I hate to admit it, but I’m a hoarder.  Yes, like those insane people on the A&E TV show.  Only my hoarding is all virtual.  For example, take the image above.  That’s just a tiny part of my Google Reader home page.  That’s a tiny part of my Google Reader home page AFTER reading most of the day on a recent Sunday. I still had thousands of entries to go after hours of reading.  On top of that, I subscribe to some technical e-newsletters.  I’m a member of quite a few LinkedIn discussion groups, each of which produce daily and weekly newsletters. (I only subscribe to the weekly versions).  Then there’s Twitter too.  In all, there are THOUSANDS of interesting floating through the ether which I’d been trying to collect and, occassionally, read. Bah humbug!

The Downside of an Information Hoard

You might think that, as an IT professional, hoarding information is good for you.  After all, the more you know, the more effective you are at your job, right?  Uh – no.  I’ve discovered a few downsides to keeping all of this information around.  First, I lose time on administrivia, uh, I mean administration.  I can’t think of a time when a search on Google has not produced the information that I’m interested in.  So by spending time keeping up with my blog feeds, adding new blog feeds, deleting old ones, and so on, I lose time administrating something that really doesn’t need to be administrated.

Second, there’s the time it takes to read all of these entries – many long hours to read thousands of entries per month. I’ve actually figured out a little trick to make this go a lot faster. What’s that trick? Well, previously, I used to start reading my entries and then clicking “Next Entry” each time. Even when I skipped a lot of entries, just slogging through them all was a big time drain.  Now, I simply select large swathes of entries that I’m not interested in and click “Mark as Read” without ever opening them. Works great!  I’ve also gotten a lot more aggressive about dropping bloggers and RSS feeds that offer low value.  A lot of bloggers have popped up who only recount things which are available in Books On-Line.  Why spend any time on that at all?  I’m looking for strong insight, experiences, and analysis – not simple technology facts.  (A follow on thought to this tip is that “Bloggers Should Write Meaningful Article Titles!”)

Third, and more importantly, information hoarding takes a big emotional toll on me.  Maybe it’s a factor of just how my brain works and is completely inapplicable to you.  But in my case, I always carry a subtle nagging feeling when I have unread entries in my various accounts.  Even when I know that these entries are optional and that it’s not necessary for me to read any of these things, I still feel like I should read them. Basically, it makes me feel like I should be working all the dang time and that makes me feel anxious.  Anxiety makes me less productive and more prone to burn-out.  And anxiety bleeds through my work hours into my home life.  It makes it hard to enjoy a movie with the kids or some gardening in the yard.  All because there’s that feeling that I haven’t gotten the hoard processed yet.

The Solution to the Information Hoard

I mentioned a couple specific techniques for thinning out the hoard in paragraph two.  To summarize, first, subscribe to only those bloggers, feeds, and newsletters which add actual understanding to your life.  Second, open and read only those entries that matter and skip the rest. Those are techniques for dealing with lots of entries to read.  But my last problem, the anxiety issue, was a little bit harder to solve.

Like a lot of internal ways of handling life’s problem, the answer is simple but not easy.  Similar life problems with simple but difficult solutions might include feelings of guilt (the solution is confession) or anger (the solution is forgiveness, either of yourself or for the other party).  So what’s the solution to anxiety? Here’s my thought process – the answer to my information hoard is about values.  What do I mean?   I value these various things because they make me better at my job.  Losing things of value causes me some anxiety.  My anxiety has its roots in the feeling that I’m letting things of values (these various blog entries) slip through my hands.  Why would you ignore things of value, or even worse, get rid of them?!?  On the other hand, if you asked me what I really and truly valued most in this world, I’d answer with “my family and loved ones”.  But again, do I actually demonstrate this priority with my time? Not nearly enough. Therefore, the answer is to properly appraise the value of my time.  When I think about it rationally, I think that this sort of reading is worth about 30 minutes per day, maybe a full 60 minutes when there’s something really important to learn or someone really significant to listen to.

