Management Bits and Tips

Although I still use Preemptive Multireading throughout my working day I decided to try another approach similar to cooperative multitasking used in old operating systems like Windows 3.x. I identified 30 technical books I want to read (mostly related to software engineering, software architecture, design and programming) and allocated one hour every day to spend about 2 minutes on each book. Most software related books have low information density per page and plenty of information is repeated from book to book which allows using some speed reading techniques. These books are unlike mathematics, physics and computer science books where I have to meditate on proofs, formulae and examples. So I switch to another book every 2 minutes and do this 30 times. 2 minutes is usually sufficient to read and turn a page and these amounts to 60 pages per day (one page per minute). An average 300-page book can be finished in 7-8 months and therefore I can read at least 30 books per year using this approach, read all of them together and don’t wait for a second book until I finish the first one! The last point is psychologically very important to me because I want everything now

A technical note: it might look that we still use preemptive multitasking with a fixed quantum here but in reality there are no external interrupt sources. All I do is to voluntarily yield reading control from one book to another. I can always spend one or two minutes more with a book if its current chapter is very interesting.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Thick books impress people (bit). Write and publish a technical book related to your work to show the complexity and importance of what your team does and highlight the technical ability of your department (tip).

If there is a perception among other people that the job of your team is easy and tasks can be accomplished more quickly then sufficiently thick book shows the opposite and emphasizes quality vs. speed.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -