We’ve all heard it: The ability to learn and apply how to communicate with skill is priceless, no matter what we do. At the top of most fields we will often find the best communicators.  The jury might be out on other things, but they do know how to share their message.

Being limited to 140 characters per message in Twitter, I’ve had to get very good at expressing my thoughts and ideas simply and clearly for maximum impact.  It doesn’t have to be bold, or brash, just clear. In this way, Twitter has become one pencil sharpener of expressing my thoughts and ideas.  How does it do that?

The long and short of it is this: When working on a project, product, business, or startups, we’re in the boat of having to communicate a lot, clearly and quickly.  Twitter helps us to develop the habit of communicating with less distracting noise, and more punchy signal.

Like the web, we all need to define what Twitter will do for us based on how we use it. For me, Twitter participates in introducing and sharing ideas that better help us define and navigate the world around us.

Twitter promotes quitting the brain dump to communicate. As a developer of projects and products, be it someone’s startup idea, or my own, I have to learn to cut through the tendency to take the easy way out and “write everything” to “cover it all”.  This is known as the brain dump.  Whether an email, on a website, or in your product, brain dumping as a way of communicating only increases complexity. It reduces focus. It makes people work to find the nuggets they are looking for.  (They won’t and they’l leave) Worse, brain dumps to communicate leave more questions than it answers, and a greater sense of confusion than it began with.

More signal, less noise. Less is definitely more. With all projects, products and startups, we often wear an extra hat of copywriters.  Write less, cut in half, and half again, right?  We often know the most about the product, how it works, and the market fit, and being able to find and speak to it with a lot of impact is a huge thing that the lean startup approach has emphasized.   Learning to find the essence and knowing what message to amplify is critically invaluable.

Training ourselves to speak about benefits instead of features. Since we’re focused on building features, we can have a tendency on communicating the features at length, and not always the benefit.  On Twitter, answering “How does this relate to me” is how information travels quickly.  “What it does” doesn’t seem as interesting.  Always developing our skill to communicate benefits is invaluable in all projects and products.

If we examine “How does this relate to me” about the relevancy of Twitter itself, we can notice some interesting things.

First there were opinions about what twitter was about.

“Twitter just IRC on the web.”
“Twitter is the wall chat of BBS (bulletin board systems) in the 1990’s”

There were the opinions where everyone wondered how is this useful to me.

“Twitter makes it hard to interact in so few characters.”
“Twitter seems like a popularity contest.”
“Who cares about typing everything you’re thinking or doing every second of the day.”

From this, a few things have become apparent about Twitter to me.

Twitter shares something with the web of the 1990’s.  It’s anything, and everything, to anyone and everyone. Tweeting about every moment, thought and whatever, is the equivalent of having flashing text on your website in the 90’s.  Cool to some at first, painful for everyone.  When we were new to Twitter, we were feeling things out.  What’s too much? what’s too little?  How do I participate in sharing?  How do I find what’s important to me?

We had Geocities in the 90’s.  Sites weren’t the greatest, but everyone was involved in consuming, expressing and sharing information with each other.  Blinking text lost out on the web, just like sharing your every thought at every second has (hopefully) on Twitter.  Search engines became a relevant way to link strangers with information that they wouldn’t know about.

Twitter has become a live, searchable stream of benefits to me. How we learned and evolved in expressing and sharing information has lead to a huge impact in the last 10 years.  Everything and everyone is becoming more, and more connected, and we’re having to deal with too much information.

Twitter helps us deal with massive information overload. Those who learn to share and communicate in 140 characters become more and more relevant as information overload and bombardment increases every year.  Conveniently, being able to write good copy for your projects or product is also very, very, powerful.

For now, the best signal to noise adjuster is people.  Computer’s can’t exactly put together the information stream we are trying to piece together ourselves as we go. We need to be able to tune things in, or out, as easily as changing an order at a restaurant. So, we pay attention to those who have a clear, consistent stream of knowledge so it can become a part of ours. Rinse, repeat with others to create our own meal from the buffet of information overload.

While it might be foolish to say there won’t be anything like it again, Twitter has, increasingly found it’s way into our lives as a communication format like email, fax, or phone. Consume it in many different ways.  Participate in just as many. Except, Twitter is a community like Facebook at the same time.  That’s unique.  And I’ll keep working to make the most of it.

So, if you made it this far, take the one benefit from the ideas above, or your own, and share how you’ll apply it.

In it he covers his typical day and mindset.  What’s interesting is his focus on basing all of his decisions around eliminating one thing, that I’ve been a huge fan of.

Interruption is the enemy of productivity.

Here’s the deal.  When creating anything, be it creative, abstract, or analytical, there’s not a lot of space to leave your thinking and attention in auto-pilot mode.

