You are going to die.

It’s okay, it happens to the best of us. But it is going to happen. We may not know when exactly you’ll succumb to the Reaper, but eventually the bell will toll for thee. Then, presumably, those left among the living will be tasked with handling the aftermath.

It’s likely you’ll have left some physical remnants behind – some furniture, maybe a few books, your prized peanut butter jar collection, whatever. We as a species have had some experience with death over the centuries, so the process of dealing with all that stuff is pretty well defined by now. But what about your digital life?

For most survivors, coping with the physical possessions and conventional assets of the departed can be overwhelming enough, but at least there are parameters and precedents. Even if a houseful of objects is liquidated through an estate sale or simply junked, mechanisms exist to ensure some sort of definitive outcome, even in the absence of a will. And there’s no way of ignoring or forgetting it: eventually the stuff will have to be dealt with.

Bit-based personal effects are different. Survivors may not be aware of the deceased’s full digital hoard, or they may not have the passwords to access the caches they do know about. They may be uncertain to the point of inaction about how to approach the problem at all.

– “Cyberspace When You’re Dead” by Rob Walker, for The New York Times. You should really read that article – it’s quite good.

When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, we started sorting through the various papers and effects she left behind. Among them was a fairly well-documented family tree dating back a couple hundred years, along with a handful of newspaper clippings about this family member or that. But none of it really gives a sense of who those people were, no sense of what their lives encompassed. All those moments have been lost in time, like tears in rain.

None of those people had Facebook accounts. Twitter streams. Blogs. Tumblrs. Flickr. GMail. Judging by the quality of the photos, they had Instagram, but it was called “scrapbooking” and the only web interface was left by spiders in the attic. Dark days indeed. But hark, we live in the bright shiny future, where many of us have all these things – but really we don’t have any of these things. There’s nothing we can touch or hold or put in a shoebox for someone to dig through later. Whereas a shoebox full of old love notes and artsy photos may likely be discovered by someone going through our physical space, a Twitter stream or Flickr account floating in “the cloud” might be entirely unknown to them.

There was an excellent panel at SXSWi 2011 titled “You’re Dead, Your Data Isn’t: What Happens Now?” in which the panelists discussed this topic.

Anything online that you pay for will stop once you stop paying the bills: Flickr accounts, domain registrations, everything. Most sites right now don’t have a field for “what do you want to happen once you die?” – it’s creepy and people don’t want to think about it. We’re invincible!

While I have no intentions of shuffling off this mortal coil anytime soon, the reality is that I could be hit by a bus, or have some deadly medical condition no one’s ever heard of, or aliens might obliterate my house from space. It could happen. So what can we do to help our friends and family sort through whatever’s left of our lives afterward? (There are businesses springing up to let you designate who should get your Facebook password and so on, though they don’t particularly interest me at this point.)

So there are two aspects to address: one is the handling of your information immediately after you take your last breath, and the other is the preservation of your identity for the future. One helps people sort through your life right now, the other will theoretically help people piece it back together years from now.

For now I don’t have any good answers for the best way to do this. It’ll be different for everyone. Here’s what I do know:

• Important documents like my birth certificate, car title and registration, insurance papers and driver’s license have been scanned to high-resolution PDFs, which are kept on an encrypted flash drive.
• Paper copies of all these documents will be given to my family and kept in fire-proof safes.
• I’m working on a document explaining what to do with my various online accounts. That document is still a very rough draft at this point, mostly because I don’t really know what should happen to them.
  • My Twitter account (@tomhenrich) will probably be shut down.
  • My Facebook account will probably be memorialized.
  • My LinkedIn profile should be deleted. The job market’s pretty thin for a dead person.
  • What about this website? Unless I get some tips from Tupac, I don’t intend to keep releasing content once I’m gone, and my family shouldn’t need to pay to keep my hosting account active. I imagine it’ll be shut down.
• Every document I create is kept in .txt format to future-proof the information as best as possible. No one needs to install special software to open .txt files, and the format is rather resilient in the face of time. They’re also easier to maintain than PDFs or stone tablets.