That’s it.  After 30 minutes, I can walk away from any sort of reading guilt-free.  So what’s my new solution to the information hoard and the anxieties that it’s been producing?  A quick check on the writers and topics I care about the most and then “MARK ALL AS READ”.  Yes, there will be more to read tomorrow.  But now I no longer carry an ever increasing load saying to myself “Someday I’ll get to that”.  I feel better already.

Feedback Requested

What’s your strategy to dealing with your information hoard?  Are you still keeping everything you ever produced or read digitally?  Does my approach sound reasonable and workable to you?  Or am I off base?

Thanks!

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

A while back at a SQL Saturday in Indianapolis, I was enjoying the WIT panel discussion listening to the panelists discuss their  upbringing and how they became a success in the field of technology.  Their stories were, in some ways, similar.  They were smart.  They weren’t scared of math.  They had an important mentor who supported them and encouraged them that they could accomplish any goal.  They endured struggles such as financial hardship that, while difficult to overcome, also refined their desire to become successful in their careers.  Some of the women who had to deal with men of the previous generation even had to overcome blatant chauvinism.

But then another similarity among the panelists, just a hunch really, struck me.  I had to ask, to confirm my idea. “How many of you were a bit of loner or at least weren’t heavily influenced by your friends’ opinions before your professional career?  Because with my own daughters, it’s their friends who they want to please.  And they’d punt right away if their friends teased them about being good at math, or choosing a technical career, or anything else I can think of for that matter.”

It was pretty much unanimous.  All of the panelists were loners or had a very small social circle during their formative years.  Now perhaps I’m speaking from an inaccurate assumption, but most of my daughters are tight with their friends.  And friends mean a lot to them, perhaps more than any other aspect of their social lives (like their family).  So if their friends tell them that being interested in technology will “geekify” them, then they’d drop it like a hot potato.

So I wanted to put this question out to my female friends in the IT world.  Were you in a big circle of friends during your developing years?  What importance did you place on their opinions?  Did they give you any flack for going in to IT or doing well in technology related classes?

It seems like the days of overt chauvinism are behind us here in the US.  But I wonder if we need to start earlier with our daughters among their own peer groups to support them for a future in technology.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

I had a very interesting conversation recently with a good friend of mine.  She’s at the top of her game as a first class enterprise DBA in a major medical institution.  She was interested in my career advice because she’d recently received an unsolicited invitation for a higher paying job in the business intelligence (BI) field.  While I won’t talk much more about the specifics of that conversation, it’s not a unique conversation.  In fact, I gave an interview to SearchSQLServer.com a while back about how DBA career paths are more and more leading into an even better paying career in business intelligence.  Check out the interview HERE.

SSWUG.ORG’s virtual webcasts will prepare the “Accidental DBA” for patterns and practices they will experience in their role as a database administrator. I will provide easy-to-understand insights and realistic examples for professionals who have not had any formal DBA training. By the end of our four-part series, you should have the information needed to get up to speed on database planning, administration and performance tuning basics.

·         Wednesday, May 4, 2011, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. PDT
·         Wednesday, June 1, 2011, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. PDT
·         Wednesday, July 6, 2011, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. PDT
·         Wednesday, August 3, 2011, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. PDT

Hope to see you there. REGISTER HERE.

Enjoy,

I’ve always appreciated how Andy Warren (blog| twitter) operates in the most transparent manner, especially as it relates to his role as a director for the Professional Association for SQL Server. For example, Andy’s latest blog post about prepping for the SQLRally, to kick off in less than 30 days, is insightful and gives you a good idea of the sort of work a strong director for PASS needs to put in.  I also enjoy how Andy more or less thinks out loud and offers you the chance to provide your input.  In that latest blog post, he was mulling different after hours entertainment options, giving you a chance to pipe up with your opinion if you had one.

