I’ve written a few times about the interpersonal training component of the graduate program I completed.  For the past few months I’ve been trying to track down the term for a particular concept we learned about.

The basic idea that I could remember was that are likely to attribute someone else’s behavior to their personality type (which is often a harsh judgment) while we are more likely to attribute our own behavior to the situation we are in (which is often a more permissive judgment).  But I was hazy on the details.

I googled and searched and read through lists of logical fallacies and personality attributes and *finally* I found what I was looking for.

It’s called actor-observer asymmetry.  Wikipedia explains (citations removed), “Actor–observer asymmetry…explains the errors that one makes when forming attributions about the behavior of others. When people judge their own behavior…they are more likely to attribute their actions to the particular situation than to a generalization about their personality. Yet when an observer is explaining the behavior of another person…they are more likely to attribute this behavior to the actors’s overall disposition rather than to situational factors.”

One example of this that I remember from school is to think about someone in a work setting rudely shooting down a colleague’s idea.  If this person is you, you might explain it as “maybe she was having a bad day” or “she was frustrated by the long meeting they had been in.”  Those are considered “situational” reasons.  If the person in the story is someone else, you would be more likely to attribute the behavior to “he’s just like that” or “he’s always kind of a jerk.”  Those are considered “dispositional” reasons.

What we were encouraged to learn from understanding this phenomenon was that you never know what is going on in someone else’s life.  A colleague may snap at you, or be short, or belittle your ideas, but it might not be because of a deep-seeded lack of respect for you (the dispositional reason), it might because they had a fight with their son before work (the situational reason).

Interpreted this way, it’s a call for compassion at work, a reminder of which I can certainly use every so often. The idea is that if you can overcome this “asymmetry,” that is, look at your colleagues behavior through the lens of situational root cause rather than dispositional root cause, you can be more effective in interacting with them.

At my last job, I had a sign at my desk that said, “Be kind; Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”  (Total aside, but this phrase, one of my favorites, has a fascinating history.)

This is not to say, “Be meek.”  When Microsoft’s CEO is urging women to let karma negotiate their salary, it’s not the time to be meek.  There are toxic people, toxic organizations, and just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that colleague isn’t out to get you.  But that does not mean that we cannot start from a place of being kind in the workplace.

Interestingly, after I graduated from my Masters program, a meta-analysis of psychological research determined that this phenomenon didn’t actually exist – at least not how it had been formulated.  There’s now a more complex theory evolving that suggests that people do describe their behaviors differently than those of others, but in some different ways.

That aside, I do come back to the core thing that I learned from this concept: that of compassion at work.

This week I was previewing a post by our Chief Scientist about why giving RAM to Infinio is better than giving it to the guest OS or application.

One of the arguments he makes is what he calls “statistical multiplexing” which he explains with this analogy:

Think of lines at a grocery checkout. If you have one line per checkout clerk, then some lines would move faster and some slower, because of the variation of both the load seen by (i.e. number of grocery items) as well as processing speed of individual clerks. Some faster clerks can have nobody in their line, and their processing capacity gets wasted – it could have been better utilized in helping out the other clerks who are overloaded.

This leads to one of my biggest pet peeves: the people at a busy set of lines who say things like “please form X number of lines – it will go faster.”  To all the people at the TSA, the grocery store, CVS, the RMV, and the bank, listen up:  That.  Is.  Not.  True.  

When the amount of time it takes to execute each transaction is variable and unpredictable, there are very few instances where it is faster to make separate lines rather than distribute the work as late in the process as possible.  The only exceptions I can think of are:

(1) if the process of distributing the work later rather than sooner is significantly more time consuming than the benefit, or

(2) if there isn’t enough scratch space to wait on allocating the work

In the grocery example, this would mean

(1) the person saying “you line 3, you line 5” takes too long – or the people in line don’t go directly to the checkout whose light is on as soon as it goes on.  But the math would have to be pretty extreme. I mean, the traffic cop would have to be *really* *really* slow for this still not to be beneficial for the people waiting.

(2)  the store (or airport) isn’t designed to have one long windy line, it’s designed to have 10 shorter straight lines.

