Joshua Blankenship on Taking a Break

Workaholics will eventually kill long term team productivity. Lone wolf heroes on the permanent all-nighter schedule are toxic. Find your threshold. Go somewhere sunny. Or just go home for the day. Don’t pull your team down because you refuse to take a break.

I completely agree with Joshua, and believe that this very principle played a part in my leaving Connexus in 2008.

However, this principle doesn’t only play itself out over the long term; people need to step away from what they are doing part way through the day as well.

I used to eat my lunch at my desk, in front of my computer. I normally would read RSS feeds at this time, but if there was work that was urgent I would work on it while eating. I also was available to be called away from my desk, sometimes leaving my food behind for up to an hour while I attend to things that really weren’t that urgent.

That changed when I read Jorge’s advice back in April:

“Never take your break where you work”

So simple, but it dramatically improved both my lunch time as well as my day as a whole. Suddenly I had more energy coming out of my lunch than I did before, and all because I simply took a break.

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A couple of years ago I purchased a Blackberry Pearl. At the time I had just transitioned from working in an office to working remotely from home and a variety of coffee shops. While I had my Macbook, having a device that was connected indefinitely was going to be imperative to performing my role in the organization.

As far as I was concerned, the Blackberry was the perfect instrument for my needs. Using the Blackberry Gmail app, I was able to be available at a moment’s notice to field questions, solve problems and keep projects moving. A short few months later I was no longer with that organization, and found myself with functionality I no longer needed. I called up Rogers and removed the data plan from my account, and used my Blackberry as a souped-up cell phone.

About a year later, I bought an iPod touch. While the iPod touch can only connect via WIFI, it has become a fairly handy mobile device. I can email, tweet, keep to-do lists and much more. However, even though both the iPod touch and iPhone have some productivity features, I really don’t feel very productive using them.

Productivity and Me

On my Macbook Pro, I have a fairly structured system to stay productive. Here’s the basic setup:

Email

My email is handled through Apple Mail.app. While I have gone back and forth between Mail.app and the Gmail.com interface, I am brought back to Mail.app because of its simplicity and integration with the rest of my desktop.

All of my email addresses are forwarded to my Gmail account so they can all be managed through one inbox. Emails from my work account are filtered through a rule to change the text colour so I can visually separate them.

Using the principles of GTD each email is dealt with in one way or another until my inbox is empty. Emails that can be addressed in 5 minutes or less are dealt with immediately. This include emails that require a reply, a web update or simply need to be archived for reference. Emails that require action that will take longer than 5 minutes are input into my Things.app inbox (more on this in a minute).

Once I have dealt with all of the emails in my inbox, an AppleScript provided by John Gruber and initiated by a FastScripts keystroke sweeps through my inbox and archives all emails that are not flagged or unread.

Things

Things.app has been the most revolutionary piece of my personal productivity system. Even before starting to read Getting Things Done, using Things helped me to capture the things I needed to do and helped keep them in focus throughout the day. Once I began reading GTD, I really started to harness the power of capturing any open loops. I do this through the Things for Mac Quick Entry HUD and the Things touch app as well. By synching these two pieces of software I am able to keep tabs on everything I need to be doing as well as capturing anything that pops into my head at almost any given time.

Things + Mail.app

Using a tip from Shawn Blanc back in January, emails that require further attention are added to Things.app using the Quick Entry HUD. Once I have typed in the action, I click and drag the email from Mail.app into the “notes” section of the to-do item.

As Gruber wrote a couple of years ago, this function is possible due to Leopard’s “message” URL handler. This URL handler allows email messages to be linked in other applications, which when clicked opens the message in Mail.app. Rather than trying to write out notes to remind myself of what needs to be addressed for each action, this message URL handler allows me to simply go back directly to the message the to-do item references.

