Happy Sunday Friends!

Welcome back to another Sunday Friends! I’m glad you’re here. Here is your Sunday Musings, dedicated to exploring and sharing thoughts and insights on productivity, technology, and life. If you find it useful, please feel free to forward this along to friends!

Yes, and…!

Cybersecurity is awesome. No really, what other function in an organization starts with understanding an entire business?

Cyber professionals understand how every team does their job in the way that accomplishes their business function for the organization. We must intuit how a development team develops, how Human Resources does personnel management across the enterprise, what Product Managers need and focus on, and how our Logistics and Sales functions operate and the best way to resource them.

Only once we can put all of that together into the bigger picture, do we start observing, understanding, mitigating, and start talking about risk.

At the lowest level, our team evaluates all the wants, needs, goals, and bad ideas from across the organization and determines the risk metric for them. I posit that we are doing well when we have a system to quickly articulate how well the organization does at Identifying vulnerabilities and threats, protecting intellectual properties and sensitive data, Detecting intrusions and anomalous activity, responding to those intrusions, and Recovering from crises.

We’re doing our real job when we are communicating that information effectively to the board and providing context such as:

• Our current state vs our target state

• Where we’ve agreed to spend and take risks

• Impactful changes to legislature and policies

• Where we are in relation to the rest of the industry

We’re doing exceptional when we do all the above and understand that:

Security exists to facilitate business, not to work against the business.

As leaders, we must inculcate the understanding that our job is to help the business find the most secure way to accomplish the goal. If even just one person on your team has a “no” in front of the “can-do” attitude, the whole team will suffer.

I’m reminded of improvisational comedy. In there they use the “Yes, and…” rule. It encourages acceptance and fosters the sense of cooperation rather than simply shutting down the engagement.

Saying “Yes” lets you reserve judgement, be receptive and listen to the ideas of others, initially accepting the idea as a suggestion with noble intent. Now you can be Socratic in your discussion and expand on the idea and tease out their logic. Next comes the “and…” Here you add to the process with new information. Here you can take the intent (desired end-state) of the suggestion and build upon it with your expertise rather than just changing it or denying it.

This Week in Productivity

⚙️Faster Typing (hear me out!)

What is it?

What if I told you I could give you one thing to do that will give you back 15 days a year?

The average person spends about 3 hours (minimum) on a keyboard typing out emails, documents, and various other communications per day. Factoring a five-day workweek and 2 weeks off a year, that means we’re spending 750 hours per year typing at work. That’s a month a year just typing. The average typing speed is 40 words per minute. Imagine doubling that typing speed. That would mean you could save more than 15 and a half days (375 hours) of your life. I don’t know about you, but that’s a significant productivity improvement.

How I use it

I absolutely believe that we can all be at least twice as productive just by learning to type faster. I’ve been learning to type faster since I was in middle school (grade 6) and my best devoted speed was about 120 words per minute (WPM). I’m not that fast daily, usually around 80-90.

I’ve committed to getting my average speed up above 100 again, and I use two sites to work accomplish this.

Because, of course, I’m going to over plan it.

First, to identify my weak areas and focus on those, I use keybr.com. Keybr has a unique function. It discovers your weaknesses and trains specifically on those. For instance, I’m terrible with “Q”.

Second, to test on real words, I use 10fastfingers.com. this site gives you 1-minute typing tests and returns your WPM, just like keybr. The difference is keybr uses gibberish words focused on finger movement and weaknesses, while 10fastfingers focuses on the top 200-1000 most used words and is a little less frustrating because of that.

Typing faster has been one of the most productive decisions I’ve made (even though it’s pretty boring to say it out loud). I think you’ll find that just practicing a couple times a week will drastically improve your typing speed and reduce the time you spend writing and communicating, freeing you up for other things!

Quote I’m Musing

“Acquire the habit of attending carefully to what is being said by another, and of entering, so far as possible, into the mind of the speaker.”
- Marcus Aurelius, (Meditations 6.53 )

Being a great leader means being a good listener. This has the double benefit of making you a better problem solver. The Socratic Method involves asking questions to clarify concepts, probe assumptions, rationale, reason, and evidence, questioning viewpoints and perspectives. The idea is to ask why and how questions to get at the critical elements of the ideas and underlying presuppositions of the creator.

We can only do this by paying attention to what is being said and understanding what is being expressed. Listening with the intention to understand. Once we understand, we can intuit the spirit and intent of what the other is saying, what their goal is.

The idea behind a discussion is to get it right, not to be right. To do this, we must listen.

I would love your feedback!

Which musing is your favorite? What else do you want to see or what should I eliminate? Any other suggestions? Just send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter and put #SundayMusings at the end so I can find it. Or, eric@erichaupt.com for long form email.
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Have a wonderful week, I’ll see you Sunday.
​-e