Not having the space can be a limiting factor, but that rarely seems to be the case.  If it were really the problem, then I wouldn’t be in so many dang lines with someone telling me that it would be faster if I ignored the natural rules of, you know, MATH.

In practice, there is a supermarket who actually implemented this.  Bravo.

How often do you find yourself saying things like this?:

“I got no work done, I was in meetings all day!”

“I didn’t get anything done, I was doing email all day.”

I think this is one of the drivers behind why we are working so hard, so long, and with such a cost to our work/life balance.  We are working – but it doesn’t feel like work.  Why?

I have a theory.

1. The number of meetings we go to that are really relevant to us is very small.

2. The percentage of email that we get that’s actually relevant to us is very small.

I’m not the only one who thinks this is true.  For example, Tim Ferris has long advocated against email.  Here’s a great post where he suggests using auto-reply to eliminate most email.  He also advises against attending meetings unless they have an agenda and an end time.  Lots of experts suggest that meetings are often over-subscribed and under-performing; the advent of the “standup meeting” is the natural antidote to that.

But I definitely don’t have a job where I can eschew email and stand up through every meeting. Still, I’ve been able to combat this idea that replying to email and attending meetings isn’t “work”.  Here’s how.

• I figured out what meetings to go to.  Some meetings are status reports from all the participants, some are working sessions, some are read-outs from a project group, some are announcements from management, and some fall into some other category.  At both Dell and Infinio I’ve looked at the meetings I attend (sometimes 4-6 hours’ worth a day at Dell, at Infinio considerably fewer) and asked “Do I need to be attending this meeting?”  Nobody ever perceived me as difficult for asking – and often I was just being invited as a courtesy.

The thing that drives me nuts is people showing up to a meeting and doing other work, usually sorting through email. Either you have to be at the meeting or you don’t.  Unless you are in an extremely dysfunctional organization (in which case, leave!), there are rarely meetings that you “sort of” have to be at.  It’s rude to the organizer, and you won’t actually feel like you accomplished anything.

• For email, I use Franklin Covey’s FAD method.  mrDiva took the course years ago and it’s one of the tips that we both still use.  Every email you get should get Filed, Acted upon, or Deleted.  Deleted means deleted – and many things you are cc’d on can be deleted.  Acted upon means you have some action to take based on the email, and those stay in your inbox  (At the end of a week I rarely have more than 10 items in my inbox.)  And Filed means you need to refer to it later, so you save it somewhere.  Now that I use Google Mail, it’s even easier because instead of Filing, I just Archive.  If I need it later, I just search rather than try to remember a folder I put it in.

And before you go all Negative Nancy on me – at Dell I was in email hell: I got hundreds of messages a day, and still managed to use this system.  Just be methodical, be ruthless, and only keep something in your Inbox if you still have to do something with it.  Face it, most people send you an email, then they come over and ask you if you got their email.  If you accidentally archive or file something you should have acted on, they’ll let you know.

Once I did these two things, I stopped feeling guilty about replying to emails and attending meetings.  I’m communicating with colleagues, customers, and vendors; I’m designing our product, strategy, and tactics; I’m understanding the bigger picture and explaining the details.

And all that is work.

I had a great talk with Christopher Kusek and Bo Bolander at VMworld about life, the universe, and everything (including Life, the Universe, and Everything).

At one point, Christopher asked me what I did for Infinio.  When I explained I did our product marketing, he said, “Oh, so you write Infinio fan fiction.”  We all had a good chuckle.  “I’m changing my LinkedIn profile right away,” I said.

But do I write fan fiction?  I think that I’d be a pretty crummy marketer if that were true.  I’m not writing fiction about Infinio – like “oh here’s this environment Infinio could work in, but only in my imagination” or “use Infinio and world hunger will be solved”

The content I write for Infinio falls into one of a few categories.  In marketing we usually think of customers as in one of three buckets:

• Awareness – someone has a problem and they are beginning to research approaches to solving it
• Consideration – someone is zeroing in on an approach and looking at the specific vendors or solutions that solve the problem that way
• Decision – someone is close to deciding which solution they are going to use to solve their problem

An Awareness asset might be something like a 2-page “What is content-based caching” primer, a Consideration asset might be something like “5 things to look at when buying new storage” and a Decision asset might be a recorded product demo.