The Problem

This is where the system begins to fall apart when the iPod touch or iPhone are introduced. While Leopard’s Mail.app utilizes the message URL handlers, Mail.app for iPhone does not. This means that if I am checking my email on my iPod touch and I read one that requires further attention, I need to close Mail, open Things, write down an action that explains in enough detail what the email was referencing, then go back to Mail to continue checking my emails. The other option is less taxing, which is to simply ignore the email on my iPod and address it later when I am on my Mac. However, to me, having to address a dozen or so emails more than once feels very unproductive, and defeats the entire purpose of keeping a clean inbox.

If I am in a situation where I have time to address some of my to-do items and I am on my iPod touch, I have a list of all of my to-dos in Things. If I open a to-do to view its notes and the notes contain a link to an email, however, the link does not work. I need to open Mail and find the email through search in order to figure out what the to-do item is referencing.

All of this may seem trivial, but it is the only issue that keeps me feeling from feeling productive on my iPod touch. In my mind the solution is for Apple to simply include the message URL handlers in the iPhone OS. It would be even better if there were a way to click and drag bits of information such as an email from one app to another (possibly by dragging it to the bottom of the screen and holding for 3 seconds).

Multiple Accounts

One other issue with using my iPod touch for productivity is Mail’s inability to use multiple “from” accounts. Because I use one inbox for both personal and work email, I have all of my emails set up in Gmail with the ability to send from the appropriate email address. In Mail.app on the Mac, the same functionality is allowed by writing out the different email addresses in the Account setup. However, on the iPod touch you cannot differentiate which email you’d like to send from. This means that, once again, I am unable to properly address my email from my mobile device. The obvious solution is for Apple to allow multiple “from” email addresses on the mobile Mail app, but until then there’s not much I can do.

Patience

When I first started using email, I had an account with Mail.com, with a 50 MB mailbox and a horrible web interface. Even though I currently have a laundry-list of complaints, I also realize that the iPhone and iPod touch have definitely opened up the possibilities for what mobile productivity could look like in the very near future. As Apple continues to develop its platform and developers continue to push the boundaries of what is possible on a mobile device, we will begin to see incredible advancements in how we interact with technology, our friends and the world around us.

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I grew up in a small town of just a couple thousand people. We had small schools, small stores, small parks, and one small, weekly paper. The Signpost came out on Wednesdays and covered not just my town, but several surrounding towns as well. It was not an uncommon occurrence to see your name or picture somewhere in the paper. I remember the first time my first time on the front page, I was around 3 and collecting Easter Eggs in our community park.

The Signpost came out once a week because that was all our little town needed. Had it been a daily, it likely would have been one sheet folded in four, with extra space for personal notes. When I was learning to read I would read the Signpost. It was all the news I needed to hear.

As I got a little older I began to pick up the London Free Press, the local paper for the city nearby. A full daily paper with news, sports, entertainment, comments, business and more found its way to our family’s doorstep every morning. When I began reading the Free Press, my world was opened wide. Suddenly there was an influx of news, more than I could possibly dream of reading.

Fast forward a few years with the introduction of blogs, news websites, social bookmarking sites, Digg and later, Twitter, and with it all a need to better manage the news I consumed. That’s when I was introduced to feed readers, a personal inbox where the world’s news could be digitally delivered right to me. Google Feed Reader and later NetNewsWire would become my gateway to the world’s news. From personal blogs to tech news sites, design websites to music news sites and everything in between, my reader replaced the traditional newspaper. It was instant, it was personal and it was free.

Until it became too much.

Overload

When I read a newspaper, I rarely read most of the articles. I glance at some of the major headlines, blow past the minor ones, and linger in the comments and business sections for a bit before heading off to work. Out of hundreds of articles I maybe read 3-5.

