I don’t know why, but my brain is constantly wandering away when I read an interesting book. Sometimes it makes me re-read paragraphs or even whole chapters over again because I completely miss the point while reading automatically with my eyes, but being somewhere else in my thoughts.

My first reaction was to shake it off and get back to the book paying closer attention to what I was just reading for past few minutes. It happened again and again throughout the years of reading and I was always annoyed at loosing time having to re-read the same text over and over again. But the feeling was so curious and so repeatable that I thought that I should start observing this behavior to try make sense of it.

As it turns out, the distractions were not the problems of the brain having hard time concentrating, but on the contrary, the process of generating new ideas. Triggered by the topic of the book or blog post, my brain was connecting prior thoughts with something new or bringing up memories that were long forgotten and never coming back in that particular context.

Basically, it’s like electric short in the brain that happens between two previously “unrelated” areas and this short builds some new bridge that allows for thoughts to travel faster between the two concepts in the future (disclosure, I’m not a neural surgeon nor I have any idea how brain actually works).

In “The Myths of Innovation”, Scott Berkun’s attributes a lot of inventions to the associative thinking that people employ connecting different things together, observations of nature, memories and so on. The shorts in my brain are much like those associations in the making.

So, getting back to the annoying distraction and the need to re-read what was just read with a blank expression on your face…

After observing it for a while I realized that getting back to reading was the worst mistake I could make – basically I was forcing myself to block the thoughts that were working hard on building that neural bridge effectively killing the associations that were being created. My desire to finish the book and to optimize reading time was prevailing over desire to get some meaning out of it completely defeating the whole purpose of reading itself.

… so I started to think of what to do instead …

There are a couple goals here – first of all is to try preserving the thought that I was previously trying to subdue. After all, I really hope those ideas are useful and not just day dreams.

Pen and paper never worked for me for some reason and I waited all this time for technology to catch up which it did bringing us mobile devices. Emails to self work very well for me and Blackberry started (literally) saving the ideas also helping with putting them into personal search engine (thanks Gmail) and effectively adding them to task list (inbox). Some people just use notes app on their smartphones and others tweet with #notetoself hash tags – whatever works best.

The second goal is to not stifle the brain activity and let it go for as long as it can naturally do so to helping those bridge-building ants in my brain create something stable and reliable and capable of transferring the thoughts between the newly connected concepts in the future.

Now, with better mobile devices with web browsers and apps, there is no need to just record your thoughts, I’m adding tasks to my issue trackers for software projects, writing blog posts, tweeting, updating my presentations and so on the go, right when I had the “blank reading” moment.

Switching from the book to working on the idea is as easy as pulling out the phone or taking iPad from my backpack (or switching the app if it’s an ebook). Luckily bookmarks were invented long time ago and there is not much to learn to be able to re-start the reading.

I urge everyone to not read a book while train ride lasts or until you go to sleep or until you reach the cover. Read it until it sparks the thought, until your brain wanders away coming up with an idea. Use reading material as a trigger for creating associations, try to catch the creative moment – don’t loose it, build on it!

This post came out pretty long, the thought is thinning and it’s time to get back to that book…

New ShowSlow version 0.10 – all measurements are now surfaced in the breakdown sections on details page.

A few particularly interesting ones, like Page Speed’s Transfer Size and Page Size and dynaTrace’s Total time on network / JavaScript and rendering, for example.

Also some visual prettying up is done with CSS3 gradients for bars (falling back to plain ones for less fortunate browsers) and some better looks for URLs that were just added for monitoring (if you have it enabled on your instance as ShowSlow.com has).

This is a start of the overhaul of details page which is going towards the version 1.0 with the goal of picking your metrics to be displayed on the graph. Stil long way to go though ;)

Follow the upgrade instructions if you already have an instance running.

Or you can download code package and install it.

Great news for Semantic Web, Facebook announced that they are going to use more structured metadata in shared web pages then just their original meta tags.

There are two parts to it – first they are going to provide storage about all things withing Facebook and on the internet in JSON format so people can write applications that use this data.