The rest I’ll learn as I go. What information is worth keeping? What should fall by the digital wayside? I don’t know yet. If you have suggestions, please speak up. I hope to post occasional updates here as I learn more and make progress.

I have two simple rules for managing my work life:

• Don’t think about work after office hours
• Ask why, and don’t be afraid to say no

As simple as these two rules are, they’re invaluable for maintaining some semblance of sanity and a reasonable work-life balance. These were my only two pieces of advice to a new employee, and I wish someone had told them to me.

Don’t think about work after office hours

It’s important to “check out” if you’re not actually supposed to be working. Weekends, vacations, sick days, whatever. Don’t give your time away for nothing, because that’s what your time will end up being worth: nothing.

When I first started at my current company, it didn’t take long to get sucked into the department culture of working all the time. Emails from managers at 3am on a Sunday weren’t uncommon. It was exhausting, and burnout was frequent. It’s not sustainable. You have to set boundaries.

Unless lives are literally depending on you, your work can wait. Once you leave the office (or finish your set work hours), turn it all off. Don’t check your email. Set your work phone to silent. Do whatever you have to do to switch work off and your personal time on.

Ask why, and don’t be afraid to say “no”

If you find yourself having to do something that you honestly believe provides no value to the company or your customers, don’t just go with the flow and do it. Ask why it has to be done. Ask why it has to be done that way. What value does it add? Maybe there’s a good answer, maybe not, but you won’t know unless you ask.

If you do get a valid answer that justifies the task, make sure you document the why, not just the how. If no one can reasonably justify the task, find a way to kill it.

Sometimes the reason is that someone with a sufficiently large paycheck said you have to do it, and there’s not much you can do about that. But you should still ask. As long as you’re genuinely concerned about quality, and not just trying to get out of work, eventually this will (or should) be respected.

The second part of this is the importance of learning to say no. Sometimes you have to stand your ground and tell people “no, I can’t do that right now”. An inability to say “no” will lead only to overwork, poor results and eventually burnout.

→ Basically: Work to support your life. Don’t die to support your work.

Unfortunately, documentation is too often confined to the how of the work, and leaves out the why.

Sure, you can lay out a step-by-step process of how to do a given task. That’s easy. I’ve written a great deal of process documentation in the last several years, with the intent of making life just that much easier for the next guy who fills that role.

What’s too often lacking is an explanation of why something is set up the way it is, or why a process has to be done a particular way. Maybe there’s a lot of tribal knowledge in your organization that covers these questions, but until someone documents that, it’s essentially useless.

If we don’t explain why a decision was made that led to the current state, it becomes much harder to work towards something better. Maybe there was a significant problem discovered along the way that required doing it a particular way. Maybe it was a budget constraint or lack of available resources. Maybe it’s just that no one thought of doing it any other way and that’s the way it’s always been done.

If no one documents the reasons, you’re condemning the next person to re-invent the wheel, to catch Sisyphus’s boulder and roll it back up the mountain themselves.

// 
// Dear maintainer:
// 
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
// 
// total_hours_wasted_here = 35
// 

“What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered?” on stackoverflow, via the Internet Archive since the original thread was removed

I’ll be making an effort to include more of the why in my own documentation as part of my ongoing work, and for great justice the sake of your sanity and your successors, I’d encourage you to do the same.

Here I am on vacation in the Northwoods writing this blog. I will be on vacation all week and will check my email every day – several times. I will log in to check on client campaigns and meet deadlines that could probably wait a few days. I am not an on-call rescue person, I work in advertising. But we have been conditioned to be connected all the time. What if I miss something?

– Can you “check out”?

My rule is very simple: if I’m not in the office, I’m not working. Obvious exceptions apply: those days when I’m just sick enough to stay home rather than infecting everyone else but not sick enough to be bedridden, days when last night’s blizzard buried my car in three feet of snow, and so on. But otherwise: no office, no work.

When I leave at the end of the day, my work laptop gets turned off and put in its bag. I don’t have a corporate-issue cellphone, so there’s nothing to persistently ding with each incoming email. The laptop doesn’t come out of its bag until the next workday morning. Once I’m across the front lobby threshold and into the parking lot, it’s me time.