On the other hand, when I open my feed reader I am bombarded by 40-50 articles, all of varying length and quality, from several hundred different sources. There’s no indication aside from looking at where the article came from to decide the priority any given article should have. In most cases, I blow through it all and only read what a few friends have written. I know I’m missing a lot of great stuff, because I don’t subscribe to feeds I’m not interested in. The contrast to this are the times when I’ve let my feeds simmer a little too long, only to have several hundred articles waiting to be addressed. On occasion this is a welcome escape. More often than not, however, a click of the “Mark All as Read” button frees me from the daunting task ahead. Only, who knows what I’ve missed…

More of What I Want, When I Want

A few months ago a friend shared a great tip to help counter the issue I was having with my feed reader. His suggestion was to put my feeds into three separate folders, called “1st,” “2nd,” and “Sparks.” The idea was to put only the must-reads into the 1st folder. The 2nd folder was for blogs I enjoy, but if I missed something wouldn’t be the end of the world. The last folder was for new blogs, that with time would either find themselves either in the 1st or 2nd folder, or out of my feed reader altogether. For a few months, this really worked well, and I found myself having a better grasp on what I really wanted to read. Thought, even with this system I had to be careful not to subscribe to too many blogs, or the system would become useless.

98.6°

The problem with RSS feed readers today is that no priority is placed on different types of posts. Going back to the newspaper analogy, stories are given priority by the type size of the headlines, the position in the paper and on each individual page, the presence of an image and length of an article. In a feed reader, however, all articles are given the exact same priority: unread. There is nothing to differentiate between a beautifully written article from one of your favourite writers and a post full of lolcats. The user is left to fend for himself, or to hopefully build a system that hopefully separates the wheat from the chaff.

98.6° and Climbing

Enter Shaun Inman’s latest creation, Fever. Fever is a combination of a normal RSS feed reader and a personal recommendation service, à la Digg or Reddit. Unlike Digg or Reddit, news is filtered not through a community voting system, but rather through links tracked through your own personal feed subscriptions.

To do this, Fever introduces what it calls the “Hot List.” To create this Hot List, Fever asks you to distinguish between your essential feeds, called Kindling, and your supplemental feeds, called Sparks. Taking the links that are tracked in your Sparks, the Hot List feeds you recommended stories and links that you won’t want to miss. The more feeds that link to a particular story or link, the hotter that item becomes and the higher it sits in your Hot List. Your Hot List can track items back over a period of a day, a few days, a few weeks and up to a month. You’ll never miss the most important news because you were too busy being Rickrolled again.

Like Inman’s previous product, Mint, Fever is a self-hosted app built to run on your own hosting server using PHP and a MySQL database to operate. While this may deter casual users who are not comfortable with self-installed web apps, that has never really been Shaun’s market. Fever, like Mint, is targeted at a tech-savvy market that values quality design and unique functionality.

Like a Real App, in the Browser!

One of the identifying qualities of an Inman creation is the high level of attention to detail, both in the aesthetics of the product as well as how the product functions. With Fever, Inman does not disappoint on either level.

When Fever first loads, users are presented with a two column layout that displays links to the user’s groups, Kindling and Sparks, and Saved items on the left, and the Hot List on the right. Kindling are the feeds that generally have a great deal of unique content, and that you enjoy reading on a regular basis. Sparks, on the other hand, can be feeds that display primarily links to other sites, or feeds that are high-volume but may not have must-read content with each post.

Hot List items are displayed with the item’s temperature in big, beautiful Helvetica Neue and a thermometer graphic indicating hot hot each item is. A link to the item is displayed in bold, with each feed that links to that item listed below so you can read not only the hot item, but also the commentary of others.

The Hot List is a great solution to a number of problems. First, it is the best solution so far to the problem of news and information importance. Again, in most feed readers each news item is given the same visual priority. In Fever, the most talked about items are brought right to the forefront. This is perfect for those times when you only have a few minutes to spare and would rather spend it reading the most interesting stories rather than sifting through countless top 10 lists.

Second, the Hot List not only highlights the hot items, but the supplementary running commentaries as well. This is handy when you want to get a varied perspective on a particular piece of news. For instance, last week Google announced the release of their first operating system, Chrome OS. While it was interesting to read the news, the running commentary behind the news was staggering. Jason Kottke and John Gruber both had incredibly interesting things to say about the Google news release, and I was able to access both commentaries directly from Fever’s Hot List items. On a larger scale, this system could potentially replace the need for reading blog comments as commentary posted on the item’s page, allowing the focus to be on well written, thoughtful commentary that doesn’t dilute the conversation.

