Monthly Archives: June 2021

Putting the FUN Back in Productivity

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It’s not a secret that it’s hard to get stuff done. Procrastination is practically a super power for me. I’ve tried so many methods and systems to keep myself on track over the years that I should probably start a review site. Sadly, the battle of my executive function being on constant vacation and the inability to get organized saps a lot of my ability to execute. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve finally realized that I need to start tricking my brain into getting things done.

Any reputable researcher will tell you that dealing with neurodivergent behaviors like ADHD is all about understanding the reasons why you do the things you do. I know what needs to be done. I just don’t want to do it. Worse yet, anything that I can do to avoid working on something is going to capture my attention because I’d rather be doing something unproductive as opposed to something I don’t like. This can manifest itself in strange ways like preferring to do the dishes instead of writing a blog post or mowing the yard instead of practicing a presentation.

Not DisFUNctional

It’s taken me a while but I’ve finally come up with a system that makes it easier to get me into a rhythm to get things done. And because you wouldn’t remember it unless I made it spell out some memorable word, we’re going to call it the FUN System. Because more than three points would likely have gotten lost anyway.

F – Fake It! – It’s going to sound silly but the first step in convincing yourself to do something is often to lie to yourself about how much better it will be when you get it done. Your brain has convinced itself that this is bad and you shouldn’t be doing it. So in order to get it done you’re going to have to convince it otherwise.

We do this all the time to others. Telling kids that veggies taste good. Telling our friends that they should do something for us so they feel better. Selling pretty much anything to anyone. It’s all about convincing someone skeptical to do something they don’t want to do. Your brain is no different. You need to convince yourself to get the thing done. Maybe you promise yourself a reward or some extra downtime or something that just gets you moving. You don’t even have to keep the promise. The key is to use it to overcome the objections your brain has already but up. Fake it however you need to in order to make something happen.

U -Understand It – This one is especially powerful for me. I love learning. Like a lot. Enough that I can often convince myself to get a bigger task accomplished more quickly by learning about it. Understanding the details or the process or figuring out how to make it all work. I binge watch documentaries on Youtube and enjoy reading up on random things to learn more about how they work or why they are the way they are.

This extends to things beyond emails and simple tasks for me. Cooking was something that was easier to accomplish and do more often when I learned how it all works together. Why 350 degrees is the magic baking temperature, for example. Or how different spices can create different styles of flavors. It’s all about learning the ins-and-outs of what you’re trying to do.

The key here is not to fall down the hole of learning more about what you’re trying to do than actually doing it. It’s very easy to get paralyzed by over learning and just sitting there going over the details again and again instead of putting them into practice. Using the above example you may have to tell yourself you can come back to the investigation after you’ve tried it once or twice. Ensure that you use the desire to learn as the driver for getting something accomplished before you procrastinate your day away.

N – Next On The List – The third way I tell myself to get things done is to move them down on the list behind an easy task. It’s a cruel trick that relies on momentum. I tell myself that I got the little easy thing done so I might as well tackle the bigger thing. And it works more often than you might think.

The brain only needs a little dopamine from a sense of accomplishment to keep going. It’s the idea that you’re being productive. So if you need to write something long then put it after a short response email. If you’re dreading a phone call then do it after you’ve tidied your desk or taken out the trash. Doing something small will help you get prepared for the big task and ensure that you can carry forward that little extra push to get through it. As a bonus, the sense of accomplishment from that extra big task will carry forward to a couple others! It’s a like a productivity feedback loop.

Tom’s Take

The usual disclaimers apply here. This is my method and it may not work for you. You have to learn how your brain works and find ways to keep it moving and working. There are other things that help create the sense of accomplishment, like routine or the enjoyment of results. But in the long run the key is finding a way to get your brain out of the funk of not wanting to do stuff. My FUN System helps me and maybe it will help you too. Try it out if you’re struggling and use it as a basis to make your own fun.

Don’t OutSMART Your Goals

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I read a piece on LifeHacker yesterday that made me shake my head a bit. I’m sure the title SMART Goals Are Overrated was designed to get people to click on it, so from that perspective it succeeded. Wading into the discourse there was an outline of how SMART goals were originally designed for managers to give tasks to employees and how SMART doesn’t fit every goal you might want to set, especially personal aspirational ones. Since I have a lot of experience with using SMART goals both for myself and for others I wanted to give some perspective on why SMART may not be the best way to go for everything but you’re a fool if you don’t at least use it as a measuring tool.

