Episode 68 - Manager vs. Maker, Damien Ryan

Summary

Productivity Alchemy, Episode 68: "Manager vs. Maker" with Damian Ryan

Podcast Date: October 25, 2018
Host: Kevin Sonney
Co-host: Ursula Vernon
Guest: Damian Ryan (Release Manager)

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Episode Overview

In Episode 68 of Productivity Alchemy, Kevin Sonney and Ursula Vernon delve into the nuances of "Manager vs. Maker" mindsets, personal productivity systems, and work-life balance, with a special in-depth interview with Damian Ryan, a release manager in the tech industry. The episode balances light-hearted home banter (pets, chickens, Instant Pots) with serious conversations about organizing work, breaking down tasks, the challenges of creative and technical productivity, and the importance of honest communication and system thinking within organizations.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Life Updates, All Things Open, and Creative Scheduling

[00:00–07:58]

• Kevin recounts experiences at the All Things Open tech conference: personal branding in tech, learning Electron.js, and the cult of the Instant Pot for home cooking.
• On hobbies and monetization: Discussion about how not every passion should be a career ("Hobbies you love do not need to be monetized." - Ursula, 09:51).
• Ursula’s Writing Deadlines: Ursula shares about having 90,000 words due in four months, needing to adjust her schedule and expectations due to personal life events (a family member entering hospice).
  • Memorable Quote:
    "Some days I will get 200 words done and be like, that is all that is coming out today. Some days I will get 3,000...Do I have enough of those to make up for the 200 word days? I don't know. We're going to find out."
    —Ursula [13:44]
• Manager vs. Maker Schedules: Kevin introduces the key theme—contrasting the empirical, math-driven approach of a manager ("just do x every day") vs. the nonlinear, interruption-prone reality of makers and creatives.

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2. Productivity, Project Management, and the Watermelon Project (Interview with Damian Ryan)

[20:47–65:00]

Damian Ryan's Approach to Release Management

• Role Explanation: Damian describes release management as "cat herding for engineering, QA, and dev" — ensuring work moves smoothly from idea to customer ([21:14–22:01]).
• Work Visualization: The importance of making work visible using tools like YouTrack (a Jira-like ticket system) and Kanban boards for project tracking.
  • "All of these tools are equally good and bad... the only good tool is when you don't have to use it anymore." —Damian [24:39]
• Conway’s Law & Tool Use: Tools often reflect the organization and its politics more than anything else ([25:48–26:04]).

Chunking and Organizing Work

• Breaking Down Tasks: To avoid cognitive overload, Damian advocates grouping tickets into larger “feature trackers” or “epics” so the big picture isn’t lost ([27:58–29:27]).
• Agile Mindset: Both Kevin and Damian critique prescriptive Agile frameworks like Scrum, preferring adaptability and emphasizing the value of retrospectives.

Communication, Systems, and Failure

• Blameless RCAs & Aviation Analogies: Learning from systemic failures rather than blaming individuals ("You can fix the system. If you don't fix the system, the failure will happen again..." — Damian [34:29]).
• Distributed Teams: Embrace persistent group chat tools, like Slack, to replicate 'water cooler' moments and foster cross-team communication ([35:55–37:21]).
• Personal Organization Habits:
  • Damian keeps bulleted lists and markdown notes in SublimeEdit—his “brain in a laptop” [39:25–40:11].
  • Backs up data using tools like syncthing [41:23].
  • Uses Excel for tracking personal reading backlogs and more ("I do have a burn down chart in Excel for the books I need to read." — Damian [41:39]).
  • “Dogfooding” and encouraging the company to use the tools they promote ([43:27]).

System Thinking, Constraints, and Continuous Improvement

• “How to Eat an Elephant”: Break down large, amorphous workloads into small, manageable pieces [44:25].
• Critical Chain and Bottlenecks: Identify and address the slowest part of any workflow for the greatest systemic improvement ([55:08–56:23]).
  • Anecdote about improving company throughput by buying the accountant a faster computer ([57:11–57:52]).

Communication Pitfalls and Watermelon Projects

• Watermelon Projects: Projects that appear healthy “green” on the outside (in status reports) but are actually “red” (in trouble) inside — risk is hidden until too late ([62:32–63:10]).
  • "They're green on the outside, red on the inside, and no one knows until the last minute when you open it up and you suddenly have to see what's inside that—oh God, it's all red." — Damian & Kevin [63:04–63:14]
• Course Correction: Importance of making small adjustments and communicating problems early, to avoid catastrophic failures late in the process.

Routines, Checklists, and Personal Habits

• Checklists Save Lives and Projects: Inspired by aviation, checklists are not childish but foundational to good practice ([54:02]).
  • "I used to hate checklists...then I got some real work. And now checklists are the only things that will save anything." — Damian [54:02]
• Routines Create Stability: Building safety and predictability via routines protects against burnout ([75:24]).

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3. Dealing With Failure, Celebrating Success, and Mindset

[68:54–82:22]

• Letting Others Fail & Hero Syndrome: Best advice received—don’t try to be the hero and fix everything yourself. If you always make yourself indispensable, burnout is inevitable.
  • "If you make yourself the hero, you will always be the hero, and all heroes die." — Damian [69:25], echoed by Kevin.
  • "You have to let other people fail...because if you don't let other people fail, they don't have an opportunity to grow." — Damian & Kevin [70:48]
• Dealing with Missed Goals: Damian confesses it’s still hard, but with age, self-forgiveness improves ([77:07]).
  • "What I found is as I got older, I really stopped caring so much...I'm really looking forward to when I turn 80 and it's like I don't care about anything." — Damian [77:19]
• Celebrating Success: Damian maintains a “victory log”—recording small successes so he can revisit them when morale is low.
  • "Whenever a little thing goes well, I write it in what I call a victory log and just leave it there. Even if it feels bad to write it...you come back to it when things are bad." — Damian [79:04]
  • Kevin affirms this idea, relating it to Ursula's writing: writing a novel is "eating an elephant;" progress can seem invisible day to day ([80:09–81:08]).

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4. Post-interview Reflections: Reliability, Process, and Money Anxiety

[87:21–103:45]

• Reliability Over Brilliance: Ursula discusses her early art career—art directors preferred an on-time, reliable artist over a brilliant but unpredictable one.
  • "Art directors would generally rather have a mediocre piece done on time than a brilliant piece a month late." — Ursula [91:13]
• Lifelong Money Anxiety: Personal backgrounds and financial anxieties shape work ethic ("If you grow up poor in your head, you are always poor." — Ursula [92:34]).
• Cultural humor on "ditch next to Walmart": A running joke on levels of disaster and success (step up: Target, step down: truck stop or seedy strip club).

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5. Closing Thoughts & Takeaways

• Communication and transparency are foundational — both in creative and technical domains.
• Systems thinking trumps individual effort — lasting organizational change comes from fixing systems, not blaming people.
• Break down big goals into small, actionable tasks — "eat the elephant one bite at a time."
• Celebrate incremental success and maintain logs or journals to offset negativity bias.
• Routines and checklists prevent burnout; safety and predictability matter.
• Let others learn through failure — don’t try to be the hero.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "Hobbies you love do not need to be monetized." — Ursula Vernon [09:51]
• "Some days I will get 200 words done and be like, that is all that is coming out today...Do I have enough of those to make up for the 200 word days? I don't know. We're going to find out." — Ursula Vernon [13:44]
• "All of these tools are equally good and bad...the only good tool is when you don't have to use it anymore." — Damian Ryan [24:39]
• "If you make yourself the hero, you will always be the hero, and all heroes die." — Damian Ryan [69:25]
• "Break your work down into smaller pieces. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." — Damian Ryan [44:25]
• "They're watermelon projects. They're green on the outside, red on the inside, and no one knows until the last minute when you open it up and you suddenly have to see what's inside that—oh God, it's all red." — Kevin Sonney & Damian Ryan [63:04–63:14]
• "Whenever a little thing goes well, I write it in what I call a victory log and just leave it there...come back to it when things are bad." — Damian Ryan [79:04]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

| Time | Segment/Topic | |-------------|---------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–07:58 | Banter, All Things Open, Instant Pots, Monetizing Hobbies | | 07:58–20:47 | Writing Deadlines, Scheduling, Human Factors in Productivity | | 20:47–65:00 | Interview with Damian Ryan: Release Management, Tools, Systems Thinking, Communication | | 65:00–82:22 | Dealing with Failure, Letting Others Fail, Victory Logs, Celebrating Success | | 87:21–94:45 | Post-interview chat: Reliability, Deadlines, Money Attitudes | | 94:45–103:45| Humor, Social Commentary, Closing Remarks |

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Tone and Language

The episode maintains a conversational, candid, and occasionally irreverent tone. Kevin, Ursula, and Damian blend technical insights with humor and real-talk about personal and work struggles, reflecting the realities of managing productivity in both creative and technical fields.

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Listen to the episode for more in-depth stories, laughter, and practical advice for creators, managers, and anyone aiming to get stuff done without burning out!

Transcript

[Kevin Sonney]

Hi, everybody. This podcast is recorded in a house with pets. I can see at least two of them with a suspected third somewhere in the room. And that does not include the teenager upstairs or the chickens outside who are just sort of chill because it's late in the day and it's kind of cool outside. And so they're starting to get into their settle down for sleep routine. But noises happen. That's the important thing to note here. Noises happen. So don't be surprised if a dog barks or a cat causes damage in the middle of the recording or if

[Ursula Vernon]

I scream because the hound who is currently in my lap decides to climb farther into my lap and knock me over.

[Kevin Sonney]

Is it Lacy or. It's Lacy, yeah. So she'll do that. The other thing to mention at this juncture is we swear. We swear loudly and with gusto, passionately. And while we aren't going to cover anything explicit or dirty or of an adult nature, were grown ups using grown up language and as such, grown up metaphors. And as such, we have to mark this as explicit in itunes because they don't have something between clean and explicit. If this were a movie in the U.S. it would be rated about PG 13. If it were a TV series, it would be like a Y 14. So parental guidance suggested just to make sure we don't break somebody's brain or offend or whatever.

[Ursula Vernon]

But you've been warned that they somehow

[Kevin Sonney]

did not learn yes from their peers, which is how it usually happens. That's how I learned. Welcome to Productivity Alchemy, episode 68. And this is a great episode. I hope I have a phenomenal interview later on that we had to do twice because here's that swearing I was talking about. I fucked up on the first take. I sat down and we did the whole interview and it was amazing and it was great. And then I realized when I went to hit stop, I realized that I had not actually hit record at the beginning, but the. The person, he was a great sport about it. We went, we redid the whole thing right away and it's still a fantastic interview and we will get to that in a little bit. The big thing I think for this past week for me is that I was at all things open for two days. The local, which is becoming more than local really, but it's the local tech and open source conference. But they are looking at maybe having around 5,000 attendees next year in downtown Raleigh. Yeah, it was their sixth year. They broke 4,000 this year. So it's really exciting to see how it's because I've been going since there were like 500 of us. We didn't even take up an entire floor of the convention center. And now I expect in another two years, the entire convention center, including spaces that we, that it hasn't been using in the past, will be used. So it's, it's really a thrilling, thrilling time and there's a lot of good tracks. There were talks on personal branding and on branding your open source project. And I skipped all of those because I looked at a friend of mine and said, I'm thinking about going to this, this talk on brand. On a personal brand. Do you think? And they're like, you have your brand, dude, you have your brand.

