Oops – lesson learned

Wow! Somebody has discovered this blog! And he left a message! And it was (drums) Matthew Cornell! Un-be-lie-va-ble! I saw it in my mailbox just before going to bed – I don’t think I’ll sleep much in the next couple of hours ;-)

And well, Matthew gave me a spanking. And yes, he was right in doing so. I owe him an apology. So Matthew, should you read this: big sorry.

What went wrong
Let me give you some background should you be new in here. About a day ago I posted a Workers of the world, unite! article, in which I started introducing one of the themes I’m thinking about currently (multiple selves in productivity and communication between these selves). I did it mainly by relating some personal events to it. And I tried to hook it up to the previous story. And here I made a mistake.

I wrote: “Matthew Cornell’s implicit reasoning is basically this: you can compare the performance of productivity systems by quantifying the output they produce. More is better (or less of course, depending on your metric).” And, as Matthew notes in the comment, this is indeed absolutely not the case. Matthew never implies in his article that systems can be ranked by output and he definitely doesn’t say that more is better.

How it went wrong
I knew this – I reread the article before writing the smart and connected one – yet still I wrote it. I should have written something similar to: ‘examples of productivity measurements as mentioned in the article of Matthew Cornell could imply that …’ Cause these examples got me thinking (about my own experiences).

It’s some kind of shorthand that fits in another context. Previous to this blog, I was writing mails about these subjects to the Toni that gets mentioned at places. He motivated me on starting a blog and after some 6 months of him nagging at it I finally started experimenting. I’m actually still in this experimental faze. And at this very moment, Toni isn’t even aware of it. He’s expecting a baby boy, and all of this was meant as some kind of present. A joke.

Why it went wrong
There’s a difference between writing mails and posting to a blog. The reader of my mails (Toni) knows what I think about Matthew Cornell (my bottom line has always been: read the man, he’s maybe not always giving the answers, but he’s asking the right questions – and he’s seriously ahead of us). The readers of this mail don’t necessarily know what I think about him. Well now they do.

Conclusion: when linking to an article, be very careful when positioning and introducing it.

P.S. to Matthew: thank you for the help with the surprise ;-)