Learn from My Mistakes

Times running out for the early registration discount.  Save $50 by registering before the end of the week!  And while you’re at it, register for my full day, pre-conference seminar on learning leadership and management skills especially tailored for the IT professional.  Here’s a quick run-down of the topics we’ll cover in my pre-con:

• Earning the respect of your team
• A deep understand of effectively motivating technology professionals
• Specific skills to lead database professionals competently that broadly fall into the categories of:
  • Coaching team members to effectively meet goals and deadlines
  • Facilitating change and navigating organizational disruptions
  • Promoting communication within the team and with management
  • Keeping teams and projects on task and within scope
  • Dealing with difficult team members
  • Practicing good team time management techniques

Read all about the goals of the session here.  If you’re coming to my session, I’d love to hear your thoughts ahead of time about challenges you’re facing!

Personal Experience, Personnel Experience

Also, just a word about my bona fides.  I’ve had a lot of leadership and management training over the years, but like many professionals I consider my on-the-job experiences to be the most valuable.

On the education side of the equation, I received a bachelor’s degree in the school of management back in the 1980′s.  I’ve also gone through the Center for Creative Leadership‘s leadership training curriculum, the Blessing and White Management Training curriculum, and SmithBucklin’s not-for-profit governance and organizational strategy training curriculum.  On the experience side of the equation, I led small dev and admin teams of 3-7 people starting way back in the early 1990′s.  In the late 1990′s, I started taking a more strategic direction with my skills as the manager of information architecture at the firm where I worked as well as taking a role as one of the founding directors of PASS.  In the early 2000′s, I joined Quest Software as our initial SQL Server product architect and spent several years leading the team to a over 50 individuals in a half dozen teams in as many disparate locations around the world.

A Few Words About Community from SQLBits8

The more I go, the more reasons I find to go back to the SQLBits conferences held around the UK.  The starting image isn’t very flattering, but here’s a fun little interview put together by Andrew Fryer of Microsoft:

Enjoy!
-Kev

Twitter at kekline
More content at http://KevinEKline.com

Register now! WWW.SQLRALLY.COM

The 2011 PASS SQLRally is just about one month away and it’s high time I highlighted some of the important things you’ll be hearing about in my precon seminar Leadership and Team Management Skills for the IT Professional. Just to set the context, many of us IT people got to our lofty career positions because of our keen use of technology.  It takes a lot of smarts to get where we’ve gotten, but they are a very specific set of smarts that can’t always be used in every business setting.  And, since so many of us have topped out in our potential salary as long as we stay in the trenches and the only do technology work, a lot of us are starting to eye those middle manager positions so that we can continue to see our career grow.  The only problem is that all of those skills that enabled us to become top tier technologists don’t transfer into the management arena.

I’ll be teaching a wide variety of soft skills and specific management checklists to help you survive those early transitional days.  And if you’re not a manager?  You’ll still want to attend because the wide variety of communication skills we’ll cover will help you stay on top of many other real life situations, from leading the local Girl Scout troop to taking a role on the local PTA organization.

You can read the full and pedantic session description at the link I provided up above.  But here’s a list of Five Funny Things You’ll Hear in the Precon:

1. “Here’s where we get out the whips and chains…”
2. “In this section, we’re going to learn how to manage our managers…”
3. “And then I was, like, OMG. And she was, like, LOL.  And her cousin was, like, ROFL. But then I was, like, meh…”
4. “Darth Vader would be proud…”
5. “The beatings will continue until morale improves!”

And one bonus:

• “That’s what she said…”

Did I put these in context, heck no! But it’s a fun session, with some practice labs and LOTS of content to help you make that transition from full time technologist to part- or even full-time leader!

I hope to see you there.

-Kevin

Twitter at kekline

As a result of the folks moving on to bigger and better things, I’m now stepping up in to the roll of editor-in-chief of SQLServerPedia.  This roll is mostly about checking on the quality of content produced by our syndicating bloggers to make sure that they’re not trying to sell products or services and that their posts are of high quality.  That’s about where the official duties end, save for things like acting as a judge in big SSP contests.

One new aspect that I want to bring to the roll is that of a newsletter.  At first, it seemed like it be great to simply point out our most popular blog posts once per month or per fortnight.  Our most popular blog posts are quite easy to track through our off-the-shelf analytic tools, after all.  However, I want to bring more to it than just a recap.