However… I recognize that there will occasionally be instances where something needs to get done outside of business hours. If that happens, someone has to contact me directly. There needs to be a phone call, or a text message, or – depending on who’s asking – a Twitter mention or message. It needs to be initiated by someone from work; I won’t be actively looking for something.

It’s simple, but actually quite effective. My boss is well aware of this policy – it was made quite clear my first day on the job. If you really need me to do something, no problem, but it’s not happening unless you get in touch directly. I’m checked out otherwise.

Photo by Keoni Cabral. cc

Elizabeth Galle tweeted a request today for accessibility references that a team of not-necessarily tech savvy people would get some use out of. Twitter responded with some great links almost immediately, and I wanted to collect those replies here in one place to serve as a starting point for any others with similar needs.

The tweet that started it off:

I need to brief team on what accessibility is and how we can improve our sites.Can you recommend any references for non-tech people?

— Elizabeth Galle (@drinkerthinker) October 20, 2011

@Tawreh makes an excellent point that web accessibility can be likened to a book, and that you should give your readers a sense of “I know where things are” immediately rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and inevitably confusing them (or frustrating them to the point that they just give up).

@drinkerthinker compare it to a book: you know where to find things in a book, you want to have the same experience with a website

— Sophie S-K (@Tawreh) October 20, 2011

@drinkerthinker like with a book, you know the contents are at the front, the page numbers tell you where you are, and so on ?

— Sophie S-K (@Tawreh) October 20, 2011

Others presented links to basic guidelines from the W3C and WebAIM groups, the authoritative sources for web usability and accessibility. The WebAIM website in particular is quite aesthetically dated, but still packs a lot of very useful information:

The internet has the potential to revolutionize disability access to information, but if we’re not careful, we can place obstacles along the way that destroy that potential and which leave people with disabilities just as discouraged and dependent upon others as before.

@drinkerthinker This section from the Web Standards Curriculum might be useful w3.org/wiki/Accessibility_basics

— Anna Debenham (@anna_debenham) October 20, 2011

@drinkerthinker Check out the resources from the good folks at WebAIM.org

— Angela Colter (@angelacolter) October 20, 2011

@drinkerthinker Also check out angelacolter.com/tools-for-conducting-an-accessibility-review/ if it’s web people

— Kevin M. Hoffman (@kevinmhoffman) October 20, 2011

Statistics! Numbers! Proof that there’s actually good reason to pay attention to accessibility practices. The information is a few years old, but it’s still valid as a means of saying this matters to real people. It’s not just us web people coming up with new things to preach about.

@drinkerthinker Here are a few stats on how many people benefit from better accessibility: http://joeclark.org/access/webaccess/JVoluntAdmin.html

— Jason Robb (@jasonrobb) October 20, 2011

Max references the bible of web design:

@drinkerthinker zeldman third edition — the accessibility is very good.

— Max Fenton (@maxfenton) October 20, 2011

Sadly, not all web resources live forever.

@drinkerthinker Did anyone archive diveintoaccessibility.org? That used to be my old standby.

— Ethan Marcotte (@beep) October 20, 2011

@drinkerthinker diveintoaccessibility.info is a bit dated, but it’s still a great starting resource.

— Ethan Marcotte (@beep) October 20, 2011

Social bookmarking to the rescue!

@drinkerthinker Try some of these: pinboard.in/u:garrettc/t:a… especially northtemple.com/2009/03/24/accessibility-to-the-face

— Garrett Coakley (@garrettc) October 20, 2011

And Angela points out that Twitter itself is a great place to find a11y information and discussions:

@drinkerthinker See also w3.org/WAI/ For non-tech people, I would focus on how #a11y problems affect people, not on checklists.

— Angela Colter (@angelacolter) October 20, 2011

I don’t have anything in particular to add to this, except to say that this is a topic not nearly enough web designers and developers pay attention to. Just because someone has a disability of some kind doesn’t mean they aren’t using the web, and just because someone’s using the web doesn’t mean they don’t have some kind of need that would benefit from even basic accessibility practices.

Keep that in mind.