[Ursula Vernon]

Chickens, mostly.

[Kevin Sonney]

Chicken.

[Ursula Vernon]

Chickens and tattoos.

[Kevin Sonney]

Chickens and tattoos at this point. And the, the occasional attitude or whatever. We also. But there was a great Talk on using PowerShell. My friend Bruce had come into town to hang out. He's someone who writes PowerShell at Microsoft for a living, didn't he?

[Ursula Vernon]

Wasn't he one of the original.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, he's one of the co inventors. All right, let's, let's be honest. Yeah, Bruce. And so we didn't actually sit and heckle or snark at the guy because the talk was really good and he was really excited to meet Bruce and talk to Bruce while we were there. Fantastic stuff. PowerShell, for those who don't know, is now open source. It runs on Linux, it runs on Mac and Windows. And it's a really powerful tool that I'm starting to learn more about because I can actually use it now. It's not just my Windows thing. And then there were the usual talks on different programming languages. I sat in on one where I built an app while in the, in the toolkit, the Electron toolkit, while he was giving the presentation, which was kind of cool that I could walk in, I could listen to the first like half hour of an hour presentation. And in that last half hour, while he was talking about, oh, you can add on this for database or you can add on that to do these app things, I actually wrote an app. Even if it was a little hello world, just simple thing, I did it right there on site. And they've got all sorts of coding tutorials that they do and you should check it out. It'll be October next year. I'll link it in the show notes.

[Ursula Vernon]

What's it called?

[Kevin Sonney]

All Things Open.

[Ursula Vernon]

Oh, no, I meant the app thing.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, the app thing. No, it's Electron js.

[Ursula Vernon]

Okay. You didn't say that.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, I said it was an electron app, but no, I'm going to link to all things open in the show notes.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yes. I'm just saying if people are interested in building a hello world app based on the talk, you should.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, I'm not going to push the source code up because it's really. But there, there are whole lots of examples out there and it's really good. And that hissing you may or may not hear in the background is our instant pot coming up to pressure.

[Ursula Vernon]

We have joined the cult.

[Kevin Sonney]

I think we have joined the cult. And, oh, such a cult. And yet are you happy to be in that cult?

[Ursula Vernon]

I have no opinion yet. You've made one dish. It was an amazing dish.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yes.

[Ursula Vernon]

But I won't swear that wasn't because you followed the recip.

[Kevin Sonney]

Well, I'm following the recipe again.

[Ursula Vernon]

Okay, good.

[Kevin Sonney]

We are. We aren't. I'm not in the improv to the improv stage of cooking with this yet. And even if I do improv some, it'll be things like this is a Hawaii. This is a Hawaiian style cooking method, but it's basically onions, garlic, water, salt and pork. And I feel like that, that isn't capturing the spirit of a Hawaiian message of a Hawaiian dish. And so I'm like, next time, next time. If we like this this way, next time I might throw some pineapple in.

[Ursula Vernon]

I thought there was pineapple with it.

[Kevin Sonney]

There isn't pineapple with it.

[Ursula Vernon]

Then why did you buy a thing of pineapple?

[Kevin Sonney]

That's for the side dish. Oh, yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

Okay.

[Kevin Sonney]

I will be roasting. I will be roasting pineapple as well as braising cabbage for the side dish because they say recommended is braised cabbage or roasted peppers and pineapple.

[Ursula Vernon]

Interesting.

[Kevin Sonney]

So I'm going to do some roasting and I'm going to do some cab. Braise some cabbage.

[Ursula Vernon]

Because I like skeptical of the instant pot cult. But if it involves Kevin using the thing to cook, then I'm not complaining.

[Kevin Sonney]

And the thing I like about it is that things that would normally take me, you know, two hours of babysitting or in the case of this thing, like six, eight hours of cooking. I can do an hour and a half, two hours.

[Ursula Vernon]

So we'll see. We'll see if usage continues once you have a job and are no longer cooking for joy.

[Damian Ryan]

Right.

[Kevin Sonney]

And it's nice to be cooking for joy. And that was the other thing at all things open, by the way, is I spent a lot of time talking to people about jobs. Most of it was networking. Some of it Was, you know, here are companies, let's see what they've got, let's see what they do. Let's see if they're the kind of place I want to work. But when I was talking to friends, because there's. There's a lot of hallway con. Oh, always with it. And I know I wanted, you know, a lot of the people who've been around both the All Things Open event, but also the tech scene in Raleigh, you know, I've know a lot of them just from over time. And a lot of it came down to distilling what am I looking for? Because that's the first thing they're like, well, what do you do? And what I do and what I'm looking for are not necessarily the same thing. And I think that's important for us to sit down and think about when we're evaluating other things. You know, we talk about evaluating, like, go through and make sure the system you're using to keep track of your organization or whatever is working for you.

[Ursula Vernon]

Right.

[Kevin Sonney]

And if it isn't, maybe you need to tune it. Maybe you need to change it up a little bit. Maybe you need to try something new. And I think the same thing can be said for creative endeavors.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah, I could be doing. I could. What can I do? I can do commissions.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Ursula Vernon]

But I don't want to live doing commissions.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right. You do them sometimes, like in an event or a special occasion or when a friend comes to you and say, here's this thing I kind of want to do. Can you help me out when your husband comes up to you and say, hey, can you help me create a logo for this podcast I'm thinking about doing, for example. For example. But on the other side, there is this whole kind of idea with our work that we should get it. I mean, and this is. This is stuck. And from the 1800s and the Protestant work ethic and all that crap in that we get a job and you don't have to like it, you don't have to love it, you don't have to be happy with it. You get a job, you get money, and then you work for your day, you come home, and if you're going to do something that makes you happy, you do it in that time period when you're not working or asleep. And oh, by the way, here's all the other obligations that, you know, society puts down on you.

[Ursula Vernon]

I would say there is a sort of dark flip side to, to what you're getting at, though.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, there is.

[Ursula Vernon]

Because the sort of Opposite of that is people saying, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. And that's toxic. Bullshit.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, because I love what I do.

[Ursula Vernon]

I work hard.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, yeah.

[Damian Ryan]

And.

[Kevin Sonney]

And. But the. And the other thing is, maybe what you love is latch hook rugs. I actually kind of like making latch hook rugs from the. You know, I did it when I was a kid. I find it restful. Haven't done it in forever, but I'd do it again. The whole idea around that, though, is maybe I love that. Well, I can't make a living at that. I have to eat well.

[Ursula Vernon]

And also, if you could make a living at it, you wouldn't necessarily want to if. Hobbies you love do not need to be monetized.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Ursula Vernon]

In fact, I have a bad habit of monetizing my hobbies and have done so multiple times, so I took up gardening because there's no damn way I can make money on gardening.

[Kevin Sonney]

Not really.

[Ursula Vernon]

And yeah, unless I get, like, a fruit stand, and it's not gonna happen.

[Kevin Sonney]

And honestly, chickens are a hobby. Yes, they're livestock, but they're a hobby. And they're not producing enough eggs or anything for me to be able to ever make money on them. And that's fine. Podcasting is a hobby. We don't actually. I mean, we have income from it, but it's not a significant amount.

[Ursula Vernon]

Well, I mean, it's. It's a pretty good chunk. The Patreon is nothing to sneeze at. But.

[Kevin Sonney]

But yeah, I mean, it's not. I.

[Ursula Vernon]

We can't live on it.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, we're losing money doing it, and that's fine. We. We do it out of love. At least I do it out of love.

[Ursula Vernon]

I don't think we're really losing money. Well, yeah, I mean, if you count the hours that we spend doing it and work in our. Our finances or whatnot, you know, how much are we cost an hour then? Yeah, totally.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

Losing money. But in I. The Patreon more comes in than we spend on podcasting. But it's.

[Kevin Sonney]

I mean, but that also. But that also includes that. That Patreon isn't exclusive to podcasting.

[Ursula Vernon]

Right. There's also the books.

[Kevin Sonney]

There's also the books. There's the art, there's the whatnot that goes with it. So.

[Ursula Vernon]

Speaking of books.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yes.

[Ursula Vernon]

I. I have a scheduling issue coming up, so.

[Kevin Sonney]

So you were telling me earlier, and.

[Ursula Vernon]

Which is that I have a novel due in March.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, crap. Now I realize. Keep talking, keep talking. I gotta Go do a thing.

[Ursula Vernon]

Okay.

[Kevin Sonney]

I'm a moron.

[Ursula Vernon]

The instant pot is going to kill him and I'm going to be very sad.

[Kevin Sonney]

There.

[Ursula Vernon]

Did you like.

[Kevin Sonney]

It's hissing an awful lot with steam. And then I'm realizing I didn't flip the little thing to, to close so it wasn't building pressure.

[Ursula Vernon]

Okay. Does it need more water added?

[Kevin Sonney]

No, it'll be fine.

[Ursula Vernon]

Okay. I have a book. Do I. I have sold a book. So do in March. Yay. It needs to be about 90,000 words long. And what I have written is about 20 some thousand words. So I need to get around 65,000 words done by March.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yep.

[Ursula Vernon]

Okay. No big deal. Except that I also have this other thing that I can't really get into too much right now, but I need another 25,000 words done on that by February. So it works out to about 90,000 words that I need to get done in the next four months. Ish.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, four ish months.

[Ursula Vernon]

And I, I sat down and did the math and it comes down to at least through February, I need to get 6,000 words done a week. On average.

[Kevin Sonney]

On average. Okay.

[Ursula Vernon]

My standard is 4,000 a week. I often do more. A 20,000 word month is not bad. But I am not one of those people who are like, I write 5,000 words a day. No, I write a thousand words a day. They're good words. I get to keep 99% of them. You know, I write very clean first drafts, but this is a lot of word count.

[Kevin Sonney]

It is.

[Ursula Vernon]

And I have to, I can't just arrange it as I know I will get 1500 words done a day because even though I have a fairly ferocious work ethic, as these things go, some days I will get 200 words done and be like, that is all that is coming out today.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Ursula Vernon]

Some days I will get 3,000 words done, and those days are great. But they don't, you know, it's. Do I have enough of those to make up for the 200 word days? I don't know. We're going to find out.

[Kevin Sonney]

So, yeah, I mean, and the, the, the statement I made earlier that you, I, you didn't look at me with murder, but you sort of gave me this look that says, are you an idiot?

