The last few weeks have been mostly consumed with getting my forthcoming book finished. It has been a rich and exhilarating time--an experience I won't soon forget. Along the way there have been heavenly experiences ("This book is actually going to happen! It's actually pretty good! This is a [...]
“We have too many meetings!” It’s a common enough cry, but what lies underneath it is, “We have too many boring/ineffective/time-wasting meetings!” Whether or not you can make meetings less frequent, what can you do to make the meetings you have more meaningful? The practice of stable [...]
Change is hard. Hermits sitting alone on a mountaintop for decades, attempting to perfect their souls, know this. Sports teams trying to improve their records know this (believe me, I’ve been a Seattle Mariners fan for 20 years and this is definitely true). And of course you know it too, from [...]
From the frat initiation in Animal House to the bachelorette party in Crazy Rich Asians, humans love to use rituals to highlight the seasons of life. It’s no accident that “ceremonies” have found their way into the mainstream of software development in the form of daily standup meetings and [...]
The war room in Doctor Strangelove, Mission Control in Apollo 13—places where people gather to debate and make decisions can get pretty intense. That’s why it’s especially important to find ways to bring curious and open present-moment awareness to the conversations that happen in physical and[...]
I like to do simple informal mindfulness practice--to cultivate stable attention in the present moment--in the woods not far from my house. For me, the environment of trees, rushing water and birds is an excellent complement for focusing in on an object (like a tree branch or a clump of moss) with [...]
Since we all live in the present moment, it’s a little surprising that we don’t really like to talk about it very much. When people gather around the office water cooler (or the contemporary social-media versions of the water cooler), what do they talk about? What they did last night, plans for [...]
I was climbing the stairs in my office building one day and noticed a small crumpled gum wrapper lying on a step. Should I pick it up, or leave it there? I decided on the latter and continued to climb. The next day the wrapper was still there. I started to get curious about how long it would stick [...]
For many years the philosopher Immanuel Kant gazed out his window at a church steeple during his ponderings. You don’t have to be a philosopher, or spend a lot of time, to get benefit from training your focus on a physical object. Your visual sense is a dominant part of your experience: visual [...]
You are equipped by default with two valuable mechanisms you can use to practice mindful focusing. The first is a set of highly sophisticated sensors attached to your ankles: your feet. The second is a system of air passages and musculature conveniently configured with connections to most of your [...]
It's hard to imagine designing a contemporary technology system without a healthy investment in performance and reliability monitoring tools. What would the human equivalent of a set of system monitoring tools look like? The Thoughtstream Monitor The Thoughtstream Monitor would present a display of [...]
Last week I went to the DevOpsDays Seattle conference. It was a great community event and very well-run, and I got to reconnect with a bunch of old friends and make some new ones. The best part of the conference for me was John Allspaw's talk on "Taking Human Performance Seriously in Software." As[...]
I wish I was one of those people who could spout off an appropriate story at every moment, illuminating situations with the perfect teaching tale that is memorable and concrete. My friend Jamal Rahman has this ability, with amazing Bangladeshi Sufi tales waiting around every corner. I'm jealous! [...]
When I led Workplace Mindfulness workshop for client last week, two participants came up to me afterward. "We really liked the material," they said, "but we need help running better meetings. Can you please just tell us what to do?" As an empowerment-oriented, freedom-loving person it's sometimes [...]
I'm very pleased to be co-authoring a book on Mindful Lean: Seven Lean Practices to Optimize with Present-Moment Awareness with Todd Hudson of the Maverick Institute in Portland. Since we are most of the way through a first draft, here's a quick overview of the contents. Introduction Lean and [...]
This fancy-sounding French term is neither a dessert nor a kinky sexual maneuver. But it may be the key to thriving in midst of profound change in our city and beyond. In my work teaching mindfulness, emotional intelligence and other human skills to technology teams, I'm often asked for guidance [...]
In the brilliant HBO hit Silicon Valley, Pied Piper (the fictional company at the heart of the story) develops a key innovation called "middle-out compression". The origins of this concept are shown in an amazing scene that is absolutely not family-friendly, so I won't link to it here (but it's [...]
I wrote recently about the abundant mindfulness opportunities present in a can of sparkling water. It may be that caffeinated beverages have a slightly non-mindful vibe to them - but you know, tea was brought to Japan in the first place by Zen monks seeking to stay awake during meditation. I'm not [...]
At a mindfulness workshop that I led at a client site last week, one of the participants offered a beautiful and elegant practice for dropping out of our habitual obsession with thinking into a clearer and more present awareness. He really likes to drink Talking Rain sparkling water. Fortunately,[...]
In many conversations and experiences in recent weeks I've been reminded that there are as many pathways to developing mindfulness awareness in the workplace as there are people. Of course this make sense: how can being conscious of the details of your own experience result from anything but [...]