SMRT, Eh?

As a recap, SMART is an acronym for the five key things you need to apply to your goal:

  • S – Specific (what are you going to do)
  • M – Measurable (how will you know when you’ve succeeded)
  • A – Attainable or Assignable (can you or the person you’ve selected do this thing)
  • R – Relevant or Relatable (is this goal appropriate for me or for the person doing it)
  • T – Timely or Time-Based (when are you going to accomplish this goal)

Aside from the obvious reason that the originators really wanted their system to spell “smart”, what does all this mean? Well, when we teach SMART goals at Wood Badge, we ask people to envision something they want to do in the next year. Maybe it’s taking a vacation. Or perhaps it’s another project they want to get done around the house. Once they’ve picked it out, we ask them to think about how they’re going to accomplish it. This second exercise is where the application of the ideas behind SMART goals comes into play.

In an enterprise IT sense we don’t do projects with no planning. At least, I really hope we don’t. We need to understand what we’re doing and why and how we’re going to get it done and when. We already have those constraints put in place when we begin the process. SMART just formalizes them into something memorable. Take an IDC switch upgrade for example:

  • Specific – We are going to upgrade the switches in the gym IDF
  • Measurable – We’re done when the switches are installed, cabled, and configured properly
  • Attainable – This is easy to accomplish and the team has done many before
  • Relevant – The networking team is doing the work, not the storage team or the accounting department. Relevant to our needs because we have more bandwidth in the gym during basketball games and we need to increase the amount of concurrent users and devices
  • Timely – We’re doing the upgrade next Friday when everyone is out of school, which is two weeks before basketball season starts to make sure we have everything ready to go with minimal disruptions. The switches are scheduled to arrive tomorrow.

See? SMART helps us plan the whole thing. Specific keeps us from setting goals like “make things faster” and forces us to be very specific. That goes hand-in-hand with Measurable, which also prevents scope creep. We’re done when we’ve met the measurable case. Setting more measurable things will help your projects work much better.

Attainable just means we’re not setting goals we can’t reach. Switching out one IDC at a time is better than trying to reconfigure the whole network in a weekend. Having been roped into unattainable projects before I really wish more of them had this condition figured out up front. Relevant helps answer why we need it or who is relates to. The accounting department may want the fastest access to the data center or the cloud but if they want us to pay thousands of dollars a month for a circuit only they can use it’s going to be hard to meet the Relevant section of the goal. Timely gives you a date to shoot for for completion. That keeps your project from sitting on the “in process” part of your kanban board until the end of time itself.

Don’t Dumb It Down

LifeHacker’s writer, Beth Skwarecki, says that SMART is deceptive because it creates a bait-and-switch mentality of setting pass-fail goals with a deadline. There’s no inherent motivation to get things done and no reason to set goals that require you to stretch your limits because you don’t want to fail. Looking at goal setting in a vacuum would validate her reasoning. However, looking at SMART as the only source of input into the goal setting process is also setting yourself up for failure.

It’s true that SMART encourages you to set deadlines and spell out what you’re doing. That’s because many people struggle with the process of actually defining goals. Like vacation planning they have the big picture of sitting on the beach clearly in mind. They stumble when it comes to booking hotels and rental cars and when to buy the airline tickets and how they’re going to get to the beach and what they need to bring when they get there and so many other things not even on their radar. SMART gives them a framework for figuring out how to make it all work.

SMART isn’t a motivator. It doesn’t make you want to do something. Instead, it gives you a way to measure progress or force yourself to understand when things need to happen. In the article, Beth says that it’s bad if you set a time goal for yourself and then you procrastinate until the week before because there is no inherent drive to work on things in a timely manner. I’d argue that has nothing to do with the SMART framework. Sure, you set yourself a goal to be finished. But we do that all the time.

We want to be able to run a 5k race by the time of the race in the fall. We want to go to Disneyland on our vacation in July. We want to buy a house before we turn 30. All of these goals have a Timely component. Maybe you don’t have a Gantt chart breaking down every minute of the planning process yet. That doesn’t mean putting a time on it doesn’t help you do things better. When I was working on my SMART goal project back in 2017 I had a whiteboard on my desk with deadlines and checkpoints to make sure I was getting things done. The motivation to finish on time came from me setting smaller, attainable goals and not big red circles on the calendar looming on the horizon.