[Ursula Vernon]

Yes. You said, well, that's

[Kevin Sonney]

like, like a thousand words a day for 94 days.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

And on the one hand, that is purely a manager thought. That is purely that empirical. Well, we, you know, if you have, if you can do X amount a day and you know, you can do X amount a day, then here's how many days it'll take. But. Right.

[Ursula Vernon]

But that's not how humans work.

[Damian Ryan]

Right.

[Kevin Sonney]

And there's. There's a book out there called. Or there's. I don't think maybe it's not a book. I'll, I'll check on it. But there's this concept of the manager schedule versus the maker schedule. And when we talk, when, when you're doing project management or when you're trying to, to organize these things, a lot of times it's really easy to just apply math and say, okay, all I have to do is X every day for X number of days. And it's done without any consideration for the idea that you're not going to do X every single day. You don't think in averages, you think in absolutes. Project managers sort of run into this all the time. They're like, how long will this take? Well, it'll take two days. Never tell a project manager it'll be two days. If it is really going to take two days, you tell them four. That gives you. Because everybody's adding buffer. Right. If it's going to take you two days, understand that there's a good chance, like I always double it because I know somewhere in there there's going to be an interruption, there's going to be a problem, there's going to be something that's going to take up that extra time.

[Ursula Vernon]

And speaking of interruptions and problems, as of Friday, my stepfather will be going into hospice, most likely.

[Kevin Sonney]

Okay. Yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

So there's a really solid chance that within a week or two, and I mean, we're, we're down to the wire of the doctor, like two weeks ago was like, you have a few weeks at most. So

[Kevin Sonney]

I'm just astounded he made it this long.

[Ursula Vernon]

Dude. Yeah, some people. Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

So there's an excellent chance that I will suddenly be in the funeral arrangement business and not the making word count business. Now, fortunately, to a certain extent, I can do both. There are people who can't. This is not a slam or a statement on my, my skills. I am. If I am very unhappy, I am capable of working very hard because what I do is set in a different world. And so I can go write that thing and not have to think about it.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Ursula Vernon]

And sometimes if it's completely miserable, I can go play a video game. And that's as much as I'm going to get done. Things are, things are very individual. So. And knowing that, in fact, my original deadline for the thing due In March was in January. And I said, that's a little close. Can we bump it out? Because while I could have pulled that off with, with a lot of grief and it is my nature to be like, to not go. Not to go. Can we push it out? But to go. I will work harder. Boxer, the horse is my. My.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yes, exactly.

[Ursula Vernon]

But I, I know this is going to happen. I know even with the best of intentions, that's gonna throw stuff off. So I pushed it out. Thank God. So I only have to do 6,000 words a day instead of like, or 6,000 words a week instead of like eight.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Ursula Vernon]

And you know, life happens. It may come down. I may be like, even, even I can't pull this out. You're going to need to, to get.

[Kevin Sonney]

And there's more time. There's. And the human part of this, no matter what the situation, whether it's a corporate job. Well, generally whether it's a corporate job, unless you have a really bad boss, whether it's creative job, when you know you're under contract, something like that is you say, look, I'm going to need more time because this life event happened and is causing this much delay. If you give them enough warning. Oh yeah, then it's great. And there's something that Damian, who is my interview and I talk about in a little more detail, which is the watermelon project.

[Ursula Vernon]

We should go listen to that thing about the watermelon.

[Kevin Sonney]

We should, and we'll do that. I just have to clarify one point. I. We were talking about the difference between bike shedding and yak shaving in the interview. And I think I got my definitions wrong. Right. Bike shedding is this situation you do when you're programming or you're discussing things where you get hung up on a little detail and it's derailing the entire project because, you know, I think it comes out of England. I was reading and they said that, you know, they were designing a nuclear plant, but they were hu. On what color to paint the bike shed. Right. They couldn't move forward until they decided on what color to paint the bike shed. So bike shedding, the other one is yak shaving, which is possibly, you know, the last step in a long, detailed process that you may or may not need to do. But you know, when you get there, you know that you're, you're, you're almost done. At least that's the one definition. Usually I think of it as more. It's a task that you're doing because you can, not because you need to. You are shaving the yak and the term actually came out of. Yes, the Ren and Stimpy episode.

[Ursula Vernon]

Okay.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. So it's. It's a thing. And these are, these are programming terms we use.

[Ursula Vernon]

And.

[Kevin Sonney]

And I'm sure when I'm. Even if I'm wrong about yak shaving, because I think that's the one I'm wrong most on, people are going to comment and tell me how wrong I am and I will be issuing corrections later. So that's fine. But in the meantime, here is Damien Ryan, who I spoke to a couple weeks ago and I'll have that interview with him right after this.

[Ursula Vernon]

Also, you sheer reacts.

[Kevin Sonney]

Really sheer not shave.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah, they're. You shear their. Their. Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

Let's go to the inter.

[Ursula Vernon]

Sam.

[Kevin Sonney]

Hi folks. I am here with listener Damian Ryan and Damian is a release manager for a tech company and we're going to talk about how Damien keeps not just himself organized, but the people who he's ultimately responsible to organized. Damien, can you do a better job of introducing yourself and telling us about what you do?

[Damian Ryan]

I can try. I'm not sure. So release management, it's a weird thing a lot of people might have. Might know about things like Scrum Masters and you've got general bosses and all of that. A release manager is someone who can be the person who looks after Jenkins and just writes build scripts, or it can be someone who's essentially responsible for the process of getting something built from the time someone has an idea all the way through to it going into the customer's hands.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, I think in our pre discussion you called it cat herding for engineering QA and dev, but not real. Cats are easier.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. Burlap sack optional.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, there you go. So in all of that, how do you keep yourself and your team organized?

[Damian Ryan]

So the big thing with keeping the team organized is making work visible and making sure everyone knows what they're doing, where they're doing it and how and why. We use several tools for this, but the main one is youtrack and utrack. It's like Jira. It's like all of these things. They're essentially ticketing systems that are built up to be kind of full featured ways of working tools and project management tools. How we use youtrack then is we have little. We have all the pieces of work and any piece of work you're going to do has to be in UTrack as a ticket. And a ticket is a description of the work to be done with some meta information about, like, who does it, where it's done, when it's for, what customer might be for. And all of these can then be arranged on what's called Kanban, which is essentially a board with all of these tickets in and their various stages.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right. And for those at home who haven't seen a Kanban board before, there was. It comes out of a Japanese manufacturing process. It's actually Japanese term, but you have a board with multiple columns. You know, here's. There's a column for things you need to do, things you're doing, things that are done. And sometimes you'll. You'll add other things. Like here's the big pile of the backlog of all the things you want to do someday. And you might have a space for QA in there, in between. Done and in the customer, release the customer. And as you, as you do things through each stage, you move it column to column so that you're kind of always aware of what's left to be done, what's been done and what's actually being done. At this moment, one of my favorite apps for that out, excuse me, outside of Jira, is an app called Trello, which is designed around Kanban boards. And I think they're now owned by Atlassian. So I'm hoping that Trello doesn't someday become Jira Lite. As much as in my last job, I was longing for Jira. I love to hate Jira, but, you know, things like IT and U Track are really good at what they do, and when you don't have them, if you're used to them, you can really miss them.

[Damian Ryan]

I mean, to be honest, all of these tools are equally good and bad, and I kind of think that the only good tool is when you don't have to use anymore. So as you're using the new one, you start longing for the old one.

[Kevin Sonney]

There are a couple tools I will never long for again. Honestly. We use Zoho projects with the last one and it was so very clunky and didn't integrate with anything that if someone comes to me and says, we want to go to Zoho projects, I'm going to be like, no,

[Damian Ryan]

okay, I'm going to take a note of that one because I've been lucky so far. And I'm even including Team City Foundation Server in there.

[Kevin Sonney]

And that's the thing, the biggest thing I found with things like Jira or TeamCity or. What's this, the Wiki ish thing? SharePoint. Right. Is that the tools themselves, everybody says the Tools suck. Nine times out of ten, it's how the tool was implemented. It's not the tool itself. It's how the company or how the person is using it that really sucks. Because the tool isn't necessarily bad. You may just be either using it wrong or trying to make it do too much or something like that.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, ultimately all of these things are. So there's a thing called Conway's Law.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, God.

[Damian Ryan]

And it's about software development and that any piece of software you make tends to resemble the team that made it and the politics that go around it.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

So like for instance, once I worked in a place where the development team and the DB team didn't talk to each other, couldn't talk to each other. Other, so they actually went off and developed their own database just to not have to talk to the other guys.

[Kevin Sonney]

That's, that's, that's one of my favorites. The other one is JWZ's law. Any program significantly advanced is not done until it can send and receive email that. That came out of. Yeah, he was, he was part of the original Nova Netscape Navigator crew and was, I think, one of the people who's not happy that Netscape started integrated an email client at the time.

[Damian Ryan]

So, yeah, I remember when it turned into Netscape Navigator and yeah, the world imploded. It was not a good time.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. Yeah, I'm still, I'm still touch and go with Firefox now, so I don't know. And we could, we could go into the browser wars, but I don't know if anyone wants to listen to that.

[Damian Ryan]

So.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, so using Kanban and breaking work up and full disclosure, folks, this is the second time we've done this interview today because I forgot to hit record. So I've got a whole bunch of notes from the last time as prompts and, and, and Damian is being very gracious in doing this like a second time, taking a. After discussing this for an hour, coming back and talking and just doing it all over again. But one of the things we had talked about is that you use now these are the things you use for your team and you're using it to break things down into smaller pieces, but that your personal organization is very different.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. So one thing I struggle with especially now is that there's so much going on. So we usually get through about a thousand of these tickets a month. That's far too much to keep in my head at one time. So spend a lot of time paging things in and out to avoid Doing that, try to chunk all of this work up into bigger things that kind of represent maybe 100 or 200 tickets. So what we do is, yes, we've all these small things that say this is work to be done. Above that we've got things I call feature trackers only because one of the religious wars in the Agile space. And all of this is what constitutes an epic.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

And generally an epic is a piece of work that's going to take longer than two weeks or a sprint. But what it really means is this thing is big, we can't break it down. What do we use to represent it? This thing's feature trackers. It will be something like do this big feature and that will be something. I use another ticket which would link to all of the smaller tickets and that would be in my head, that would be the representative there. So I can move those things around like chess pieces and not have to try to get lost in seven or 800 tickets that go on.

[Kevin Sonney]

And really the funny thing is that when you look at Agile in the pure sense, like the original Agile Manifesto actually really had nothing to say about how to break up work or any of this infrastructure framework that was built around it.

[Damian Ryan]

No, I mean a lot of this stuff actually comes from Ken Beck's work on xp, which happened long before the manifesto was written. Yeah, we're Talking what, early 2000s now?