None of that is fiction.  Although I’ll admit – I am a fan of Infinio. 🙂

I’m a problem-solver by nature, I can’t help myself.  I always look for ways to optimize systems, and I’m a whiz at things like getting ten people into three cars at four locations, and cooking five dishes in an oven that only fits three, but keeping everything hot.

Usually, it’s a characteristic my friends and colleagues appreciate.

But last week I was bested by someone who had the “right” answer.  I was at a kids’ service for Rosh Hashanah with my daughter.  We were making a pretend soup for the holiday (because that is what you do at a kids’ service for 2-year olds) and for each ingredient we were teaching the kids the Hebrew word.  Water (mayim), chicken (oaf), matzah ball (k’neidelach), you get the idea.  Then one of the kids suggested that we add parsley to the soup.

The adults looked at each other – parsley?  How do you say parsley?

I scanned my brain for the word for parsley, and came up with nothing.  Then I remembered that we eat parsley on Passover and that in that context it’s called “karpas.”  Now Jewish holiday symbolism can be complex, and some people don’t eat parsley, they eat potato, but they still call it “karpas,” so I knew that word didn’t literally mean “parsley.”

But I figured that this room of 2-year olds was going to riot if we didn’t keep them occupied and engaged, so I suggested, “karpas.”

The guy leading the service paused and thought about it for a second and gave me a cautious, “huh, ok…”  and we were about to continue with our song, when a woman in the back said confidently, “petrozelia,” the actual word for parsley in Hebrew.

Petrozelia.  Really?

I’m all for having the real answer to things.  If the most important thing was accuracy, then that is very accurate.  But it made me think about the context of when it’s important to have the right answer, versus when it’s important to have an answer that works.  I think knowing how to approach a problem, and how to come up with something that works can sometimes be as important as knowing the answer.

(As it turns out, “karpas” comes from the Greek “karpos” which means “raw vegetable.”  Looks like Toula’s father was right.)

Sometimes I wonder if marketing is really my calling.

A few months ago, I was at the Citrix Synergy show.  The booth next to ours was a company called “Extra Hop” that provides performance analytics.  Their booth was busier than ours, but the whole time I kept mumbling to myself (and to any of my colleagues who would listen)

“Extra Hop?  That’s a terrible name!  It sounds like you are adding latency to a network.”

Not two weeks later they got $41M in Series C funding.  Clearly their marketing team understands something about their customers that I don’t.

At VMworld, we were near an IT security company named Thycotic.  Yes, Thycotic.  At first I thought it sounded like a thyroid disorder.  Then someone said it out loud and it got worse.

“Why would you name your company something that sounds like “psychotic” with a lisp?”

But apparently they are one of DC’s fastest growing tech companies.  They’re on the Inc 500. Their name is not holding them back.  (Nor, by my cursory research, is their name purposely ironic.)

It goes to show you that marketing is subjective.  “Good” marketing is determined by the market, not by critics or outsiders.  Put another way, the proof is in the pudding.  Here are 11 examples of companies who changed their slogans.  Not all the ‘after’s seem better to me, but the market felt otherwise.

One of the perks of working in Kendall Square is taking public transportation to work every day.  I love public transportation!  I love the maps, the systems, figuring out how to get from point A to point B.  In foreign cities it’s one of the highlights for me.

My last job had a huge long car commute, and I was a champ at using that time well.  I’d queue up podcasts, pre-program friends’ and colleagues’ phone numbers into my phone, I’d use Waze to pick the best route, and for a while even used a breast pump on the way home.  (Moms are awesome multi-taskers!)

The goal of my old commute and my new commute are the same:

1. Get home as soon as possible

2. Use the time during my commute as well as possible

3. Optimize the morning commute for the best coffee/pastry options 🙂

Now I take the bus and the train every day.  If I’m coming from home, I take the 43 to Park St then the red line two stops to Kendall.  If I’m coming from babyDiva’s daycare, I take the Silver Line to Downtown Crossing, then walk to Park and red line it to Kendall.  Then I do the same thing in reverse at night.