The last thing I’ll say about the article is that SMART goals aren’t supposed to push you to challenge yourself. Beth says that SMART encourages you to do things that are attainable so you don’t fail. I’d argue that the purpose of SMART is to help you set attainable goals and then help you reflect on what you could be doing better or more often. Yes, everyone wants to succeed as often as possible. Constant failure is discouraging. You also need to make sure you aren’t just setting targets to knock down for the sake of knocking them over.

Goals that are set without a check-in aren’t really helping you. Projects with SMART goals should be living documents that get updated frequently. Are you sailing through your running goals? Time to reset your yardstick and stretch yourself a bit. Run a faster time or go for a longer distance. Are you having struggles with your project because things aren’t coming together? Sit down and be honest with yourself and figure out how to make the most out of what you have. Maybe it’s not replacing every AP in the office but just the ones in the employee areas in the main building. If you’re not adjusting your goals along the way based on the feedback you get from the process then you’re going to fall into the trap of making things too easy to fail or too hard to succeed.

Tom’s Take

I’m a big fan of using the right tools for the job. Don’t use screwdrivers as chisels. Don’t use a flamethrower to light cigars. And don’t forget that you can find other ways to make things work for you. SMART isn’t the superior system for every situation out there. There are times when it’s maddening and doesn’t properly fit. However, running your projects and goals through the SMART filter will usually help you identify where you need to tighten up language or timelines. It certainly can’t hurt. And if it’s not working at all then try to find a better way to make it work for you. Use a tool or framework instead of just thinking you’ll do it your own way. That’s the kind of thinking that leads smart people into making dumb decisions.

A Decade of CCIE Certification

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I was notified this week that I’m eligible for the 10-year CCIE plaque. Which means that it’s been a decade since I walked out of Cisco’s Building C in San Jose with a new number and a different outlook on my networking career. The cliche is that “so many things have changed” since that day and it’s absolutely accurate because the only constant in life is change.

Labbing On the Road

I think the first thing that makes me think about the passage of time since my certification is the fact that the lab where I took the exam no longer exists. Building C was sold to the company that owns and operates the San Francisco 49ers stadium just down Tasman drive from the old letter buildings. Those real estate locations were much more valuable to the NFL than to Cisco. I can’t even really go and visit my old stomping grounds any more because the buildings were gutted, renovated, and offered to other operations that aren’t from Cisco.

Now, you don’t even go to San Jose or RTP for the lab. Three years ago the labs in the US moved to Richardson, TX. The central aspect of the location is pretty appealing when you think about it. A part of me wishes I would have had the opportunity to take the lab there since I wouldn’t have to jump on a plane and burn three days of my work schedule. The costs of my lab attempts would have been a lot less if I only had to drive down for one night in a hotel and got to come back and sleep in my bed that same night. I realize that it’s equally inconvenient for people to need to fly to the middle of the country when they used to be closer to the lab when it was on either coast. However, real estate in RTP and San Jose is beyond crazy when it comes to price. Moving the lab to somewhere more reasonable means Cisco is getting value out of their buildings elsewhere.

The mobile lab is another aspect of the changes in the CCIE certification program that are a welcome change. By putting the lab on the road and giving people in countries far away from a lab location the opportunity to get certified the program can continue to be relevant. This is due in large part to the changes in the lab that allow a large part of it to be virtualized or operated remotely from a rack located somewhere else. I remember starting my lab studies and thinking to myself that the rack that I was working on was just across the room. Not that there was much that I could do about it. The idea that there could be something going on that was just out of my reach was an itch I had to get over. Today, you would never even start to believe that you had a hardware issue in your lab because of the streamlining of the process. That can only happen when you optimize your offerings to the point where you can just virtualize the whole thing.

The Next Ten Years

Right now, I still have a year to go on my certification before I have to make the decision to keep it current or go to Emeritus retirement. My role on the CCIE Advisory council doesn’t matter either way. I’m likely going to just go Emeritus when the opportunity presents itself because I don’t use those lab skills every day. I’m not configuring BGP filter lists and port channels like I used to. The technical skills that I honed in Building C serve me more now to understand technology at an architecture level. I can see how people are using tools to solve problems and offer commentary when they are making poor decisions or when a better protocol exists.