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh yeah, yeah. And even then, as I saw Andrew Hunt, who co wrote the Pragmatic Programmer, one of the original signers of the Agile manifesto, I saw him speak and he said, you know, one of the things is that the, that Agile is, is meant to be adaptable. And so a lot of these things, like here's this very formal Scrum thing, it's meant to be adaptable for people to be able to use it. Not. Here is what Agile is carved in

[Damian Ryan]

stone you've hit onto. One of the things I had a rant on our first time around is I don't like Scrum. I don't like prescriptive frameworks that say you must do this. You have to have a product owner, you have to have this time box that's two weeks and you have to deliver an increment every time. I especially don't like things like Safe and Less, which are frameworks for scaling Scrum and scaling Agile up to organizations of tens of thousands of people. And they absolutely terrify me. So probably what you call Agile agnostic, there's some good tools there. Use what works. If it doesn't work, throw it away.

[Kevin Sonney]

And even in the classes I was taking towards my Scrum Master Certified, there was a discussion of this is how it's all laid out and this is what is officially Scrum. And I just use air quotes. I don't know if you can see that on the camera. I know the people at home couldn't see that on the camera. But you should feel free to pitch out things that aren't working right. Because in the end, it's just a framework and you don't have to use every piece of a framework.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And it's really good to start off. It gives you a good starting place. I won't be mean about Scrum anymore. It gives you a good starting place when you don't know what's going on and what the tools do. And then it gives you room to say, okay, hang on, let's try this thing. Let's try this. What I will say is the one thing you shouldn't throw is retrospective.

[Kevin Sonney]

No, absolutely not.

[Damian Ryan]

If you're not constantly looking at what's going on, how to improve how things are being blocked, and how to improve the system you work in, then you're not going to do anything to make it better. Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

We had a concept at my last job called the blameless root cause analysis, the blameless rca. And part of that was getting everybody in a room, not just the group that necessarily had the failure, was responsible directly for fixing it, but to go over the entire impact from when we detect when a problem was detected to when it was considered completely fixed and all of the groups, any actions needed to be taken by all of the groups involved, from the customer support team, notifying people, customers sooner that there's a problem, to any engineering fixes that had to go in to operations, building more monitors or tuning monitoring systems to better detect things or prevent things in the future. And rather than have it focus on, well, it's this person's fault, right. Or it's because OPS did a thing. OPS is to blame. It was much more of a because OPS did a thing. Here's the impact it had and here's how as a group, we're going to address it and make sure it doesn't happen again.

[Damian Ryan]

And funny enough, that's something we were just talking about today, talking about how aviation metaphors and how airlines and pilots deal with failure feeds into that. So if you look at when a plane goes down or when an accident happens, how CAA and the FAA tried to deal with that, it's not about taking the pilot open everyone up and saying what went wrong.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

It's about looking at what happened, how we can fix it, and how we can put things in a checklist so it doesn't happen again.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. And the media wants a single point of blame. They want to be able to say the pilot was at fault. Right. Or this person is a horrible monster because they let this happen. And. But oftentimes it isn't just one person's fault, It's a systemic failure.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And you can fix the system. If you don't fix the system, then the failure will happen again and again and you just run out of people to blame after a while.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right, right. And we talked a lot in the prior interview about the toxicity of that sort of workplace, which, you know, where if there's. If it's always someone's fault, a person's fault, that you shouldn't be. You shouldn't be hammering on a person for a particular fault if you should be. And we'll talk more about this when we talk about systems and habits, I'm sure, but you need to be talking to each other.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. So that was. Yeah. One of the things we talked about is that without open and honest communication at all points, you're going to bring these failures in. The hardest thing in a company to do is learn to trust a bunch of relative strangers. Especially when you start off with what's going to be your livelihood. Your addiction to food and water.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yes.

[Damian Ryan]

And living space. The only way you can build up that trust is by constantly talking. And it's terrifying for engineers because no one wants to take their headphones off and start talking. I'd rather look at this code.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right. I gotta say, one of the things that we really improved our communication was actually implementing a group chat that actually worked because we were a distributed team at one of my prior jobs. And so, like, operations had their thing, how they. How they communicated, and engineering had their thing where they communicated, and marketing and customer support had a whole other thing. And we made a strategic decision to say we're going to implement Slack. And that got us all talking to each other because instead of having to say, well, if I want to ask the engineers a question, they want me to get on hip chat. And if I need to talk to customer success, I need to be using Skype for business. And I don't even know what sales wants us to use and things like that, suddenly we were all in the same place and it opened those channels up, especially since we were a distributed team. So now our London office could talk to developers in the Seattle office. So much easier.

[Damian Ryan]

That's one thing that's really hard to keep going with a distributed team. The water cooler moment you come in, you have a coffee, you have a chat with people you would never talk to in your day to day work.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right. And we had social channels just for that sort of thing. We had a channel set aside for just talking about music. Right.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And it's super important.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. And a lot of companies just think, no, the business chat should be just business and this. But if you're working on a distributed team, you need to be able to have those interactions.

[Damian Ryan]

Yep. And the hardest part in any job is getting used to this weird and wacky organism that is the company.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right. Very much so. And now, now we're divulging away back. So I'm going to pull us back in with how do you keep yourself and your team organized? And we talked about keeping the team organized and keeping the company organized because they're kind of interrelated. But one of the things I found interesting was that when it comes to your personal organization, it's very different.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. So I suffer from probably Irish mother syndrome in that I'll make sure everyone else is okay and then forget myself. Right. So I'm really, really good at giving advice. Some of it's useful even. I'm really, really bad at taking what I say.

[Kevin Sonney]

And as someone who is apparently an amateur advice giver on the Internet now, I find the same thing. One of the most valuable things I did when going through all the experiments with Ursula earlier on in the first year, I guess, was trying some of the things I was recommending to her myself or trying them over again because I hadn't done them in years and years and years. But no, it's. It's very common. It's the shoemaker's children problem. Shoemaker's children doesn't have any shoes. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That may be an Americanism. I don't know. I like the term Irish mother problem. Too busy taking care of everyone else to take care of yourself. Yeah, yeah. But you were saying you keep things in lists, so.

[Damian Ryan]

Yep, I've. So I used to keep everything in my head when it was just me and I was working on small things. That was easy. And as the number of people I have to work with grows. But find out that there's not much space in my head for all of this. So Sublime Edit is my brain. I keep a lot of stuff there. Everything is bulleted lists or markdown and there's about 15 tabs of stuff I'm either thinking about or stuff I have to keep on track. And everything is in there. If I ever lose that laptop, I'm dead. I should probably actually upload that stuff to a Git repository somewhere just so it's backed up, restored.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, backups are important. They're huge. Very important. Yep.

[Damian Ryan]

Terrible at that as well. At least personal backups.

[Kevin Sonney]

I use an open source tool called syncthing, which keeps it. Which syncs directories between multiple computers that you own. There's no cloud storage or third party involved. And I try to keep all my lists like that in one of those folders so that I know if something bad happens to a laptop, the data is still somewhere else. I actually saved my butt with that when I accidentally deleted my home directory trying to do some encryption stuff on my last work laptop. And what should have been days and days and days of recovery. I was just like, okay, it's gone. Bring up syncthing and you know, reinstall sync thing. Get everything, all the dependencies needed. Then, okay, this directory, this directory, this directory. And oh, look, there's everything. You know, I think I lost a couple scripts that hadn't been committed to Git yet that were trivial. So. But yeah, no, do that back up. You will thank yourself later.

[Damian Ryan]

Which means everything's gonna collapse tonight. Well, yeah, and it's gonna be too late, because that's how the universe works.

[Kevin Sonney]

Indeed. And you also said you, you. You're one of the Excel people.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah, I know. I like Excel. I use Excel for fun. I do. I'm the sort of person, I have a burn down chart in Excel for the books I need to read.

[Kevin Sonney]

That's much easier than the folder on my Kindle that says read next, which has about 40 things in it right now.

[Damian Ryan]

Okay, I feel really bad now. I think my backlog is 320.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, that's just the things on my Kindle.

[Damian Ryan]

Oh, yeah, that's just on my Kindle. Yeah, I have a problem. Yeah, no, I need to be ill for a long time just to catch up.

[Kevin Sonney]

Hugo Season is terrible for me because I. I have to stop everything and, and go read. And sometimes things I already read, but often it's things I meant to read now it's like, well, instead of getting to that after these other five, I got to read it now. Yeah, so there's that and now.

[Damian Ryan]

And then the, the other thing I think we talked about, there's we use youtrack and I complain a lot to the entire company. It's not a Huge company. But I complain a lot everywhere where I can about people not using YouTrack and not putting stuff in there. And we pay money for this tool. It's for organizing your work. Why not use it? Stop putting stuff into SharePoint, just do it there. I've started and I have a small project with stuff that I know is going to come up at some time in the future. And it's for more strategic things that we should do when I've time to get out of the weeds. So put stuff in there and track it that way.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right. I believe the term that is. Is commonly used is dog fooding. We eat our own dog food.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

Although at one company it was we drink our own Kool Aid, which is a reference to the. To. To Jim Jones, which I found to be a rather grim. A very grim. Yes. Did you drink the Kool A. Oh, wait. I don't like. I'm concerned about this reference. But all of this.

[Damian Ryan]

I would use that one because I tend to go quite grim.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Damian Ryan]

With most things.

[Kevin Sonney]

But I guess the purpose of all of this is to break your work down into smaller pieces.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. Ultimately there's a lot to do. Everyone has a lot to do everywhere. And if you look at this just huge amorphous blob that is everything that needs to be done to make life happy. It's terrifying.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Damian Ryan]

So, yeah. The phrase is usually how do you eat an elephant? And it's one bite at a time. So it's easier if you break your work down. And all of this work, which could be a ticket that would say fix all of the systems in the company. You'd have to break it down into tiny things like fix this little thing that's broken. Fix this other little thing that's broken. And a lot of it comes from Goldratt's book the goal, which was rewritten as it's unfair to say rewritten. But it was reimagined as the Phoenix Project. It's a book people will probably know about if you work in it.

[Kevin Sonney]

It's one of my favorite books. Anytime I find someone who is not who. Who doesn't get the. The agile concepts or doesn't understand the. I'm gonna use a term here. So. And I. I know the philosophy of DevOps since DevOps is much more a philosophy than a toolkit that they need to read the Phoenix Project first.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And it's really good. It's written as a novel. Yeah. It's a little bit cringy because it's a business book. Pretending it's a novel, pretending to be a business book or the other way around, whatever way it is. But ultimately what it says is, you know, think of all of your work like you're on a factory floor. If you're trying to build one automobile at a time, you're going to get a couple of cars out a year. And while they'll be really expensive cars, you're building Teslas. You're not going to make a fortune.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yep.

