[thelist] web designers unique? (was: Filling up timesheets - good or bad?)

Erika Meyer erika at seastorm.com
Sat Jan 13 05:25:35 CST 2001


>i did concert promotions for five years...
did you fill out a task chart?

>in many cases, i did them all at once, on what should have been
>bigger budget projects...
-- did you fill out task charts?

>has anyone else seen these quotes?  like the ninja one?  i used to
>collect 'em, but that was two machine rebuilds (4.5 years) ago..

I have never seen the nija quote but I have read Guy Kawasaki's books.

I am fimiliar with I Ching, the Tao Te Ching and books like that. 
I've practiced T'ai Chi.  I watch Pokemon, too.  All these are about 
the yin and yang and art of life and war, which is very much like the 
world we work in.

The warrior thing makes more sense to me as a web designer than it 
did when I worked as a bartender and even as a teacher which is more 
similar in terms of the complexity.

Web design requires a lot of both logical and creative skills.  But I 
think a lot of the 'nija warrior' (or Tao) has to do with the 
political intricacies that surround the creation and growth of web 
sites.  Everything is a balancing act:

Political & business stuff aside, the raw technical stuff is a 
balancing act on it's own:
creative vs. logical
chaos vs. order
audience vs. client
image vs. word
graphic design vs. usability  (etc.)

Not that this has much to do with task charts... except that it takes 
a special kind of person to take this all on. (Not to mention the 
pace everything moves at) It is not a job for the timid, or for those 
who need a lot of guidance in everything they do.

As a teacher, I ALWAYS asked my students for feedback on how my 
methods and processes worked for them.  I made sure they could 
respond in such a way that they felt safe about it, that it would not 
affect their grade, etc.

I've yet to find a manager who will do this.
There's some kind of assumption that the manager knows what is best, 
because he/she is in some kind of 'superior' position.

I say, defeat the hierarchy.

Task charts are about making a manager feel like he or she is 
accomplishing something.  I have to fill one in now.  It must be in 
Excel.  I cannot think in little boxes like that.  I cannot set 
'deadlines' the way I've been told to do. But no one asked me, did 
they.

Here is some feedback for
any managers who might be reading this:

task charts suck.
-- teamwork rocks.

hierarchical management sucks.
-- bottom-up management rocks.

deadlines suck.
-- goals rock.

Erika

(uh... did the subject line change?)

***
http://home1.gte.net/sny22njz/artofwww/index.html
"The Art of Web Application Development"
***
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/dao/dao_1.html
"The Tao of Web Design"
***

erika at seastorm.com




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