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A thought experiment, if you would. Your house is burning. What do you take with you? Let’s assume for the sake of discussion:

• You wake up in your bed and realize there’s a fire you can’t put out; you need to get out.
• You have a safe exit, but not for long.
• You have some kind of small bag handy, like a backpack or a pillowcase, that you can throw stuff into.
• You can only make one trip. Once you’re out, you’re out; no going back in for more.

What do you grab? Some people would try to grab a typewriter, a guitar and some boxes; others think they’ll have time to shuffle a vintage table-style record player out the door; and still others think all they need is their wedding ring and some smokes. I’m not sure these people quite grasp the concept of your house is burning down you need to get out now or you’ll die of being on FIRE.

So my question is: what would you take?

My list is a bit more spartan and probably a lot more practical. I don’t have any children or pets, so it’s just me and some stuff. I’ve put a bit of thought into this over the last year or so:

1. Jeans. Into the pockets go, in order (all swiped from the stand next to my bed):
   1. Wallet (ID, debit/credit cards, some cash) – I’m going to need these all very shortly.
   2. Phone – while a physical device can be replaced, and all my data is backed up, I’m going to need to contact people and I don’t have the organic memory to store all their information.
   3. Keys – let’s assume my car isn’t parked in my living room; I’ll be wanting to use it.
2. Laptop, thrown into its bag – as with the phone, a device can be replaced, but my laptop is easily the most valuable and personal object I own, so it’s coming with if I’ve got the five seconds it takes to grab it.
3. A shirt and a pair of shoes – I may not have time to put them on, but they’ll be important once I’m out.
4. Glasses and contact lenses (in their cases) – if I’m not wearing one or the other already, I’ll need them shortly. I can see without them well enough to get out of the house, though.
5. On my way out, try to roll my bike out the door with me.

That’s really it. Everything else, while it will be hard to lose, can burn. I’m not going to risk my life trying to save my TV, or try to box up all my DVDs, or carry a chair out. Important documents like my insurance policies, etc, are stored in an offsite safe and backed up digitally elsewhere; insurance will cover the lost belongings.

So what would you take with you?

What are your priorities when faced with losing everything? It’s good to take a step back sometimes and evaluate your life, what you’ve surrounded yourself with, and what you could (or couldn’t) bear to lose if it came down to it.

Photo by Dave Hogg. (License: Creative Commons)

Social media can create really superficial vantage points. We can see a few tweets or a blog post or a Facebook status from someone and think we’ve got them all figured out. So much nuance can be lost in the midst of snippets of electronic and fleeting communication.

Absolutely true. We live with a stream of constant tweets, check-ins and status updates, and yet how much about these “friends” do we really truly know? And how much about ourselves do they know? My guess? Not much. And so Amber lists a handful of things about herself that help us get a better sense of who she is, then in true internet fashion issues a call for the rest of us to share alike.

So, doing my best to avoid sounding narcissistic, here are a handful of things I wish people knew about me. Warning: candid revelations below.

I’m an introvert.

From Wikipedia:

Introverts are people whose energy tends to expand through reflection and dwindle during interaction. Introverts tend to be more reserved and less outspoken in large groups.

Yep. That’s me. I’m generally a pretty quiet person (though, in the right circumstances, I’ve been known to get loud). Given a choice, most of the time I would prefer to be left to myself rather than out in a crowd. Not out of any sort of agoraphobic tendencies, it’s simply that people are tiring.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should really read Jerry Brito’s excellent post “Top Ten Myths About Introverts” in which he very accurately clears up a few common misconceptions about my kind of people. Namely, introverts aren’t antisocial. We just take our socializing in smaller doses than others. I’m trying to work on this.

Unfortunately, introversion comes with its downsides. I tend to spend a lot of time over-analyzing things, and let some things stick around in my head for far longer than they have any right to. (No, those things won’t be listed here.)

I don’t display emotions readily.

People who know me in real life would likely be able to tell you that I’m not exactly an emotional person. This ties pretty closely to my note above about being an introvert. I have a pretty flat outward emotional state. This can be helpful sometimes, and it can be detrimental sometimes. The appearance of indifference doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not excited (or, just as easily, completely uninterested) in what’s going on. It just doesn’t show either way as far as most people can tell.