[Damian Ryan]

If you want to do this, you break it down like Ford and you do small pieces. Get them out, get them and get them checked and just keep going.

[Kevin Sonney]

And, and in one of my courses back in the day when I was doing formal schooling and thinking about actually getting a bachelor's degree for those at home who don't know, I have a high school diploma and that's it and some professional certifications. But I took a course and one of the things they talked about was the just in time model of building things or supplying things. Ford, who, you know, does has that sort of a concept of instead of five people focusing on one big thing, you've got a whole bunch of people focusing on little things down that line. And then you get to GM who not only has the same process on the, here's a person who does just this one little thing. And so it's one little change that builds to a big thing, but they also reuse things very well. So anytime you buy a General Motors car of a certain year, it's probably going to use the same distributor as every other GM car that year. Right. So that now they're actually reusing all of, all of that effort into designing the perfect, most efficient distributor. And instead of saying, well, it's just this one car and that car's a one off and we'll design a whole new distributor for the other car coming off. Everybody's using the same distributor, so it's really easy to create new things by reusing things they've already built.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And I mean that's part of again, object orientation and other programming ways of doing this. You don't, you're not carving a statue, you're building blocks and putting Lego together and that's the efficient and safer way of making software.

[Kevin Sonney]

Does it drive you as crazy as it drives me when someone says, well, I don't really trust how the other people are doing it, so we're just going to write our own from scratch

[Damian Ryan]

or I'm going to lie down or yell at something. Yeah, non invented hair syndrome is just endemic and I hate it.

[Kevin Sonney]

I also had one where it was, well, we tried these five products and none of them did the exact specific thing we wanted. Each of them did some of them, none of them did all of it. So we're just going to write our own because that's the only way to get the exact thing we want. And I wanted to claw my eyes out.

[Damian Ryan]

Yep. And it's a hard thing for engineers to do as well, to not be perfect and to realize it's okay to not be perfect as long as you get 80% of what you want, that's a success.

[Kevin Sonney]

Minimum viable product, people. That's sort of an Agile joke. One of the things is that the goal with Agile is not to ship a giant thing that is perfect in every way. It is to build the functionality, to get the minimum of what you want so that you can get that out the door so you can start building on top of it. Because if you try to build one big thing and release it, games are the best illustration of that. Right before we had Internet connected consoles, a game shipped when it had no bugs or it had as few bugs as they could get away with. And because they would never be able to change it or update it.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And then you've got the opposite. The game comes out and the first level you play is always the giant loading screen that takes 700 gigabytes from the Internet.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right. Because it's all the updates of things, since they're like, well, we have a release date. There it goes. And now here's all the fixes we need to put out for it. Yep. Or all the media, they couldn't fit on the dvd.

[Damian Ryan]

No. Just sell that. That's dlc.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, gotcha, gotcha.

[Damian Ryan]

I've gone to the dark side.

[Kevin Sonney]

There we go. Yeah. All right, we'll pull it back in. So you also talked about using the emergent task planner at one point.

[Damian Ryan]

Right. So we were talking about habits and how to keep organized. And so I was trying to see where my time goes. I felt extremely busy, but not incredibly productive. So I started using the emergency task pattern just to see where it goes every 50 minutes. Write down what I was doing. And I was getting interrupted every 15 minutes, which was crazy. And the interruptions were useful. So that let me know that it's time to anything that involves a lot of concentration. It's time to let someone else do and just cope with the interruptions and deal with that. And while it's not fun, it's probably better for the team in that way.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. One of the things I had talked about in our last discussion was I had a team member who had to do that sort of thought intensive thing. He's our network engineer and to prevent interruptions, he had bought a blink, which is a little tiny USB LED controlled light. He mounted it at his cubicle and started to implement Pomodor. So he would say, I'm doing, I'm doing pomos tomatoes, blocks of time. And if it's red, I can be. I'm involved in something and that's a do not disturb light. If it's green, it's okay to interrupt me. And if it's blue, I'm taking a break or something like that. I'll be, you know, I'll be back. And so much. And that was, it was sort of like that was the only way he could gatekeep people from walking up and going, hey, man, can you help me with something completely unrelated to the firewall rules he's trying to craft? And it's going to take him three hours. Right?

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. I talked about how, you know, a five minute interruption can be about an hour's worth of lost work because it takes much time to switch all of that stuff back in.

[Kevin Sonney]

Or at first it takes time to switch off. You can toss it out really easily. But yet I think for every five, every five minute interruption is 15 minutes of trying to refocus on what you were doing. Which is, which is important to know and important to remind people of how disruptive those sorts of interruptions are. Right. And how hard being an interrupt driven or a reactive organization is on your people.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. Because once you're, once you're in the weeds all of the time, reacting, reacting, reacting, you don't have time to kind of come back up and see where we're going next. Because you're always fire.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. I was talking to Chris Shiner and he was talking. We were talking about ADHD for everybody at home. You heard this last week, Damon. You get to hear it in about a month because it's the interview that's going to air before the one we're recording right now. But it was that he tends to get the hyper focus portion of adhd so that he can't. He has, he has to make that effort to see the bigger picture. I asked if it was. He can't see the forest for the trees. He's more like, I can't see the forest for the bark.

[Damian Ryan]

Yep.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

But that is really tricky.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right, so I think we've strayed a Little bit from how do you keep yourself organized into the what system and habits are valuable to you? Starting with breaking work into smaller pieces.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. So we've covered lists. Lists everywhere.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yep.

[Damian Ryan]

I used to hate checklists. I used to think they were childish. And then I got some real work. And now checklists are the only things that will save anything. So keeping this stuff down, checklists are good as well. If you want to automate anything, you start off with a checklist, then start building automation around it.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, yeah, here's the pro. You have to figure out step by step what a process is before you can implement automation to make so that you don't have to do it by hand every time.

[Damian Ryan]

And again, we're getting into systems thinking, and if you want to try and improve anything or try and keep a handle on organization of something that's bigger than a person, you have to map out the land.

[Kevin Sonney]

Absolutely.

[Damian Ryan]

You have to map out how it's currently working. And that will give you the way to kind of figure out where it's broken, where you need to fix things next.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, I think I read. I read another business book disguised as a novel about Critical Chain, and I'll look the title up later.

[Damian Ryan]

Oh, that's. That's the same guy who wrote the gold.

[Kevin Sonney]

Okay.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

And it was. It was a. It was very dry because it was about project managers basically learning how to be better project managers. But one of the things it talked about was how these processes are all a big chain. And I think. Yeah, and they talk about that also in, in the Phoenix project, that a slowdown in one, in one link, in one step of the process slows down the whole thing. And it's finding those critical points where those slowdowns can have the biggest impact and either fixing it or preventing it so that the whole system runs smoothly.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah, this whole thing about you can do all sorts of work to improve anything, but if you're not working on the constraint in the system, like the slowest part, it's wasted. Yes, you can have the best developers in the world, but if you can't ship that stuff, nothing's going anywhere. And vice versa. If you ship the stuff really easy but it's broken, you're not getting anything, any value whatsoever.

[Kevin Sonney]

It even comes down to sometimes the constraints are outside your control. In my prior job, sometimes the constraint was literally how fast you could write something to disk. And sometimes there are things you can do to fix that, like don't write so much to disk or don't write to the same disk you're trying to use to load the program, move the database so that it's on a different machine than the web app. And sometimes there's just nothing you can do except change the program so that it adapts for recognizes that this is going to be a problem and we need to understand that this constraint is in place and work around it.

[Damian Ryan]

So COO current company tells. He likes to tell a funny story. In one of his previous companies, the person who did all the accounting and got all of the money in to keep the company going had an incredibly slow computer and the throughput of what that person could get done in a day was abysmal. So they made the change of giving that person a better computer, the throughput of the company and actually made twice as much money just because they could send out more and more bills, they

[Kevin Sonney]

could get the invoices out. Yeah.

[Damian Ryan]

The constraint is not necessarily where you think it is and it could be something really simple like spending an extra $200 on the computer.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, yeah. In one case, I was managing systems for a piece of software that was very memory intensive and the constraint was how much was literally physically how much memory could be on a box and as represented by Java Heap. And as anyone who's developed in Java knows, and the rest of us probably don't, is the bigger the memory allocated to Java, the longer it takes to clean it back out when it does what's called garbage collection. And so we'd get into a situation where it couldn't do a full garbage collection before the next one would start and it would get locked up. So we had to actually implement a constraint of we can't go past a certain boundary in memory because if we do, then it's impossible for the program to function. Right. So sometimes adding a constraint actually helps rather than hurts.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah, it's a way of thinking. It's kind of trying to think outside your own area of expertise and try and see how what you do at any one time will affect the entire company.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yep. Yeah. And just making that change suddenly changed all of our capital expenses because we didn't have to continually buy bigger machines.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And then suddenly budgets are easier, spending less money. You don't have to look after so many machines.

[Kevin Sonney]

Well, actually what it meant was we could then implement virtualization, which meant that instead of having to have one machine per customer, we'd have 5, 10, 16 customers on a really, really big machine, which was a big change from, you know, we can have two because otherwise their memory clashes with each Other,

[Ursula Vernon]

you

[Kevin Sonney]

know, again, though, efficient use of resources by looking at the system, not at an individual problem.

[Damian Ryan]

Yep.

[Kevin Sonney]

So, okay, so systems and habits, valuable system thinking, breaking work into smaller pieces. And then we spent a lot of time last time talking about communication, because you had said that communication is one of the hardest things and the most valuable things that you can do as a release manager, but the teams can do among themselves.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. So a lot of time, especially in tech companies, you get people trying to come up with technical ways of solving a problem they see.

[Ursula Vernon]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

So an example would be, oh, developers don't put good QA notes on their tickets. Can we put some sort of weird script in that would stop them being able to submit them for QA if they don't?

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

And that's a technological. There. That's a technological solution to a problem. That's basically, go talk to the person who sits three seats down and ask them what the thing is to do. Document it together, put it in the ticket.

[Kevin Sonney]

And if this is a singular person who's consistently having that issue, maybe if it is recurring, the two of you go talk to either their manager or your manager about why this isn't working and maybe how to do it better versus punishing the whole team and saying, all right, because one person can't seem to get this, now we're going to force everybody to do it a specific way.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. Again, most problems, if not all of them, can be solved by fixing the system everyone's in. Right. I don't think people are inherently out to break things. Yeah. Okay. There's 10% of the population that skew towards negative personality traits.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

But most people in most organizations just want to get things done.

[Kevin Sonney]

And the people who feel this obscene urge just to break everything, maybe they need jobs in qa.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

Most fun I had was doing hardware verification. Yeah. But the other thing you talked about with communication was what you called watermelon projects.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. Okay. So another thing that I've seen with people failing to communicate is that they're afraid to say things are going wrong because. Or they'll be punished for it. So they'll leave, walk around going, yeah, my project is green. My project is green. Don't worry until the problems build up and build up, and then suddenly the project is read overnight.