Stay in Bed with a Fever?

Of course, no feed reader is complete without a mobile counterpart. Fever comes with a Mobile Safari-optimized version, complete with the appropriate iPhone icon. The mobile version of Fever looks beautiful, and the Hot List is the perfect companion for those quick fixes while on the go.

Meltdown

With all that is positive about Fever, there are a few minor things I hope will be addressed in future releases¹

First, I wish there was a bit more documentation as to how the whole system works. Shaun did release a demo video to explain many of the features, however I was still lost on some things. The main one was how Fever refreshes the feeds. At 248 feeds, Fever takes a few minutes to refresh them all. Initially I had Fever set to refresh when I went to the site, which meant I had to wait almost 5 minutes to start reading anything. It also meant that I had to load my feeds in my desktop browser before loading Fever on my iPod touch, otherwise the feeds wouldn’t refresh.

This was very frustrating, until I dug a little deeper and found out about refreshing using cron. Even now I’m not entirely sure what cron is, other than knowing that it replays a certain code every 15 minutes to refresh my feeds. The code can be found under “Extras” in the main Fever menu.

Second, the iPhone app, while aesthetically beautiful, lags quite a bit in how it transitions from one section of the app to the other. While it looks like a native iPhone app, it doesn’t function like one, and that is unfortunate. I don’t know if there’s a way for Shaun to create a native Fever app for the iPhone, but if there is, I’m sure there’s a market for it.

Thirty Bones

Finally, the only major downside to Fever: the price. I am absolutely in favour of paying for quality products. I also have a passion for supporting the independent developer community. Where the issue arrises here, however, is that there are so many incredible feed readers available for free, it’s hard to justify the $30 price tag for Fever. When NetNewsWire and NewsFire, two incredibly beautiful and functional desktop apps, and Google Reader, a fully functional web-based reader are all free, $30 seems quite steep. The Hot List is a very unique feature in the feed reader world, but I’m not entirely sure it justifies the price.

I am hoping that Shaun uses future versions of Fever to push the envelope of what a feed reader can be. I would love if there were some social aspect to it, where my Hot List is affected in some way by my friends’ Host Lists. I suspect that future releases will also include some of the extensibility of the current version of Mint, including different themes and plugins. Perhaps Inman would be able to produce a hosted version, so that those not as technologically savvy could themselves catch a bit of the Fever.

Contagious

With Fever, Inman has at the very least produced a very unique feed reader, while at the same time has laid down the foundations for what is potentially the most promising solution to the problem of information overload.

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Yesterday I purchased and installed Fever, the self-hosted feed reader/personal recommendation service from Shaun Inman. I’m still learning the ropes, but so far I’m really impressed by both the functionality and the design of the user interface. Shaun has once again done a great job.

Since its launch, Fever has become the preferred feed reader of a number of people. Thanks in large part to Shawn Blanc, a number of new Fever users have recently subscribed to my blog. Prior to Fever, this was the level of connection I had with my readers:

Graphs and charts outlining my readers’ choice of RSS reader, browser, operating system, etc. were the only indicators (outside of personal contact) of who was reading my blog.

While for the majority of my readers this hasn’t and will not change, for the growing percentage of readers using Fever, suddenly anonymity is no longer guaranteed. In my Mint stats, as people access my site via their Fever installation, their domain name is also tracked. Every time someone visits my site from their Fever app, I am able to see exactly who subscribes to me, and with that information I am able to visit their site.

There are some very cool benefits to this circumstance. I now have the opportunity to return the favour to my readers and subscribe to their blogs. I am able to make contact through email or their comments section. I am able to get a much clearer sense of the types of people who are reading what I have to say.

