Anthony Panozzo's Blog

I'm sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one.

Abraham Lincoln

For a long time, I strove to be efficient in communication. I would carefully consider the right words for things, especially when writing. But I realize now that good communication should have some redundancy.

Most of the time, the point of communicating is to convey information. Of course, there are other reasons people might converse. Redundancy is nice because it gets the message across eventually. Communication is inherently a very lossy channel.

I tried git show and git log, but these operate on the local repository and defined remotes. In order to see what git treeish your Heroku repo is using, try:

$ git ls-remote git@heroku.com:APP-NAME.git
97ec101adde21cfaf7f8c3ed47656e	HEAD
97ec101adde21cfaf7f8c3ed47656e	refs/heads/master

To find out the Heroku git repository name, you can also try

I came upon a helpful tool for diagnosing why I sometimes do things that logically seem to be against my best interests. Odds are, you are probably doing it too without even knowing it.

The concept

The concept is "negative gain." It is the positive reinforcement that one gets for doing behaviors that have negative results.

It is easier to make the changes you want once you are aware of what you get out of being the way you are. This is called the 'negative gain'. It is what we give ourselves for unconsciously not choosing to be or do what we want out of fear of failing.

A negative gain provides a temporary compensation – a kind of second best – for finding an excuse not to do what we want to do, because our fear prevents us. Negative gains are false friends, because they seem to make us feel better in the short term, but turn out to be a sham as we realise we are failing to make things better for ourself.

We even feel worse when we keep on using the same old mechanisms of avoidance. Negative gains are different from 'rewards' where we have chosen to be or do what we want. Examining some typical negative gains should make the concept clear…

Was writing some code the other day, and then wanted to have similar functionality in a different area of the codebase. I did not want to directly copy and paste, as I consider this to be a very recognizable code smell. Basically, copying and pasting is a clear indicator that there is similar structure that is not being realized. It is similar to making up really complicated equations and models for why planets in the sky do loop-de-loops, and then understanding that they all revolve around the sun. That understanding simplifies things.

However, it was tough to think about what needed to be abstracted out of the solution that I was going to use. What I did was to copy the original to another area, change it to work in that context, and then factor out the common parts as best as possible to a library function. I expect to use this function a few times, so this seems to make the most sense from a flexibility and maintenance perspective.

I recently watched Randy Pausch's lecture on time management (1 hour). It's a good reminder of things to consider when dealing with people and simultaneously trying to accomplish great things. Inspired, here are some of my communication management hacks.

Generally, I subscribe to Paul Graham's Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule. I attempt to identify large blocks of uninterrupted time using the fold calendar and then avoid interruptions while I get stuff done.

Sometimes I'm not looking to get that much done, so I disregard these concepts. But they have served me well in times of need.

Communication notification philosophy

Basically, turn off real-time automatic notifications of communication while leaving some channel for messages of critical importance.

I like Tim Ferriss's adage of "sometimes you need to let small bad things happen to get large good things done."

Email is simply not the correct medium for anything time-sensitive because it is asynchronous. You should not expect a response in less than three days to email you send, and you should not need to respond to emails in less than a day. No email should be important enough to warrant blocking the most important thing you should be doing. If the concern truly is pressing, the person will just have to call you. Set the communication guidelines clearly, and help others understand how you can best be reached.