You have to be present.  You have to be immersed.  You have to be deep into what you are doing. You have to be swimming in the deep end of the pool.

You have to be flowing, effortlessly, with all your might, at the same time.. as per The little book of flow

In software development, and startups especially, our time is prone to interruptions.  For me, interruptions are poisonous to productivity.  Developers are paid to deliver, not spin their wheels, and confuse activity with results.

It’s been long established that a block of 2-3 hours, uninterrupted, is the best chance you have to get 5-6 hours of work done. The more you’re behind the steering wheel and driving intently, the quicker you will reach and pass the challenges that lie ahead.

In Jason’s article, every aspect of his day shares a creation and use of insulation around his time and accessibility, as well as for  everyone on his team.

I spend another good portion of my day thinking about how to make things less complicated. In the software world, the first, second, and third versions of any product are really pretty good, because everyone can use them. Then companies start adding more and more stuff to keep their existing customers happy. But you end up dying with your customer base, because the software is too complicated for a newcomer. We keep our products simple. I’d rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them.

This leaves them to do what they do best.. create.  Everyone is accessible, but it’s opt-in.  Whether its reading time, coding time, or design time, it’s just that, and it stays just that.  He tells his tale of working interruption free, far more than the majority of folks.  Does it mean he’s interruption free? No. But he seems to manage what he does.

What’s the benefit of doing it this way?  Well, at any given moment, we really can’t say what might come our way.  Often when we are chasing our work, or it is chasing after us, another fire comes our way.

I remember something I learnt during my Network Engineer days.  I was good at being thrown down a well, into any situation, and  coming out successful.  The client was happy and we didn’t really have to look at it again.  Tiring, yes.  Stressful, of course. Exciting, yeah.  Learn to learn quickly? Absolutely.

That is, until I realized what it was doing to me.  I was getting a reputation of being a star who could be thrown into any messy situation and come out on top.  Guess what I started getting more of… messy situations!   So, by being good at cleaning up messes, I attracted more. The only problem was, I didn’t get to perform or create at my highest level when I was dealing with problems that I was inheriting.

So I started refusing to participate in the emergencies of others that were preventable either by time, or by frequency (the same people often have the biggest fires) that I started building — and keeping the highest creative part of my time to myself.  This lead me to my second major rule of interruption.

Poor planning on your part, does not make an emergency in my part.

Wishful thinking?  Perhaps, to those hopelessly lost.  Concepts of managing your manager, and managing expectations are often things we all need to learn painfully, personally in ways that we will never forget.

How to slay the interruption dragon?  Find what works for you.  Keep searching until you have your fit. Here’s some of what I practice.

1. Batch Work: Compartmentalizing my day into business tasks, development tasks, design tasks, etc, has helped me a lot.  When I try to be a hero, it only lasts so long.
2. Surprise Time: I leave 1-2 whole hours a day un-scheduled every day for surprises.  If no surprises come, great, I get ahead on other items.
3. Email and Voicemail can wait. Turn off all voicemail and email indicators on your screen, in sound, etc.  They are all distractions and interruptions.  There is no problem big or important enough that it can’t wait an hour or two.  If the problem really is that large, let it be — you will get repeated calls.  People will be jumping out windows.  I have a 3 call rule.  If I don’t answer the first two times because I’m working on something, the third time someone better be dying or something better be on fire.  It has worked well for me.
4. Communicate in batches. Either you are someone who asks the majority of questions, or answers them.  Blackberries, et al., benefit the the folks asking questions, not the answer givers.  Too often, when people get busy doing other people’s jobs via dreaded blackberry dialogues, they’re not doing their own work.
5. Reward thoughtful interruption. Anyone who sends you a request, thought out, laid out, with supporting information to minimize back and forth deserves to be rewarded.  Anyone who emails you in advance deserves to be rewarded.  It doesn’t mean punish the last minute or late requests… their self-chosen stress will be enough and you don’t need to add to it.  But do reward those who set you up to succeed and are mindful of your plate as much as their own by getting to them sooner, faster, and more consistently.  Let the thoughtful people know of the times that you schedule your communicating.
6. Manage interrupters. Anyone who stops you, for more than 30 seconds to give you a heads up, is essentially saying through their actions that whatever they are interrupting you with is more important than what you are working on.  It also means, they are saying what you do isn’t important, to you, or them.  We can say it might not be that intentionally disrespectful. It’s far better to cultivate mindfulness between people both ways.  When someone interrupts you, religiously say “I only have a minute right now and have to finish something. If we need more time we can schedule it in, is that okay?”  This asks the visiting message to be clear, concise, and get to the point.