The CCIE itself is still a very valuable certification to hold and study for. IT certification on the whole has been trending away from being the gold standard for hiring. Cloud and DevOps focus more on skills instead of papers hanging on a wall. However, operations teams still need ways to differentiate their people. If nothing else the CCIE is a great forcing function for you to figure out how deeply into networking you really want to get. It’s not enough to be curious about BGP or Frame Relay and traffic shaping QoS. You have to understand it at a level that would bore most others to tears. If you’re not prepared to know the minutia of a protocol the way that some people memorize batting averages or random movie trivia than you might not be up for this particular challenge.

The CCIE also isn’t going away any time soon. I remarked to someone the other day that the CCIE is a technology bellweather. I can remember the clamor to introduce the “new” SDN changes into the program so many years ago. I also chuckle when I think about the CCIE OpenFlow that more than a couple of people proposed. The certification program exists to refine and highlight the technology solutions that people are using today. It’s not a sneak peak at things that might be important later on in life. Think about how long it took for them to remove ISDN, ATM, and even frame relay from the test. And even frame relay was debated heavily because more than a few claimed they still used it in production.

The CCIE is a testament to the way that people study for and build networks at a high level. It’s not a cool badge to keep on your list like a hunting trophy. It’s a testament to the commitment that it takes to attain something like that. The JNCIE and the VCDX are much the same. They represent an investment of time and energy into something that proves your capabilities. More than any other certification, the CCIE challenges people. It creates study habits and builds communities. It makes people ask themselves hard questions about desire and commitment and helps the best rise to the occasion. It’s more than just a certification.

Tom’s Take

I wouldn’t change a thing about my CCIE journey. I learned as much from the failures as I did from the success. The opportunities afforded to me because of that number have been immeasurable. But through it all I realized that the process of getting my lab has helped shape me into who I am today. A decade past late night study sessions and soul-crushing failures I know that it was all worth it because it helped me take technology more seriously and form the habits and process that have served me well from then on. I’m happy to get the new plaque that marks me as a veteran of the lab plus ten years. My status as a CCIE might pass into Emeritus but the lessons I learned along the way will always be there.

Charting the Course For Aruba

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By now you’ve seen the news that longtime CEO of Aruba Keerti Melkote is retiring. He’s decided that his 20-year journey has come to a conclusion and he is stepping down into an advisory role until the end of the HPE fiscal year on October 31, 2021. Leaving along with him are CTO Partha Narasimhan and Chief Architect Pradeep Iyer. It’s a big shift in the way that things will be done going forward for Aruba. There are already plenty of hot takes out there about how this is going to be good or bad for Aruba and for HPE depending on which source you want to read. Because I just couldn’t resist I’m going to take a stab at it too.

Happy Trails To You

Keerti is a great person. He’s smart and capable and has always surrounded himself with good people as well. The HPE acquisition honestly couldn’t have gone any better for him and his team. The term “reverse acquisition” gets used a lot and I think this is one of the few positive examples of it. Aruba became the networking division of HPE. They rebuilt the husk that was HP’s campus networking division and expanded it substantially. They introduced new data center switches and kept up with their leading place in the access point market.

However, even the best people eventually need new challenges. There was always a bit of a looming role on the horizon for Keerti according to many industry analysts. As speculated by Stephen Foskett on this past week’s episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown, Keerti was the odds-on favorite to take over HPE one day. He had the pedigree of running a successful business and he understood how data moving to the cloud was going to be a huge driver for hardware in the future. He even had taken over a combined business unit of networking devices and edge computing renamed Intelligent Edge last year. All signs pointed to him being the one to step up when Antonio Neri eventually moved on.

That Keerti chose to step away now could indicate that he realized the HPE CEO job was not going to break his way. Perhaps the pandemic has sapped some of his desire to continue to run the business. Given that Partha and Pradeep are also choosing to depart as well it could be more of an indicator of internal discussions and not a choice by Keerti to move on of his own accord. I’m not speculating that there is pressure on him. It could just be that this was the best time to make the exit after steering the ship through the rough seas of the pandemic.

