Attention to detail. That’s something I learned from one of my very first jobs out of grad school. I had just finished school and starting my career. My assignment was to pull together various data sources and draft up chapter 2 of a strategic plan for the client. I cobbled the data together, packaged it up, and emailed it to my boss.

After a one-on-one sit down, he handed me the chapter back. In my day, we used hard copy paper. There were red pen marks everywhere. You couldn’t even see the document below all the red scribbles. He then says some words I’ll never forget, “Daniel, you need to take accountability in your work.”

I went home that night, all frustrated and angry. Here I am, hot shot grad student, thinking I knew everything. What school never taught you was how to take criticism, no matter how it’s delivered. I considered quitting, getting a new job. I wanted to say screw it and walk away.

After cooling down, I realized he had challenged me. It wasn’t him that was the problem. It was me. I needed to be accountable to my work. I needed to take pride in my work.

Years later, after working for two of the most anal bosses on the planet, I realized that they were two of my greatest mentors. My short time with the company (due to personal reasons), sparked a career where moving pixels mattered. In that time, I learned a few lessons I continue to carry to this day:

1. Edit a document all the way up to the point where you click send. It’s never to late to haggle over word choice, checking for dotted i’s and crossing t’s.
2. Pixels matter. If a box is out of alignment, it looks out of alignment. If it’s perfect, no one will know.
3. You’ll burn out trying to get to perfection, but good enough is never enough. Good enough will make you average and you can’t afford to be average in a very competitive environment.
4. Clients will  never know that you put all the effort into making your work perfect, but they’ll be very quick to point out when it’s not.
5. When you’re part of a small company (or a small team in a big company), it always feels good to beat the big boys (or girls) at the same game.

This is a big list of fairly generic conceptual ideas. Below are some examples of things I do:

• Zooming in 800% in PowerPoint to make sure that a box aligns to the pixel.
• Check to make sure that lines in bullet lists are ended by punctuation (or not) consistently.
• Reading a document, re-reading, printing it out and reading it, editing it, getting a fresh set of eyes to read it, and then doing it all over again.
• Asking why a graph, table, chart, or paragraph belongs in a document. If it has not purpose, it doesn’t belong. It should contribute to the story.
• Printing a document out in color and in black and white and flipping through it as a client would. Does it read well? Does it tell the story? What if I only skimmed? Would I also get the same message?

Finally, the biggest lesson I learned is that it takes a lot of work, genuinely a lot of hard work to produce good work. It meant getting cross-eyed as you scan a document for mistakes. It meant reading a document at least 100 times before saying good to go.

Thank you Mike and Dan. You taught me well.

PS: I don’t apply the same rigor to my blog. This is a free form platform. If I did, it would write one post a year.

How many of you watched this and was surprised as well?

I just finished watching Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead on Netflix. It’s a documentary about a guy who decides to reboot his life by going on a juice only fast for 60 days. He lost weight and everything you would expect from such a drastic change in lifestyle. He was energized, didn’t rely on his medication, and had a better outlook on life.

After many years of overworking and not paying attention to my diet, I think age has finally caught up. Today, I struggled to remember words, concepts, and experiences as I was responding to an email. Just a few years back, I would be able to do that while tweeting, listening to music, watching a movie, and drinking a soda.

For me, I’m naturally a small build. I can eat massive amounts of food and not gain significant weight. Instead, it all affects my mood and arteries. So, starting today, and my defacto New Year’s resolution, I will be going on a hybrid juice diet. I’m not going to give up eating all meals, but will replace at least 50 – 75% of my meals with juice.

Using data to analyze my progress

As a technologist, I love tech toys. In the health world, there is a lot of tech to monitor virtually everything. The advantage of doing so is the amount of data I can collect over time versus my periodic checkup at the doctor’s office.

I’m currently using:

1. a Fitbit to track activity level (flights of stairs, steps taken) and sleep quality (number of times awoken at night). The app also has a form to manually track body measurements.
2. DNA sequencing from 23andme. This is a little creepy but I sent in a saliva sample a while ago and they sequence part of the DNA and correlate it to survey data from participants.

I would like to track:

1. Weight – I would like to try the Withings wifi body scale. It tracks weight, fat mass, and BMI and transmits it via wifi.
2. Blood pressure – Withings also has a blood pressure monitor that could hook up to my iPhone.

Great presentation from David Sherwin from Frog Design:

What better way to improve your handwriting than to publicly embarassing yourself by posting it online. On a computer, my writing is perfect. The fonts are always the same size and shape. With a pen, not so much. With a Wacom Bamboo, even worse. However, it’s just like when I first learned how to type on the iPhone, it just takes practice.

Note: I was in the middle of writing this post when the news broke of Steve Job. Rather than wait, I think he would’ve wanted us to continue with our lives and support the continuing innovation.

—

It’s unfortunate for Tim Cook to take over just prior to the release of the iPhone 4S. With the delay of the annual release of the iPhone, there was pent up demand for a major overhaul of the iPhone 4 design. After problems with the antennae in the iPhone 4 release, people were expecting a new design to come out, something similar to a miniaturized iPad.