[Kevin Sonney]

Mm.

[Damian Ryan]

And Yep. That's the phrase that I've heard recently is they're watermelon projects.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Damian Ryan]

They're green on the outside, red on the inside, and no one knows until the last minute when you open it

[Kevin Sonney]

up and you suddenly have to see what's inside that. Oh God, it's all red.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

And, and communicating early on can prevent that.

[Damian Ryan]

Well, it's like if you, when you're going off course in the plane, I, I do lots of metaphors. We'll just have to deal with it.

[Kevin Sonney]

That's fine.

[Damian Ryan]

You got, of course, in a plane, is it easier to kind of make a small correction and get back on course so every few minutes or do you wait until you've become like 300 miles off course and then try and go back up the other side triangle.

[Kevin Sonney]

And from a, from a, again from an efficiency standpoint, you know, airplanes have the constraint of how much fuel they have. And if you're 300 miles off course and you know you're like a long haul, like you're going from say Raleigh to, to Heathrow, that 300 miles is a lot of fuel. And now suddenly you may not be able to get there.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And you'll crash.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. When you could have fixed it by just making little adjustments 300 miles ago.

[Damian Ryan]

And again that kind of feeds into the small batch sizes. Do little things. If you do small things often you can correct a lot easier. Instead of doing a giant project that you only know if it works at the very end or not.

[Kevin Sonney]

And talk through the, and keep those lines of communication going the entire time so that no one gets caught off guard if something needs to be adjusted

[Damian Ryan]

and not just within a team, between teams and between departments. I think the healthier companies and the companies are always held up as these are the good places to work are those places where people talk all the time.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. We had talked about when implementing Agile because I've been in transitional companies and you've done it several times. That it isn't just if when doing it you can't do it with just. Engineering is going to be agile now. It's an organization wide thing because a change to how engineering does things is going to impact things from support to finance to the executive level. So the whole company has to embrace that. And that makes it really difficult sometimes.

[Damian Ryan]

Well, every time if you think about it, engineering says okay, yeah, we're going to release more often. We're releasing every two weeks. And the poor group of support people are like, hang on, our support matrix is going to go up by 12. How are we going to support all these various versions in the wild?

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

And then marketing's going, hang on, we have a cadence for these things. Our customers don't want to take it at this level. And all these things Build up again systems thinking. Every small change has an effect across an entire system.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yep. And one of the nice things I think about the small incremental changes is it actually makes that easier when you're talking to supporter finance to say, hey, you know, here's a little change that's going to improve all of, all of this stuff for your customers, or not finance to support all of the customers. But again, you're right, the danger is there that instead of having one version to support, they're going to have 50. And at one of my prior companies, we had that problem and there was a very large effort being made to get everyone, like the entire, every customer we had onto within a range of, you know, the prior version, the current version or the newest, you know, the, the or the newest version. So that, and we were tracking metrics along. Okay, how many people are behind what is considered current. And then as we start to deploy the next version, you know, what's the, what's the path look like? How many people are still 4 revs back versus 1 rev back versus current. And a big effort was made to start shortening that gap and that, and that, that support burden. Right. And it's a hard thing to do. And it took everybody in the company to be able to do it, from the, the salespeople and the customer management people to talking to the customers to explain what the value is here and why we're doing it and build those expectations to support being able to stop supporting things and be able to support the new things. Because they're not supporting 50 old versions.

[Damian Ryan]

Right.

[Kevin Sonney]

But it was hard. It was hard. And it took us two or three years to get to a point where on average we would have current, current minus one and current minus two only.

[Damian Ryan]

And it does involve the entire company all the way through from sales to the whole senior management team. Because you have to persuade your customers to do what you want and what's good for you.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

So necessarily for them.

[Kevin Sonney]

Not always.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And you know, they're hard conversations to have.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. And we were fortunate that most of our customers were very happy because it meant that some of them were on the old versions and had that inertia built up, had been dealing with bugs that we literally couldn't fix without upgrading. Right. I don't know why the dog is going off. It's just, it's bark o', clock, I guess. And that leads us into. Much more into the best advice or feedback you've been given. So why don't we do that one first and Then we'll come back on how you decide what to do first on a given day.

[Damian Ryan]

Sure.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yep.

[Damian Ryan]

So best feedback I think I've ever gotten was. It's okay not to be perfect and not to try and do everything at the one time.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

It's incredibly hard to do, though, especially for someone who doesn't like failure.

[Kevin Sonney]

I think your exact quote was, if you make yourself the hero, you will always be the hero, and all heroes die.

[Damian Ryan]

That's stage two.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, that's stage two. Okay. Oh, no, wait, wait. I think the first one is if you don't have to fix every. You don't have to fix everything yourself. You have to let other people fail.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

And part of that is letting yourself fail too.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. Yeah. Because if you don't fail, then no one is ever going to try and pick this stuff up because we're all busy. Everyone's super busy. And no one's going to try and volunteer for work if they can help it. You know, if you're going around solving everyone's problems and that speaks to the hero part.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

You're going to left there be left there to flame out like most superheroes.

[Kevin Sonney]

Mm. Yeah. And while. While the compelling. While that hero's journey arc of the hero fails and then rebuilds themselves and comes back and saves the day for everyone is. Is a good story. It's hell to live.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And it doesn't work for people. We're people, not stories.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yes. So, yeah. And I think there's a lot to be. A lot to be said on the you have to let other people fail portion of this, because if you don't let other people fail, they don't have an opportunity to grow.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And it is really, really hard. And it's something I struggle with a lot to try and look at failure as an opportunity. And it's a lesson learning thing. It's not about, you are a bad person and you will never, ever get an opportunity again. That's what. So it is really hard to reframe that.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

And I struggle with it all the time.

[Kevin Sonney]

I. I'm in my. I don't know what number of, you know, job hunts this time around. Right. And yeah, it's not easy. And I know there are going to be times when I'm not going get. I'm gonna try to get something or I'm gonna apply for something and I'm not gonna get it and someone else might get it or maybe, you know, anytime I don't do something. I think it was my cousin Susan, who said this one, something to this effect is when I don't do something, it's an opportunity for someone else. Right. By trying to be the hero, I'm taking away opportunities from other people.

[Ursula Vernon]

People.

[Damian Ryan]

It's a really good way of putting it.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's loop back now and talk about how you decide what, what you decide to do first on a given day.

[Damian Ryan]

So I'm terrible. I do what you're not supposed to do. I read the email first. I usually read email before I even get out of bed. Oh, I know. Just to get it. I won't get into a whole loop of replying to it, but I want to have an idea of what's coming before I get in. But yeah, I do try and keep things at least a little bit structured. So go through email first thing, go through tickets, look at what's broken and what's going on and if anything needs to be done urgently and get that out of the way because pretty much after about 10 o' clock, the day is gone. It just becomes like a soup of people and things and just getting on with it.

[Kevin Sonney]

And, and, and that's, I mean, it's like you're building a routine around that. And I think that's really the important takeaway is that you've got that routine of, okay, the first thing I do is I check my email. Maybe I'm checking at the wrong time, but I'm checking my email first. Then I'm, you know, looking at the tickets because I know at a certain point in the day everything's going to go straight to hell.

[Damian Ryan]

And this is, well, I mean, I've started using Habitica just for this reason. It's, and it's not because I like going on quests, honest.

[Kevin Sonney]

You know, I, I started there as well and then I found myself going, well, you know, if I can get everything done today, I maybe will have. I, I can, you know, and we finish this thing, I'll. I'll be able to get three more pets. And I'm at that. I've reached the point where I'm just like, I'm trying to get one of everything and it's, and that's part of the feedback loop of why do I make sure I, you know, why do I have a thing on there for feeding the chickens, which I'm reasonably sure I'm going to do every day, but I've also got a thing on there for, you know, take your pills, take your morning pills, take your night pills. Right. Things that I need to remember to do just to make sure I do them.

[Damian Ryan]

So there are a couple of things that are my downfall. If there's a progress bar, I need to get it to 100%.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh.

[Damian Ryan]

And if there are wars and badges, I want them all. So I kind of game myself with these things. This. Every day I'm going to stick a progress bar and I'm going to click the thing, make it go towards 100% and get that dopamine hit.

[Kevin Sonney]

So I take it you're one of the people who collects the productivity alchemy open badges as well.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah, they are like crack cocaine to me.

[Kevin Sonney]

Well, then when we're done with this, I'll give you the special code for I was a guest.

[Damian Ryan]

That's the only reason I'm doing this.

[Kevin Sonney]

Nice. Now, I know I've done something good by doing the patches. But. But going back to it, routines are really important. I don't think a lot of. I think a lot of people kind of poo poo the idea of routine. They want to make it something formal when really often it's not.

[Damian Ryan]

It's knowing where you want. Yeah. Knowing what's going to happen at any time is really useful. When things start going south, you kind of have to build up this scaffold of safety around you. And safety is a really important thing that kind of ties into. When I talk about communication. It's about feeling safe, feeling that everyone's got your back. And a routine helps with that. And all of this stuff helps avoid burnout. Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

And as someone who's burned out more than once, I think I was talking again when I was talking to Chris. I think it was that burnout is not something you ever 100% get over. It's. It's much more of a. It can go, to use the cancer metaphor I used in the interview. And I feel so terrible using it because the only way I could come up with it goes into remission, but it's never really gone. Right. And so you. The. The things. Like a good routine is a scaffolding to help prevent it from happening again.

[Damian Ryan]

Yep. And it's. It's part of the looking after yourself, putting your own mask on, which I've already admitted I'm terrible at. And I know it. I'm a bad person.

[Kevin Sonney]

That's all right. So am I okay with that? Yeah, I'll own that. It's not a big thing. Okay, so that takes us down to the last two questions. And when we did this the first time, you decided to go with the sad, easy question first, which is how do you do with. How do you deal with failure or when you miss a goal?

[Damian Ryan]

So, yeah, the short answer is I try very hard and do this reframing, say failure is an opportunity and all of that. And I fail at that too.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

So then I beat myself up and I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night about things that happened when I was 10. But what I found is as I got older, I really stopped caring so much. And I'm really looking forward to when I turn 80 and it's like I don't care about anything. I'm gone down the road in my pants, you know?

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, I, that I embarrassed myself when I was 16. Who cares? I. How much more embarrassed can I be at 95 years old? Yeah, right. Completely off subject, my Ursula's stepfather is turning. I think he just turned like 82. And as I like to say, he, he taught the hippies how to smoke dope back in the 60s. And he used to, he used to be like, how can people wake and bake? You know, how can these kids get up in the morning, smoke weed and then do things? Well, by the time he hit 70, he's like, I'm 70, who gives a shit, right? I want to be 70 and going, who gives a shit? Because at 40 something it's really. Sometimes you do have to worry about who gives a shit not a good thing.