Analysis

The thing in my commute that takes the longest time is walking from the red line to the office.  Since the office isn’t moving any time soon, that’s a static cost.  The good news is that I pass lots of good coffee on the way: Tatte and Voltage to name a few.

The next thing that takes a long time is occasionally waiting for the bus.  The red line seems to come pretty regularly for me, but the bus can take a while.  I do have the option of walking to/from Park Street to/from daycare or home, but it’s about 25 minutes, so it only sometimes makes sense if the bus gods are against me.

The thing that is the most stressful is getting to babyDiva’s daycare on the days I pick her up.  mrDiva does more pickups (I do more drop-offs) but sometimes I need to get her.  Worrying about if the bus is coming/will come/will come soon/will come in time is tough.  I find that if I leave just 10 minutes earlier (at 4:50) then I can stop worrying so much.

This tweet by a prominent working mom captured it perfectly:

Competing in the nursery-pickup-before-six triathlon (bus, train, drive) and hoping the trains don’t inexplicably break (again) #workingmum

— Meg Pickard (@megpickard) April 10, 2014

Iterating

I’ve tried some other stuff that hasn’t worked.  I tried getting on at Downtown Crossing in the mornings, but the walk to the red line from the Silver isn’t any closer than Park Street.  I’ve tried the 9 or 11 from daycare to the Broadway stop but that doesn’t save me any time.  I’ve also tried just walking to Broadway, but the distance is a little too long to save me any time.

Recently I figured out that I can save some time if I take the 9 or 11 from Broadway to daycare – in a way that doesn’t work well in reverse.  That’s interesting to me that reversing my commute doesn’t always work the same way as playing it forward, depending on where certain stops and bus routes are.

Tools of the trade

I use the MBTA Alerts app on my phone to track when the next bus is, and will sometimes choose the 43 or Silver Line independent of daycare responsibilities if that’s what makes the most sense.

Most days I read books, yes real paper books, but sometimes I listen to podcasts.  My favorite is This American Life which has a great show but a terrible app.  I also like The Moth, RadioLab, Planet Money, and Story Collider.  Beyond Pod is a good app to keep all these organized – it’s one of the only apps whose Premium version I’ve paid for.

I find that I can get really lazy about taking out my book and just play Dots on my phone instead, then hate myself for wasting 40 minutes.  So I try to carry my book with me onto the bus/train so it’s easy to get to rather than having to fish it out of my backpack.  I also find that it’s annoying to have to take out my T pass from my bag, but women’s pants don’t always have pockets so there’s that first world problem.

Walking 

There are a few beautiful days – maybe there have been 10 so far in my 6 months at Infinio – where I’ve stepped outside and it’s been so nice that I have abandoned the MBTA plan in favor of walking.  I can walk to work in less than half an hour, marveling the entire time that it’s still less time than it used to take me to drive to my old job.

Last week I wrote about how much planning was plaguing me and started to write a little about how it is related to my Myers-Briggs type.  I thought I’d write more about Myers Briggs today.

Myers-Briggs is a personality test (“MBTI” Myers Briggs Type Indicator).  It rates you on four dimensions, described as follows on www.MyersBriggs.org:

Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

I first took the MBTI in high school, otherwise obsessed with Cosmo’s “Are you a sexy librarian or a foxy teacher?”  I also took it a few times in college and in grad school.  Every time, I was always the same type: ESTJ.  And strongly ESTJ.  Not like, E, kinda S, T or N, J, but off-the-charts E.S.T.J.

An excerpt from the description of ESTJ (from the above site) reads “Practical, realistic, matter-of-fact. Decisive, quickly move to implement decisions…Have a clear set of logical standards, systematically follow them and want others to also.”  And that was me, for a long, long time.

Can I move the needle?

