Actions” list I made which was my conscious plan of how to make LyricWiki rock your socks off in the mid-term.

To solve this problem of not having a grasp on my tasks, I whipped up a little widget which you can see in the side-column of the blog, near the bottom. The results were much better than I expected: I actually instantly felt like I was in more control, I felt comfortable removing tasks that were duplicated across lists, and I can finally tell when I’m moving fast enough to make forward progress.

The widget tracks the size of all of my various to-do lists and updates that number hourly. There are two reasons for the caching: 1) checking the lists requires hitting the sites and that takes at least 3 seconds total 2) if it updated in real-time, I’d sit there refreshing the thing all day!

The widget actually has some neat hidden features. Here is the to-do list widget on its own page which also tracks the number of tasks I’ve had at the end of each day and charts my progress (using the Google Charts API). If anyone is interested, maybe I’ll write another post where I give out the source-code to the widget.

Conveniently, the widget is narrow enough to both fit in a blog sidebar and be displayed on a smartphone. It’s currently the homepage on my blackberry and I don’t see that changing any time soon!

Conclusion

The quote “what gets measured gets managed” always seems to ring true for me. I think of it again and again – usually after-the-fact when I’ve just saved time by being OCD about something. I strongly recommend that you take a second (right now) and think of an area of your life or your work which you feel isn’t getting sufficient attention and consider tracking meaningful statistics about it. Please share any similar successful experiences in the comments!

Pitt talk was fun

The talk I gave this week on SiloSync at Pitt was a fun venue. Their Lunch-and-Learn series is a really cool idea and sounds like it’s getting even more interesting. Next month’s talk is going to be done by a VP from Sun Microsystems. Prior to presenting, approved I jumped back into the SiloSync code and wrote the beginnings of the importer for Facebook.

As a side-note: one of the things that’s fascinating about this project is that I get to see all of the half-implemented security that different sites use. LiveJournal had a secure way of sending passwords, but shockingly stores passwords as plain-text (a big security faux-pas). Similarly, I saw some left-over fields in Facebook’s login form, but it appears that they just punted and used https (a secure web connection using SSL encryption) to just encrypt the whole login.

Back to the crux of this post: I’ve been rather tempted lately to actually finish SiloSync – which I had previously shelved in hopes that Open Social and other big-name initiatives would fix the problem (they didn’t). Google, Facebook, and MySpace have all announced fake data portability initiatives in the last week or so, which shows that if we want our data to be free, we’re going to have to take it (see my previous post on freeing the social graph for why this is important).

I decided it would be best to make a habit of posting my slide-decks when I present (I appreciate it when other people do that), here are the PowerPoint and Open Document (Open Office) versions. In the process of making the presentation, I ended up creating a visual representation of SiloSync which I think does a great job of summing up the whole idea for someone who hasn’t been exposed to it yet. That’s the picture above and to the right… click it to see the full-size version.

Interestingly, with these effectively useless announcements from the major Social Networks, a lot of non-technical press has been declaring that data is now free. Okay, cool, let’s all go home.

Fortunately, most of the technical press is calling them on it. Everyone from TechCrunch to David Recordon (of OpenId fame) is telling it like it is.

If you are interested in seeing SiloSync pushed to fruition (more than you’re interested in seeing Motive Suggest or doItLater v2.0), let me know so that I can weigh off the interest between the several projects competing for my time. Also, feel free to leave comments about your thoughts on the various “fake” data portability. This seems to be the topic which always gets the most vocal response on my blog.

Dearth of Education about… Education

I was at a bookstore last night looking to learn more about learning itself. I was horrified by the state of things. I figured in a massive Barnes and Nobel which has entire aisle devoted to focused niches such as Manga or Personal Fitness, doctor that Education should have an entire area – strange that I didn’t remember seeing it before since I’m in bookstores quite often. I mean… it’s education; a book store should be just the place to find this info.

After poking around for a while, I had to ask for help. I was finally shown the single “Education” rack (there’s about 5 racks on each side of a single aisle). I poured through the titles on the shelf and there wasn’t a single volume on pedagogy (roughly: the study of teaching) or epistemology (the study of how humans learn). All of the books I found were basically just mis-classified and belonged in the “teaching” section next to this rack. There were nice little memoirs about a teacher’s first day on the job, a book about the challenges of being an administrator in a poorly-funded inner city school… but no actual scientific studies of how to teach people or how people learn.

Something is terribly wrong here.