Here are some ideas I was considering and for which I’d like your feedback:

1. I’d like to highlight a blogger in a brief interview in each newsletter.  Would you be interested in reading it?
2. I’d like to riff on the database industry, in general, and SQL Server, specifically, depending on my mood at the time.
3. Get some help from you, dear reader, on a variety of crowd-sourced and community driven content much like we’ve done with the useful (and exhaustive) list of SQL Server Twitterers found HERE.
4. Spend more time doing either podcasts (no video) or videocasts.  Would you use either?  Do you have a preference?

Of course, I’ll continue to do all of my usual blogging including my Tool Time tips for SQL Server Magazine, professional development advice in the Plays Well With Others column, and thoughts on the database industry, virtualization, cloud computing, and pretty much anything else I feel like blabbing about.

Thanks for the opportunity to serve.  I look forward to your feedback!

Best regards,

-Kevin

My Favorite Magazine

There are a lot of reasons why I love The Economist magazine and pay over $100 per year for a subscription.  First of all, it summarizes all of its news articles, big and small, in the first 4-5 pages of the magazine.  Don’t have time to read the entire issue?  No problem, how does 20 minutes work for you?  Second, it reports news from around the world as if the rest of the world actually matters, whereas every American news magazine I read looks at the rest of the world as an afterthought.  You probably know me well enough to know that I travel internationally at least a couple times each year (not Greg Low levels of international travel, but still) and it always surprises my friends abroad that I know whose in leadership in their home country, what their biggest internal issues are, and so forth.  Thank you Economist. Third, I like the external viewpoint the Economist brings to American politics.  Although it’s has a moderately conservative political leaning, it doesn’t mind poking a finger into the eye of stupid ideas and positions held by any party or politician.  Simply put, the Brits behind the Economist don’t have a dog in our fight and so are free to speak their own very well informed mind.

I count the subscription expense towards my professional development because I’ve had no other input that was quite as effective at broadening my horizons, so to speak.

Gosh – I did NOT mean to make this blog post sound like a commercial! My apologies!

What I was getting at in the heading points to another thing I really like about the Economist – very intelligent and well structured debates which the hold on-line every week or two.  These debates follow the Oxford style of debate (I didn’t even know there was an Oxford style of debate) with open commentary from us, the public. In their words, “The format was made famous by the 186-year-old Oxford Union and has been practised by heads of state, prominent intellectuals and galvanising figures from across the cultural spectrum. It revolves around an assertion that is defended on one side (the “proposer”) and assailed on another (the “opposition”) in a contest hosted and overseen by a moderator. Each side has three chances to persuade readers: opening, rebuttal and closing.”

An Excellent Book for New DBAs and Those Who Want to Become Better DBAs

One recent debate caught my eye as particularly significant for the IT industry (the heading is a hyperlink):

Innovation Models

This house believes Japanese “incremental innovation” is superior to the West’s “disruptive innovation”.

Wow! That’s a broadside if ever I saw one.  But a very worthy discussion, especially for me since innovation and creativity in the development process are some of my favorite pet topics.  I’ve long believed that DBAs and Developers are much more akin to artists and “makers” than to engineers, so the innovation process is a big deal to me.  I wrote about this at length when I was given the opportunity to write a forward to Tom Larock’s (blog | twitter) book, DBA Survivor.

I encourage you to push your intellect a little further and harder.  Take a look at this debate and, since their free to the public, subscribe to the RSS feed and see what else comes down the pipeline.  There’s a new one just around the corner.

Don’t forget that free DVDs of our virtual conferences featuring me, along with Buck Woody (blog | twitter) and Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) will be mailed anywhere in North America free of charge, now available at this link.

Enjoy!

-Kevin

SearchSQLServer.Com

Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) and I did an interview with TechTarget’s Brendan Cournoyer at last summer’s Tech-Ed, which as turned into a podcast titled “Cloud efforts advance, SQL Server evolves.” The podcast covers all the major trends at the conference (like BI), virtualization features in Quest’s products (like Spotlight), Brent’s new book and MCM certification, and more.

Here’s a link to hear it, appearing on 6/11/10: http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/podcast/Cloud-efforts-advance-SQL-Server-evolves