Rearranging the Deck Chairs

That brings me to the next interesting place that Aruba finds itself. With Keerti and company off to greener pastures, who steps in to replace them? When I first heard the news of the departure of three very visible parts of Aruba all at once my first thought jumped immediately to David Hughes, the former CEO of Silver Peak.

HPE bought Silver Peak last year and integrated their SD-WAN solutions into Aruba. I was a bit curious about this when it first happened because Aruba had been touting their SD-Branch solution that leveraged ClearPass extensively. To shift gears and adopt Silver Peak as the primary solution for the WAN edge was a shift in thinking. By itself that might have been a minor footnote.

Then a funnier thing happened that gave me pause. I started seeing more and more Silver Peak names popping up at Aruba. That’s something you would expect to see when a company gets acquired. But the people that were hopping into roles elsewhere outside of the WAN side of the house was somewhat shocking. It felt for a while like Silver Peak was taking over a lot of key positions inside of Aruba on the marketing side of the house. Which meant that the team was poised for something bigger in the long run.

When David Hughes was named as the successor to Partha and Pradeep as the CTO and Chief Architect at Aruba it made sense to me. Hughes is good at the technology. He understand the WAN and networking. He doesn’t need to worry about much about the wireless side of the house because Aruba has tons of wireless experts, including Chuck Lukaszewski. Hughes will do a great job integrating the networking and WAN side of the house to embrace the edge mentality that Aruba and HPE have been talking about for the past several months.

So, if David Hughes isn’t running Aruba, who is? That would be Phil Mottram, a veteran of the HPE Communications Technology Group. He has management material written all over him. He’s been an executive at a number of companies and he is going to steer Aruba in the direction that HPE wants it to go. That’s where the real questions are going to start being asked around here. I’m sure there’s probably going to be some kind of a speech by Antonio Neri about how Aruba is a proud part of the HPE family and the culture that has existed at Aruba is going to continue even after the departure of the founder. That’s pretty much the standard discussion you have with everyone after they leave. I’m sure something very similar happened after the Meraki founders left Cisco post-acquisition.

The Sky’s The Limit

What is HPE planning for Aruba? If I were a betting man, I’d say the current trend is going to see Aruba become more integrated into HPE. Not quite on the level of Nimble Storage but nowhere near the practical independence they’ve had for the last few years. We’re seeing that HPE is looking at Aruba as a valuable brand as much as anything else. The moves above in relation to the departure of Keerti make that apparent.

Why would you put a seasoned CEO in the role of Chief Architect? Why would you name a senior Vice President to the role of President of that business unit? And why would the CEO agree to be where he is willingly when that carrot is just out of reach? I would say it’s because David Hughes either realizes or has been told that the role of Chief Architect is going to be much more important in the coming months. That would make a lot of sense if the identity of Aruba begins to be subsumed into HPE proper.

Think about Meraki and Cisco. Meraki has always been a fiercely independent company. You would have been hard pressed for the first year or two to even realize that Cisco was the owner. However, in the past couple of years the walls that separate Cisco and Meraki have started to come down. Meraki is functioning more like a brand inside of Cisco than an independent part of the organization. It’s not a negative thing. In fact, it’s what should happen to successful companies when they get purchased. However, given the independence streak of the past it seems more intriguing than what’s on the surface.

Aruba is going to find itself being pulled in more toward HPE’s orbit. The inclusion of Aruba in the HPE Intelligent Edge business unit says that HPE has big plans for the whole thing. They don’t want to have their customers seeing HPE and Aruba as two separate things. Instead, HPE would love to leverage the customers that Aruba does have today to bring in more HPE opportunities. The synergy between the two is the whole reason for the acquisition in the first place. Why not take advantage of it? Perhaps the departure of the old guard is the impetus for making that change?

Tom’s Take

Aruba isn’t going to go away. It’s not going to be like a storage solution being eaten alive and then disappearing into a nameplate on a rack unit. Aruba has too much value as a brand and a comfortable position in the networking space to be completely eliminated. However, it is going to become more valuable to have the expertise of the Aruba teams creating more synergy inside of HPE and leading efforts to integrate the edge networking and compute solutions together to come out ahead as people shift some of their workloads around to take advantage of all the work that’s been done there. Time will tell if Aruba stays separate enough to be remembered as the titan they’ve been.