At the same time, however, this poses some unique questions about how to approach this new level of openness. Is it appropriate to email someone who subscribes to me, thanking them for taking the time to read what I have to say even if they’ve never made direct contact with me? Are there other security/privacy issues that arise when I am made aware of who is reading my blog? How will knowing who is reading affect how I write?

I’m interested to see how the Fever user community grows and begins to interact with one another in a very new way. I hope that Fever will continue to integrate social connections between its users, beyond the side-effects of having a self-hosted app. It could really open up a whole new way of sharing news, finding information, and beginning dialogues around what we are collectively reading.

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My parents, from the time I was born, have been incredibly supportive of me and what I want to do in life. They have been active participants in most of the major decisions I’ve made in my life, providing encouragement and advice, challenging my assumptions and taking a genuine interest in my life and success.

I’ve had some audacious dreams in the past. From going to Bible College to be a youth pastor, to touring around the US chasing my rockstar dreams, to working at a church hours from home. Not every decision has been easy, and not every decision has been the right one. However, never once have my parents ever said “we don’t believe you can do that.” Not once.

As we get closer to the launch of the project Adam and I have been working on for the past 6+ months, I am starting to feel some apprehension about it all. Are we really ready for this? Is the product we’ve been working on going to reach our target market? Have we chosen appropriate pricing for it? Will anyone else even care?

My greatest fear is that the whole thing will end up to be a failure. This is my first online business, and while it’s been relatively easy to get where we are, this is just the beginning. There’s a lot of road left to travel.

It’s on the brink of a big launch that I need to hear my parents words clearly in my mind and my heart. “We love you, Patrick. We believe in you.” I’m so, so happy and grateful that I’ve been blessed to have this type of encouragement throughout my life. My goal is to not waste it away with fears of failure. If they believe in me, what is there to fear?

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I’m not one for big software reviews, but I’ve been thinking about sharing some of the software I’ve been really into lately. To start, I thought I’d do a quick write-up of some small utilities that really make life on a Mac even more enjoyable.

• I Love Stars by Potion Factory is a simple utility that displays the current iTunes song rating in your menu bar and allows you to add/change the rating to what you’re listening to. I’ve never been very good at rating my music, but after installing I Love Stars today, I am really into it. This app is incredibly polished, shown in simple ways like the way the stars roll away when you pause a song, or how it flashes in the menu bar 3/4 through the song when the song your listening to hasn’t been rated.
• Caffeine by Lighthead is so simple, yet so incredible. Basically, Caffeine sits in your menu bar as an empty coffee cup. When you click on the icon, the cup fills with coffee, and the app keeps your Mac’s screen from dimming. This is really helpful when you’re watching long YouTube videos and you don’t want to go into System Preferences to adjust your screen settings or from having to move your mouse around to keep the screen bright. Such a simple concept and implementation, but I use it daily.
• WeatherBug is a menu item that does one thing: displays the temperature. As soon as I am done this post, I’ll be heading over to Subway, and now I know whether I need a jacket. So simple, but so helpful.
• Quicksilver really doesn’t need to be mentioned, but I’ve been really getting more into some of the hidden functionality of the app that has been awesome. Everything from emailing attachments without opening Finder, to using Quicksilver as my iTunes remote control has done nothing but reaffirm my love for this app.

Anyway, those are just some fun, free apps I’ve been using for the past while that have really made owning a Mac an even better experience. If you’ve got more to share, send them my way!

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My web development app of choice, Coda by Panic, works so well in so many ways. I am constantly learning more about how it works and find more and more helpful features as I continue to use it.

While there is so much positive to write about it, there is one detail that I can’t stand: the “Sites” section. I love the icons and the overall look of it, but to me the whole layout seems very unstructured.

(Matt Brett)

I do web development both at work and in my own personal time. The sites I work on in each situation are not the same, and yet in Coda they are all grouped together. It would be so much nicer if Panic added a way to separate sites into groups for easy scanning and organizing. Below is a quick mock-up of how it could be done.

I have a few other ideas that may work as well, such as using some sort of tagging system à la Things.