When I was in grad school, we took several different types of assessments to heighten our self-awareness to better interact with others.  When we took MBTI, we also read Type Talk at Work to get some coaching on how to use it as a framework for communicating at work.  Unsurprisingly, I was an ESTJ again.  But this time, I was going through some things outside of work and school that led me to believe that being so strongly an ESTJ was both an asset and a liability.  Though people’s MBTI type typically doesn’t change, I was determined to move the needle on some of my preferences.

In particular, I really wanted to allow myself to make some decisions using Feelings, not just Thinking, and to allow the structure of my world to have some uncertainty in it.  While I didn’t turn into an ESNP overnight, I did manage to incorporate N and P into my world more and over time those measurements became much less extreme.

I sometimes have to remind myself of this.  Not that I live exclusively in the MBTI world – I recognize it’s just one way to view the world, and a flawed one at that.  But it has been a useful framework to remember how to coach myself in a situation.   I have to remember that I can make a decision based on a “gut feeling” or “just because” rather than always needing data and analysis to do everything.

Am I really an “E”?

Fast forward to becoming a mom last January.  It has been surprisingly exhausting.  Sure, it’s also rewarding and sweet and wonderful, but it is also tiring.  Now, I’ve always been outgoing.  And when I say outgoing, I mean talk-to-strangers-on-the-T outgoing.  I didn’t mind being alone – in particular I love to read – but I’ve noticed that since the baby, I crave alone time and silence and quiet to recharge at a level I used to actively avoid at all costs.

I read this article on “Having an Outgoing Personality but actually being Introverted” hoping it would clarify this change for me, but (despite its being interesting) it doesn’t describe me very well.

I think that I’ve turned towards introversion because I put so much energy into babyDiva.  When I am with her I am constantly asking her questions, showing her things, reading her books, coming up with “jobs” for her to do around the house with me, taking her places, etc.  To me, this is being a good parent – engaging with her, teaching her things, sharing experiences – but I think I’m so focused on doing it “right” that I exhaust my extroversive capabilities with her by thinking I need to be “on” all the time.

I could stand to watch this Upworthy video now and then.  It’s a set of short questions with mothers where they critique their own parenting, then a set of questions with their kids about what they think of their moms.  It’s beautiful and shows that maybe I am aspiring to the wrong thing.

I don’t think being introverted is bad – I heard Susan Cain speak last year at the Mass Conference for Women about the power of introverts.  But I also don’t think being introverted is natural for me, I think that it’s just a coping mechanism for now.

I hate planning.  Until last week, I forgot how much.

Last week, I started writing Infinio’s content plan.  I assessed what content we had, put it into buckets, and started looking for the gaps that would define what whitepapers, videos, demos, infographics, and other assets we create before the end of the year.

I forgot that when I was at Dell, each quarter I’d write up a plan for the content my team was going to deliver.  It drove me crazy – I was full of self-doubt that I had good ideas, that the team could execute them, that we were doing too much / too little, that we were aligning with the right major initiatives.   My manager would spend a little time with me on it, make some suggestions, tell me it was great, then it would be done.

I forgot that I go crazy before vacations.  Before we had babyDiva, mrDiva and I used to go on all sorts of adventures – to the Azores, Iceland, Belize, Eastern Europe, Southern France.  I would spend months poring over TripAdvisor and the guidebooks and booking.com to schedule exactly the right itinerary.

Don’t get me wrong – I love *having* a plan.  I love executing against a plan.  And I love the success that comes with executing against a good plan.

I use a grocery list.  I book plane tickets months in advance.  I love maps, and public transportation.  I make all of babyDiva’s lunches for the week on Sunday.  I am what you would call “a planner.”  But I hate some of it.

I think it has to do with a part of me that’s best understood through the lens of Myers-Briggs.  The final letter in Myers-Briggs relates to Structure.

From The Myers and Briggs Foundation:

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

I think I’ll write more about my Myers-Briggs type next week, but for now suffice it to say, I am an incredibly strong “J”.  I have very little tolerance for open-endedness.  I like things to be settled, to already have a plan, to have decided, rather than to have things in a state where I still have to decide.

I think that’s why I like having a plan…but hate making one.  The process of making one is all about uncertainty, while the process of having one is all about having decided.