Once I’ve gotten to know someone, and they’ve earned some amount of trust, I might warm up a bit and let some emotion show through once in a while. But trust is hard earned, and it takes a long while to get to that point. Being an introvert who doesn’t love being around people all the time means it takes even longer for people to be around me long enough to accumulate that amount of trust.

Truthfully, even writing this post is betraying more information than I’d normally let on.

I love to cook, but don’t do it as much as I’d like.

I know, I know, there’s this notion of a bachelor sitting at home, surrounded by empty pizza boxes and Chinese takeout containers because he doesn’t know where the kitchen even is. That’s not me. I actually really do enjoy cooking (not so much baking), but being a single guy means I don’t really get to do so all that often.

Fortunately, several of my close friends are in the same predicament (guys and girls alike) so we’ve started a semi-regular “dinner night” where we get together at someone’s house to hang out and make dinner. The new rule is that whatever we make has to be a brand new recipe we’ve never tried before – something we’ve wanted to try but didn’t want to have 12 servings of leftovers if it turned out poorly. Most of my dishes are really just me looking in the pantry, finding a bunch of disparate ingredients, and looking for some way to combine them in an edible fashion. It usually turns out okay, and there’s always PB&J if it goes south.

I have a serious case of “impostor syndrome”.

The idea of impostor syndrome is that the person tends to feel like a fraud who’s somehow managed to trick people around them into believing they’re more competent than they truly are. This describes me quite well, though I’m sure there’s some weird mind-bending Heisenberg effect where being aware of my tendency towards impostor syndrome makes me less so.

It’s not entirely without basis. I’m a web developer by trade, but my knowledge of the craft isn’t as strong as it should be. I know PHP, but rely heavily on Google to confirm the syntax of many functions. I have a working knowledge of Javascript, but haven’t put much effort thus far into learning industry-standard frameworks and libraries like jQuery, YUI or any number of others. (I’m working on correcting this, albeit slowly.)

So while I’ve been working as a web developer for the last few years, and performing as an absolute rockstar as such (though for much of that time I was the only actual developer on the team), I have trouble truly believing in my abilities. I know I’m a smart guy and can pick up most of what I need, but that belief that I’m smarter than the average person also tends to make me think maybe I’m just doing a really great job at fooling everybody.

Your word matters to me.

Back in ye olden days, people’s word was law. Business arrangements were conducted on the strength of someone’s word and a handshake, and there were consequences if you violated that agreement. Today, not so much. There’s not a lot of stock left in people’s word; promises made are just empty words.

So I’m a bit old fashioned in that I still put stock in people’s word, and I take it personally when people don’t honor their commitments. If you tell me you’re going to do something or be somewhere at a particular time, I assume you’re going to stick to that. When you fail to follow through on your promise, I count that as a strike against you. (The flipside is of course that I take my own word very seriously, and if I tell you I’m going to do something, you can count on the fact that it’s going to be done.)

So yeah.

This was originally going to be titled “Ten Things I Wish People Knew About Me”, but that got knocked down to “Five Things” I was comfortable sharing at this particular juncture. Maybe I’ll warm up to sharing more at some point, but… maybe don’t hold your breath either. Is there anything in particular you want to know about me?

In the spirit of sharing, I’ll extend Amber’s call for others to do the same and share their own notes on what they’d like the world to really know about them. Feel free to use the comments below as your sounding board, or leave a link to a post of your own.

It was posted totally on a whim; I expected maybe a handful of people to star or retweet it. Instead it took off and got massive visibility. As of the time of this writing it had been retweeted 1231 times using Twitter’s native retweet function and – according to a quick search via the Twitter API – over 600 times by people copying and pasting it, retweeting others who had commented, etc.

I’ve never had anywhere near this kind of widespread attention to any of my tweets in almost a year of Twitter activity. I’d love to spend some time analyzing the various non-native retweets to figure out the progression – who commented on it, whose comments got retweeted the most, and how the tweet evolved as it went. Surprisingly, the vast majority of these stayed in the original form. A few people posted it as a “via @tomhenrich” tweet, etc, but most of the retweets I saw kept it as a proper “RT @tomhenrich” format.