However it’s done, there needs to be a way to better organize sites in Coda. If Transmit can have organized sites, why can’t Coda?

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As some of you may know, for a few weeks in March and April I took some time off from checking my web stats. As I wrote two weeks into it, it made me realize that for too long I have been deriving my identity and self worth on numbers that I just can’t control.

As I neared the end of my fast from looking at my stats, I felt this new feeling of creative freedom. Some of my best writing came out during that period. A lot of this had to do with my perspective when writing. Rather than asking myself “how can I write something that will boost my traffic?” I asked “what can I write that my friends would enjoy reading?” I tried to think of what other writers I respect would like to read. I focused on faces much more than on a set of graphs and pie charts.

More importantly though, this freedom helped me realize that this is my blog. This is not your blog. This is not the next google searcher’s blog. This isn’t my RSS reader’s blog. I began to ask “Why do I spend so much time focusing on making them like my blog?”

It was during this time that I changed the header of my blog. As those who visit the site can see, it now reads “This is Pat Dryburgh.” This is who I am; this is what I love, what I hate, what inspires me, what challenges me, the questions I am asking myself and the answers I’m discovering. I could go and scour the internet again to fill another “Top 10 Best Websites with a Green Background and Sans Serif Type” post, but that’s not me.

As strange as it sounds, this isn’t my brand. I don’t have a strategy here. I will save that process for more important things. This is just me, plain and simple. Sometimes raw, sometimes dry, sometimes ugly. I don’t write this to scare you away. Hopefully more people can start to lower the walls a bit and realize that there is freedom in openness.

Some people have been interested in how my stats increased while I was focused solely on writing. While I was happy to tell them, I am personally more excited about the personal growth I went through as part of the process.

If you’re feeling weighed down with pressure to keep up your image, to impress your audience, to grow your stats, then put the numbers away. Maybe turn off your comments. Let it be you and your blog. Let your blog be you.

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I’ve never been good at drawing. I have purchased proper drawing pencils and drawing pads, read tutorials online, borrowed books from the library. Every twenty pages or so in my Moleskine journal are doodles that I’ve attempted and scratched out. Eventually I decided the problem wasn’t me, it was the medium. I borrowed a Wacom tablet from work, opened up Illustrator and started with the pen tool.

That lasted no more than three minutes.

I am not sure what it is about drawing that I feel so drawn too, but ever since elementary school I have wished I had even a shred of talent for visual arts. My least favourite school activity was creating those stupid “Unit Title Pages.”¹ I am sure the highest mark I ever received for a title page was 5/10. It just wasn’t something I could do.

At the age of 13, I took up guitar. As I didn’t have money for lessons, I taught myself. With the help of some friends, I was competent enough to start my first band in grade 8. Through secondary school I studied music, starting with the clarinet and progressing through three different saxophones. I also picked up a little bit of drumming, piano and bass guitar. Even though no one in my immediate family was actively musical, all of these skills seemed to come almost naturally.

By the time I was in college, some friends from school and I began writing songs, touring around Ontario and recording CD’s. The need quickly arose for a website. After my experience self-teaching myself music I felt confident I could learn web design, even though my previous visual art excursions had been painful at best. I pirated my first copy of Photoshop 7 and ImageReady, fired up Microsoft FrontPage and tackled some old-fashioned table-based design.

So far, this new adventure has lasted 4 years.

This past year has been the first year I’ve been consistently active in graphic and web design. Prior to this my only work was for myself and my band. Now I am doing work for people all over the country and in different parts of the world. I am by no means an expert, but I continue to strive to get better every single day.

I do this because I have decided to take pride in my craft.

Just like when learning music, I approach design with a high level of respect. I admire and learn from those who have come before me, while dialoguing, sharing and gaining wisdom from those who are this journey with me now. When I begin a design I spend time researching the client. I try to understand the problem my design is hoping to solve. I pay attention to details and work tirelessly until I feel absolutely confident in what I have produced. If it doesn’t feel right, I am not afraid to discard. If I’m totally stuck, I will ask friends for advice. I will not stop until I can look at a design and be proud of what I’ve created.