[Damian Ryan]

Occasionally. Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

Occasionally, yeah. All right, now the hard question and, or the fun question is do you celebrate success? And if so, how? And I loved your answer to this last time.

[Damian Ryan]

So. Yep, it's incredibly hard, especially for some of the group in the 80s in Ireland, there was an awful lot of. You don't brag about stuff. You, you have ideas above your station. We call it no having notions.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yes, absolutely.

[Damian Ryan]

Really hard to know. Celebrate your success. But what I do is whenever a little thing goes well, I write it in what I call a victory log and just leave it there. Even if it feels bad to write it. You know, I'm having notions or whatever. Leave it there and then come back to it when things are bad. Because you come back to it when things are bad. If it's written down. You don't have all the tricks your brain plays on you when you're feeling bad. That just turns everything black and white.

[Kevin Sonney]

And I love this idea and it's something I think I might, I'm probably going to start trying to do because it's really easy to forget those victories or let them be transient before you go back to the bad stuff, I

[Damian Ryan]

think it was really horrible thing about your brain is that your memories are tied to your emotional state.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

So when you're feeling down, all you'll remember the other memories that happened last time, you're feeling down, and it's really hard to kind of get those good things back in your head.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. I think it was on this week's show because we're recording this on the 5th of October. And so on this week's show, Ursula was talking about how, you know, she just finished a book and she's like, I feel kind of bad about it now. What am I going to do? And then we started doing the math and she has written in the past 10 years 30 books.

[Damian Ryan]

Wow.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right? Or. Or no, she's 20 since NERC was released. 30 overall. Right. And. And I'm like, you know, I know finishing a book is a big deal and a big accomplishment. And, you know, if you. And look at how. And we were talking about how it adds up. And writing a book is eating an elephant because she has. She can't write. She can't just sit down and whip out 150,000 words in a sitting. She has to do a thousand words here, a thousand words there. Right.

[Damian Ryan]

But when you're doing that, it's really, really hard to kind of just look up for a second. When you're down there fighting, you're trying to get through this huge project, it's really hard to kind of look up and look behind and see where you've come.

[Kevin Sonney]

And sometimes when you're in the middle of that project, you're like, I'm never going to do this. Right. Or I'm never going to be able to finish X. If you've got that victory log, if you've got the ability to go back and say, well, actually, yeah, no, you've done this before. Look how good you've done before. You can do it again. You don't have to do better the second time around. You can meet. There's a thing about meeting or exceeding your own expectations. If you just meeting them is a victory. And write that down on the log.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And it's. It's the little things that help. It's not all about being, again, not being a hero. We're not fighting dragons.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Damian Ryan]

It's just getting through a day that can be a victory.

[Kevin Sonney]

And I've had days like that recently. Yeah, yeah.

[Damian Ryan]

We all do and we all will again.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, yeah.

[Damian Ryan]

It's part of being human.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. Some days the Victory log is I got out of bed.

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah. And write it down.

[Kevin Sonney]

And write it down. Yeah. So that's everything. There is so much I'm sorry we lost in the other discussion because I forgot to verify that I had actually started recording. So that's on me. System failure and a place for me to implement a checklist now. A prerecord checklist which I hadn't done before. And so now it's something I'm. Let me flip back to my bullet journal end. Because I've got my journal right here. Build. See this way I'll make sure I do it right. Pre interview checklist. And that goes in with all of the other. With the rest of the checklist I have on any other. Any production because I have a whole. I have habitica tasks that happen weekly for record this part, record that part, you know, put it all together, set the release date, all that stuff. So now, now I build a checklist for what to do before, during and after an interview to make sure I don't forget something like pushing record next time.

[Damian Ryan]

You know, there's a lot we can learn from the aviation industry.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, it really is.

[Damian Ryan]

I never thought I'd say that in my lifetime. But you know, checklists. Let's say the phrase I have control.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Damian Ryan]

You got multiple people on a project. Blameless. What you call it? Retrospectives.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. One of the things I do whenever I'm. I'm working. Security convention. If I'm one of the people in charge, we have, you know, a rotating shift or a group of people who rotate who are the, you know, the buck stops here. People, the duty officers. And one of the things I always log because we keep detailed logs is that, you know, I have the con. You know, I'm the person who's now on duty and I am now off con and I've handed off to whoever's next. Right. Because if we don't, then we don't have maybe that clear definition in the, in the records of who was in charge and ultimately responsible when we go back to do our retrospectives. Right?

[Damian Ryan]

Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

So awesome. So where can we find you online and what things do you want to promote now that we have the opportunity to promote things?

[Damian Ryan]

Another one. I'm too well for this shit.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, I know.

[Damian Ryan]

I do have the Twitter J. Ryan. It's mostly nonsense, a lot of gifs and occasional something intelligent, but maybe once a year. Also, while I have nothing to promote the company I work for featurespace, it's a machine learning, fraud detection company. We are growing Aggressively. And hiring. We've got offices in Cambridge, uk, London and in Atlanta if anyone wants to know. Have a look at the website. We've got roles we're looking for data scientists, we're looking for engineers. Please hit us up. Hiring is hard. Hiring good people is really hard.

[Kevin Sonney]

I know. And finding a good place to work is hard.

[Damian Ryan]

It's. It's like being a puppy in a pound. It's those finding the right place that fits and being the person who fits in that place, it's difficult. I know. Searching for a job felt like dating and it's been a long time since I've dated. I don't like either one. Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

And now, now that I'm. I'm starting to put my feet back into the pool of the jobs hunt, believe me, I'm probably going to the website and take a look to see if there's anything that fits my needs. So.

[Damian Ryan]

Yep. Thanks too.

[Kevin Sonney]

So thank you so much, Damien, for doing this twice. It's hard enough doing it once. Having to do it a second time is. Is not necessarily easy. So thank you very much. And for the people at home. We'll be right back,

[Ursula Vernon]

Sam.

[Kevin Sonney]

So we're back. And it was interesting. Interesting. As I'm looking over my nose, I'm going, crap. The yak shaving discussion was actually with Chris, who will have on in about two weeks because I'm completely confused. But we still have that concept of the watermelon project. Green on the outside and red on the inside.

[Ursula Vernon]

Are you sure that's in the interview?

[Kevin Sonney]

I'm staring at the Dunman notes right now. Okay, so green on the inside, red on the. Or green on the outside, red on the inside. That. That's the project manager saying, everything's great. Everything's great until the last possible minute and then going, it's all on fire. All of our statuses are red. We're not going to make it. It's terrible thing. And that's going back to what we were saying before the break, before the interview. That's what you want to avoid with your editor.

[Ursula Vernon]

Are we actually recording?

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

Oh, oh, okay. It was all compressed and weird and I didn't see the thing going and I didn't get the feedback of my little voice nuggets. And I was like, ah, here, let

[Kevin Sonney]

me all in, Biggin.

[Ursula Vernon]

Thank you.

[Kevin Sonney]

I'm Biggin. There you go. That better?

[Ursula Vernon]

Yes, that's much better.

[Kevin Sonney]

So that's one. Yeah. We've had. We've. Since we've. Before this setup, we had so many Issues making sure that recording was or wasn't happening.

[Ursula Vernon]

I am, I am now intensely paranoid.

[Kevin Sonney]

Ursula absolutely wants to watch this.

[Ursula Vernon]

This. Anyway, the. But yes, one of my gigs long ago was doing book covers and I was not good. I'm gonna put that out there. And people are always like, oh, you're selling yourself short. No, look, I have a realistic understanding and of my work. And compared to now, I was crap on a stick. Compared to a lot of my peers, I was crap on a stick. I was not producing terribly high quality work. Right. Art director still bought my stuff and the reason was they knew exactly what they would get and they would know I would have it done by deadline. So it's the, the what is it fast, cheap, good. Well, I was fast and cheap and I was also reliable.

[Kevin Sonney]

Actually it's not necessarily fast, cheap, good. I've also heard it as under budget, on schedule and, and high quality.

[Damian Ryan]

Pick two.

[Ursula Vernon]

Well, yeah, that's, that's yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

Fast, cheap and good.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah, yeah. I, I will actually also occasionally add pleasant to work with in there, but I was pleasant to work with. I sent a sketch at every damn stage. Like I would finish the sketch, I would send it to them, they, I, they would approve it. I would do, I would paint the background, I would send it to them, they would approve it. They knew exactly where the project was at every single point.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right.

[Ursula Vernon]

Art directors seriously loved that because at least the ones I worked with because they knew it was not going to be the day before and they'd deadline and they'd just get, oh yeah, sorry, I haven't gotten it done. And I did occasionally get work on several memorable occasions when they got that from someone else who was like, yeah, I haven't done anything. And I just, you know, but hadn't told them. And so they had, you know, they had to go to pre press like the next day.

[Kevin Sonney]

I remember, I remember you actually getting

[Ursula Vernon]

one of those 24 hour turnaround on a cover.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

And I told them, look, this will not be a work of heartbreaking genius, but it will be done.

[Kevin Sonney]

And perfectly happy with that one. Perfectly happy with that.

[Ursula Vernon]

And the, the nice man I did it for has remembered me fondly for many years and thrown work my. And says hi to me. Hi, Russell. Anyway, so I was not great, but I was reliable. And they knew exactly where they were on the project and that made up for a multitude of sins. Art directors would generally rather have a mediocre piece done on time than a brilliant piece a month late.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. Especially if you've got when you're doing, like, magazine covers or promo work, like, no, that stuff has to go to press on that date or it doesn't come out.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

You know, and any delay books, I want to say novels, there may be a little more flexibility. That doesn't make them happy, but there's a little more squish in the system.

[Ursula Vernon]

And I also think they. Yeah, they build more squish into the system, which is why it always weirded out my editors. When I handed everything in early at Penguin, they were like, she always makes her deadlines. And I was getting cards saying, to my most timely author. And I'm like, I'm starting to feel a little weird about the way you all keep harping on that.

[Kevin Sonney]

Wasn't it that your. Your. Your agent said to your editor, you don't understand. She just sits at home and writes

[Ursula Vernon]

something like, yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, they. I had come up in a system with art where if you don't make the deadline, you don't eat.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. And so that makes a big difference. And related to that, one of the things that the founder of All Things Open was saying yesterday was that those early life experiences stick with you no matter how good your situation gets. He grew up in a coal mining town in West Virginia. He was not wealthy. His dad was a coal miner. And if he hadn't found some things basically on accident, he would have probably ended up being a coal miner because he didn't know what the opportunities were.

[Ursula Vernon]

I've talked to a lot of people. If you grow up poor in your head, you are always poor.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

There is no amount of money I will ever have where I will not be convinced that it will be taken away from me immediately.