Nerdy highlights: I got retweeted by both @charliejane and @bonniegrrl! Mostly I’m just happy to see there are that many people on Twitter that appreciate a good nerdy HTTP status code joke.

What’s really weird is how many people kept retweeting it today, when it’s no longer 4/04. Date-based humor knows no bounds, apparently.

Hey, it’s 4/04. TODAY NOT FOUND. #nerdhumor

— Tom Henrich (@tomhenrich) April4, 2011

It’s extremely easy to pick up and relocate ourselves in an age where everything has gone digital.

This isn’t really a surprise. There are lots of books and blogs extolling the virtues of a location-independent lifestyle. Even for those of us who aren’t globe-trotting, it’s become remarkably easy to just… leave. For the two weeks I was living at my parents’ house taking care of their dog, I packed a single bag with a few changes of clothes and basic toiletries, a couple books, and my laptop. (Plus my phone, but that’s always on me and thus not really counted as packing.) That’s it.

All my other possessions were unimportant.

Granted, I wasn’t packing for a survival trek. I knew there would be food on hand and a kitchen to prepare it, a bed to sleep in, and functioning utilities. But it was interesting to see just how few of my own things I needed in order to be away from home for two weeks.

• Mail was not a concern – all my bills are handled online, and personal letters have long been replaced by email, texts, and the social web. The sum total of my physical mail for two weeks was a pair of Netflix envelopes and a handful of unwanted marketing flyers and catalogs (which go straight to the trash).
• Netflix and Hulu were at the ready for movies and TV. iTunes holds my music library. A couple books, which could just as easily have been library loans, and a very active dog sufficed for most of my entertainment.
• Two weeks’ worth of clothing really doesn’t take up much space and can be packed fairly quickly. A few pairs of jeans, several t-shirts and overshirts for work, and some sweatshirts, plus a coat and gloves, all of which fits well in a moderately-sized duffle bag.

My laptop and my phone are undoubtedly my two most important possessions. Those two devices have replaced (or at least could replace) my mailbox, my media center, a bookshelf, paper notebooks, my alarm clock, and a phonebook, among other things. Digital storage is cheaper than ever, so I could easily back up all my DVDs to a portable harddrive.

Obviously there are some things I can’t digitize. My couch, for one. And as easy as it might be to order a pizza online, I like cooking, so my kitchen is here to stay. But the rest of my stuff? That’s just it – it’s just stuff. I’m planning to overhaul my belongings, going by the rule of “If I had to move right now and could only take one car, would this go with me?” My guess is that the answer will consistently tend toward “no.”

What else in my life can I digitize to reduce my clutter? Moving to a monastery and renouncing all worldly things is out of the question, but I’m open to suggestions.

Obviously any profession has certain skillsets that are required for basic completion of the relevant tasks. Architects need to be able to sketch designs and understand building stress points. Firefighters need to know how to hook up hoses and where to aim the water for best coverage. I’m a front-end developer; I need to know how to write proper XHTML and CSS, use Photoshop, and manage project timelines.

Even so, none of the various technical abilities I’ve acquired over the years are as important as simply knowing when it’s necessary to say “no” to people. It’s a “soft skill” but it’s just as vital as any knowledge of coding languages, operating systems, or tech support tips. I’ve learned that saying “yes” all the time leads to nothing but stress and ultimately sub-par work. You end up trying to please all the people all the time, and it’s just not doable.

I think too many people have this idea that it’s unacceptable to say no (or worse, to hear it from others). There’s a fear that saying “no” will somehow make them look incapable of handling the work, make them look like they can’t be trusted to get stuff done. They’re half right, technically. There’s a point at which workload outweighs available time, and when that happens the work will suffer, the person will suffer, and the client will suffer.

No one wants that.

I’ve learned — the hard way — that my health (mental and physical) and my output are directly affected by my ability to regulate my workload effectively. Knowing when and more importantly how to tell people that you can’t currently oblige their request is absolutely critical to keeping yourself in balance.

I just wish more people understood that.