I take pride in my craft.

There are many songs I have written that will never see the light of day. There begins to be nearly as many unfinished and discarded designs.

This past week a number of stories emerged through twitter about different designers and their work being copied or ripped off. Some of these stories have happened to particular designers on more than one occasion. Other stories are heaped in controversy over which side copied the other resulting in law suits, internet protests and questionable circumstantial evidence.

I am not interested in casting blame, but I think these stories teach us something. I believe that if we truly take pride in our craft, whether that craft is design, music, writing, knitting, etc., we are compelled to produce the absolute best and the most original work we can. If we are serious about becoming masters of our craft, we will continue to study. If we desire to be the best we can be at what we do, we will strive to do everything we can to work with passion and integrity.

Nothing should get in the way of an honest pursuit of our chosen craft. Not a pressing deadline, or a hounding client, or pressure from others.

If all you ever do is sing another person’s song, you’re not a rock star. You’re a karaoke singer.

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Tonight I had some extra work to do at the office, so after my workout I made a stop at the Subway shop close by. I usually stop by this particular Subway once every two weeks or so, normally during the day when the day staff is on. I’ve always been fairly impressed by the team at this shop, though I had never experienced the evening staff. I was in for a pleasant surprise.

As I entered, there was a young man behind the counter and 4 or 5 customers lined up. The evening Sandwich Artist was working by himself, and was just finishing up a sub. Not an abnormal situation for the dinnertime rush at a Subway, save for one small detail.

The guy behind the counter was covered in mayonnaise.

I don’t mean he had some mayonnaise on his hands. I mean his hands, arms, shirt and face were plastered in the stuff. From what I could tell, the incident had occurred just seconds before I walked in the door, as he was still holding the bottle.

Phased but not deterred, the man behind the counter continued to finish the sandwich he was working on and processed the payment. He then moved on to the friend of the first customer and finished her sandwich and payment process.

Then the next customer.

Then two more.

By the time he got to me, the last person in line, the man behind the counter had started and finished making 5 sandwiches. On a couple of occasions, he had to use paper towel in order to cook some of the meat toppings.

Mayonnaise was still plastered all over his face.

There were a couple of things that blew me away. First, the demeanour of the customers he served. Not one took notice of the fact that this employee, who is likely making just over minimum wage, was serving them in spite of having a face full of condiment.

Second, and most important, was the dedication that this employee displayed by working through an obviously uncomfortable situation.

As he finished with the customer before me and turned to take my order, I demanded that he take a couple of minutes to clean himself up. Not because I was disgusted by what was on him, but out of respect for a fellow human being. As he was wiping himself down with paper towel, I asked him his name.

“Dave.”

During the brief conversation we had as he put together my turkey breast on whole wheat, I learned that Dave had worked at the store for a while. I also learned that he had hopes for bigger and better things than being a Subway sandwich artist. What those hopes were I never learned, but during my visit I did discover one thing: this man is a Rockstar.

I told Dave as he was finishing my order that I was blown away by his dedication. I also told Dave that if I were an employer, I would hire him on the spot, regardless of what business or industry I was in. Skills can be taught, talents acquired. The dedication and drive that Dave showed making sandwiches with a face smeared in mayonnaise takes a lifetime to develop.

I know times are tough right now. Not a lot of places are hiring, and even fewer are looking for someone whose experience is making sandwiches. However, if you are someone who runs a company, manages human resources, or simply wants to see your company do well, be on the look out for guys like Dave. It’s guys and girls like him who will, without a doubt, take your company to the next level.

I will be going into Subway tomorrow to speak with the manager. I want to give a commendation for Dave’s incredible work ethic. I am going to suggest a raise, though I suspect the request won’t be granted. I just want that manager to know that Dave is doing his company an incredible service.

Dave is not a sandwich artist. He is a Customer Service Rockstar.

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