Alex Denning

alexdenning.com · American English

Life and work for the 21st century

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2021 year in review
Jan 10, 2022 · original
Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it. — Finite and Infinite Games I find Finite and Infinite Games to be a remarkably pretentious book, but as I tumble through the years I’m referencing it more and more. In the finite game, you play to win. In the infinite game, you play for its own sake. 2021 was about infinite games. 2021 has been a wild year. I feel much more capable than a year ago, and dare I say it, I feel like I’m operating at a much higher level. Reflecting on 2021 I set a couple of goals for the start of 2021: Increase the pace of work and projects Action more ideas Get “out” of client work Publish blog posts weekly I felt going into 2021 that I was capable of doing more, and my goals were focused on that. I didn’t k
Understanding remote work as performance
May 5, 2021 · original
The rapid shift to remote work over the last year has often led to attempting to replicate in-person ways of working, but remotely. Without an adaptation of processes and ways of working, remote work becomes much more about “performance” than “work”. This post is about the implications of remote work as performance, where the performance has value, and alternative ways of doing things. Remote work as performance One of the key differences between remote and in-person knowledge work is that when remote, you have much less information about what your colleagues are doing. You can’t see that they’re at their desk, in their office, out for lunch, in a meeting, and so on. Instead, your main check-in mechanism is to interrupt them, usually via Slack. When your main mechanism for checking-in with colleagues becomes interrupting them, we incentivise responding rapidly to interruptions as “good”.
Building process and becoming a technology-driven service business
Mar 18, 2021 · original
Standard Operating Procedure , process, workflow… a couple of years ago I thought these were all by words for bloat and the antithesis of working quickly or making progress. It’s fair to say I’ve done a full turn on that one: I now run a process-driven company where how we do everything is built around process. This post isn’t about that, though: this about how we use process to be a technology-driven service company. Working with process in a business that relies on humans doing the work is nothing new. Using technology to add scale to those processes is a different and exciting way if doing things. We work with technology companies, and a common viewpoint is that services don’t scale. Products are viewed as the superior option for their scale. One client even said to me once; “Alex you’re not stupid, so why don’t you make products?” I see our processes as the product, and building tech
Starting and finishing projects, fast and slow
Mar 10, 2021 · original
One of my strengths is coming up with ideas , and one of my goals for this year is to get faster at executing the ideas. We’re two months in, and I’ve made a lot of progress so far. New ideas often create new ideas, though, and one of the challenges has been finishing projects once they’re past the initial stage of excitement, and bringing others along for the ride. Understanding the goal, and implications of the goal Goal setting is a powerful way of making progress, and I like to use the end of the year to review where I’m at and set new goals for the coming year. That’s fairly standard and uncontroversial. What I’m less good at is understanding the implications of the goal: doing one thing may lead to unintended side-effects. We understand this with KPIs, which is where paired metrics come from. You might, for example, pair revenue with profit margin to ensure you don’t optimise for o
How I’ve doubled down on Deep Work
Jan 31, 2021 · original
I’ve written about Deep Work many times before, including how I do it in practice and how we do it at Ellipsis. I’ve been a dedicated Deep Worker since I read it in one sitting on a long haul flight 4 years ago, and the longevity of the idea is interesting. There are lots of productivity ideas, but few stick. Both of my previous posts are now a little dated, so as it has stuck, I thought it’d be interesting to re-review how I’ve doubled down on Deep Work recently. Remind me what this is? The idea of “Deep Work” comes from Cal Newport, a Computer Science Professor at Georgetown University, and is something he expands on in his book of the same name . Here’s the idea in Cal’s words: Deep work is cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results , and that push our abilities to continually improve… . Deep work results in improvement of the val
2020 year in review
Jan 12, 2021 · original
I haven’t written an annual review post for a couple of years and had no intention of changing that this year, but I’ve enjoyed reading other people’s, am pretty bad at writing about myself and want to change that, and want to write more this year. It seems like a good fit! 2020 is over, hooray! I can’t start this without talking about COVID-19. At the time of writing, in the UK hospitalisation rates are higher than ever, 1.9 million people have died worldwide , and whilst vaccinations are starting it seems plausible restrictions are still in place in 12 months’ time. I’ve been mostly at home, my wife works in medicine and has been doing dangerous work where a lot of people have died. It’s been terrible. 2020 was a good year to be working remotely already, though. It was also a good year to be working in an industry which helps people work online. For me personally, 2020 had things which
Digital Minimalism has valuable lessons on technology and the good life, but was also a bit disappointing
Jul 27, 2020 · original
This post is about the book’s really good core ideas, and then a brief section on where they were weaker. I originally wrote this a year ago when I first read the post, but I’ve sat on publishing it. It makes some good points, so I’m doing so! I recently read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I was looking forward to this: Cal’s previous book Deep Work has had a huge influence on my professional life (as I’ve written about before ) and I’m a keen subscriber to his blog posts. The book was set up to be a home run, but it was simultaneously really good and a little disappointing. The core idea started very strongly and was packed with insight, but by the end it strayed too far from this core insight and was relyig on weaker secondary sources, ideas, and arguments. I hope this is both a useful recap of the points which resonated most with me, and a useful intellectual critique of where the
Lessons in Stoicism: book notes, and commentary
Jul 27, 2020 · original
My to-read list is long, and books can wait years to get read. I select a mix of interests, and try to make sure my reading is well rounded. It’s thus fairly unusual that I read Lessons in Stoicism quickly after finding it. I find the subject matter (modern takes on Stoicism) interesting but it’s also pretty short and I find the cover design extremely pleasing. Even the fanciest systems are undermined by the simplest things. My reaction when I finished reading the book was that it was okay, but nowhere near as good as A Guide To The Good Life (aff link), which was one of the first of the modern Stoicism trends and remains one of the best. A Guide To The Good Life explores how to live according to Stoic rules at a deeply practical level. It’s a popular book: it’s supported by the original Stoic text but it’s very much a fresh interpretation. Lessons in Stoicism is similar, but it’s much m
Deliberate practice: a practical guide to practicing knowledge work
Jul 1, 2019 · original
We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little that challenges our brains… for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally good enough. [But with deliberate practice] If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can. – Anders Ericsson, Peak Recently I discussed how we can think about applying deliberate practice to knowledge work , looking at Professor Anders Ericsson’s book Peak and thesis of deliberate practice , a theory of skill development which focuses on performance and how to improve it, rather than just knowledge for its own sake. The first post discusses some of the challenges in applying deliberate practice to “knowledge work”. Ericsson’s focus is on areas with objectively defined expert performers and well-established training methods; think chess or tennis,
Deliberate practice: applying the abstract theory to careers
Apr 29, 2019 · original
On our recent trip to Morocco my Kindle tragically broke. It was a Kindle Keyboard 3G, and I’d had it since 2011. It featured a full sized keyboard and a 3G connection anywhere in the world, free! Unsurprisingly those features rarely came in useful, but it served me well. Sadly when I put the Kindle down when I sat down on the flight the screen broke. We were just taking off! The worst time to break a Kindle! I had changed my mind about bringing any physical books at the last minute, so when we arrived at our Riad (hotel) one of the first things I did was download the Kindle app for my phone and find something to read. I settled on Peak by Anders Ericsson, a Professor at Florida State University. The subtitle is Secrets from the New Science of Expertise , and the book is about Ericsson’s work in researching “deliberate practice”, a theory of skill development which argues the most effici

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