However, after reviewing the keynote, I believe that the iPhone 4S is a major breakthrough. The antennae has been enhanced to support intelligent switching between the two to get the best signal possible. It has a dual-core A5 processor, same as the iPad 2. The same processor that runs the iPad is now crammed into the iPhone. We should expect games of the same quality as Xbox’s and Playstation’s.

The iPhone 4S also comes with a brand new 8MP camera with all new lenses and more light captured per pixel. I’m not a photographer so I can’t speak to the specs. That said, this phone’s camera is better than the point and shoot I carry around on trips. That’s one less device to carry.

The camera also captures 1080P HD video. Goodbye already dead Flip Mino. Again, advanced hardware coupled with software will make this little phone an amazing alternative to video cameras.

Couple all of this with iOS5, SIRI, and iCloud and you have a really powerful phone.

Sure, if you compare specs, there are phones with larger screens, faster processors, etc. However, none of them offer the same user experience as the iPhone 4S. No other system out there offers the end to end integration from desktop to laptop to tablet to phone. iCloud ties these systems together seamlessly.

As all the pundits bash on Apple, I believe we’ll look back and say that the iPhone has and always did and will have the best experience bar none.

Apple has announced that Steve Jobs has passed away.

You truly changed and revolutionized the world. You will be missed.

I’m at Oakland Intl Airport catching a flight back after a three day workshop on The Principles of Graphic Facilitation hosted by The Grove.

PGF Program

1. Principles of Graphic Facilitation - This two day workshop builds on core skills in meeting facilitation and graphic recording and connects the two skills. Either on its own can be a powerful tool, but when combined, the impact is astounding.
2. Workplace Applications Intensive – This add on workshop applies everything you learned in the first two days and starts to build the tools you need to apply it to your work.

The course comes with The Grove published books on Graphic Facilitation, Best Practices, Sketching Practice books, Visual Meetings by David Sibbett, and more. Just these materials alone would cost you hundreds of dollars. When you factor in all these materials, the course is a steal.

The Experience

Just like any other program, the interaction and meeting of the minds by people all over the world adds so much value that you can’t get from reading the books. Since we’re all busy professionals and creatives from all walks of life, taking three days off can be difficult for everyone. However, this is my first workshop where people were truly interested, came early every day just to make sure they get every little bit. The shared experience of learning and practicing together built such a strong bond that other types of programs can’t achieve in such a short timeframe.

Resources

At the last day, we got a preview of new digital tools for graphic facilitation. Below are a few things we talked about:

• Wacom Bamboo Tablet ($69) – Pen tablet input device. Very low cost for getting started and practicing.
• Wacom Cintiq ($999 for 12″ version and $1999 for 21″ version)
• Sketchbook Pro ($79) – Pro version with more options
• Sketchbook Copic Edition (Free) – This is a free version of Sketchbook Pro and uses the same marker colors as Copic Markers. Works perfectly fine for most people.
• Join.Me – I’m adding this is an alternative to WebEx and other corporate screencasting and conferencing tools. I like it because there’s a free version and it’s really easy to connect everyone.

We talked about using the iPad as a facilitation device. Although the iPad 2 has HDMI mirroring and airplay, it’s still not a very good tool for broadcasting visual displays. First, the resolution is still too low. I personally would wait for iPad 3 with a potentially higher resolution screen. Higher resolution gives you the ability to portray and view more detail.

On the iPad, I also use Sketchbook Pro and Brushes.

Looking ahead

In the coming weeks, I hope to share some of my work and present new ideas to advance the field of graphic facilitation.

Edit 9/15/2011:

Here’s an output of a practice file I made using Sketchbook Pro on the iPad while my flight home from San Francisco.

I’ve been paying particular attention to bus riders in Seattle. I’ve notice a growing trend of smart phone addicts. We’re still children, holding onto our Starbucks coffee (our adult sippy cup) and grasping our smart phones inches from our face (our toy). The weather in Seattle is amazing in September. This is when summer starts and the views onto the lake and sound is breath taking. Yet nearly 1/3 of the riders on the bus live in a world dictated by a 3.5″ screen.

Social media has made us less “social” and smart phones have made us less “smart.”

While at my optometrist appointment for my annual eye exam, she asked how much time do I spend in front of a computer a day. That number for me lately has gone down from 16 hours a day to about 6. In fact, most of my work day is on paper (sorry Captain Planet) and whiteboards. I’ve matured to the point where most of the design and planning is done offline and the execution is done later.

As I spend less time in front of my 3.5″ smart phone and 15″ laptop, I find myself getting more done and less focused on busy work.

Here are a few other changes I’ve made:

1. Forget about organizing emails into folders and tagging – use search to find things later.
2. Inbox zero is a waste of time – check email periodically and do something about it, or flag it for attention later.
3. Carry a paper notebook around, take notes, and review it daily.
4. Doodle more.