For example, public information about me on Facebook can be seen at this URL:
https://graph.facebook.com/sergey.chernyshev

And here how it looks:

{
   "id": "504972292",
   "name": "Sergey Chernyshev",
   "first_name": "Sergey",
   "last_name": "Chernyshev",
   "link": "http://www.facebook.com/sergey.chernyshev"
}

This way all you need to know is ID, which in my case is sergey.chernyshev or 504972292.

Another side of this is that Facebook is going to also store data from pages that were shared using their share button or added to interests or in any other way loaded into facebook’s system. They will be extracting this data using RDFa format and interpret it using a vocabulary that they call Open Graph Protocol (I will be calling it RDfb).

<html xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/">
<head>
<title>The Rock (1996)</title>
<meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
<meta property="og:type" content="movie" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg" />
...
</head>
...
</html>

This will allow sites to add a few lines of code to their pages to get them recognized as meaningful data instead of just human-readable documents – this will allow smart agents like search engines, mobile applications, embedded systems and just simple widgets to make sense of this data and help people see it in the context that is most usable for them.

I have a feeling that Facebook being a great driver for many business decisions related to promotion and marketing through social media, this change is going to be a best thing that happened to Semantic Web so far, might be even bigger then Yahoo’s and Google’s efforts in universal search.

P.S. Such a great present for my presentation about RDFa tonight ;)

I was listening to a long awaited interview with Seth Godin that Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley from Startup Success Podcast just released and Seth said something (11:38 in mp3) that resonated with me immediately:

…I use a resistance as a compass. If I’m uncomfortable about doing something, if I hear the voice of the lizard brain, that’s exactly what I choose to do…

This is exactly the “path of the most embarrassment” that I wrote about some time ago. This is the feeling that I found. The one that is so easy to differentiate from the comfortable fuzzy feeling that boring stuff brings.

It feels so good to have a validation by Seth, I think I should listen to this lizard brain more often not to step away from the path of the most embarrassment. Wait… good feelings should be avoided, don’t they…

I’m working on HowDoable for a few months already and it’s been a fun ride and main challenge is to go towards the goal.

I’m using Pivotal tracker for my agile needs and i have a long backlog which I’m adding to more stuff over time, rearranging the list and so on. What I noticed that rearranging gets a pattern during hard times – I tend to avoid some kind of tasks – those that are not very natural for me, like writing some texts in English or just regular startup problems like writing business plan or think about the product from user’s perspective.

What I tend to push up the list is something I’m comfortable doing, like coding new features or playing around with new colors, logo, some other things, but definitely not those that bring me closer to the release.

Many words are said about shipping the product early and why it can be vital to business so I’m not going to repeat them here, but I never found a good recommendation about how exactly do we do that. One thing that I heard lately is a paradigm of “minimal viable product” which is about the set of features to include that will make the product stand out, but no more.

What it doesn’t describe is how do you do that in agile environment when so many backlog items come up when you start and reprioritization happens very often and requires constant attention. So I struggle to find that feeling that I can catch and follow during the periodic reordering of my task list / backlog to make sure that things that need to be done to be successful don’t get pushed down by things that I just feel like doing.

Some time ago I read a good quote from Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn – “If you’re not embarrassed by your first release, then you launched too late.” and it stuck with me as a great description of the problem of over-polishing the product which is not even seen by users yet.

So I though to myself – if I look at it from agile perspective and treat each iteration’s or even day’s product as a final product (thing that you want to have in your agile world) then embarrassment is exactly the feeling that needs to guide you when you’re picking the next thing to do.

What I mean is that if you thinking of moving some task down to replace it with some other task, think if this other tasks’ completion is going to help you avoid some potential embarrassment and if so, then stop right there! – what you’re doing is trying to feel better about the product and not bringing the product to the state that will benefit the business.

Unfortunately these are two different things and extreme perfectionism tha arises from trying to “polish the torpedo” never did any good and many projects and businesses were ruined by “unfinished torpedoes with shiny casing”.

So now what I do and urge all the strartupers to do (or open source developers for that matter) is to follow the path of the most embarrassment – when you feel that you have a choice of doing something to reduce the embarrassment, turn around and go into the opposite direction because you’re trying not to hurt your feelings. What you need to do instead is to go towards the business goals that I hope you had time to define and didn’t just jump into development, right.

Hope this insight helps and if you feel I’m wrong, let me know in the comments.