[Kevin Sonney]

Right. And that was one of the things he was saying, why he does this big open source conference and does scholarships for underrepresented groups and for people who can't afford it and who are interested in it, because these are the opportunities he wanted when he was younger and now he's able to give them. Todd is just really. Guys, if Todd is amazing, I'll link to his stuff too.

[Ursula Vernon]

Incidentally, if. If you are one of those people who grew up in that situation and have substantial anxiety around money, even when you have a little money, God help you if you don't. Then you have lots of anxiety that, yeah, yeah, I'm here. I can tell you, no, it doesn't actually get better. I'm not gonna lie that I will be anxious about money until I die.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

And.

[Kevin Sonney]

And it's.

[Ursula Vernon]

It's an interesting to say that, but them's the breaks.

[Kevin Sonney]

And it's an interesting cultural difference because I wasn't in that situation. I was much better off. Even though I think there were some money struggles behind the scenes, my sister and I never really saw them. Right. And so as far as I knew, we grew up. Up in that phase where we started maybe at lower middle class and ended at upper middle class throughout that. And so for me, the.

[Ursula Vernon]

You have this amazing attitude that money will come from somewhere that just baffles me because I've.

[Kevin Sonney]

I've been so poor. I'm miserable. I'm sitting in my living room, and all I can afford is a loaf of bread and a stick of butter, and that's dinner. Right. And dug my ass out of it. You know, I. I've done it multiple times, so I guess it says to me it's possible I'm on easy mode because I'm a straight white male. I will admit that. But.

[Ursula Vernon]

Well, you know, I mean, I've. I've dug myself out of it too. But. But the difference is that. That the. The wires in there is not a relaxed about money mode in my brain. You can be either I'm worried about money or I'm not worried about money. I don't have that switch. It is. It is welded in one position.

[Kevin Sonney]

Gotcha.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. And that. That there was a question from. From someone online that I'll probably read in full at the letter show, but for now, let's. Let me roll through this one real quick. And that is what is the step up from. And the step down from the dying in a ditch in Walmart.

[Ursula Vernon]

Ah, yes. Well, the step up, I believe, is dying in a ditch next to Target.

[Kevin Sonney]

Mm.

[Ursula Vernon]

And the step down is. I'm gonna say dying in a ditch next to a strip club or a truck stop.

[Kevin Sonney]

Truck stop. I'll give you strip club. I mean, now you're. Now you're slut shaming sex workers.

[Ursula Vernon]

No, I'm not sex slut shaming anybody. I'm saying strip clubs tend to be in seedy parts of town and are frequently. I mean, I've seen some real dive, dive, dive strip club exteriors.

[Kevin Sonney]

I. I have.

[Ursula Vernon]

They tend to be shunted to parts of town where the ditches are perhaps not kept up as well.

[Kevin Sonney]

And I.

[Ursula Vernon]

This has nothing to do with the people who work there. I salute them. You can do it. I can't. I am in awe of, frankly, your physical skills.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, God, yeah. Like the pole doing the pole tricks and stuff. Yeah. Jesus.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah, I know there are classes. I just look at that and like, my back. It was like, I'll go out right now. You want me to go out, I'll go out. Don't look at that. I'll go out.

[Kevin Sonney]

But I have been to places that are upscale and clean and nice. And I personally believe that strip clubs get a. Generally a bad reputation based on having been sort of sent to the pariah side. I've been in some lovely establishments.

[Ursula Vernon]

We went to a lovely establishment. The women's room was still a pit. There was one stall door on five stalls. And you could either have the stall with the door or the stall where the toilet seat had been ripped off and thrown in a corner.

[Kevin Sonney]

So it was. So it was like going to the. Going to the women's room in the one gay bar they used to have goth night at.

[Ursula Vernon]

No, that was better kept.

[Kevin Sonney]

Okay.

[Ursula Vernon]

The.

[Damian Ryan]

The.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yes, the unisex slash women's room was. It wasn't the men's room with the bubble wall.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, yeah, the bubble wall and the lighting and the.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah, no, but. And it was a dark hole, but it had a door that closed and there was a seat on the toilet.

[Kevin Sonney]

Heard it here, folks. I have not taken Ursula to a high enough quality strip club, apparently. And I don't think we need to go to a different one.

[Ursula Vernon]

But I feel either. Truck stop. And again, this is no more a slam on strip clubs than it is a slam on truckers.

[Kevin Sonney]

True strippers.

[Ursula Vernon]

Than it is a slam on trucks.

[Kevin Sonney]

I will say that in the majority when driving, I will stop at a truck stop because sometimes they have the most amazing, like, oh, my God, there's this one between here and Charlotte that has the most amazing hot dogs. But I always park in the light and I always, you know, and. And, you know, I. I don't spend much time there. And that seems to be kind of regular for me in truck stops. Like, no matter what state I'm in, no matter where I'm going, unless I go to one of those super duper flying J's with like a mini food court in it, truck stops always seem to be a bit dicey. Yeah, little.

[Ursula Vernon]

And my experience with strip clubs is similar. They wonderful people can and do work there.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, absolutely.

[Ursula Vernon]

Generally speaking, they are, because of their very nature in poorly patrolled. Poorly. And that's not police patrol necessarily. That's neighborhood, you know, grounds keeping, that kind of thing.

[Kevin Sonney]

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I mean, CD is the word. CD is the word. You're Looking for.

[Ursula Vernon]

Okay, maybe they are shunted into seedy areas by their nature.

[Kevin Sonney]

There you go. Okay.

[Ursula Vernon]

And it would be lovely if that was not the case. But it is the case, and I don't want to die in a ditch there.

[Kevin Sonney]

Okay, that's fair.

[Ursula Vernon]

That's fair.

[Kevin Sonney]

So taking it full circle back to the. That's the step down.

[Ursula Vernon]

Step down from Walmart is a low end strip club.

[Kevin Sonney]

Okay.

[Ursula Vernon]

Or truck stop.

[Kevin Sonney]

Or truck stop.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yes.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

A non Flying J truck stop probably.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. We were, we were talking about. Often in it, we talk about. Oh, yeah, that's a real dumpster fire. Yes, yes. And we were talking about, we were comparing quality of dumpster fires, and at one point I think someone said, well, yes, it's a dumpster fire, but it's a higher class of dumpster. And I'm like, so it's like the dumpster behind the Waffle House versus the dumpster behind the, you know, the McDonald's. And they're like, yeah, no, because the dumpster behind the Waffle House, they've got a plan for keeping that thing burning in any kind of condition. And I'm like, I would, I would

[Ursula Vernon]

say a dish next to a Waffle House is a lateral move from a ditch next to Walmart.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ursula Vernon]

I'm not gonna kick it up. I'm gonna say Waffle House. And I eat at Waffle House.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, yeah, no, we do. We do.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah. But again, I've seen their ditches.

[Kevin Sonney]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But their ditches will work in almost any emergency situation. If it doesn't, then we know there are problems.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yes.

[Kevin Sonney]

Hey, we had the limited menu during the hurricane, which was surprising what they were able to do without. So.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Sonney]

If you want, if you want to plan disaster recovery, plan disaster recovery like Walmart. I would. You mean Waffle House or Waffle House? Yes. Thank you. Yeah. Walmart just shuts down. If you want disaster. If you want to talk about, you know, being able to handle any situation, Waffle House is the master of that.

[Ursula Vernon]

They're sort of war room with Waffle House execs during a natural disaster is frankly infinitely superior to the current one at FEMA and the White House. And I would happily hand it over to the Waffle House people at the moment with the understanding we'll get it back in a few years.

[Kevin Sonney]

Well, the side effect. And I found this out at a talk by my friend V.M. brasher, who's got her new book out now, but she. They have, they actually have plan books like in Every Waffle House that say, okay, if you don't have gas, here are the things you can serve. If you don't have refrigeration, here are the things you can serve. Here's. They have every contingency so that they can stay open unless, like, everything shuts down and they run out of gas and electricity and this. And water. They even have a. We don't have water. Here is what we can serve menu. Like, limited menu.

[Ursula Vernon]

My concern is that in order to staff these Waffle Houses, occasionally people do not evacuate who should, because they are told to come to work.

[Kevin Sonney]

They have sleeping arrangements in almost all Waffle Houses so that if people get stuck there because they came into work and couldn't go home or.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah, but that's not the same as my kids. I have to get my kids out of here. I'm. I can't come into work. Well, don't bother coming back when the storm's over.

[Kevin Sonney]

I do not know about Waffle House's policy on that. I know that there are many. There are many places that are just like, yeah, don't bother coming back. I don't know what Waffle Houses are, but I seem to recall seeing something in all of those notes of fam. Take care of your family first.

[Ursula Vernon]

And then, well, if so that is. That is hopefully true. I'm thinking of, like, Dunkin Donuts was like, oh, yeah, you're all gonna stay here, and if you aren't, don't come back and don't have your parents call me. Because, I mean, it was mostly hiring kids because I'm not hiring your parents. And it was like, okay, you need to have. You need to not be running that store. And you also need to be beaten severely with sticks and donuts.

[Kevin Sonney]

And donuts.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yeah, donuts. All right, all right.

[Kevin Sonney]

So, yeah, that's it for this week. Our badge code this week is Watermelon.

[Ursula Vernon]

Watermelon.

[Kevin Sonney]

Watermelon. For those of you who missed it in past episodes, we issue open badges. These are happy little images that contain metadata that prove where you got it and who you got it from and things like that. And it's used by educational organizations and all kinds of places. And so we issue them because they're fun. And you just go to the website, you enter in the word watermelon into where it's in the little form where it says, you know, put the badge code here, and it'll walk you through the process from there.

[Ursula Vernon]

You can support us on Patreon. And I was gonna say before earlier today that you could support us on Drip. But they've just announced their closing Drip down. Two weeks after I got my invite, of course, just after I had finished my thing.

[Damian Ryan]

So.

[Ursula Vernon]

Drip. We hardly knew ye.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yeah. No. Wow.

[Damian Ryan]

Okay.

[Ursula Vernon]

You can buy us the Patreon. Is Ursula V. Still? Yep, I was. I even had the trip branded Red Wombat studio and everything.

[Kevin Sonney]

Easy, easy.

[Ursula Vernon]

Buy Kevin a coffee.

[Kevin Sonney]

Yes, you can buy me a coffee at Kofi. K O-F I.com K S O-N-N-E-Y and

[Ursula Vernon]

as we say often at this point in this current day and age, you don't actually have to give us money. We would really prefer you go give it to like a get out the vote organization or something that helps people, you know, get to the polls who may be homebound or something like that.

[Kevin Sonney]

Absolutely. Or to the various legal causes trying to untangle and unlock the mess on our borders with immigrant children.

[Ursula Vernon]

Yes. And so, I mean, we're doing fine. We love it when you support us, but. But at the moment, we feel like there are things in the world that may need the money more. So go forth and do good.

[Kevin Sonney]

And also while you go forth and do good, be productive. Woo.